american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 209In ancient times, in order to create knights, men chose hunters in the mountainswho were men of great endurance, and carpenters and smiths and masonsbecause they were accustomed to giving blows and their hands are strong.Also butchers, because they were used to killing live things and sheddingtheir blood. Such men are well formed, strong and lithe. The Ancients choseknights in this manner for a very long time. But when they saw that in manycases their proteges, lacking verguenza, forgot the reasons for their elevationand instead of defeating their enemies were defeated themselves, men knowledgeablein these matters looked for knights who, by their nature, possessedverguenza. . . . For they held a weak man with the will to endure far preferableto a strong one who easily fled. Because of this the authorities saw toit that knights should be men of good lineageYThe limpieza de sangre was, in effect, a particularly crude and malignantrevision of this long-held exclusionary principle, and during the latefifteenth century and for all of the sixteenth it became a mania throughoutSpain. Specialists in genealogy known as linajudo checked and scrutinizedbloodlines and pedigrees. Neither fame nor even death provided escape forthose accused of being tainted. Thus, the remains of the celebrated pioneerin medicine, Garcia d'Orta, were exhumed in 1580 "and solemnly burnedin an auto-da-fe held at Goa, in accordance with the posthumous punishmentinflicted on crypto-Jews who had escaped the stake in their lifetime."Catholic Spaniards with distant Jewish ancestors changed their names andfalsified their genealogies to avoid the ruination of their reputations or theloss of their access to professions and education. For even the most humblepeasant of "pure" Christian ancestry now could proudly regard himself assuperior to the wealthiest marrano. It was all just a matter of blood. 38Historically, then, it was within this evolving context of ethnic andracial discrimination that there emerged in Europe the idea that the peopleof the Indies might be a separate, distinct, and naturally subordinate race.By 1520 the popular Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus, whoseeventual burial place became a Catholic shrine, was arguing that Africans,Indians, and other non-Christian peoples of color were not even descendedfrom Adam and Eve, but from separate and inferior progenitors. 39 Paracelsusadvanced this thesis less than thirty years after Columbus's first contactwith the people of the Caribbean, although in that short time theIndies' many millions of native peoples-whose ancestry in those islandslong predated even that of the Vandals and Visigoths in Spain-had effectivelybeen exterminated. But the assault on Mexico and the rest of MesoandSouth America was at that moment only beginning.Paracelsus's notion of separate and unequal human creations was anearly version of what in time would become known as "polygenesis," oneof the staples of nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racism. Even beforethe Swiss writer committed this idea to print, however, there was in circulationa complementary suggestion, put forward in 1512 by Spaniards