american-holocaust

210 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTBernardo de Mesa {later Bishop of Cuba) and Gil Gregorio, and in 1519by a Scotsman named John Mair (Johannes Major), that the Indians mightbe a special race created by God to fulfill a destiny of enslavement toChristian Europeans. Drawing on both Aristotle and Aquinas, the Spaniards-whowere meeting at the king's behest-placed the matter in thecontext of "natural law," with Gregorio contending that since it was apparentthat these creatures were "idle, vicious, and without charity," itwas a violation of the natural order to permit them to remain free. Mair,at the time a member of the College de Montaigu in Paris, first pointedout what by then was commonly accepted by most Europeans-that therecently discovered people of the New World "live like beasts" and indeed,in some locales, are truly "wild men." Neither these facts, nor the latesuccess of the Europeans in conquering these creatures, should be causefor surprise, Mair thought, since "as the Philosopher [Aristotle] says in thethird and fourth chapters of the first book of the Politics, it is clear thatsome men are by nature slaves, others by nature free. . . . On this accountthe Philosopher says in the first chapter of the aforementioned bookthat this is the reason why the Greeks should be masters over the barbariansbecause, by nature, the barbarians and slaves are the same." 40Few notions could have been sweeter to the minds of early sixteenthcenturySpanish thinkers, and they lost no time in adopting it. From thetime of that first royal junta in 1512, at which Mesa and Gregorio hadused natural law to justify enslavement of the Indians, throughout the 1520sand 1530s and 1540s-while the indigenous peoples of Middle and SouthAmerica were being consumed by the millions in the same inferno of diseaseand fiery carnage that had turned the Caribbean's natives to ash­Spain's philosophers and theologians debated among themselves whetherthe Indians were men or monkeys, whether they were mere brutes or werecapable of rational thought, and whether or not God intended them to bepermanent slaves of their European overlords. By the time these discussionsreached their famous apogee in the confrontation between Bartolomede Las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda at Valladolid, in the summerof 1550, more native people of the Americas had been consumed in thecombined conflagrations of pestilence and genocide than the mind cancomprehend.Called before the so-called Council of Fourteen by Charles V-the HolyRoman Emperor and the most powerful man in Europe-to argue whetherthe natives of the Americas should be considered natural slaves because,as Sepulveda claimed, they were mere "homunculi [contemptible little people]in whom you will scarcely find even vestiges of humanity," Las Casasand Sepulveda publicly argued back and forth for about a month. EvenLas Casas-the most passionate and humane European advocate for theIndians of his own time and for many years to come:-felt forced to acknowledgethat the Indians "may be completely barbaric." However, he