american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 219pean epidemic disease (from which, said one Spaniard, the Indians "diedin heaps, like bedbugs") or from the blades of Spanish rapiers. 64 Since, tothe minds of Europeans at that time, such extraordinary events did notoccur except by divine intent, what could God's purpose be in permitting-ordirecting-the mass destruction of the native peoples?The Spanish friars were divided on this question. Some of them argued,in line with Fathers Betanzos and Ortiz, that the Indians had such a terriblehistory of ungodliness-and especially of indulgence in sins of the fleshthatGod was punishing them by exterminating them, and the Spanishwere merely the means of carrying out his holy will. (As noted above, suchideas were rooted not only in early Christian thought but in Western classicaltradition as well: it was about 800 years before the rise of Christianity,for instance, that Greek wisdom had described famine, plague, andinfertility-the crushing burdens now being imposed on the Indians-asthe divinely ordered and inevitable just due of those societies that behaved"wickedly.") 65 Others, such as the distinguished Franciscan monk and historianGeronimo de Mendieta, contended that, on the contrary, the massiveIndian die-off was God's punishment to the Spanish for their horrendousmistreatment of the natives. Because of their great evil in oppressingthe Indians, Mendieta concluded, God had decided to deprive the Spanishof their seemingly inexhaustible supply of slaves and forced labor. "Oncethe Indians are exterminated," he wrote in his Historia ec/esiastica indianafrom Mexico in the later sixteenth century, "I do not know what is goingto happen in this land except that the Spaniards will then rob and kill eachother." He continued: "And concerning the plagues that we see among[the Indians] I cannot help but feel that God is telling us: 'You [the Spaniards]are hastening to exterminate this race. I shall help you to wipe themout more quickly. You shall soon find yourselves without them, a prospectthat you desire so ardently.' " 66In sum, whether God was punishing the Indians for their sins or theSpanish for their cruelties, both sides in this ecclesiastical debate were agreedthat God wanted the Indians dead. The conquistadors were only too happyto oblige their Lord and be his holy instrument. If the divinely orderedimmolation of these creatures-whom the wisest men in Spain, after all,had long since declared to be mere beasts and natural slaves-was in theend intended to be a punishment for the conquistadors' brutality, theycould worry about that in the future, while counting their gold and silver.But the Crown and the merchants who were funding the New World enterprisewanted their share of the treasure now. Moreover, apart from thediseases that God was using to kill off the native people, should anyoneexpress concern over the massive killings that took place in the mines thatwere supplying all that treasure, the appeal to Aristotle-now enhancedwith an insidious element of outright racism-was readily available, andever more widely employed with every passing year.The Spanish magistrate Juan de Matienzo provides just one example