american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 221neither do institutions come into being and sustain themselves without theinspiration of economic or political necessity. In sixteenth-century Spain,as we have seen, that necessity was created by an impoverished and financiallydependent small nation that made itself into an empire, an empirethat engaged in ambitious wars of expansion (and vicious Inquisitorialrepression of suspected non-believers within), but an empire with a hugeand gaping hole in its treasury: no sooner were gold or silver depositedthan they drained away to creditors. The only remedy for this, since controlof expenditures did not fit with imperial visions, was to accelerate theappropriation of wealth. And this demanded the theft and mining of moreand more New World gold and silver.The Spanish possessed neither the manpower nor the inclination formining America's vast store of precious metals themselves. But, along withall those riches, God had provided more laborers than could be imagined-tensupon tens of millions-so many, in fact, that the first Portuguesegovernor of Brazil claimed it would be impossible to exhaust thesupply even if the Europeans were to cut the natives up in slaughterhouses.There was, however, nothing to be gained from the wholesale butchery ofIndians for mere entertainment-although that commonly did occur at thehands of enthusiastic conquistadors-while a great deal was to be achievedfrom working them until they collapsed. So enormous was the reservoir ofnative muscle and flesh that no rational slave driver would spend goodmoney on caring for these beasts (and beasts they were, and natural slaves,so the wisest of wise men had come to agree); it was more efficient simplyto use them up and then replace them.Mass murder and torture and mutilation had their place, of course, asinstruments of terror to recruit reluctant natives and to be sure they stayedin line. But the extermination of entire communities and cultures, thoughcommonplace, was rarely the Spaniards' declared end goal, since to do someant a large expenditure of energy with no financial return. As with Hispaniola,Tenochtitlan, Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards' mammoth destructionof whole societies generally was a by-product of conquest andnative enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end initself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committedby the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British Americaextermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because itmade economic sense.IIIBy the close of the sixteenth century bullion, primarily silver, made upmore than 95 percent of all exports leaving Spanish America for Europe.Nearly that same percentage of the indigenous population had been destroyedin the process of seizing those riches. In its insatiable hunger, Spain