Radical Ramblings

emember when you were in elementary school and your teachers fed you "facts". Well, guess what - they were LIES!! All those historical truths about righteous explorers and magnificent empires, for the most part, were constructed, propagandist falsehoods. They were fed to us through our history textbooks written by white conservative men that probably got funded to do so by the State Department (but god knows if that's even the truth). If there's one thing that I've learned in college it's that the truth is relative and, thus, there is no such thing as an objective historical account. The essence of history - a report of what has happened in our past, something which states, rather officially, that this is what happened and this is why - is very much a tale that the winner gets to tell after he kills off everyone else. Confused? Let me break it down a little bit further.

In elementary school we first learned about Christopher Columbus and other Spanish/Portuguese explorers. We were taught about how brave and inspiring these men were. Our teachers told us of their numerous accomplishments in discovering "new" lands and all of the innovative ideas they brought to the "New World". However, they failed to inform us, well at least me, of the 67 million 'Indians' that the explorers killed in their wake. No doubt, it must have taken a lot of courage to jump on a ship and set sail for a far away land that you had never been to before; I give the explorers that much credit.

But I refuse to give them credit where it is NOT due. Our teachers practically built halos around these men; we learned of their many noble virtues such as courage, gallantry, and intelligence. But how much of this is actually true? For example, one of our respected explorers, Francisco Pizarrro, was in fact an illiterate pig-breeder (Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America, p. 26). Furthermore, we were always taught that Columbus stumbled into the Americas by accident on his way to the Indies as he was in search of spices and goods. What we weren't informed of was that he really wanted to exploit the rich resources of the land and spread the "supreme" Catholic faith. Actually before each military action that the Spanish conquistadores took, the captians "were required to read to the Indians, without an interpreter a. . .Requerimiento exhorting them to adopt the holy Catholic faith:

If you do not, or if you maliciously delay in so doing, I certify that with God's help I will advance powerfully against you and make war on you whereever and however I am able, and will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their majesties and take your women and children to be slaves, and as such I will sell and dispose of them as their majesties may order, and I will take your possessions and do you all the harm and damage that I can. (Vidart, Daniel. Ideologia y realidad de America , Montevideo, 1968)

I don't seem to recall ever learning this when I was younger. In fact, I never learned history from the "Indians"point of view. By the way, I put "Indians" in quotes because these people aren't REALLY Indians, that's just what Mr. Columbus dubbed them when he thought he had reached India instead of Central America.

Another interesting fact that never came to my attention before was that in 1492 Pope Alexander VI issues a statement to Queen Isabella of Spain in which he gives the Spanish Crown the right to claim the lands of the 'pagans'; basically he gave the Spanish Monarchy two continents because the land did not belong to Christians. Were we taught such convoluted information in order to explain to ourselves that these men were good and righteous and that they MUST have had logical, just reasons for their actions? Did we need to lie to ourselves and rationalize in some pathetic way that there had to logical reasons behind such cruelties? Could we not bear to hear the truth?

It's funny how I had never learned about the massive number of deaths, the brutal killings, or immense exploitation that went on during this period. The massacre that had occurred was over 6 times that of the Holocaust, yet how is it that our teachers never failed to mention that the 'Indians' of South and Central America and of the numerous isles that occupied the area were ruthlessly victimized by our Spanish and Portuguese heroes?

Maybe it is because the Indians are dead and their ancestors are powerless peasants that either work exhausted land or work for 5 cents an hour to make Banana Republic clothing. Or maybe it is because the white, conservative men that write our history books, for the most part, are the winners. The ancestors of those explorers or the other Europeans that benefitted from the conquistadors' work: cleansing the savages from the land that they subsequently deforested and mined to death. Or maybe it was both of these things.