Fascism For Real

I have been around for a good long time, having entered political activism in the early 1960s when I was in graduate school. In those heady days of demonstrations, mainly against the Vietnam War then raging, the term ‘fascism’ was tossed around rather loosely, I thought. Everyone who did not oppose the war or who voted for it or screamed at us demonstrators as we marched (usually hard-hat construction workers), was characterized as ‘fascist.’ We said it and wrote it all the time, but for myself at least, it was a mostly rhetorical device. It was really the retort to all those shouts of ‘commie,’ ‘pinko,’ ‘queer’ that we were routinely met with. For what is the opposite of ‘commie’? Why ‘fascist ‘of course. And I think that’s the way most of us used it and thought of it. We called Johnson a fascist. And Nixon a fascist. And McNamara a fascist. And General Westmoreland a fascist. And the police fascists.

            It’s different now. With fifty more years of nonstop police brutality aimed mostly at Blacks, with militias armed to the teeth stoking and hoping for a race war, with the President of the United States lauding people in Nazi gear as “fine people,” with the President’s supporters impervious to reason or even facts—including the videotaped police shootings of unarmed black men, often in the back—with the majority of the Republican Party finding 180,000 deaths (half of whom are minorities) from Covid-19 as “acceptable,” and with major media figures like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter praising the 17-year-old cop lover who gunned down three protesters in Kenosha Wisconsin as a hero who should be president, and the police simply letting that same gunman walk away with his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder in plain sight while they, the same police, attack unarmed protesters screaming that this kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, had just shot three people, two of whom were dead—with all this and more, fascism appears no longer to be a rhetorical device. The threat of fascism taking over in this nation, in some form or another, is now very real indeed. As Allen Ginsberg once wrote: “America, this is quite serious.”

            And that’s how I’m feeling now. Outraged and disgusted and incredulous that such a large percentage of Americans (including many of my distant relatives) actually believe this serial liar and fraud and sexual deviant and serial bankrupt and money launderer and illiterate piece of narcissistic excrement who now sits in the White House. They actually believe him; believe that he is their savior; believe that he has brought them protection and safety from the hordes of “others” he says are out there seeking to take everything away from them; those hordes enabled, they believe, by the coastal elites, who see them as beneath contempt. And in a way, it is true. They are contemptible. For being so gullible that they can’t see through the con, can’t see they are being manipulated in the same way southern plantation owners once manipulated poor whites in the South: by offering them the freed slaves to look down upon; by showing them that no matter how poor or illiterate they were, they were still white and therefore several steps above the bottom dwellers, forever superior to those freed black slaves. In short, fed them a steady diet of white supremacy. The same has been done to many of the ethnic groups like my own, Italian Americans, who were racialized and scorned when they first arrived around the turn of the 20^th century, when they were said to be another race, closer to Africans then Italians. Unfit to be Americans, they were said to be; the detritus of Europe; fit only to be sterilized and work in sewers. But after a couple of generations, and much toil, they, most of them, have been granted that unassailable ticket to Americanism—whiteness. The price for the ticket being the age-old one in America: to become racist. Which must have seemed a fair price to pay for that one privilege: to be above, no matter what your earnings or position has been, and, regardless of your heritage, able to look down upon those people of color who occupy, and must always occupy the bottom rungs of the social ladder. And that is what is at stake for most of them, the Trump lovers. Staying at least that one rung above the bottom, retaining that hard-won place that now seems threatened by the darkening of America. And they are right. Their unquestioned place is indeed threatened; because America is, in fact, turning into a nation where people of color will soon, if they don’t already, outnumber “whites.” Which to me, is a good thing, long long overdue. Not to them. To them it looms like an ‘existential threat.’

            It is a truism, at least, that when people are threatened, they will resort to any scheme, any rationale to prevent and fend off the perceived threat. Germans in the thirties are a type case. In the face of their defeat in WWI, and the draconian reparations that bankrupted their nation, and rocketing inflation, they were putty in the hands of the Nazis who both gave them an age-old threat to focus on—the Jews in their midst—and a promise of a return to the glory they loved to see as their heritage—their dominance over all of Europe and the world. And so they succumbed to the madman who was also a great conman. And it took only a few years for their nation, along with the flower of their youth, to be destroyed, utterly. Now we are going to see if the same fate is in store for the United States of America. For the conman is, unbelievably to many, in power. And he has harped on and hinted at and exaggerated the threat, which is, in some senses, real. It is the threat outlined above: that the privileged place of whiteness, long the linchpin of our entire Republic and enshrined in our Constitution, is in danger of giving way. And the demographics bear this out. And the unquenchable nostalgia for the days when the perks of whiteness were not just in place but unchallenged, the days before the Civil War for some, the days before the equal rights amendments and the Civil Rights laws for most, and before Brown v. Board of Education and mixed-race marriages and the right to sit and eat and live and play and go to school together with ‘those’ people—the days before all that liberal claptrap, might come again. And though it is manifestly a pipe dream, it still seems to have power for too many. And it is that power—Make America Great Again, which is to say, white again—that holds the promise, or should I say the threat, of fascism.  

            Now, with the Black Lives Matter movement galvanized by the police murder in plain sight of George Floyd, and most recently with Officer Rusten Shesky’s shooting in the back, also on video, of the unarmed Jacob Blake as he was trying to enter his car containing his three young children while Shesky, holding onto his shirt, fired seven bullets into him; and with the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse of no less than three protesters of the Blake shooting (two of whom died), and being allowed by those same police to walk away without even a question about the AR-15 he was carrying (this young white boy was apparently earlier given a bottle of water, together with his white militia buddies, as a token of the policemen’s thanks for “helping out”), and allowed to travel twenty miles to his home in Illinois before being arrested the next day; and with the Kenosha police chief essentially blaming the victims for their own deaths because they were out “protesting” in the first place; and with news at the same time that this coziness between cops and militias is not at all unusual since many other police forces in this nation have forged ties with these same vigilante militias (see “White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US: a former FBI agent has documented links between serving officers and racist militant activities in more than a dozen states,” The Guardian, Aug. 27, 2020.), with many cops signing on as actual militia members—now it appears that law enforcement and its apparent animosity towards black and brown people is no accident perpetrated by a few ‘bad actors,’ but rather, looks to be built in. Racism left over from the original slave patrols that tracked down escaped slaves, and returned this “property” to their masters; in time morphing into what we in white America now take to be ‘neutral’ police protecting American lives and property; but still with that racist origin pervading much of what we call “law enforcement.” 

            I can still remember the surprise of us mostly white protesters demonstrating against the war, and suddenly realizing that here, in our American streets, the situation had changed; the relationship with law enforcement had changed. It was no longer the friendly cop on the beat chatting with the neighbors and looking out for the kids. Now they were armed, in  riot gear, and threatening to those very same grown-up kids. Now they seemed eager, especially in Chicago, to beat on those kids with billy clubs and tear gas, white or not. Commies. Pinkos. Queers. Disrespecting the flag and the government and the troops fighting so you cowards have the right to exercise your damn constitutional rights. And we suddenly understood what our black brothers had warned all along: watch out for cops. They’ll kill you. Even so, we knew, most of us, that we were armed with that invisible shield: whiteness. And also that there are large portions of the American public who are not so armed and have never, in over 400 years, been so armed; and the recent fight has erupted, once again, over their promised access to simple justice. 

            Nor is it only over black and brown equality either. Now it’s over equality, or rather mass inequality, period. Over the obscene spectacle in the United States of a few billionaires like Gates and Bezos and Buffet not only controlling more wealth than half the population, but growing unbelievably richer as the Covid-19 virus devastates and impoverishes the rest of the population, especially, most viciously and disproportionately, those same people of color who are dying at a rate as obscene as is the wealth of the mandarins. And many people, particularly among the younger generations but including this aging writer, are finding this grossly unequal access to privilege, to the basics of life itself, too nauseating to stomach any longer. 

            It is too nauseating to see police shooting an unarmed black man in the back, while allowing a white kid armed to the teeth to simply walk away. To see that the difference, in the eyes of the police, is the one distinction that always matters in America, the color of a person’s skin. To see that if you are black or brown, any encounter with the police, no matter how mild, no matter one’s cultural status or wealth, can result in death. Which means, unequivocally, that the entire sordid history of race enters every police confrontation in this country, and that that history often dictates that a black man might well walk away or try to escape rather than put himself at the mercy of a cop liable to be carrying that history in a way that incites either fear or loathing and, ultimately, the firing of his/her weapon with lethal effect. It happened to Trayvon Martin. To Breonna Taylor. To twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. To Jacob Blake and to countless others in recent years, and going on back to routine lynchings and burnings throughout the nation, and with the same purpose: intimidation. Don’t get too uppity or you’ll die. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be at the hands of the police. It could well be, now, with the encouragement of the police themselves, and of the current President, death at the hands of some 17-year-old kid who thinks it’s cool to join a militia and go hunting for “those” people. 

            Yes, we seem to be at a tipping point in this America. And the protests in the streets are only one visible part of it. There’s also this virus raging, and the same people who think it might be cool to gun down protesters, are also joining with this unhinged president in their own protest—against the universally-prescribed cautions from medical experts that the way to prevent the virus’s spread is to wear masks—to protect others, not oneself—and maintain social distance. Very simple, and apparently commonsensical. Instead, the militia types, the ones who love to shout about their “freedoms,” characterize mask wearing and social distancing as violations of those American rights. Refusing to wear masks like their President, they prefer sometimes violent confrontations with clerks and service workers who try to implement those safety codes. As if nowhere in America are there any rules that these ‘free spirits’ have to obey to keep others safe. Ditto with rules to prevent pollution of the environment, or initiatives by the global community to bring arguably the greatest threat to humanity in history—global warming—under at least minimal control. Fuck that, they say. Fuck that, says their heroic president. Fuck that, say the big oil companies who hide their mercenary reasons behind the rubric of “rights.” We’re free and independent; we have rights; we can do anything we want. And the world burns. And the president piles gasoline on the flames. 

            Perhaps most relevant to this discussion are the recent moves, authoritarian to their core, by Drumpf to throw gasoline on the most fundamental act in any democracy—voting. Even above and beyond the traditional Republican attempts to discourage and prevent minorities in urban areas from voting, such as gerrymandering and poll closings and voter ID laws, are this president’s moves to steal the 2020 election—the preeminent initial move of every fascist regime. Appointing one of his biggest donors to be Postmaster General (done at a time when it had become clear that mail-in voting would be a preference for many people not wanting to risk contagion from Covid-19 by traditional in-person voting), the President apparently hoped, with this move, to discourage and disable voters from mailing in the ballots that would certainly favor his opponent. And new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was happy to oblige, ordering post offices to stop allowing overtime to ensure that the day’s mail was delivered, removing mail boxes in target states, and dismantling dozens of automatic mail-sorting machines. This sabotage of the postal system has been defended by DeJoy as part of his “cost-cutting” measures to “save” the service, when everyone knows of the long-running project of conservatives to privatize this most valued governmental service, not to mention Drumpf’s naked attempt to tip the election in his favor. But that’s not all. This fascist wannabe has speculated about suspending the election (because of the virus he scorns, of course) and pre-emptively tweets that even if the election goes off on time, even if the intimidating tactic of sending police to polling stations doesn’t reduce turnout in cities, all mail-in ballots will  be corrupt, as will the whole election, and might not be settled for “months or even years.” Which sounds like a way of signaling that he will not accept the election results if he loses; and/or a way of signaling to his militia minions that they should be prepared to contest the election armed with their “right to carry” weapons in full view. And it seems to be working, at least among Republicans who, two-thirds of them, tell pollsters that “they don’t have confidence in the fairness of the election” (Sarah Abramsky, Truthout.org, Aug. 29, 2020). 

            So what do we have? The stage is being set for a portion of the public to find the 2020 presidential election “fraudulent,” and for the President to reject the results, and to blame his loss on “anarchists and left-wing extremists” who he alleges have taken control of the Democratic Party and its weak nominee, the “socialist” Joe Biden. Who, we are told, intends to impose Bolshevism and communism on the entire nation in order to “destroy our second amendment, attack the right to life, and replace American freedom with left wing fascism” (Drumpf, as quoted by Paul Street, Counterpunch, Aug. 28, 2020). Yes, the current president of the United States and his surrogates have said all this and more, screaming maniacally at their recent convention that our “sacred” American way of life, our freedoms, are now under attack not only by anarchists in the streets, but by the other party as well. With the implication that concerned Americans—the Kenosha Guard and the Proud Boys and the hundreds of armed militia “patriots” documented by the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right as having intimidated protesters in more than 300 counties this summer alone (see Financial Times, Aug. 28), including  the fully-armed militia-types who occupied the gallery of the Idaho State House in Boise recently to protest the state order to wear masks and, like Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, got away without so much as a parking ticket because, according to Idaho State Police spokeswoman, Lynn Hightower “Idaho State Police personnel determined they could not have made arrests on the spot without elevating the potential for violence” (NPR.org, Aug. 25, 2020)—especially concerned Americans with guns, the President implied, ought to take action in the event of his defeat. 

            Now whether it will be Trump—which may seem doubtful given his deficiency in brain cells and courage—or one of his more smooth-talking, dangerous successors like Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo, or even some unknown nut case from Q-Anon, the conspiracy theorists who claim to have evidence of left-wing liberals and Hollywood types engaging in demonic child sex rituals and even eating babies—the stage has been set for some sort of authoritarian rejection of our weak-kneed democracy, and its replacement by a strong man to root out the alleged evil. Several nations around the world—Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, India, Brazil—have already gone this route. But can it happen here? Only time will tell. But unless the American public—the public still in possession of its faculties and a rudimentary sense of truth and ethics, that is—comes out en masse in November to reject in a landslide such a takeover, it very well could. Some form of fascism could, that is, given the multiple stresses on the nation and its increasingly frightened populace seeking a simple solution, happen here. And considering the racist history of this nation, and the immense threats for humanity stemming from the ignorant dismissal of the real crises, and the inclination of many toward those simple-minded solutions, we’re all going to need more than a shrink, or a few pills, or even the friendly glance of the  almighty, if it does. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

   

Origins

  

Lewis Dartnell’s book, Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History (Basic Books: 2019) contains surprising gems, like this one: 

“We are a species of apes born of the climate change and tectonics within East Africa” (p. 25).

 

Or this one:

“There’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite sides of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world” (46).

 

Which is to say that we humans are all one species, more alike than the surface characteristics that divide us suggest, and all derived from “a single exodus event out of Africa, rather than multiple waves of migration, and probably from no more than a few thousand original migrants” (46). Furthermore, what seems to have driven our one primate ancestor to develop our most distinguishing characteristic—a huge brain—was the adversity of extreme climate variability in the tectonic rift valley of East Africa. That’s because, as Dartnell informs us, 

“Intelligence…is the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body” (19). 

 

And so, in three of these rapidly shifting climatic events in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley (occurring roughly 2.7, 1.9 and 1 million years ago), new hominin species, marked by greater brain size—including Homo Erectus, the direct ancestor to our species—emerged. This latter is important, since some Homo Erectus left Africa in the variable climate phase around 1.8 million years ago, to eventually become Neanderthals in Europe; while those who stayed in Africa gave rise around 300,000 years ago, to anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. They, in turn, migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago. So both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are our ancestors, both deriving from that big-brained Homo Erectus. 

            The other important takeaway from this book is the somewhat startling and humbling fact that the alleged ‘superiority’ of western or European culture is really an accident of geography, and a product of plate tectonics as well. As Dartnell explains it, the continent of Eurasia has benefited from its massive grasslands or steppes, where grains such as wheat, barley and oats (all variants of grasses) grew wild. This led to their cultivation, and then to more or less permanent settlements whose agriculturalists, thriving on grains, could set aside surpluses. This in turn led to priest classes who did not have to toil or spend time hunting and gathering, and eventually to kingly classes who could afford to go to war. But Eurasia was blessed with one other critical element: ruminants such as cows and horses, both of which fed on those expansive grasslands, and which could be used not only for protein foods, but for work such as pulling plows and wagons, and carrying individual humans. Indeed, Eurasia was home to the most important of the domesticated mammals:

The five most important animals through human history--sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses—as well as the donkey and the camel that provided transport in particular regions, were present only in Eurasia (88).

 

By contrast, the Americas, where the horse and the camel had actually evolved (both migrated out to develop in Eurasia), had only one domesticated ruminant, the llama, and very few other large mammals. So with these natural endowments, the civilizations of Eurasia were able to develop major technologies long before the equally sophisticated civilizations of the Americas—which also had grains such as corn that could be stored, but lacked those large mammals to boost their energy capacity. 

            It was not only the natural flora and fauna that provided for advanced civilizations, however. Again, plate tectonics provided the soil and water that seeded most civilizations—the Mesopotamians, the Harappans in India, the Minoans and Greeks and Tuscans, the Mayans and Aztecs. All of them developed, Dartnell informs us, “near plate boundaries.” Why? Because they are located where rich arable land formed in “depressed basins at the feet of mountains ranges caused by continental collisions” (27-8)—that is, huge tectonic plates smashing into each other and raising mountains such as the Himalayas and the Alps. The other element that contributes to such fertile land, of course, is volcanoes. And they too “arise in a broad line 100 Kilometers or so away from the subduction line, as the swallowed plate sinks deeper into the hot interior and melts to release rising bubbles of magma to feed eruptions on the surface above” (ibid). And further, such faults create springs “which become a water source for settlement in arid regions” (29). The Eurasian continent, according to Dartnell, had one other lucky advantage over the Americas: its orientation. Eurasia, that is, runs roughly east to west, whereas the Americas are oriented roughly north to south. That means that animals and crops that adapted to the grasslands of the Steppes could be utilized far to the west in Europe, and vice versa; their latitudes and hence their climates are roughly the same. Not so with the Americas: what works in Mexico’s climate and terrain will not necessarily work far to the north in Canada, and animals that thrive in The Great Plains do not adapt well far to the south in Peru (87-88).

            Beyond even this, Dartnell shows us how metals, too, are products of the massive movements of the earth, leading to the development of some civilizations due to the luck of their location. Consider the Great pyramids of Egypt, or the astonishingly advanced civilization of the Minoans on Crete. It is easy to think of them as the result of some superior endowment of their people, or of “genius” individuals. But more likely, it is the result of ancient processes deep in the earth. In the Egyptian case, the pyramids were built of limestone. And what forms limestone? foraminifera shells deposited on the sea floor of the ancient Tethys Ocean that once covered most of what are now the lands around the Mediterranean Sea—all that is left of the Tethys Ocean. These shells were, over eons, adhered together to become Nummulites (the word means ‘little coins’ in Latin), the foundation of the nummulitic limestone Egyptians used to build the pyramids (128). Similarly, the copper that made Minoans on Cyprus rich (around the second millennium BC, Cyprus was the major copper supplier for Mesopotamia, Egypt and the entire Mediterranean) was the product of an ocean vent pushed up onto Cyprus by plate tectonics. So too, iron and the process of smelting that transformed civilizations (in Europe from the 1300s on) and the weapons and tools they used, likewise comes from processes deep in the earth, and billions of years before that, in the furnace of the stars. Dartnell, in fact, calls iron “the star-killer element” (167) because 

once iron is created in nuclear fusion, the star can no longer produce enough energy to hold up its outer layers, and collapses on its own core, before exploding in a supernova.

 

And from that supernova comes all the iron deposited on our planet and in us, via many foods we eat. And iron, of course, is what makes our blood red, something else Dartnell startles us with:

…the iron in your blood not only links you to the ancient stars that created it in their nuclear forge, but also to the magnetic shield around our world that protects life on earth (169).

 

That is, the magnetic field acts like a “deflector shield” to prevent the solar wind particles from blowing our atmosphere off into space. All because of the lucky happenstance of iron. 

            There are many more amazing facts that Dartnell gives us—including how coal is produced due to the trees of the Carboniferous Era not rotting as normal trees do, but being preserved almost whole as peat, and then diving deep into the earth’s hot interior to rise again in the mountain rocks from tectonic events—but one had particular resonance for me personally. He describes the crucial role of the winds that we now know circle the earth in belts, and how critical they were when boats had to rely on winds to fill their sails. The so-called Age of Discovery depended on some of these wind discoveries, one of which the Portuguese discovered called the volta do mar: on their return trips from Africa, sailors would go north out into the ocean so as to exploit westerly winds (winds blowing east)—to get back to Portugal. This knowledge affected Columbus and his epic journey, but Dartnell calls his success “a sheer historical fluke.” Columbus, that is, had tried initially to convince King Joao of Portugal to sponsor his journey. The King declined, and so the great mariner had to turn to Queen Isabella of Spain. This meant that “Columbus attempted his crossing from an archipelago [the Canary Islands, the only Atlantic islands controlled by Spain] that happens to be upwind of the Americas. If his expedition had set sail from the Azores, it would likely have perished deep in the ocean” (230). That is, if Columbus had been sponsored by Portugal, he would likely have tried to sail from the Portuguese-controlled Azores against prevailing westerly winds (very difficult if not impossible in those days). Since he was sponsored by Spain, however, he headed west from the more southerly Canaries, caught the easterly trade winds, and driven by these favorable winds, made it to the Caribbean just in time to survive. On the return, he was clever enough to use the Portuguese-discovered volta do mar and the westerly trade winds, made it back first to the Azores, and then to Spain. 

            In sum, this is a book full of gems that are not commonly considered, and certainly not collected in one volume. And it’s written so that a layman like myself can understand most, if not all, of those ancient geological processes—which, as Dartnell tells us, have so fundamentally shaped our history and culture. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Exculpating Columbus

Carol Delaney (Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, Free Press: 2011) knows she has a problem in convincing a now-skeptical world that Columbus was not the generator of native subjugation he has been accused of in recent years. So she sets out to show that, far from “intending to commit genocide,” Columbus’s main objective was to garner the money and influence to get the Christian monarchs for whom he worked to launch a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. As she writes early on: “The quest for Jerusalem was Columbus’s grand passion” (xvi). The problem is that even if this were the great mariner’s aim (and there is some doubt whether it was, or whether he used his conspicuously-expressed faith as a ploy to curry favor with the very Catholic Queen Isabela), it still does not excuse his behaviors. For there is no doubt that Columbus did send Native American slaves to Spain against the express wishes of Queen Isabela, nor that he was obsessed with finding gold (a percentage of which he insisted on claiming for himself), nor that he did set in motion the dreaded encomienda system which was, in effect, slavery, and which led to the decimation of the native population on the islands he “discovered.” Nevertheless, Delaney tries valiantly to convince us that Columbus was simply a devout man of his time, and that this poor mariner, son of a weaver, was intimately familiar with the Bible—not only the New Testament important to Christians, but the Old Testament, sacred to the Jews—at a time when most men of any class could not even read, let alone read and write in Latin or any other language. Yet we are shown how Columbus quotes almost entirely from the Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, and Daniel, and Ezekiel, and from the Psalms, with a familiarity that is astonishing. Delaney even acknowledges that there have been scholars, Salvador de Madariaga most prominently, who have alleged that Columbus must have been a Jew, a converso who publicly and loudly professed Christianity (conversos who were suspected of secretly ‘Judaizing’ were subject to the tortures of the Inquisition), for one thing because only a Jew could be expected to know so much about the Old Testament. She even grants, in an endnote (p. 256, note 1) that “Columbus may have had a Jewish ancestor;” but in the same breath insists that he seemed unaware of it. 

            All this aside, Delaney’s passion to prove that her hero was a devout Christian who only wanted to save souls for Christ, comes through loud and clear. Perhaps too loud and clear. For it forces her to marshal arguments that sound more like special pleading than the work of a gennuine, i.e. disinterested, scholar. This is not to say that Delaney hasn’t done her homework. She has. And along the way she provides us with much compelling information about both Columbus the man, and the times in which he lived. But that cannot deter us from the fact that her mountain of information does not, in the end, make the case she wishes to make. Columbus, though a fascinating and often-sympathetic figure in her reading, remains stained by the accusations against him, mostly in his own words. Take one very important paragraph cited by Delaney near the end of her book. She is quoting from the Admiral’s lament to the world that he has been badly used by those (mainly Nicolas Ovando and Francisco Bobadilla) who have been given authority over the very lands he himself has discovered. Here is what he writes (Delaney attributes this to several sources, including the famous Lettera Rarissima he wrote to the sovereigns after the 4^th Voyage, July 7, 1503): 

What man has ever lived, not excluding Job, who would not have wished himself dead in my situation: seeking to save my life and that of my son, my brother and my friends. I was at that moment denied access to the very land and ports which, by the will of God and sweating blood, I had conquered for Spain (my emphasis).

 

It is those last few words that I think bear scrutiny. For Delaney has been arguing all along that Columbus’ true aim stems from his Christian faith, his mission to save souls for Christ, to find the means to liberate Jerusalem. And yet, what he writes here for all to see, is that he views himself not as a missionary, but as a conqueror. Another quote from his Letter to Dona Juana de Torres in 1500, reinforces this point:

I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manners and religion are very different from ours, who live in sierras and mountains, without fixed settlements, and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen our Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries. (emphasis mine)

 

He has conquered a whole world for Spain, he says; and living in that world are a myriad of conquered people, whom his very first encounter with led him to write that “with fifty men, I could subjugate them all.” Which he subsequently did. Many of whom he sent to Spain as slaves—for that, according to Delaney, accorded with the laws of war. Conquered people could be enslaved, she writes. So could those who resisted Christianization. Or those who engaged in battle with Christians to resist the Christians’ violent depradations. No universal right to self-defense here—which is what native people had been doing all along: defending themselves. No. If you as a native resisted what Europeans—who claim to have “discovered” you—wanted to do to you, you were a combatant and could be enslaved at best, slaughtered at worst. 

            This is the kind of European arrogance that Carol Delaney wants us to accept as the excuse for all Columbus did (this arrogance is accentuated in the Papal Bull of 1493, issued by the notorious Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, which granted Spain all the lands ‘discovered’ by Columbus, and later divided the entire ocean between Spain and Portugal—not considering in either bull, needless to say, the existence of the millions of natives there). Though she is right that he himself did not commit, or even order genocide (which the most rabid of his detractors claim), she is also wrong, in this writer’s opinion, that Columbus was blameless. He was not. For he it was who almost immediately thought it was perfectly legitimate to seize six natives as specimens to display in Spain as ‘proof’ that he had found the Indies. And upon his return on the second voyage, he saw it as perfectly legitimate to send back to Spain, on Feb. 2, 1494, no less than twelve supply ships, consisting of “profitable materials from nature—including twenty-six Indians—from the man-eating Caribs” (p. 141). Note that Delaney is careful to add that the enslaved were cannibals, and more:

In doing this, he was following papal policy at the time, which permitted enslavement of those captured in a “just war,” those who resisted Christianization, or those who went against the law of nature (Delaney, p. 141).

 

In other words, Carol Delaney is justifying, in every way possible (she cites Columbus in his memo to the Queen, making the case that, by capturing the “unnatural” Caribs, Spain would gain great credit because the Indians would respond favorably to the Spanish system of justice by their eagerness to become the Queen’s vassals) what not even Queen Isabela, herself a devout product of her time, would do. And Carol Delaney admits this: 

When the sovereigns received Columbus’s memo, they responded that, in the future, they would prefer that he try to convert the natives while still in the islands…however, when he elaborated a plan to send more Caribs back as slavesas a way to defray the costs of supplying the settlement, the sovereigns demurred (142; all emphases mine).

 

In short, the Queen saw right through Columbus’s rationale for slavery, and tried to nip it in the bud. So did Bartolome de Las Casas, who lived in the islands for many years, and translated much of Columbus’s writing in his Historia de las Indias. Las Casas writes about this shipment:

In this notable document occurs the first mention of slavery in the New World. The Admiral directs Torres to inform the sovereigns that he has made slaves of some Indians captured (in) the cannibal islands, and has sent them to Spain to have them taught Spanish in order that they may later serve as interpreters.  The justification he advanced for this measure was that by taking (them) from their surroundings they would be cured of their cannibalism, converted to Christianity, and their souls saved…(Las Casas, as cited in Francis A. McNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings, (Nov. 2007).

 

Father Las Casas went on to elaborate what was worse, in his opinion: 

 

The next suggestion, despite any possible excellence of his motives, was a frank proposal to establish a thriving trade in human flesh as barefaced as could be made by the least scrupulous "blackbirder."  The Admiral, always dwelling upon the spiritual welfare of the cannibal natives, proposed that the more of them that could be captured, the better it would be, and then, mingling temporal advantages to Spaniards with spiritual blessings to the natives, he explained that the quantities of livestock and other necessaries required by the colonists, might be paid for by the sale of slaves sent back to Spain in the ships which would bring these supplies several times a year to the colony (Ibid). 

 

In other words, Fr. Bartolome de Las Casas was not fooled by Columbus’s protestations about his concern for “the spiritual welfare of the natives.” He saw through it, just as the Queen had, and condemned it. Especially, as even Carol Delaney admits, because “In reality, the distinction between ‘good’ natives and those who attacked the Spaniards and resisted Christianization was probably often blurred” (Delaney, 154). Furthermore, justifying slavery because of the customs of the enslaved (and an anthropologist like Delaney should know that cannibalism can be often attributed to conditions where a plentiful protein source is lacking, as it was on the Caribbean islands) simply won’t do. Arrogant conquerors backed by a Pope may justify the enslavement of a conquered people in this way, but history cannot accept this justification. 

            Then there is the encomienda system mentioned above. Though the islands were initially viewed as a place for setting up trading posts, soon grants of land were made to settlers who followed on subsequent voyages. And natives who lived on those lands were considered part of the property, and expected to pay tribute. Here is what Las Casas has to say about this:

Columbus laid a tribute upon the entire population of the island which required that each Indian above fourteen years of age who lived in the mining provinces was to pay a little bell filled with gold every three months; the natives of all other provinces were to pay one arroba of cotton. These amounts were so excessive that in 1496 it was found necessary to change the nature of the payment, and, instead of the gold and cotton required from the villages, labour was substituted, the Indians being required to lay out and work the plantations of the colonists in their vicinity. This was the germ of the cruel and oppressive repartimientos and encomiendas which were destined to depopulate the islands…(op cit, McNutt)

 

This cruel system, which made subjects of all the natives and forced them to first pay tribute and then labor for the Spanish, who had now become colonists, is blamed by Las Casas for no less than “depopulating” the islands. And how does Carol Delaney justify this part of Columbus’s legacy? First, she claims that the system of tribute was “nothing new,” as a similar one already existed with regard to Spanish land taken from Muslims, and given to Spanish hidalgos. Then she maintains that the original idea for the encomienda system was not Columbus’s at all, but rather that of the rebel leader Francisco Roldan, who had led a rebellion in the western half of Hispaniola. When Columbus went to meet him in 1498 to forge a truce, Roldan insisted on allowing his rebels to keep the land they had colonized, along with all the natives on them as laborers. Delaney says that this was the origin of the encomienda system, which even she describes as “quasi-serfdom” (179). But the fact remains that Columbus agreed to allow the encomienda system to be maintained, and not just in the rebel lands, but throughout the islands. Whether initially instituted by Columbus or simply ratified by him, it was a brutal system that led, as Las Casas maintains, to the depopulation of the islands. In his Brevissima Relacion, or Short Report of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1541, Las Casas gives us some idea of the extent of the damage:

whereas there were more than three million souls, whom we saw in Hispaniola, there

are to-day, not two hundred of the native population left.

 

Three million to two hundred. And this refers to just the one island of Hispaniola, which Columbus colonized first. Las Casas gives us more in this devastating text, but we mostly know the rest. 

            One final reference to Delaney’s book deserves mention. On her very last page, which encompasses her summary of the millennial age (which she claims explains why Columbus was so obsessed with liberating Jerusalem—it was believed, she writes, to be the precondition to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ to redeem the entire world), Delaney adds her own plea for ending the dangerous apocalyptic myth that still prevails. Here is what she writes:

How can we diffuse the power of the apocalyptic myth before its destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy becomes a reality? On that the fate of our world may depend (244).

 

These are her last words, the concluding words of her book, which for most writers are revised again and again, receiving intense scrutiny to get them right. The problem is, that scrutiny was either haphazard or in vain, for she uses the word “diffuse” (to disperse or spread widely) rather than “defuse” (to reduce the danger of, originally to remove the fuse from an explosive device). This appears to be a serious blunder, one which makes this writer, at least, question the value, aside from its other weaknesses, of her entire attempt to exculpate Columbus. 

Lawrence DiStasi