The Mentality that Killed Indians and Replaced Them with Slaves

             Perhaps many of those who died in the American Invasion may have died  due to a  to lack of immunity or susceptibility to Western diseases, but the death rate is far in excess of what would have naturally occurred without the tyranny and murderous greed of the Encomienda, Hacienda and Mission systems and later, of the Westward expansion. The Encomienda system was a system of forced labor that in many ways was worse than the system of slavery that succeeded it. The Encomeinda or Repartimento system was one by which the king granted forced Indian labor to the discretion of their owners to do with whatever they willed.  In the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru, most of the Native Americans were killed off in 50 years under this arrangement. The Spanish themselves recognized that their labor was being killed off by the Encomienda system and the fear of the loss of wealth, rather than any humanitarian concern seems to be the main reason it was replaced by the Hacienda system by the mid 17th century. The Hacienda system was not much better, nor was the eventual 'independence', which  led to the imperialist system of economic exploitation, both by local landowners, politicians and those involved in trade, and especially by the U.S. which dominates Latin American policy today. The murder of some 250,000 Guatemalans, mostly Mayans,  under an American supported, CIA devised and dominated dictatorship in the 1970's and 80's is a continuation of the American Invasion of 1492.

            The system of African slavery began as a result of the Europeans having largely eliminated their Native American labor supply.  This fact is often overlooked and the decimation of Native Americans is too often treated as a separate subject from the history of African Americans. Actually the two forms of atrocity are inextricably related. The Natives were little more than work machines, indeed, the slave system is the antecedent of industrial mechanization and high technology. The new computer, robotic and biotechnologies seek to orchestrate the mentality that created the slave trade into a system of biological and psychological control and turn both the mind and cells into production for profit. The goal of technology could have been to better the lives of everyone safely, but mostly it has been to better the profits of a very few at the expense of the many.  The enchaining of cells, atoms, machines and genes to the creation of profit for the few has its origins in the atrocities against Indians and Africans. The estimates of slaves shipped to the new world vary from 9-16 million, some are much higher. One of the most conservative of the historians who have analyzed the numerical data on the slave trade writes that

the cost of the slave trade in human life was many times the number of slaves landed in the Americas. For every slave landed alive, other people died in warfare [to get slaves], along the     paths leading to the coast [of Africa], awaiting shipment, or on the crowded and unsanitary conditions of the middle passage.[1]  

 It is unclear what "many times the number of slaves landed in America" means exactly, but at least two or three times is implied.  One could assume then that this represents at least 30 million Africans killed. This would bring the total of those killed in both the Native American and African slave trade atrocities to somewhere between 90-120 million people. Even if one uses more conservative death tolls, this would make it the worst  single atrocity in human history. But singling out the early atrocities is rather arbitrary.  One could say with some justification that later atrocities, such as those committed by  the British in Bengal, Africa, China or Tasmania, or by the U.S. in the Philippines, Hawaii and Mexico, the Nazi atrocities and the atrocities in Russia and China under Mao and Stalin are continuations of the early imperial atrocities that began after the original voyage of Columbus. All these atrocities are ultimately one atrocity occurring through different agents at different times. All of these atrocities share common causes and characteristics.  If all these were included as part of the European World Invasion then the death toll is many hundred millions.

        There are few European accounts of these atrocities, and hardly any Native American of African accounts. There are the accounts of Las Casas, who supplied valuable information about the atrocities against the Indians after Columbus arrived. [2] As Stannard has observed however, Las Casas' estimates of the size of the Spanish atrocities may have been too conservative.[3]  But Las Casas defends the Native Americans only to an extent: he still thought they "may be completely barbaric" and should be colonized, submitted to a theocratic state and be submitted to the rule of the King.[4]

            Cabeza de Vaca,  seems to have identified with the Indians to a degree, but apparently only when it was to his advantage. [5] But at the same time his main interest appears to have been Christianization and gold, and the information he gathered helped lead to the atrocities of Coronado.

             There are a few Native Accounts and slave narratives, such as that of Oluadah Equiano, which are highly informative, but Equiano is writing later and one must make many inferences. Equiano, when he first sees the Europeans, thinks they are cannibals, not without reason, as the Middle Passage, on which Equiano was about to embark, would kill at least 3 million Africans, out of the 10-15 million that were probably shipped to make profit for the European traders. A Mayan Indian after the Mexican conquest accuses the Europeans of being "marauders by day, offenders by night, murders of the world...this was the beginning of our poverty...of tribute...begging...looting...of enslavement for debt...constant fighting...suffering". An Aztec writes, "the houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood. We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe wall, for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead".[6] An early Narragansett named Miantomomo writes that "since these Englishmen have seized our country, they have cut down the grass with scythes, and the trees with axes. Their cows and horses eat up the grass, and their hogs spoil our beds of clams: and finally we shall all starve to death".[7]

            On the basis of the sources that seem believable,  to repeat, the death toll from the Conquest of the so called "New World", if one adds together the death tolls from both the Slave trade, about 30 million, and the Native American holocaust,  perhaps 60-100 million,  a total of somewhere between 90-130 million people were killed for god, gold and European supremacy.  Even if one assumes that many of these were killed by disease, the horror remains unaccounted for.  Indeed,  an atrocity of this magnitude requires, as some authors have pointed out, a complete rethinking of European and American history. This involves not merely a critique of the political-economic actions of the West, but a critique of the entire Western culture and the "Canon" of Great Books and Great Ideas that was and largely remains the cultural engine behind the movement of the political-economic supremacy of the Western Imperial powers.

           Besides the Mayan, Native American or Slave accounts of these atrocities, there is also  the evidence of the  mentalities in European culture that encouraged and supported these atrocities. This is much harder to define and delineate, since one must largely leave the realm of quantifiable history. But the numbers of those killed in the Conquest and the slave trade, while not known exactly, are known well enough to express the quilt of the Euro-Americans in no uncertain terms. The question becomes, therefore, what is the nature of the mentality that can kill, starve or work to death this number of people? And since "we are guilty" as Einstein said, how can we understand why the Euro-Americans did it, still do it and are likely to do it again?  How can what survives of the mentality of conquest and knowledge/power in current civilization be brought into question ? I will try to look a little deeper. It is clear that religion and science, or knowledge systems in general play a major role in these atrocities. But how can this be more clearly defined?

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