Everything old is new again, native populations edition

We talked last week about Nazis — or, at least, Nazi sympathizers — in the good ol’ USA. This week, we’re climbing into the way-wayback machine to look at how racism is embedded in colonialism and (yes, sorry) Christianity, and not just in the good ol’ USA.
Long ago and far away (1492, actually), a guy named Christopher Columbus set out to find a sea route to the treasures of Asia that had become must-haves in Europe since Marco Polo’s travels in the 13th century. The Spanish empire in the New World kicked off when Chris disembarked in what we now call the Bahamas, where he met the local folks, the Arawak. These friendly locals were wearing gold jewelry, so of course Chris took them prisoner, and demanded to be taken to the source of the gold. He also noted in his journal that he could conquer the entire tribe with a squad of 50 men, and “govern them how I please.”
If we go further back in that way-wayback machine, to the ancient civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and Rome, we’ll see that Chris didn’t invent this “travel, meet new people, and conquer or kill them” thing. This is human history, writ both small and large. On the small scale, we’ve been bonking each other over the head with blunt objects since Neanderthal times, when Cro Magnons (homo sapiens) bashed harder and wound up becoming the apex predator here on planet Earth. So this whole “you’re different, imma have to kill you” thing seems embedded in human DNA. On the larger scale, as humans organized into groups — we’ll call them “society” — we started codifying who is “us,” and who is “them,” and “them” would be “the enemy,” and have to either surrender or die. That codification includes what we have referred to as “laws” since Egyptian (Ma’at) and Babylonian (Code of Hammurabi) time.
Bonking-over-head was replaced during the Bronze Age by stabbing as the preferred method to murder one’s fellow humans, and then gunpowder served up the first gun in the 14th century. It’s been off to the mass murder races since then in what many call “the civilized world,” which is laughable, really. “Civilized” is not how I’d describe people who keep inventing more effective ways to murder each other at scale, but that might just be me.
OK, I promised you Christianity in this thing, so here goes: in 1513, the rulers of Spain worried that their wholesale slaughter of native populations in the Western Hemisphere might put their immortal souls at risk. They then came up with the Spanish Requirement of 1513 (you can read the whole thing in Spanish, or Google-translate English, here), which grew out of Pope Nicholas V’s papal bull Dum Diversas, which legitimized the slave trade, at least as a result of war. Charming, right? That made it possible for Spanish Conquistadores to read aloud — in Spanish, which the local populations did not speak — declarations that demanded the local populations “accept Spanish rule and allow preaching to them by Catholic missionaries on pain of war, slavery or death.” Which, according to the Church (Rome) and the Crown (Spain), meant that the Spanish forces could then murdelize the folks already living in the Western Hemisphere with impunity. I repeat: charming, right?
That Spanish Requirement thing became the bedrock of European occupation and conquest of the millions of native folks who lived here before we turned up, handing out smallpox infected blankets and death by wounding as hostess gifts. Spain’s requirement, supported by Catholic doctrine and dogma, gave white guys (and it really was all dudes at the outset) the divine right to murder and pillage with impunity, all in the name of “civilizing the heathen hordes.” Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Dutch, the Italians — everybody did it. They did it in Africa, too, which kicked off that brisk Middle Passage slave trade that brought Black people to the Western Hemisphere against their will, where they helped build North, Central, and South America in Europe’s image, at least at the beginning.

Middle East? Yeah, we got that too. Just go Google “the Crusades,” and see how we’re still dealing with the bloody echo of that same motherf***ing “Christian campaign” today.
Asia wasn’t off the hook on this whole “look out, white guys are coming!” thing, by the way. Ask anyone with roots on the Indian subcontinent, or in southeast Asia. And let’s not forget the native Australian folks, who suffered the same physical and cultural genocide that native populations in the Western Hemisphere did. All in the name of “Christian conversion” and the rights assigned to European white dudes by papal order.
I’m banging on about this ’cause, as Professor Santayana told us long ago (1905, to be exact), “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That’s been paraphrased as “those who don’t study history are condemned to repeat it” — whichever version you know, you know it’s the truth. If we don’t/can’t remember our past, we’re on the path to idiocracy … and not the funny version that Mike Judge served up back in 2005, either.
This echoes today in the standoff at Standing Rock, in Charlottesville, and anywhere else where not-white people are forced to live lives “less than” the white folks — particularly those “good Christian” ones who seem to have forgotten that Christ himself was more than likely a dark-skinned dude, not the White Viking Jesus that Western civ has served up for millennia — that are the original occupants of this broad, fruitful land of ours.
It’s time to start having conversations about reparations, folks.
Yes, really.
Rather than build a giant bloody wall, why not help the people whose lands, and whose bodies, we stole take their full place in what is their own country?
Just asking.
Let’s start.
Yes, really.

