indeed self-deluded, is preferable to the cowardice of not taking a position.
The point of this chapter is to paint a few false historical narratives in enough detail to see clearly some of the lies we tell about our histories, how they were constructed and maintained, and the purposes they may serve. We will also consider the costs. It has famously been said that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it, or as Harry Truman put it: “The only thing new under the sun is the history you do not know.”
THE US FALSE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
The false US narrative can be summarized with a few key facts, their rationalization, and the function of the rationalizations. The key fact is the slaughter and dispossession of an entire people (or set of peoples) to make room for Europeans (and their African slaves), a feat also accomplished by treaties not kept. Too late did Amerindians learn never to sign a treaty with a white man. For the latter, treaties were merely temporary agreements to be abrogated as soon as it was advantageous to do so.
It is fully apt that Christopher Columbus should have been elevated to historical status for discovering the Americas. On the one hand, he did no such thing. There were more than 100 million people awaiting him when he arrived. And ships had also recently arrived from Africa, Polynesia, Phoenicia, and even other European countries. On the other hand, Columbus was unique in that he combined exploration with an explicit plan for subjugating the locals and extracting their wealth and labor. This of course is not what he is celebrated for.
His first visit in 1492 merely allowed him to look around, and this is the one preserved in historical memory. The arrival of his three cute little ships—the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—connoted a naive, peaceful arrival to “discover” a brand-new land. The second time (in 1493), he arrived more fully prepared: seventeen ships, at least twelve hundred men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs trained to rend human flesh. Yet this second visit is lost from historical memory entirely. It is the key visit, but no one mentions it.
In Hispaniola, he and his men immediately demanded food, gold, spun cotton, and access to the local women. Indians were put to work mining gold, raising Spanish food, and even carrying the Spaniards around wherever they went. Minor offenses by Indians were punished by mutilation—an ear, a nose, both hands. Failing to find gold, Columbus started slave capture and transmission on a large scale, returning to Spain with five hundred Indians (almost half dying on the way) and leaving five hundred slaves behind. He launched a reign of sadistic terror: newborns given to dogs as food or smashed against rocks in front of their screaming mothers, twenty thousand killed in Hispaniola alone, with more to come on nearby islands. Mass suicide and regular infanticide were common responses by the Indians to the horrors they were experiencing. To make a long story shorter, a mere twenty-five years later when Columbus and his immediate heirs were done with Hispaniola, its Indian population had been reduced from an estimated five million people to fewer than fifty thousand. This was a story to be repeated in North, Central, and South America except that in the mainland tropics you could never exterminate everyone, especially those living deeper or higher in the forest. Neither the invention of ships nor means of navigation allowed this conquest and holocaust to take place; it was the invention of large guns, which could be attached to sturdy ships and supported by an array of smaller guns and aggressive weapons. It was the invention of high-tech war across the sea that brought about the new wave of colonization and genocide.
The point is that our retrospective re-creation of the “founding of the Americas” minimizes the sordid details of murder, slavery, sexual exploitation, and degradation with which it began. Instead it exalts simple exploration and discovery. Thus do we deny the motives and the reality of the territorial takeover. The benefit is self-glorification and continuation of the same kind of behavior; the cost is much more long-term, depending partly on the reaction of the survivors to this kind of behavior.
The holocaust was repeated up and down the Americas: one part introduced diseases to which the local people had little or no resistance, and one part heartless slaughter—women, children, the elderly, all members of village after village after village put