In honor of Christopher "Genocide" Columbus

You can tell right away that this is going to be a polemic. Columbus Day, on October 9, is a federal holiday in the United States. I'm not writing to begrudge the postal workers their holiday - they deserve one.

Interestingly enough, Columbus Day is celebrated in the Italian-American community, and in Latin America. Sometimes it is called Dia de la Raza; la Raza, as I understand it, refers to "the race," the mestizos who descended from the Spaniards and the native populations of Latin America.

All this does ignore the fact that Christopher Columbus was responsible for acts of intentional genocide against the Native Americans. I'd like to emphasize that I'm singling out Columbus the mythical figure more than Christopher the person, because if not for him, someone else would have come in conquest.

Columbus wrote in his journal, "We can send from here, in the name of the Holy Trinity, all the slaves and Brazil wood which could be sold." (1) As the source points out, he landed among the Taino, a peaceful people, and he wasted no time in pillaging them. If he had landed among, say, the Iroquois or the Maya, the story might have been different - or it might not. The Taino may have numbered in the millions before Columbus, but after 40 years of introduced foreign disease, pillaging, and murder, they were nearly extinct.

The United States of America is founded on a base of genocide. That genocide is probably worse than the Holocaust, only it is far back enough in history that people forget. We have soothed our consciences for too long, saying that we were bringing enlightenment to the savages. This must cease. What has been done cannot be undone. But reparations can be made for the slaughter. Reparations to the people who we have made foreigners in their own land, and repentance to God, who knows the hearts of all men and women, and who weeps at our coldness and wilful ignorance. Every time we feel hostile towards illegal immigrants, we should humble ourselves by remembering that the land we are on was obtained through conquest, coercion, and forced population transfer - which would make it illegal under the modern Geneva Conventions.

I have a friend, who is trying to find God on the Arizona-Mexico border. She works with an organization called No Mas Muertes, or No More Deaths. They provide food and medical aid to immigrants who are attempting to cross the border. The objective is not to assist them in entering the US illegally, but to provide aid to those who are in need - and, this being the desert, if you don't get aid, you might die of dehydration. The leaders of the organization were recently arrested on a felony charge of transporting illegal immigrants (in their case, to a hospital). The charges were dismissed on technical grounds. However, I am told that focus groups that No Mas Muertes conducted before the trial showed that juries would simply vote to convict on hearing the words "illegal" and "immigrants". The sad irony is that Arizona and some neighboring states were obtained by conquest from the invasion of Mexico. It does not matter who fired the first shot in the war. By the modern Geneva Conventions, it is illegal for a country to conquer a territory by military force, and then transfer its own population there. That is what we did in the Mexican-American War, and we should remember that.

(1) http://www.danielnpaul.com/ChristopherColumbus.html