american holocaust prologue

American Holocaust Prologue

Author David Stannard's book American Holocaust (1992) provides a view of the European explorers who settled the so-called "New World" of the Americas that completely defies the common perception of their exploits. In contemporary American society, explorers like Christopher Columbus, Cortes, Pizzarro, and the American Pioneers who settled the "Wild West" are all regarded and celebrated as heroes who braved great risks and accomplished something beneficial for future generations. Every October, Americans hold parades to honor Columbus's discovery of America, for the most obvious example.

However, at the time that these historical figures "discovered" and "settled" these lands, they were all already occupied by native peoples who had lived there peacefully for hundreds or thousands of years. Our historical retrospective completely ignores the fact that what we remember euphemistically as "exploration" or "settlement" really masks a horrible truth of exploitation, brutality, murder, and genocide. Stannard uses very effective examples to illustrate the vast scale of the atrocities committed by the European explorers in particular. For example, he explains that the scale of murder of the "Indian" peoples of the Americas (itself an incredibly presumptuous and ethnocentric name based on the erroneous assumptions attributable to bad navigation and geographical awareness of the Europeans) with reference to the hypothetical murder of modern-day Americans. Specifically in that regard, Stannard explains that the percentage of native "Indians" who were slaughtered by the Europeans after they arrived in the Americas would be comparable (numerically) to the murder of every Caucasian and African-American living today in the United States.

In fact, when the European explorers began "settling" the "New World," they systematically exploited, cheated, enslaved, and simply murdered the native populations by the thousands until virtually every single member of those ancient societies was dead within less than a century of their first unfortunate first contact with the Europeans. In many cases, the motive was economic, such as in the atrocities committed by Columbus and his men against the native Indians of modern-day Haiti. Desperate to find the gold Columbus had assumed was hidden on the island to pay back his investors, he ordered all Indians to produce a certain amount of gold every three months in return for a copper token they were forced to hang from their necks. Any Indian subsequently found without such a token would have his hands cut off and be left to bleed to death. Unfortunately for the Indians, Columbus was wrong about the gold deposits he expected to find; as a result, most of the Indians were simply hunted down with dogs and murdered after failing to meet their gold quotas.

In the American West, the situation was just as bad and equally obscured in modern-day historical references. Generally, American history of the settlement of the Western Territories focuses on the hardships encountered by the Settlers and of their skirmishes with American Indians. Moreover, most of those encounters are portrayed as unprovoked attacks by savage Indian marauders who killed innocent white families. I truth, such encounters did occur, but much less frequently than instances where American military forces (and rogue posses of Settlers) simply hunted down Indian tribes and massacred their entire populations, including women and children.