That Christopher Columbus was tied to some
romantic vision of exploration is one of the biggest lies perpetuated in the western world. In fact the consequences of his voyage,
beyond the destruction of civilization as it existed prior in the Western
Hemisphere, was the development of economic systems that formed the basis for
capitalism and slavery in the Americas. But there was an even greater lie
when it comes to North America as to its “founding” because North America did
not fit neatly into the Columbus exploration leading to exploitation
hypothesis.
Ok,
lie is not the most scholarly choice to describe what is going on, except in
the sense of when you tell yourself something that is pretty much baseless and
you believe it no matter how plausible or implausible. Plausible? If so then
how could it be a lie. It’s a lie because the plausibility is never questioned
because of the need for whatever it is to be true – because of a need to find
truth – because of a belief that there is truth. This happens a lot with
history, with ideas, with politics in the general public (and with scholars
too). Sometimes there are good reasons for this and when it comes to history as
the public knows it the reasons are good, so we live and love the lie. A better
term might be applied, mythos. There is a mythos of the “discovery” and a
mythos of the “founding” that are sacrosanct – unquestionable, because truth or
lie, plausible or implausible, questioned or not, we need our story, our mythos
to be true to insure ourselves of the nobility of what we are doing and where
we came from (or even more cynically to justify the way things are and justify
how it benefits some and not others). All cultures do it – ancient cultures
were a direct product of the gods (the real ones and not the fake ones that
their neighbors came from, hah). And America does it too – not springing from
the gods, but from equally infallible circumstance. Mythos – the truth that
supports our divine origin – must be protected at all costs – even if it is a
lie.
The
Traditional Interpretation on Columbus, the origin, the motivation, the
outcome, is sometimes secured in two entangled hypotheses: the “nice”
phraseology of “God, Gold and Glory,” and that he was looking for Asia and
sailed west to prove the world was round (killing two birds with one
stone). Religion, and spreading the Only religion then becomes part of the
Columbian Exchange. Was Columbus a devout Catholic and Christian? God only
knows, though his writings are full of homage to the divine, but the problem is
that sugar is the reality in consequence of his voyages and not mass conversion
or evangelical revival. The establishment of capitalistic processes which
benefitted the 1%, however, is not a good mythos for the establishment of
European life in the Americas, much less a good justification for the
destruction of the native cultures present in the Americas before Columbus, or,
for that matter, the destruction of African populations brought to the New
World by the Columbian sugar trade. The destructive ramifications of industrial
agriculture as the only reason for the colonization of the New World (at least
the Caribbean and Central and South America) seems barbaric, and it is. So
Columbus and other subsequent colonizing efforts are rightly, but mostly
wrongly, wrapped in a shroud of God and in the nobility of exploration.
To
suggest that all colonizing efforts were the same in their motivation and
outcome is, of course, not correct, but even still, the way we are taught about
colonizing ventures, whether in the Caribbean or North America, has the essential
components of the same mythos – the same lie, or even more deviously a cover-up
for the same thing. To reinforce “God, Gold and Glory” Spanish colonization
skips over the development of sugar production through industrial agriculture
(mass produced for market consumption) and moves straight to tales about
Conquistadors and other military explorers. God is harder to see as the motivation
behind the likes of Cortes and Pizarro, but the Gold and Glory is easy to
see. But sugar? It’s the main thing, but it’s a
boring thing, but it’s the main thing. Why is it more significant than the GGG hypothesis?
When visiting Costa Rica,
along a winding road, posts were being spiked into the ground for fencing by a
group of workers. About a mile down completed fencing seemed to have posts that
still had branches coming out of them. Did they just not trim those posts? And
then a mile later the posts of the fencing were full blown trees. Trees? Was it
possible that this place was fertile enough that you could chop down a tree,
make it into posts, stick the posts into the ground and they would bloom back
into trees, Trees? I don’t know, but that’s what it looked like.
 |
| In Costa Rica living fences is actually a thing. |
Of course, "looks like" doesn’t
substantiate anything, but what is known is that here is a climate good for
year around growing with enough water resources and good enough soil to produce
whatever it is you want to produce. I’ve never seen posts grow into trees in
Cuba or Jamaica or Hispaniola or Barbados …. You get the picture, but the
conditions for mass production to lead to mass consumption (and therefore
growing profit) in the Caribbean was astounding. If you could control those
lands, as Columbus and other Europeans who followed after him saw to, wealth
beyond imagination could be yours –and once labor and transport were secured a
system of production that would dominate the Atlantic World from 1500-1800 was
established, and this system created massive amounts of wealth for those who
controlled that system. Not the laborers – they were slaves, not the whole
community – they were mostly peasants in the Old World, but for those who
controlled the system went the wealth. Yikes, talk about a bad founding mythos,
history, story, whatever. Can somebody get some religion in here to “create” a
better story? Sure, but that’s not the worst of it, that’s not the big lie, as
can be seen when we look to the North and the colonization of North America …. next
time.
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