DeSoto-Hernando-1791.
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Today is January 6, 2025. On this date four years ago a vile, shameless, and greedy skunk, Donald Trump -- who had just befouled both the White House and our nation for four years -- fomented a violent insurrection in a failed attempt to retain power after being trounced by Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election. Notwithstanding Trump's lies designed to whitewash his failed insurrection, it is a day that will live in infamy.
Unfortunately, rather than receiving justice and rotting in jail, Trump had been reelected, thanks to the dehumanized and morally depraved Christian White supremacists, who infamously cast their votes for a convicted felon, serial liar, sexual predator and ignoramus. Many of these pathetic souls even celebrate Trump's failed insurrection.
But they are just the latest of a long line of Christian White supremacist ancestors whose greedy and violent actions have despoiled the Americas while dehumanizing themselves.
In fact, the history of the Americas has been besmirched by violent Christian White supremacy ever since the fateful voyage, in 1492, of the self-proclaimed "Christ bearer," Christopher Columbus. Although certainly a violent Christian White supremacist, Columbus also was "a braggart, a bore, and a bit cracked" (Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, Harper Collins, 2000, p. 98).
Cracked? Yes! "Columbus hoped to convert the Asians to Christianity and to recruit their bodies and their wealth to assist Europeans in a final crusade to crush Islam and reclaim Jerusalem. Such a victory would then invite Christ's return to earth to reign over a millennium of perfect justice and harmony" (American Colonies" The Settling of North America, Alan Taylor, Penguin, 2001, p. 33).
In his book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, (Vintage, 2012), Charles C. Mann tells us that "Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round." Columbus, "disputed both facts." He believed the planet was shaped like a pear and had a circumference at least five thousand miles smaller than it actually is (p.42). Although incapable of using quadrants and astrolabes, Columbus relied on past experiences at sea, dead reckoning, and the North Equatorial Current to stumble upon an island in the Bahamas that he named San Salvador. He incorrectly "concluded that he had reached an island or peninsula on the outskirts of China" (Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504, by Laurence Bergreen, Penguin, 2011, p. 6). Although, "No comparable figure in the age of discovery was so mistaken as to his whereabouts" (Ibid., p. 7), it was a delusion he held his entire life.
Columbus eventually settled in Hispaniola, largely populated at the time by one million Taino Indians, who he viewed as ripe fodder for enslavement and exploitation in his obsessive search for gold. Due to a subordinate's negligence, a mere boy was permitted to guide the Santa Maria while the adults slept off a drunken Christmas Eve celebration. And guide it he did! Directly into three coral reefs. When it became clear that the ship could not be saved, it was torn apart so that the wood could be used to build a fortress, called La Navidad. Fearful that this disaster would taint his voyage and potentially prevent him from leading future voyages, cunning and heartless Columbus ordered thirty-nine members of his crew to remain at La Navidad, while he returned to Spain. Perhaps the remaining two ships could not have accommodated the entire crew. Nevertheless, that decision ensured one future return voyage to Hispaniola, because only he and his crew knew where La Navidad was located.
Instead of criticism, the fortress at La Navidad was touted throughout Western Europe as the first settlement in the New World. Historians subsequently would dub that voyage as the beginning of the monumentally transformational "Columbian Exchange," which saw Old World flora, fauna, and diseases transferred to the New World, and New World flora, fauna, and diseases transferred to the Old.
Pope Alexander VI seized upon the sensations caused by Columbus's "Letter on the First Voyage," (which was riddled with lies and exaggerations), to issue four Papal Bulls which had the effect of arrogantly dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal. "The bulls were based on the assumption that Christian nations could, by divine right, claim title to newly discovered non-Christian lands and their peoples" (Ibid., p 121).
Things went less well for the Christian White supremacist during his subsequent three voyages. On his second voyage, Columbus found that La Navidad had been burned to the ground and all thirty-nine crew members were dead. His harsh retaliatory measures and heartless exploitation led to widespread unrest, mass suicide, and even opposition from other Spaniards. He also enslaved "five hundred and fifty souls " around two hundred and fifty of [whom] died" before reaching Spain, and he cast those who died "into the sea" (The Discovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U. S. History, Ned Blackhawk, Yale, 2023, p. 22).
After his third voyage, Columbus was arrested, placed in chains, put in the hold of a ship, and returned to Spain. Released and permitted a fourth voyage, shipworms forced him to scuttle his last two ships, bind them together as a fortress in Jamaica, and await an improbable rescue, lest he be lost to the ages. Surrounded by Indians, he waited a year before a rescue ship miraculously appeared.
The Taino of Hispaniola fared far worse. Although many died at the hands of the Spanish, disease played a major role in reducing the population from one million in 1492 to approximately 46,000 by 1512. Unable to be contained, disease spread rapidly across the Caribbean and into mainland Central America and South America. It often preceded the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, who would spread it further.
Inspired by Columbus, "During the sixteenth century, the New World drew about 250,000 Spanish emigrants to the Americas" (Taylor, p. 61). Many of these Spaniards married or had sex with Indians. Their offspring were called mestizos.
In North America, the Spaniards established a colony in New Mexico in 1598 on the backs of the Pueblo Indians. Provoked to revolt in 1680, the Pueblos sent a force of nearly 17,000 natives against the colonists, forcing the latter to flee to El Paso. Eventually, the Spaniards recovered. But the revolt was "the greatest setback that natives ever inflicted on European expansion in North America" (Ibid., p. 89).
Earlier, in 1565, they established a fortified town in Florida named St. Augustine, which became the first enduring colonial town in what became known as the United States (Ibid., p. 77).
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