Colonization of North America. English colonies

The first inhabitants of South America were the American Indians. There is evidence that they were from Asia. Approximately 9000 years before our era, they crossed the Bering Strait, and then descended to the south, passing through the entire territory of North America. It was these people who created one of the most ancient and unusual civilizations in South America, including the mysterious states of the Aztecs and Incas. The ancient civilization of the South American Indians was ruthlessly destroyed by the Europeans, who began colonizing the continent in the 1500s.

Capture and looting

By the end of the 1500s, most of the South American continent had been taken over by Europeans. They were attracted here by huge natural resources - gold and precious stones. During colonization, Europeans destroyed and plundered ancient cities and brought diseases from Europe that wiped out almost the entire indigenous population - the Indians.

Modern population

There are twelve independent states in South America. The largest country, Brazil, covers almost half of the continent, including the vast Amazon Basin. Most of the inhabitants of South America speak Spanish, that is, the language of the conquerors who sailed here from Europe on their sailing ships in the 16th century. True, in Brazil, on whose territory the invaders once landed - the Portuguese, the official language is Portuguese. Another country, Guyana, speaks English. Native American Indians still survive in the highlands of Bolivia and Peru. The majority of the inhabitants of Argentina are white, and in neighboring Brazil there are a large number of descendants of African black slaves.

Culture and sports

South America has become the birthplace of many unusual people and a hospitable home that has gathered many different cultures under its roof. Bright colorful houses in La Boca - the bohemian quarter of the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires. This area, which attracts artists and musicians, is inhabited mainly by Italians, descendants of settlers from Genoa who sailed here in the 1800s.
The most favorite sport on the continent is football, and it is not surprising that it was the South American teams - Brazil and Argentina - that became world champions more often than others. Pele played for Brazil - the most outstanding footballer in the history of this game.
In addition to football, Brazil is famous for its famous carnivals, which are held in Rio de Janeiro. During the carnival, which takes place in February or March, millions of people pass through the streets of Rio in the rhythm of the samba, and millions more spectators watch this colorful action. The Brazilian carnival is the most massive holiday held on our planet.

Chronology of the most important events:

1499 - Amerigo Vespucci and Alonso de Hoyeda reach the mouth of the Amazon

1502 - Vespucci, after a second voyage, finally comes to the conclusion that the American continent is not part of India

· 1513 -- After a 25-day trek through the jungles of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, he crosses the Isthmus of Panama and reaches the Pacific coast of America for the first time.

· 1513 -- Juan Ponce de León sets off in search of the legendary Fountain of Youth. Having failed in reaching the object of the search, he nevertheless discovers gold deposits. Names the Florida peninsula and declares it a Spanish possession.

· 1519 - Fernand Cortes enters Tenochtitlan, captures the Emperor Montezuma, thus starting the conquest of the Aztec empire. His triumph leads to 300 years of Spanish rule in Mexico and Central America.

1522 - Psqual de Andogoya discovers Peru.

· 1523 -- Spain establishes a permanent military base and settlement in Jamaica.

· 1531 - Francisco Pizarro invades Peru, destroys thousands of natives and conquers the Inca Empire, the most powerful state of South American Indians. A huge number of Incas die from chickenpox brought by the Spaniards.

· 1536 - Spanish settlers found Buenos Aires, but after five years they were forced to leave the city under the onslaught of the Indians.

· 1538 -- Founding of Bogotá.

· 1539 - The first printing press in the New World opens in Mexico City.

· 1540 -- Opening of the Grand Canyon.

· 1541 - Fernand de Soto reaches the banks of the Mississippi.

1551 -- First universities founded in Lima and Mexico City

1565 - St. Augustine is founded - the first settlement of Europeans in the territory of the modern United States

1567 -- Founding of Rio de Janeiro

1580 -- Refoundation of Buenos Aires

· 1605 -- (1609 according to some sources) Founding of Santa Fe, the capital of the Spanish colony of New Mexico (now a US state) Reader on the history of the state and law of foreign countries. M.: Thought, 1984. - S. 87.

By the middle of the 16th century, Spanish domination of the American continent was almost absolute, colonial possessions stretching from Cape Horn to New Mexico brought huge revenues to the royal treasury. Attempts by other European states to establish colonies in America were not crowned with noticeable success.

But at the same time, the balance of power in the Old World began to change: the kings spent the streams of silver and gold flowing from the colonies, and had little interest in the economy of the metropolis, which, under the weight of an inefficient, corrupt administrative apparatus, clerical dominance and lack of incentives for modernization, began to lag behind more and more. from the rapidly developing economy of England. Spain gradually lost the status of the main European superpower and mistress of the seas. Many years of war in the Netherlands, huge funds spent on the fight against the Reformation throughout Europe, the conflict with England hastened the decline of Spain. The last straw was the death of the Invincible Armada in 1588. After the English admirals, and more so in a violent storm, destroyed the largest fleet of the time, Spain fell into the shadows, never to recover from this blow.

Leadership in the "relay race" of colonization passed to England, France and Holland.

In 1585 and 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh, on the orders of Queen Elizabeth I of England, made two attempts to establish a permanent settlement in North America. The reconnaissance expedition reached the American coast in 1584, and named the open coast of Virginia (Eng. Virginia - "Virgin") in honor of the "Virgin Queen" Elizabeth I, who never married. Both attempts ended in failure - the first colony, founded on Roanook Island off the coast of Virginia, was on the verge of collapse due to Indian attacks and lack of supplies and was evacuated by Sir Francis Drake in April 1587. In July of the same year, a second expedition of colonists landed on the island, numbering 117 people. It was planned that ships with equipment and food would arrive in the colony in the spring of 1588. However, for various reasons, the supply expedition was delayed by almost a year and a half. When she arrived at the place, all the buildings of the colonists were intact, but no traces of people, with the exception of the remains of one person, were found. The exact fate of the colonists has not been established to this day.

At the beginning of the 17th century, private capital entered the business. In 1605, two joint-stock companies received licenses from King James I to establish colonies in Virginia. It should be borne in mind that at that time the term "Virginia" denoted the entire territory of the North American continent. The first of the companies, the Virginia Company of London, received the rights to the southern part of the continent, the second Plymouth Company (English Plimuth Company) to the northern part of the continent. Despite the fact that both companies officially proclaimed the spread of Christianity as the main goal, the license received granted them the right to "search and mine gold, silver and copper by all means."

On December 20, 1606, the colonists set sail aboard three ships, and after a difficult, almost five-month voyage, during which several dozen died of starvation and disease, in May 1607 they reached Chesapeake Bay. Over the next month, they built a wooden fort named after King Fort James (the English pronunciation of the name Jacob). The fort was later renamed Jamestown, the first permanent British settlement in America.

The official historiography of the United States considers Jamestown the cradle of the country, the history of the settlement and its leader, Captain John Smith of Jamestown, is covered in many serious studies and works of art. The latter, as a rule, idealize the history of the city and the pioneers who inhabited it (for example, the popular cartoon Pocahontas). In fact, the first years of the colony were extremely difficult, in the famine winter of 1609-1610. out of 500 colonists, no more than 60 survived, and, according to some evidence, the survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive the hunger of the Reader on the history of the state and the law of foreign countries. M.: Thought, 1984. - S. 187.

In subsequent years, when the issue of physical survival was no longer so acute, the two most important problems were tensions with the indigenous population and the economic feasibility of the existence of the colony. To the disappointment of the shareholders of the London Virginia Company, neither gold nor silver was found by the colonists, and the main export commodity was ship timber. Despite the fact that this product was in certain demand in the metropolis, which had exhausted its forests, the profit, as well as from other attempts at economic activity, was minimal. The situation changed in 1612, when farmer and landowner John Rolfe managed to cross a local variety of tobacco grown by the Indians with varieties imported from Bermuda. The resulting hybrids were well adapted to the Virginia climate and at the same time suited the tastes of English consumers. The colony acquired a source of reliable income and for many years tobacco became the basis of the economy and exports of Virginia, and the phrases "Virginia tobacco", "Virginia blend" are used as characteristics of tobacco products to this day. Five years later, tobacco exports amounted to 20,000 pounds, a year later it was doubled, and by 1629 it reached 500,000 pounds. John Rolfe rendered another service to the colony: in 1614 he managed to negotiate peace with the local Indian chief. The peace treaty was sealed by marriage between Rolf and the leader's daughter, Pocahontas.

In 1619, two events occurred that had a significant impact on the entire subsequent history of the United States. This year, Governor John Yardley decided to hand over some of the power to the House of Burgesses, establishing the New World's first elected legislature. The first meeting of the council took place on July 30, 1619. In the same year, a small group of Africans of Angolan origin was acquired by the colonists. Although formally they were not slaves, but had long contracts without the right to terminate, it is customary to count the history of slavery in America from this event.

In 1622, almost a quarter of the population of the colony was destroyed by the rebellious Indians. In 1624, the license of the London Company, whose affairs fell into decay, was revoked and from that time Virginia became a royal colony. The governor was appointed by the king, but the colonial council retained significant powers.

By 1712, New France was at its largest. It included five provinces:

Canada (the southern part of the modern province of Quebec), divided in turn into three "governments": Quebec, Three Rivers (fr. Trois-Rivieres), Montreal and the dependent territory of Pays d "en Haut, which included the modern Canadian and American regions of the Great Lakes , of which the ports of Pontchartrand (Detroit) (fr. Pontchartrain) and Michillimakinac (fr. Michillimakinac) were practically the only poles of French settlement after the destruction of Huronia.

· Acadia (modern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick).

Hudson Bay (modern day Canada)

New Earth

Louisiana (the central part of the USA, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans), subdivided into two administrative regions: Lower Louisiana and Illinois (fr. le Pays des Illinois).

As a result of the voyage of Columbus, they found much more, a whole “New World”, inhabited by numerous peoples. Having conquered these peoples with lightning speed, the Europeans began the merciless exploitation of the natural and human resources of the continent they had captured. Namely, from this moment begins a breakthrough that by the end of the 19th century made the Euro-American civilization dominant over the rest of the peoples of the planet.

The remarkable Marxist geographer James Bluth, in his groundbreaking study The Colonial Model of the World, paints a broad picture of early capitalist production in colonial South America and shows its key importance for the rise of European capitalism. It is necessary to briefly summarize his conclusions.

precious metals

Thanks to the conquest of America, by 1640, Europeans received from there at least 180 tons of gold and 17 thousand tons of silver. This is official data. In fact, these figures can be safely multiplied by two, taking into account the poor customs records and the widespread development of smuggling. The huge influx of precious metals led to a sharp expansion of the sphere of money circulation, necessary for the formation of capitalism. But, more importantly, the gold and silver that fell on them allowed European entrepreneurs to pay higher prices for goods and labor and thereby seize the dominant heights in international trade and production, ousting their competitors - the groupings of the non-European proto-bourgeoisie, especially in the Mediterranean region. Leaving aside for now the role of genocide in the extraction of precious metals, as well as other forms of capitalist economy in Columbus America, it is necessary to note Blaut's important argument that the very process of mining these metals and the economic activity necessary to ensure it were profitable.

plantations

In the 15-16 centuries. commercial and feudal sugar production developed throughout the Mediterranean and in West and East Africa, although honey was still preferred in northern Europe due to its lower cost. Even then, the sugar industry was an important part of the proto-capitalist sector in the Mediterranean economy. Then, throughout the 16th century, there is a process of rapid development of sugar plantations in America, which replaces and displaces the production of sugar in the Mediterranean. Thus, using the two traditional benefits of colonialism - "free" land and cheap labor - European proto-capitalists eliminate their competitors with their feudal and semi-feudal production. No other industry, Blauth concludes, was as important to the development of capitalism before the 19th century as the sugar plantations in Columbian America. And the data he cites is truly amazing.

So in 1600, 30,000 tons of sugar were exported from Brazil with a selling price of 2 million pounds. This is about twice the value of all British exports for that year. Recall that it is Britain and its commodity production of wool that Eurocentric historians (i.e. 99% of all historians) consider to be the main engine of capitalist development in the 17th century. That same year, Brazil's per capita income (excluding the Indians, of course) was higher than that of Britain, which only caught up with Brazil later. By the end of the 16th century, the rate of capitalist accumulation on Brazilian plantations was so high that it allowed production to double every 2 years. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Dutch capitalists, who controlled a significant part of the sugar business in Brazil, made calculations that showed that the annual rate of return in this industry was 56%, and in monetary terms, almost 1 million pounds sterling (a fantastic amount for that time). Moreover, these profits were even higher at the end of the 16th century, when the cost of production, including the purchase of slaves, was only one-fifth of the income from the sale of sugar.

Sugar plantations in America were central to the rise of the early capitalist economy in Europe. But besides sugar, there was also tobacco, there were spices, dyes, there was a huge fishing industry in Newfoundland and other places on the East coast of North America. All this was also part of the capitalist development of Europe. The slave trade was also extremely profitable. By the end of the 16th century, up to 1 million people worked in the colonial economy of the Western Hemisphere, according to Blauth's calculations, about half of whom were employed in capitalist production. In the 1570s, the huge mining town of Potosi in the Andes had a population of 120,000, more than at that time lived in such European cities as Paris, Rome or Madrid.

Finally, about fifty new types of agricultural plants, cultivated by the agrarian genius of the peoples of the "New World", fell into the hands of Europeans, such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, a number of pepper varieties, cocoa for chocolate production, a number of legumes, peanuts, sunflowers, etc. Of these — potatoes and corn became cheap substitutes for bread for the European masses, saving millions from devastating crop shortages, allowing Europe to double food production in fifty years from 1492 and thus provide one of the main conditions for creating a market for wage labor for capitalist production.

So, thanks to the works of Blaut and a number of other radical historians, the key role of early European colonialism in the development of capitalism and its “centering” (centratedness - neologism of J. Blaut - A.B.) is beginning to emerge in Europe, and not in other areas of world proto-capitalist development. . Vast territories, cheap slave labor of enslaved peoples, and the plunder of the natural wealth of the Americas gave the European proto-bourgeoisie a decisive superiority over its competitors in the international economic system of the 16th and 17th centuries, allowed it to rapidly accelerate the already existing tendencies of capitalist production and accumulation, and thus initiate the process of social -political transformation of feudal Europe into a bourgeois society. As the famous Caribbean Marxist historian S.R.L. James, "the slave trade and slavery became the economic basis of the French Revolution... Almost every industry that developed in France in the 18th century was based on the production of goods for the coast of Guinea or for America." (James, 47-48).

This fateful turn in world history was based on the genocide of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. This genocide was not only the first in the history of capitalism, not only stands at its origins, it is both the largest in terms of the number of victims and the longest extermination of peoples and ethnic groups, which continues to this day.

"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."
(Bhagavad Gita)

Robert Oppenheimer remembered these lines when he saw the first atomic explosion. With much more right, the ominous words of an ancient Sanskrit poem could be recalled by the people who were on the ships Ninya, Pinta and Santa Maria, when, 450 years before the Explosion, in the same dark early morning, they noticed a fire on the lee side of the island, subsequently named after the Saint Savior - San Salvador.

26 days after a nuclear device was tested in the New Mexico desert, a bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed at least 130,000 people, almost all of them civilians. In just 21 years after Columbus landed on the islands of the Caribbean, the largest of them, renamed by the Admiral in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), lost almost its entire indigenous population - about 8 million people killed, died from disease, hunger, slave labor and desperation. The devastating power of this Spanish "nuclear bomb" on Hispaniola was equivalent to more than 50 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. And that was just the beginning.

Thus, University of Hawaii historian David Stanard begins his book American Holocaust (1992) by comparing the first and “most monstrous in terms of size and consequences of genocide in world history” with the practice of genocides in the 20th century, and in this historical perspective lies, in my opinion. view, the special significance of his work, as well as the significance of Ward Churchill's follow-up book "The Minor Question of Genocide" (1997) and a number of other studies of recent years. In these works, the destruction of the indigenous population of the Americas by Europeans and Latinos appears not only as the most massive and long-lasting (up to the present day) genocide in world history, but also as an organic part of the Euro-American civilization from the late Middle Ages to Western imperialism of our days.

Stanard begins his book by describing the astounding richness and diversity of human life in the Americas until the fateful voyage of Columbus. He then takes the reader along the historical-geographic route of genocide, from the extermination of the native inhabitants of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, to the turn north and the destruction of the Indians in Florida, Virginia and New England, and finally through the Great Prairies and the Southwest to California. and the Pacific coast of the Northwest. The following part of my article is based primarily on Stanard's book, while the second part, the genocide in North America, uses Churchill's work.

Who was the victim of the most massive genocide in world history?

The human society destroyed by the Europeans in the Caribbean was in all respects superior to their own, if we take proximity to the ideal of a communist society as a measure of development. It would be more accurate to say that, thanks to a rare combination of natural conditions, the Tainos (or Arawaks) lived in a communist society. Not in the way the European Marx imagined it, but nevertheless communist. The inhabitants of the Greater Antilles have reached a high level in regulating their relations with the natural world. They learned to get everything they needed from nature, not exhausting it, but cultivating and transforming it. They had huge aqua farms, in each of which they raised up to a thousand large sea turtles (the equivalent of 100 head of cattle). They literally “collected” small fish from the sea, using plant substances that paralyzed them. Their agriculture was superior to European levels and was based on a three-tier planting system that uses a combination of different types of plants to create a favorable soil and climate regime. Their dwellings, spacious, clean and bright, would be the envy of the European masses.

The American geographer Carl Sauer comes to the following conclusion:

"The tropical idyll that we find in the descriptions of Columbus and Peter Martyr was basically true." About Tainos (Arawak): “These people did not feel the need for anything. They took care of their plants and were skilled fishermen, canoeists and swimmers. They built attractive dwellings and kept them clean. Aesthetically, they expressed themselves in wood. They had free time to play ball, dance and music. They lived in peace and friendship." (Standard, 51).

But Columbus, this typical European of the 15th and 16th centuries, had a different idea of ​​"good society." October 12, 1492, the day of "Contact", he wrote in his diary:
“These people walk in what their mother gave birth to, but they are good-natured ... they can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith. They will make good and skillful servants.”

On that day, representatives of the two continents met for the first time on an island that the locals called Guanahani. Early in the morning, under the tall pines on the sandy shore, a crowd of curious Tainos gathered. They watched as a strange boat with a fishbone-like hull and bearded strangers in it swam up to the shore and buried itself in the sand. Bearded men came out of it and pulled it higher, away from the foam of the surf. Now they were facing each other. The newcomers were swarthy and dark-haired, shaggy heads, overgrown beards, many of their faces were pitted with smallpox - one of the 60-70 deadly diseases that they would bring to the Western Hemisphere. There was a heavy smell coming from them. In Europe of the 15th century, they did not bathe. At a temperature of 30-35 degrees Celsius, the aliens were dressed from head to toe, with metal armor hanging over their clothes. In their hands they held long thin knives, daggers and sticks sparkling in the sun.

In the logbook, Columbus often notes the striking beauty of the islands and their inhabitants - friendly, happy, peaceful. And two days after the first contact, an ominous entry appears in the log: "50 soldiers are enough to subdue them all and make them do whatever we want." “The locals let us go where we want and give us everything we ask of them.” Most of all, Europeans were surprised by the incomprehensible generosity of this people for them. And this is not surprising. Columbus and his comrades sailed to these islands from a real hell, which was at that time Europe. They were the real fiends (and in many respects the dregs) of the European hell, over which the bloody dawn of the initial capitalist accumulation arose. It is necessary to tell briefly about this place.

Hell called "Europe"

A fierce class war was going on in hell Europe, frequent epidemics of smallpox, cholera and plague devastated cities, death from hunger even more often mowed down the population. But even in prosperous years, according to the historian of Spain of the 16th century, "the rich ate, and ate to satiety, while thousands of hungry eyes looked eagerly at their gargantuan dinners." So precarious was the subsistence of the masses that even in the 17th century, each "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet in France killed an equal or twice as large percentage of the population as US losses in the Civil War. Centuries after Columbus' voyage, the urban ditches of Europe still served as public toilets, the entrails of slaughtered animals and the remains of carcasses thrown out to rot in the streets. A particular problem in London was the so-called. "holes for the poor" - "large, deep, open pits, where the corpses of the dead poor people were piled, in a row, layer on layer. Only when the pit was filled to the brim, it was covered with earth. One contemporary wrote: “How disgusting is the stench that comes from these pits filled with corpses, especially in the heat and after the rain.” Little better was the smell coming from the living Europeans, most of whom were born and died without washing once. Nearly every one of them bore the marks of smallpox and other deforming diseases that left their victims half-blind, covered in pockmarks, scabs, festering chronic ulcers, lame, and so on. The average life expectancy did not reach 30 years. Half of the children died before reaching 10.

Around every corner you could lie in wait for a criminal. One of the most popular methods of robbery was to throw a stone from the window on the head of his victim and then search it, and one of the festive entertainments was to burn a dozen or two cats alive. In the famine years, the cities of Europe were shaken by riots. And the largest class war of that era, or rather a series of wars under the general name Peasants, claimed more than 100,000 lives. The fate of the rural population was not the best. The classic description of the French peasants of the 17th century, left by La Bruère and confirmed by modern historians, summarizes the existence of this most numerous class of feudal Europe:

“Gloomy animals, males and females scattered over the countryside, dirty and deathly pale, sun-scorched, chained to the ground, which they dig and shovel with invincible tenacity; they have a kind of gift of speech, and when they straighten up, you can see human faces on them, and they are really people. At night they return to their lairs, where they live on black bread, water and roots.

And what Lawrence Stone wrote about a typical English village can be applied to the rest of Europe at that time:

“It was a place full of hatred and malice, the only thing that connected its inhabitants were episodes of mass hysteria, which for a time united the majority in order to torture and burn the local witch.” There were cities in England and on the Continent in which up to a third of the population were accused of witchcraft, and where 10 out of every hundred citizens were executed on this charge in one year alone. At the end of the 16th - 17th century, in one of the regions of peaceful Switzerland, more than 3,300 people were executed for "Satanism". In the tiny village of Wiesensteig, 63 "witches" were burned in one year. In the Obermarchtal, with a population of 700, 54 people died at the stake in three years.

Poverty was such a central phenomenon in European society that in the 17th century the French language had a whole palette of words (about 20) to designate all its gradations and shades. The Dictionary of the Academy explained the meaning of the term dans un etat d'indigence absolue as follows: "one who previously had no food or necessary clothing or a roof over his head, but who has now said goodbye to a few crumpled cooking bowls and blankets that constituted the main property working families.

Slavery flourished in Christian Europe. The church welcomed and encouraged him, she herself was the largest slave trader; the significance of her policy in this area for understanding the genocide in America, I will say at the end of the essay. In the 14th and 15th centuries, most of the slaves came from Eastern Europe, especially Romania (history repeats itself in modern times). Little girls were especially valued. From a letter from a slave trader to a customer interested in this product: “When the ships from Romania arrive, there must be girls there, but keep in mind that small slave girls are as expensive as adults; none of those of any value is worth less than 50-60 florins.” Historian John Boswell observes that "between 10 and 20 percent of the women sold in Seville in the 15th century were pregnant or had babies, and these unborn children and babies were usually delivered to the buyer with the woman at no extra charge."

The rich had their own problems. They coveted gold and silver to satisfy their habits of exotic goods, habits acquired since the time of the first crusades, i.e. the first colonial expeditions of Europeans. Silks, spices, fine cotton, drugs and medicines, perfumes and jewelry required a lot of money. Thus gold became for the Europeans, in the words of one Venetian, “the veins of the whole state life ... its mind and soul. . .her essence and her very life.” But the supply of precious metals from Africa and the Middle East has been unreliable. In addition, the wars in Eastern Europe drained the European treasury. It was necessary to find a new, reliable and preferably cheaper source of gold.

What to add to this? As can be seen from the above, brutal violence was the norm of European life. But at times it took on a particularly pathological character and, as it were, foreshadowed what awaited the unsuspecting inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the everyday scenes of witch-hunts and campfires, in 1476 in Milan, a mob tore a man to pieces, and then his tormentors ate them. In Paris and Lyon, the Huguenots were killed and cut into pieces, which were then openly sold on the streets. Other outbreaks of sophisticated torture, murder and ritual cannibalism were not unusual either.

Finally, while Columbus was searching Europe for money for his maritime adventures, the Inquisition was raging in Spain. Here and elsewhere in Europe, suspected apostates were subjected to torture and execution in every way that the inventive imagination of Europeans was capable of. Some were hung, burned at the stake, boiled in a cauldron, or hung on a rack. Others were crushed, decapitated, skinned alive, drowned and quartered.

Such was the world that the former slave trader Christopher Columbus and his sailors left astern in August 1492. They were the typical inhabitants of this world, its deadly bacilli, whose deadly power was soon to be tested by the millions of human beings who lived across the Atlantic.

Numbers

“When the white gentlemen came to our land, they brought fear and withering of the flowers. They mutilated and destroyed the color of other peoples. . . Marauders by day, criminals by night, murderers of the world." Mayan book Chilam Balam.

Stanard and Churchill devote many pages to describing the conspiracy of the Euro-American scientific establishment to withhold the true population of the American continent in the pre-Columbian era. At the head of this conspiracy was and continues to be the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. And Ward Churchill also talks in detail about the resistance, which American Zionist scientists specializing in the so-called strategic area for the ideology of modern imperialism. "Holocaust", i.e. of the Nazi genocide against European Jews, render the attempts of progressive historians to establish the real scale and world-historical significance of the genocide of the native inhabitants of America at the hands of "Western civilization". The latter question will be dealt with in the second part of this article on genocide in North America. As for the flagship of official American science, the Smithsonian Institution until very recently promoted as "scientific" estimates of the pre-Columbian population made in the 19th and early 20th centuries by racist anthropologists like James Mooney, according to which no more than 1 100,000 people. Only in the post-war period, the use of agricultural analysis methods made it possible to establish that the population density there was an order of magnitude higher, and that back in the 17th century, for example, on the island of Martha's Vinyard, now a resort place for the richest and most influential Euro-Americans, 3 thousand Indians lived. By the mid 60s. an estimate of the indigenous population north of the Rio Grande had risen to a minimum of 12.5 million by the start of the European invasion. Only in the Great Lakes region by 1492 lived up to 3.8 million, and in the Mississippi basin and the main tributaries - up to 5.25. In the 80s. new research has shown that the population of pre-Columbian North America may have been as high as 18.5, and the entire hemisphere as high as 112 million (Dobyns). From these studies, Cherokee demographer Russell Thornton made calculations to determine how many people did, and could not, live in North America. His conclusion: at least 9-12.5 million. Recently, many historians have taken the average between the calculations of Dobyns and Thornton as the norm, i.e. 15 million as the most likely approximate number of native North Americans. In other words, the population of this continent was about fifteen times what the Smithsonian claimed back in the 1980s, and seven and a half times what it is willing to admit today. Moreover, calculations similar to those carried out by Dobyns and Thornton were already known in the middle of the 19th century, but they were ignored as ideologically unacceptable, contradicting the central myth of the conquerors about the supposedly “primordial”, “desert” continent, which was just waiting for them to populate it. .

On the basis of modern data, it can be said that when on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus descended on one of the islands of the continent, soon called the "New World," its population ranged from 100 to 145 million people (Standard). Two centuries later, it was reduced by 90%. To date, the most "fortunate" of the once existing peoples of both Americas have retained no more than 5% of their former numbers. In its size and duration (until today), the genocide of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere has no parallel in world history.

So in Hispaniola, where about 8 million Tainos flourished until 1492, by 1570 there were only two miserable villages of the indigenous inhabitants of the island, about which 80 years ago Columbus wrote that "there are no better and more affectionate people in the world."

Some statistics by region.

In the 75 years from the arrival of the first Europeans in 1519 to 1594, the population of Central Mexico, the most densely populated region of the American continent, declined by 95%, from 25 million to barely 1,300,000 people.

In the 60 years since the arrival of the Spaniards, the population of Western Nicaragua has declined by 99%, from over 1 million to less than 10,000 people.

In Western and Central Honduras, over half a century, 95% of the indigenous people were destroyed. In Cordoba, near the Gulf of Mexico, 97% in a little over a century. In the neighboring province of Jalapa, 97% of the population was also destroyed: from 180,000 in 1520 to 5,000 in 1626. And so it is everywhere in Mexico and Central America. The advent of Europeans meant the lightning-fast and almost complete disappearance of the indigenous population, who lived and flourished there for many millennia.

On the eve of the European invasion of Peru and Chile, from 9 to 14 million people lived in the homeland of the Incas ... Long before the end of the century, no more than 1 million inhabitants remained in Peru. And in a few years - only half of it. 94% of the Andean population was destroyed, from 8.5 to 13.5 million people.

Brazil was perhaps the most populated region of the Americas. According to the first Portuguese governor, Tome de Souza, the reserves of the indigenous population here were inexhaustible "even if we butchered them in a slaughterhouse." He was wrong. Already 20 years after the founding of the colony in 1549, epidemics and slave labor on plantations brought the peoples of Brazil to the brink of extinction.

By the end of the 16th century, about 200 thousand Spaniards moved to both "Indies". To Mexico, Central America and further south. By the same time, from 60 to 80 million indigenous people of these areas had been destroyed.

Genocidal methods of the Columbian era

Here we see striking parallels with Nazi methods. Already in the second expedition of Columbus (1493), the Spaniards used an analogue of the Nazi Sonderkommandos to enslave and destroy the local population. Parties of Spanish thugs with dogs trained to kill a person, instruments of torture, gallows and shackles staged regular punitive expeditions with indispensable mass executions. But it is important to emphasize the following. The connection between this early capitalist genocide and the Nazi genocide ran deeper. The Tainos people, who inhabited the Greater Antilles and were completely exterminated within a few decades, fell victim not to “medieval” cruelties, not to Christian fanaticism, and not even to the pathological greed of the European invaders. Both that, and another, and the third led to genocide, only being organized by new economic rationality. The entire population of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and other islands was registered as private property, which was supposed to bring profit. This methodical accounting of the huge population scattered over the world's largest islands by a handful of Europeans who have just emerged from the Middle Ages is most striking.

Columbus was the first to use mass hangings

From Spanish accountants in armor and with a cross, a direct thread stretches to the "rubber" genocide in the "Belgian" Congo, which killed 10 million Africans, and to the Nazi system of slave labor for destruction.

Columbus obliged all residents over the age of 14 to hand over to the Spaniards a thimble of golden sand or 25 pounds of cotton every three months (in areas where there was no gold). Those who fulfilled this quota were hung around their necks with a copper token indicating the date of receipt of the last tribute. The token gave its owner the right to three months of life. Caught without this token or with an expired one, the hands of both hands were cut off, they were hung around the neck of the victim and sent to die in their village. Columbus, who had previously been a slave trader along the western coast of Africa, apparently adopted this form of execution from Arab slave traders. During the governorship of Columbus, only in Hispaniola, up to 10 thousand Indians were killed in this way. It was almost impossible to fulfill the established quota. The locals had to give up growing food and everything else in order to dig for gold. Hunger has begun. Weakened and demoralized, they became easy prey for diseases introduced by the Spaniards. Such as influenza brought by pigs from the Canaries, which were brought to Hispaniola by the second expedition of Columbus. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Taínos died in this first pandemic of the American genocide. An eyewitness describes huge piles of Hispaniola residents who died of influenza, who had no one to bury. The Indians tried to run wherever their eyes looked: across the entire island, into the mountains, even to other islands. But there was no escape anywhere. Mothers killed their children before killing themselves. Entire villages resorted to mass suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs or taking poison. But even more found death in the hands of the Spaniards.

In addition to atrocities that could at least be explained by the cannibalistic rationality of systematic gain, the genocide at Atilla, and then on the continent, included seemingly irrational, unjustified forms of violence on a mass scale and pathological, sadistic forms. Sources contemporary to Columbus describe how the Spanish colonists hung, roasted on skewers, and burned the Indians at the stake. Children were cut into pieces to feed the dogs. And this despite the fact that the Tainos at first did not offer the Spaniards practically no resistance. “The Spaniards wagered who could cut a man in two with one blow or cut off his head, or they ripped open their bellies. They tore babies from their mother's breasts by the legs and smashed their heads against stones .... Other children they strung on their long swords along with their mothers and all who stood before them. No SS man on the Eastern Front could have been asked for greater zeal, Ward Churchill rightly observes. Let us add that the Spaniards established a rule that for one killed Christian, they would kill a hundred Indians. The Nazis didn't have to invent anything. All they had to do was copy.

Cuban Lidice 16th century

The evidence of the Spaniards of that era about their sadism is truly incalculable. In one oft-cited episode in Cuba, a Spanish unit of about 100 soldiers made a halt on the banks of the river and, finding whetstones in it, sharpened their swords on them. Wanting to test their sharpness, an eyewitness of this event reports, they attacked a group of men, women, children and old people (apparently specially rounded up for this) sitting on the shore, who looked in fear at the Spaniards and their horses, and began to rip open their stomachs, chop and cut until they have killed them all. Then they entered a large house standing nearby and did the same there, killing everyone they found there. Streams of blood flowed from the house, as if a herd of cows had been slaughtered there. Seeing the terrible wounds of the dead and dying was a terrible sight.

This massacre began in the village of Zukayo, whose inhabitants had prepared a lunch of cassava, fruit and fish for the conquistadors shortly before. From there it spread throughout the region. No one knows how many Indians the Spaniards killed in this outburst of sadism before their bloodlust was blunted, but Las Casas reckons well over 20,000.

The Spaniards took pleasure in inventing sophisticated cruelties and tortures. They built a gallows high enough for the hanged man to touch the ground with his toes to avoid strangulation, and thus hung thirteen Indians, one by one, in honor of Christ the Savior and his apostles. While the Indians were still alive, the Spaniards tested the sharpness and strength of their swords on them, opening their chest with one blow, so that the insides could be seen, and there were those who did worse things. Then, straw was wrapped around their cut bodies and burned alive. One soldier caught two children of two years old, pierced their throats with a dagger and threw them into the abyss.

If these descriptions seem familiar to those who have heard of the massacres in My Lai, Song Mai, and other Vietnamese villages, the similarity is made even stronger by the term "appeasement" that the Spaniards used to describe their terror. But as horrific as the massacres in Vietnam were, they are nothing compared in scale to what happened five hundred years ago on the island of Hispaniola alone. By the time Columbus arrived in 1492, the population of this island was 8 million. Four years later, from a third to a half of this number died and was destroyed. And after 1496 the rate of destruction increased even more.

Slave work

Unlike British America, where the genocide had as its immediate goal the physical extermination of the indigenous population in order to conquer "living space", the genocide in Central and South America was a by-product of the brutal exploitation of the Indians for economic purposes. Massacres and torture were not uncommon, but they served as instruments of terror to subdue and "pacify" the indigenous population. The inhabitants of America were regarded as tens of millions of gratuitous laborers of natural slaves to extract gold and silver. There were so many of them that the rational economic method for the Spaniards was not to reproduce the labor force of their slaves, but to replace them. The Indians were killed by overwork, then to be replaced with a fresh batch of slaves.

From the highlands of the Andes, they were driven to coca plantations in the lowlands of the rainforest, where their organism, unusual for such a climate, became easy prey for deadly diseases. Such as "outa", from which the nose, mouth and throat rotted and died a painful death. So high was the mortality on these plantations (up to 50% in five months) that even the Crown became worried, issuing a decree restricting coca production. Like all decrees of this kind, he remained on paper, because, as a contemporary wrote, “there is one disease on coca plantations that is worse than all others. This is the unlimited greed of the Spaniards."

But it was even worse to get into the silver mines. Workers were lowered to a depth of 250 meters with a bag of fried maize for a week-long shift. In addition to overwork, landslides, poor ventilation and the violence of overseers, Indian miners breathed poisonous fumes of arsenic, mercury, etc. “If 20 healthy Indians go down the shaft on Monday, only half can get out of it crippled on Sunday,” wrote one contemporary. Stanard calculates that the average life expectancy of coca pickers and Indian miners during the early period of the genocide was no more than three or four months, i.e. about the same as in the synthetic rubber factory in Auschwitz in 1943.

Hernán Cortes tortures Cuauhtémoc to find out where the Aztecs hid the gold

After the massacre in the Aztec capital of Tenochtetlan, Cortes declared Central Mexico the "New Spain" and established a colonial regime based on slave labor there. This is how a contemporary describes the methods of "appeasement" (hence "appeasement" as Washington's official policy during the Vietnam War) and the enslavement of Indians to work in the mines.

“Numerous testimonies of numerous witnesses tell how the Indians are led in columns to the mines. They are chained to each other with neck shackles.

Pits with stakes on which the Indians were strung

Those who fall down get their heads cut off. There are stories of children being locked up in houses and set on fire, and also stabbed to death if they walk too slowly. It is common to cut off women's breasts and tie weights to their legs before throwing them into a lake or lagoon. There are stories of babies torn from their mothers, killed and used as road signs. Fugitive or "wandering" Indians are cut off the limbs and sent to their villages, having cut off hands and noses hung around their necks. They talk about "pregnant women, children and the elderly, who are caught as much as possible" and thrown into special pits, at the bottom of which sharp stakes are dug and "leave them there until the pit is full." And many, many more." (Standard, 82-83)

Indians are burned in their houses

As a result, of the approximately 25 million inhabitants who inhabited the Mexican kingdom at the time of the arrival of the conquistadors, by 1595 only 1.3 million remained alive. The rest were mostly tortured in the mines and plantations of "New Spain".

In the Andes, where the Pizarro bands wielded swords and whips, by the end of the 16th century the population had fallen from 14 million to less than 1 million. The reasons were the same as in Mexico and Central America. As one Spaniard in Peru wrote in 1539, “The Indians here are completely destroyed and dying ... They pray with a cross that for God's sake they will be given food. But [the soldiers] kill all the llamas for nothing more than to make candles ... The Indians are not left with anything to sow, and since they have no livestock and nowhere to get it from, they can only die of hunger. (Churchill, 103)

Psychological aspect of genocide

The latest historians of the American genocide are beginning to pay more and more attention to its psychological aspect, the role of depression and stress in the destruction without a trace of tens and hundreds of peoples and ethnic groups. And here I see a number of parallels with the current situation of the peoples of the former Soviet Union.

Chronicles of the genocide have preserved numerous evidence of the mental "deployment" of the indigenous population of America. The cultural war waged by the European conquerors for centuries against the cultures of the peoples they enslaved with the open intention of destroying them had horrendous consequences on the psyche of the indigenous population of the New World. The response to this "psychic attack" ranged from alcoholism to chronic depression, mass infanticide and suicide, and even more often people just lay down and died. By-products of mental damage were a sharp drop in the birth rate and a rise in infant mortality. Even if diseases, hunger, hard labor and murder did not lead to the complete destruction of the indigenous collective, sooner and later low birth rates and infant mortality led to this. The Spanish noticed a sharp drop in the number of children and at times tried to force the Indians to have children.

Kirpatrick Sale summed up the reaction of the Taínos to their genocide thus:

“Las Casas, like others, expresses the opinion that what most struck the strange white people from the big ships of the Tainos was not their violence, not even their greed and strange attitude towards property, but rather their coldness, their spiritual callousness, their lack of love ". (Kirkpatrick Sale. The Conquest of Paradise. p. 151.)

In general, reading the history of imperialist genocide on all continents - from Hispaniola, the Andes and California to Equatorial Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China and Tasmania - one begins to understand literature like Wells' War of the Worlds or Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles differently, not to mention Hollywood alien invasions. Do these nightmares of Euro-American fiction originate from the horrors of the past repressed in the "collective unconscious", are they not designed to suppress guilt (or, conversely, prepare for new genocides) by portraying themselves as victims of "aliens" who were exterminated by your ancestors from Columbus to Churchill, Hitler and the Bushes?

Demonization of the victim

The genocide in America also had its own propagandistic support, its own “black PR”, strikingly similar to that used by the Euro-American imperialists to “demonize” their future enemy in the eyes of their population, to give war and robbery an aura of justice.

On January 16, 1493, three days after killing two Tainos while trading, Columbus turned his ships back to Europe. In his journal, he described the natives and their people killed by the Spaniards as "evil inhabitants of the island of Kariba who eat people." As proven by modern anthropologists, this was pure fiction, but it formed the basis of a kind of classification of the population of Antilles, and then of the entire New World, which became a guide to genocide. Those who welcomed and submitted to the colonialists were considered "affectionate Tainos". Those natives who resisted or were simply killed by the Spaniards fell under the rubric of cannibal savages, deserving everything that the colonialists were able to inflict on them. (In particular, in the log of November 4 and 23, 1492, we find such creations of the gloomy medieval imagination of Columbus: these "ferocious savages" "have an eye in the middle of their foreheads", they have "dog noses with which they drink the blood of their victims, which they slit the throat and castrate.")

“These islands are inhabited by the Cannibals, a savage, rebellious race that feeds on human flesh. They are properly called anthropophagi. They wage constant wars against the affectionate and timid Indians for the sake of their bodies; these are their trophies, what they are after. They ruthlessly destroy and terrorize the Indians."

This description of Coma, one of the participants in the second expedition of Columbus, says much more about Europeans than about the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The Spaniards dehumanized in advance people whom they had never seen, but who were to become their victims. And it's not a distant story; it reads like today's newspaper.

"A wild and recalcitrant race" are the keywords of Western imperialism, from Columbus to Bush. "Wild" - because she does not want to be a slave to a "civilized" invader. The Soviet communists were also recorded among the "wild" "enemies of civilization". From Columbus, who in 1493 invented Caribbean cannibals with an eye on his forehead and dog noses, there is a direct thread to the Reichsführer Himmler, who, at a meeting of SS leaders in mid-1942, explained the specifics of the war on the Eastern Front in this way:

"In all previous campaigns, Germany's enemies had enough common sense and decency to succumb to superior force, thanks to their "old and civilized ... Western European sophistication." In the Battle of France, enemy units surrendered as soon as they received a warning that "further resistance is pointless." Of course, “we SS men” came to Russia without illusions, but until the last winter too many Germans did not realize that “Russian commissars and die-hard Bolsheviks are filled with a cruel will to power and animal stubbornness, which makes them fight to the end and has nothing to do with human logic or duty ... but is an instinct inherent in all animals. The Bolsheviks were "animals" so "deprived of everything human" that "surrounded and without food, they resorted to killing their comrades in order to hold out longer", behavior that bordered on "cannibalism". This is a "war of annihilation" between "the rough matter, the primitive mass, better to say, the subhuman Untermensch waged by the commissars" and the "Germans..." (Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 281.)

In fact, and in strict accordance with the principle of ideological inversion, cannibalism was practiced not by the indigenous inhabitants of the New World, but by their conquerors. The second expedition of Columbus brought to the Caribbean a large batch of mastiffs and greyhounds, trained to kill people and eat their insides. Very soon the Spaniards began to feed their dogs with human flesh. Living children were considered a special delicacy. The colonizers allowed dogs to gnaw them alive, often in the presence of their parents.

Dogs eat Indians

Spaniard Feeding Hounds with Indian Children

Modern historians come to the conclusion that in the Caribbean there was a whole network of "butcher shops" where the bodies of the Indians were sold as dog food. Like everything else in the legacy of Columbus, cannibalism also developed on the mainland. A letter from one of the conquerors of the Inca empire has been preserved, in which he writes: “... when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese named Rohe Martin. On the porch of his house hung pieces of cut Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild beasts…” (Standard, 88)

In turn, the Spaniards often had to eat their human-fed dogs when, in search of gold and slaves, they fell into a difficult situation and suffered from hunger. This is one of the dark ironies of this genocide.

Why?

Churchill asks how to explain the fact that a group of human beings, even if such as the Spaniards of the Columbus era, collectively obsessed with the thirst for wealth and prestige, could for a long time show such boundless ferocity, such transcendent inhumanity towards other people ? The same question was raised earlier by Stanard, who traced in detail the ideological roots of genocide in America from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. “Who are these people whose minds and souls were behind the genocides of Muslims, Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies and other religious, racial and ethnic groups? Who are they who continue to commit massacres today?” What kind of people could commit these heinous crimes? Christians, Stanard replies, and invites the reader to acquaint himself with ancient European Christian views on gender, race, and war. He discovers that by the end of the Middle Ages, European culture had prepared all the necessary prerequisites for a four-hundred-year-old genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the New World.

Stanard pays special attention to the Christian imperative to suppress "carnal desires", i.e. Church-imposed repressive attitudes towards sexuality in European culture. In particular, he establishes a genetic link between the genocide in the New World and the all-European waves of terror against the "witches", in which some modern researchers see the bearers of the matriarchal pagan ideology, popular among the masses and threatening the power of the Church and the feudal elite.

Stanard also emphasizes the European origin of the concept of race and skin color.

The Church has always supported the slave trade, although in the early Middle Ages it was in principle forbidden to keep Christians in slavery. Indeed, for the Church, only a Christian was a man in the full sense of the word. The "infidels" could become human only by adopting Christianity, and this gave them the right to freedom. But in the 14th century, an ominous change took place in the politics of the Church. With the increase in the volume of the slave trade in the Mediterranean, the profits from it also increased. But these incomes were threatened by a loophole left by the clergy to reinforce the ideology of Christian exceptionalism. Earlier ideological motives came into conflict with the material interests of the Christian ruling classes. And so, in 1366, the prelates of Florence authorized the importation and sale of "infidel" slaves, explaining that by "infidels" they meant "all slaves of the wrong origin, even if by the time of their importation they became Catholics", and that "infidels by origin " means simply "from the land and race of the infidels." Thus, the Church changed the principle that justifies slavery from religious to ethnic, which was an important step towards modern genocides based on unchanging racial and ethnic characteristics (Armenian, Jewish, Gypsy, Slavic, and others).

European racial "science" did not lag behind religion either. The specificity of European feudalism was the requirement for the genetic exclusivity of the nobility. In Spain, the concept of "blood purity", limpieza de sangra, became central towards the end of the 15th and throughout the 16th century. The nobility could not be achieved either by wealth or merit. The origins of "racial science" lie in the genealogical research of the time, which was conducted by a whole army of specialists in checking pedigree lines.

Particularly important was the theory of "separate and unequal origin", put forward by the famous Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus by 1520. According to this theory, Africans, Indians and other non-Christian "colored" peoples did not descend from Adam and Eve, but from other and lower ancestors. The ideas of Paracelsus became widespread in Europe on the eve of the European invasion of Mexico and South America. These ideas were an early expression of the so-called. the theory of "polygenesis", which became an indispensable part of the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century. But even before the publication of the writings of Paracelsus, similar ideological justifications for genocide appeared in Spain (1512) and Scotland (1519). The Spaniard Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and the Scot Johann Major came to the same conclusion that the original inhabitants of the New World were a special race that God intended to be the slaves of European Christians. The height of the theological disputes of Spanish intellectuals about whether the Indians are people or monkeys falls on the middle of the 16th century, when millions of inhabitants of Central and South America died from terrible epidemics, brutal massacres and hard labor.

The official historian of the Indies, Fernandez de Ovieda, did not deny the atrocities against the Indians and described "countless cruel deaths, innumerable as stars." But he considered it acceptable, for "to use gunpowder against the Gentiles is to smoke incense for the Lord." And to the pleas of Las Casas to spare the inhabitants of America, the theologian Juan de Sepulveda declared: "How can one doubt that peoples so uncivilized, so barbaric and corrupted by so many sins and perversions were justly conquered." He quoted Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics that some people are "natural slaves" and "must be driven like wild beasts to make them live right". To which Las Casas replied: "Let's forget about Aristotle, because, fortunately, we have the covenant of Christ: Love your neighbor as yourself." (But even Las Casas, the most passionate and humane European defender of the Indians, felt compelled to admit, that they are "possibly complete barbarians").

But if among the church intelligentsia opinions about the nature of the native inhabitants of America could differ, among the European masses there was complete unanimity on this score. Even 15 years before the great debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda, a Spanish columnist wrote that "ordinary people" universally consider those who are convinced that the American Indians are not people, but "a special, third kind of animals between man and ape and were created God to better serve man." (Standard, 211).

Thus, in the early 16th century, a racist apology for colonialism and suprematism was formed, which in the hands of the Euro-American ruling classes would serve as a justification ("defense of civilization") for subsequent genocides (and more to come?). It is not surprising, therefore, that on the basis of his research, Stanard puts forward the thesis of a deep ideological connection between the Spanish and Anglo-Saxon genocide of the peoples of America and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. European colonizers, white settlers and Nazis had the same ideological roots. And that ideology, Stanard adds, remains alive today. It was on it that US interventions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East were based.

List of used literature

J. M. Blaut. The Colonizer's Model of the World. Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: The Giulford Press, 1993.

Ward Churchill. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.

C. L. R. James. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Arno J Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

David Stannard. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993.

From the school bench we are told that America settled by the inhabitants of Asia, who moved there in groups through the Bering Isthmus (in the place where the strait is now). They settled in the New World after a huge glacier began to melt 14-15 thousand years ago. Did the indigenous population of America really come to the mainland (more precisely, two continents) in this way?!

However, recent discoveries by archaeologists and geneticists have shaken this coherent theory. It turns out that America was inhabited repeatedly, some strange peoples did this, almost related to the Australians, and besides, it is not clear on what transport the first "Indians" reached the extreme south of the New World.

The population of America. First version

Until the end of the 20th century, the “Clovis first” hypothesis dominated American anthropology, according to which it was this culture of ancient mammoth hunters that appeared 12.5-13.5 thousand years ago that was the most ancient in the New World.

According to this hypothesis, people who ended up in Alaska could survive on ice-free land, because there was quite a bit of snow here, but then the path to the south was blocked by glaciers until a period of 14-16 thousand years ago, due to which settlement in the Americas began only after the end of the last glaciation.

The hypothesis was coherent and logical, but in the second half of the 20th century some discoveries were made that were incompatible with it. In the 1980s, Tom Dillehay, during excavations in Monte Verde (southern Chile), found that people had been there at least 14.5 thousand years ago. This caused a strong reaction from the scientific community: it turned out that the discovered culture was 1.5 thousand years older than Clovis in North America.

In order not to rewrite students and not change their view of the characteristics of the American population, most American anthropologists simply denied the find scientific reliability. Already during the excavations, Delai faced a powerful attack on his professional reputation, it came to the closure of funding for excavations and attempts to declare Monte Verde a phenomenon that was not related to archeology.

Only in 1997 did he manage to confirm the dating at 14,000 years, which caused a deep crisis in understanding the ways of settling America. At that time, there were no places of such ancient settlement in North America, which raised the question of where exactly people could get to Chile.

Recently, the Chileans suggested that Delea continue excavations. Influenced by the sad experience of twenty years of excuses, he initially refused. “I was fed up,” the scientist explained his position. However, in the end he agreed and found tools at the MVI site, undoubtedly man-made, whose antiquity was 14.5-19 thousand years.

History repeated itself: archaeologist Michael Waters immediately questioned the findings. In his opinion, the finds can be simple stones, remotely similar to tools, which means that the traditional chronology of the settlement of America is still out of danger.

Delays found "guns"

Seaside nomads

To understand how justified the criticism of the new work, we turned to the anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky (Moscow State University). According to him, the tools found are indeed very primitive (processed on one side), but made from materials that are not found in Monte Verde. Quartz for a significant part of them had to be brought from afar, that is, such items cannot be of natural origin.

The scientist noted that the systematic criticism of discoveries of this kind is quite understandable: "When you teach in school and university that America was inhabited in a certain way, it is not so easy to give up this point of view."

Mammoths in Beringia

The conservatism of American researchers is also understandable: in North America, the recognized finds date back thousands of years after the period indicated by Delea. And what about the theory that before the melting of the glacier, the ancestors of the Indians blocked by it could not settle south?

However, Drobyshevsky notes, there is nothing supernatural in the more ancient dates of the Chilean sites. The islands along Canada's present-day Pacific coast were not glaciated, and bear remains from the Ice Age have been found there. This means that people could well spread along the coast, swimming across in boats and not going deep into the then inhospitable North America.

Australian footprint

However, the fact that the first reliable finds of the ancestors of the Indians were made in Chile does not end with the oddities of the settlement of America. Not so long ago, it turned out that the genes of the Aleuts and groups of Brazilian Indians have features characteristic of the genes of the Papuans and Australian Aborigines.

As the Russian anthropologist emphasizes, the data of geneticists are well combined with the results of the analysis of skulls previously found in South America and having features close to Australian ones.

In his opinion, most likely, the Australian trace in South America is associated with a common ancestral group, part of which moved to Australia tens of thousands of years ago, while the other migrated along the coast of Asia to the north, up to Beringia, and from there reached the South American continent. .

The appearance of Luzia is the name of a woman who lived 11 thousand years ago, whose remains were discovered in a Brazilian cave

As if that weren't enough, genetic studies in 2013 showed that Brazilian Botacudo Indians are close in mitochondrial DNA to Polynesians and part of the inhabitants of Madagascar. Unlike the Australoids, the Polynesians could well have reached South America by sea. At the same time, traces of their genes in eastern Brazil, and not on the Pacific coast, are not so easy to explain.

It turns out that a small group of Polynesian navigators, for some reason, did not return after landing, but overcame the Andean highlands, which were unusual for them, in order to settle in Brazil. One can only guess about the motives for such a long and difficult overland journey for typical sailors.

So, a small part of the American natives have traces of genes that are very far from the genome of the rest of the Indians, which contradicts the idea of ​​​​a single group of ancestors from Beringia.

30 thousand years before us

However, there are more radical deviations from the idea of ​​settling America in one wave and only after the melting of the glacier. In the 1970s, the Brazilian archaeologist Nieda Guidon discovered the cave site of Pedra Furada (Brazil), where, in addition to primitive tools, there were many bonfires, the age of which radiocarbon analysis showed from 30 to 48 thousand years.

It is easy to understand that such figures caused great rejection by North American anthropologists. The same Deley criticized radiocarbon dating, noting that traces could remain after a fire of natural origin.

Gidon reacted sharply to such opinions of her colleagues from the United States in Latin American: “Fire of natural origin cannot arise deep in a cave. American archaeologists need to write less and dig more.”

Drobyshevsky emphasizes that although no one has yet been able to challenge the dating of the Brazilians, the doubts of the Americans are quite understandable. If people were in Brazil 40 thousand years ago, then where did they go then and where are the traces of their stay in other parts of the New World?

Toba volcano eruption

The history of mankind knows cases when the first colonizers of new lands almost completely died out, leaving no significant traces. This is what happened to Homo sapiens who settled in Asia. Their first traces there date back to the period up to 125 thousand years ago, however, genetic data say that all of humanity originated from a population that emerged from Africa, much later - only 60 thousand years ago.

There is a hypothesis that the reason for this could be the extinction of the then Asian part as a result of the eruption of the Toba volcano 70 thousand years ago. The energy of this event is considered to exceed the combined yield of all the combined nuclear weapons ever created by mankind.

However, even an event more powerful than a nuclear war is difficult to explain the disappearance of significant human populations. Some researchers note that neither Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor even Homo floresiensis, who lived relatively close to Toba, died out from the explosion.

And judging by individual finds in South India, local Homo sapiens did not die out at that time, traces of which are not observed in the genes of modern people for some reason. Thus, the question of where the people who settled 40 thousand years ago in South America could have gone remains open and to some extent casts doubt on the most ancient finds of the Pedra Furada type.

Genetics vs genetics

Not only archaeological data often come into conflict, but also such seemingly reliable evidence as genetic markers. This summer, Maanasa Raghavan's group at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen announced that genetic data disproved the idea that more than one wave of ancient settlers participated in settling the Americas.

According to them, genes close to Australians and Papuans appeared in the New World later than 9,000 years ago, when America was already inhabited by immigrants from Asia.

At the same time, the work of another group of geneticists led by Pontus Skoglund came out, which, based on the same material, made the opposite statement: a certain ghost population appeared in the New World either 15 thousand years ago, or even earlier, and, perhaps, settled there before the Asian wave of migration, from which the ancestors of the vast majority of modern Indians originated.

According to them, relatives of the Australian Aborigines crossed the Bering Strait only to be forced out by the subsequent wave of "Indian" migration, whose representatives began to dominate the Americas, pushing the few descendants of the first wave into the Amazon jungle and the Aleutian Islands.

Ragnavan's reconstruction of the settlement of the Americas

Even if geneticists cannot agree among themselves on whether the “Indian” or “Australian” components became the first natives of America, it is even more difficult for everyone else to understand this issue. And yet, something can be said about this: skulls similar in shape to the Papuan ones have been found on the territory of modern Brazil for more than 10 thousand years.

The scientific picture of the settlement of the Americas is very complex, and at the present stage it is changing significantly. It is clear that groups of different origins participated in the settlement of the New World - at least two, not counting a small Polynesian component that appeared later than the others.

It is also obvious that at least part of the settlers were able to colonize the continent despite the glacier - bypassing it in boats or on ice. At the same time, the pioneers subsequently moved along the coast, quite quickly reaching the south of modern Chile. The early Americans appear to have been highly mobile, expansive, and well versed in the use of water transport.

The first English settlement in America appeared in 1607 in Virginia and was named Jamestown. The trading post, founded by members of the crews of three English ships under the command of Captain K. Newport, served at the same time as an outpost on the path of the Spanish advance to the north of the continent. The first years of the existence of Jamestown were a time of endless disasters and hardships: diseases, famine and Indian raids took the lives of more than 4 thousand of the first English settlers of America. Ho, already at the end of 1608, the first ship sailed to England, carrying a cargo of timber and iron ore. In just a few years, Jamestown turned into a prosperous village thanks to the extensive plantations of tobacco previously cultivated only by the Indians laid there in 1609, which by 1616 became the main source of income for the inhabitants. Tobacco exports to England, which in 1618 amounted to 20 thousand pounds in monetary terms, increased by 1627 to half a million pounds, creating the necessary economic conditions for population growth. The influx of colonists was greatly facilitated by the allocation of a 50-acre plot of land to any applicant who had the financial means to pay a small rent. Already by 1620 the population of the village was approx. 1000 people, and in all of Virginia there were approx. 2 thousand
lovek. In the 80s. 15th century exports of tobacco from two southern colonies - Virginia and Maryland rose to 20 million pounds.
The virgin forests, stretching for more than two thousand kilometers along the entire Atlantic coast, abounded with everything necessary for the construction of dwellings and ships, and the rich nature satisfied the needs of the colonists for food. The increasingly frequent calls of European ships into the natural bays of the coast provided them with goods that were not produced in the colonies. The products of their labor were exported to the Old World from the same colonies. But the rapid development of the northeastern lands, and even more so the advance into the interior of the continent, beyond the Appalachian Mountains, was hampered by the lack of roads, impenetrable forests and mountains, as well as the dangerous neighborhood with Indian tribes hostile to aliens.
The fragmentation of these tribes and the complete lack of unity in their sorties against the colonists became the main reason for the displacement of the Indians from the lands they occupied and their final defeat. The temporary alliances of some Indian tribes with the French (in the north of the continent) and with the Spaniards (in the south), who were also worried about the pressure and energy of the British, Scandinavians and Germans advancing from the east coast, did not bring the desired results. The first attempts to conclude peace agreements between individual Indian tribes and the English colonists who settled in the New World also turned out to be ineffective.
European immigrants were attracted to America by the rich natural resources of a distant continent, which promised rapid material prosperity, and its remoteness from European strongholds of religious dogmas and political predilections. Not supported by the governments or official churches of any country, the exodus of Europeans to the New World was financed by private companies and individuals, driven primarily by an interest in generating income from the transportation of people and goods. Already in 1606, the London and Plymouth companies were formed in England, which actively

Signing of the Mayflower Agreement
engaged in the development of the northeast coast of America, including the delivery of English colonists to the continent. Numerous immigrants traveled to the New World with families and even entire communities at their own expense. A significant part of the new arrivals were young women, whose appearance was met with sincere enthusiasm by the single male population of the colonies, paying the cost of their "transportation" from Europe at the rate of 120 pounds of tobacco per head.
Huge, hundreds of thousands of hectares, plots of land were allocated by the British crown to the representatives of the English nobility as a gift or for a nominal fee. Interested in the development of their new property, the English aristocracy advanced large sums for the delivery of their recruited compatriots and their arrangement on the lands received. Despite the extreme attractiveness of the conditions existing in the New World for newly arriving colonists, during these years there was a clear lack of human resources, primarily for the reason that only a third of the ships and people embarking on a dangerous journey - two a third died on the way. He was distinguished by hospitality and the new land, which met the colonists with unusual frosts for Europeans, harsh natural conditions and, as a rule, the hostile attitude of the Indian population.
At the end of August 1619, a Dutch ship arrived in Virginia, bringing the first black Africans to America, twenty of whom were immediately bought by the colonists as servants. Negroes began to turn into lifelong slaves, and in the 60s. 17th century slave status in Virginia and Maryland became hereditary. The slave trade has become a permanent feature of commercial transactions between East Africa
and the American colonies. African chieftains readily traded their men for textiles, household items, gunpowder, and weapons imported from New England and the American South.
In December 1620, an event took place that went down in American history as the beginning of the purposeful colonization of the continent by the British - the Mayflower ship arrived on the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts with 102 Calvinist Puritans, who were rejected by the traditional Anglican Church and did not later find sympathy in Holland. The only way to preserve their religion, these people, who called themselves pilgrims, considered moving to America. While still aboard a ship crossing the ocean, they entered into an agreement between themselves, called the Mayflower Compact. It reflected in the most general form the ideas of the first American colonists about democracy, self-government and civil liberties. These notions were developed later in similar agreements reached by the colonists of Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and in later documents of American history, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. Having lost half the members of their community, but surviving in a land they had not yet explored in the harsh conditions of the first American winter and the crop failure that followed, the colonists set an example for their compatriots and other Europeans, who arrived in the New World already prepared for the hardships that awaited them.
After 1630, at least a dozen small towns arose in Plymouth Colony, the first New England colony that later became the colony of Massachusetts Bay, in which the newly arrived English Puritans settled. Immigration wave 1630-1643 Delivered to New England approx. 20 thousand people, at least 45 thousand more, chose the colonies of the American South or the islands of Central America for their residence.
For 75 years after the appearance in 1607 on the territory of the modern USA of the first English colony of Virgie

12 more colonies arose - New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The credit for founding them did not always belong to subjects of the British crown. In 1624, on the island of Manhattan in Hudson Bay [named after the English captain G. Hudson (Hudson), who discovered it in 1609, was in the Dutch service], Dutch fur traders founded a province called New Netherland, with the main city of New Amsterdam. The land on which this city developed was bought in 1626 by a Dutch colonist from the Indians for $24. The Dutch never managed to achieve any significant socio-economic development of their only colony in the New World.
After 1648 and up to 1674, England and Holland fought three times, and during these 25 years, in addition to hostilities, there was a continuous and fierce economic struggle between them. In 1664, New Amsterdam was captured by the British under the command of the king's brother Duke of York, who renamed the city New York. During the Anglo-Dutch War of 1673-1674. The Netherlands managed to restore their power for a short time in this territory, but after the defeat of the Dutch in the war, the British again took possession of it. From then until the end of the American Revolution in 1783 from r. Kennebec to Florida, from New England to the Lower South, the Union Jack flew over the entire northeast coast of the continent.