Something About the Europeans
Part One
There’s something about the Europeans – it’s difficult to nail down without an in-depth historical analysis – but they seem to have this ‘thing’, or this love affair with poisons. It’s uncanny. The love affair runs so deep and wide that one could say their penchant for poisons was/is likely written right into their DNA. There has never been a culture of humans – say in the last ten-thousand years since the agricultural revolution – that has mass-produced and mass-distributed as many poisons as the modern, progressive, wealth-driven, war-mongering Europeans. It’s quite fitting that the now-globalized Industrial Revolution – along with its fossil fuel-dependent combustion engines, its lethal coal industries and its atmosphere-chocking, CO2-spewing machines – should be birthed, nurtured and centered in western Europe.
Of course the Industrial Revolution greatly magnified the variety and toxicity of the poisons but it was the five-hundred year campaign to conquer, colonize and Christianize the rest of the planet that helped spread the European poisons to the far reaches of the globe.
“They came to our land… like night comes to the day”
(An Oglala Sioux elder who later died at the Pine Ridge Massacre in South Dakota…1891)
The vast expanses and the pristine wilderness of what is now known as the Americas were not spared the onslaught of European poisons. Circa 1492, Europe had just endured 500 years of territorial conflicts, crusades, plagues and numerous civil wars. The coffers of the European crowns and principalities were empty. When Columbus set out on his infamous voyage to find a new and shorter route to India, he inadvertently stumbled onto the New World. When word began to filter back describing the unfathomable wealth, the gold, resources and a new land that just seemed to ‘go on forever’, all the cash registers in Europe started ringing. It was like all their prayers had been answered.
And it seemed to be all there… just for the taking.
With the blessings of the Catholic Church, the Doctrine of Discovery in hand and dreams of unimaginable wealth filling their heads, the Europeans set out in their warships to conquer and exploit the new found land. But they were not alone. For hidden in their blankets, clothing, sacks, their body hair, their feces and infesting their animals was a pernicious stow-away more deadlier than their most advanced weaponry…namely, the bugs, germs, viruses and diseases that plagued Europe during the middle ages leading up to Columbus. In the five centuries preceding 1492, Europe was a virtual cesspool of filth, disease and contagion, exemplified by the Bubonic Plague which decimated the region in the fourteenth century and wiped out something in the range of 50-100 million locals in only four years (1347-1351).
(Note: Historians and cultural anthropologists have identified the sources of the filth and disease, namely, (1) acute human over-population, (2) the practice of raising farm animals in densely populated areas, (3) the lack of sanitation, antiseptics, antidotes and vaccines, and lastly (4) the lack of personal hygiene amongst the populace).
The indigenous tribes and societies of what is now North, South and Central America didn’t see it coming. Even the newly-arriving Europeans were oblivious to the magnitude of suffering and death they were about to unleash on the unsuspecting natives over the next five hundred years of colonization. Not to belittle the events of 1939-1945, but the magnitude of suffering and death caused by the European campaign to conquer, colonize and Christianize the Americas – as well as the rest of the non-European globe – far eclipses even the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust. Cultural anthropologists estimate the death toll in the Americas – over 500 years – to be in the range of 70-80 million. The estimated human death toll of the entire global campaign (including the Americas) was between 250-300 million.
The horrendous and incomprehensible death toll – mentioned above – was almost entirely made up of indigenous peoples. And most of the death was caused by European diseases transported on the ships. There is a growing consensus among present-day historians and anthropologists that the European campaign to conquer, colonize and Christianize the planet was the single greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated.
Poisons come in many different forms and this was also true for the European campaign to colonize the planet. The bugs, germs and diseases were invisible and deadly, no question about that, but another form of poison that arrived on the death ships – just as lethal and just as invisible – was in the form of attitudes. Particularly the attitude of superiority. To better understand the virulent and poisonous nature of this particular attitude we must travel back and examine the history of the European region.
Genetics and the Human Family
In the centuries and millennia following the Great African Diaspora some 70,000 years ago, one wave of migrants headed north to the lush and fertile paradise which bordered the Tigris and Euphrates on the east, the Iberian Peninsula on the west and then north to what is now the British Isles and east again to Scandinavia. Europa, as it would later come to be known, would provide the new migrants streaming in from Sub-Saharan Africa with an ideal climate and geography for, not only surviving, but thriving as well. And thrive they eventually did. Of the many exit routes leading out of eastern Africa, the route to the Fertile Crescent and through the Bosporus (the gateway to Europa) was the shortest and the early tribes arriving in that region had a definite head start on settling and developing their cultural identities. The term ‘head start’ is apropos considering the thousands and tens of thousands of years it took for other migrating tribes to reach such far away locales as Mongolia, eastern Asia, Indonesia, Australia, India and the Americas. The distant ancestors of the indigenous peoples of North, South and Central America took an extremely long and extremely dangerous route with lots of stops along the way and arrived in the western hemisphere approximately 50,000 years later than the early migrants did in Europa.
Cultural development in early Europa was an exponential process. After migrating from eastern Africa it took many thousands of years of cultural incubation and gestation before the exponential curve began its slow but inexorable rise to regional, and eventually, world domination. The dual inventions of agriculture and the ‘wheel’ (approx. 8,000 years BCE) were game changers which greatly fueled the cultural explosion in the area. The new and burgeoning fields of science, medicine, music, art, architecture, metallurgy, agronomy, advanced weaponry and religious ideology began to thrive and the whole region – from the Atlantic to the Middle East – became a hotbed of invention and innovation. The early Europeans of that period naturally got quite caught up in the frenzy… how could they not have.
It must also be understood that invention and innovation were pretty much the exclusive domain of the newly minted elite class that were spawned by the agricultural revolution and the subsequent stratification of human societies. A new and progressive (perhaps aggressive) understanding of wealth, value, property, land and precious metals exacerbated the frenzy and the entire region went somewhat ‘berserk’ with invention and innovation. So there is no question that the Europeans – with their cultural head-start, year-round food security, plentiful natural resources and lust for wealth – can be identified as super-advanced and super-modern compared to other migrants out of Africa.
But, the fundamental question remains… were they ‘superior’?.
Hmmm… I think the answer to that question can be found in the recent mapping of the human genome. First of all, it would be fair to say that the modern Europeans (post agricultural revolution) were so caught up in the frenzy of rapid change and innovation – and being quite oblivious to what was happening in the rest of world – it is understandable that the mindsets of Euro-centrism, crown of creation, manifest destiny and ‘we’re the best thing since sliced bread’ would flourish, And these centrism-based mindsets would come to define the European worldview…that worldview limited almost exclusively to territory within the boundaries of Europa. It would be easy, under the above circumstances, for the Europeans to believe that they were a superior ‘race’ and all other races were inferior. Cultural isolation and insulation can lead to narcissism, which further nurtures the seeds of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism and eventually, racism.
Hindsight is 20/20 and today – thanks to the mapping of the human genome – we have a crystal clear understanding of (1) the events surrounding the African Diaspora, (2) the many divergent routes that humanity took in peopling the planet and (3) the tens of thousand of years it took for global cultures to establish their unique identities. Crystal clear. And one thing that is most crystal clear – thanks to the mapping – is that there are no such things as ‘races’. That in fact, all humans are integral members of one close-knit genetic family who migrated (in many different directions) out of Africa some 70-80,000 years ago and adapted over tens of thousands of years to different climates, environmental conditions, foods, terrains, proximity to oceans, etc. And through the wonders of genetic adaptation, our skin tones and colouration changed depending on the latitudes we settled at and the levels of sunlight that we were exposed to. The above conditions are superficial (like skin color) and do not change the fact that we are still integral members of one close-knit genetic family…the Homo sapiens.
If we draw a comparison between the global ‘human’ family and a typical family living across the street – that just happens to have a lot of kids – it would be ridiculous for the parents (across the street) to start classifying their children as ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’. Yes, each is unique, each is different…one may gravitate towards a business career, one towards the arts, perhaps another is in to politics while another may find their vocation involves raising children of their own. But it’s unthinkable to grade each child as ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’. Why? Because they are all members of one close-knit family unit.
The poisonous attitude of superiority – held by the European state and the Catholic Church for most of the past five to six hundred years – was born out of blind ignorance. But regardless, the attitude was strategically used to morally justify and legitimize the ensuing genocide visited upon the global indigenous mosaic. The Catholic Church played a significant role in the global genocide by initially giving its (Gods) blessings to the whole sordid affair via a series of Papal Bulls issued in the late fifteenth century. It should be noted that one of those Papal Bulls also gave King Philip of Portugal the Vatican’s official blessing to begin abducting African citizens to be used as slaves. And thus began another unconscionable crime against humanity – perpetrated by the European state and the Catholic Church – which eventually saw twelve million African nationals captured and sold into slavery. Most of those unfortunates were shipped west to the ‘New World’ to do all the dirty work that the now powerful USA was founded upon.
Do the Math
The Church and the European state still have a lot to answer for as a result of the above litany of offenses. Pre-Columbus, the European Crowns were broke, mainly due to five hundred years of constant war, crusades and tax revenue lost due to cataclysms such as the Bubonic Plague. The Catholic Church fared no better, especially with the plague wiping out fifty to a hundred million mostly Catholic donors. Post-Columbus, the European state and the Catholic Church would quickly become two of the wealthiest corporations on the planet. Do the math. Financially destitute before Columbus, obscenely wealthy after. The European state, the Catholic Church and even the USA and Canada have never really come to grips with or acknowledged that the fabulous wealth they enjoy today was gained through conquest, rape, plundering, genocide and slavery…all crimes against humanity.
(Note: The following is a short excerpt from a recent and related essay)
White Washing the Truth from Canadian History Books
Recent studies, headed by Professor Alexander Koch of University College in London, have provided some conclusive findings concerning the incomprehensible magnitude of the genocide which occurred in the Americas, due to European colonization. According to Professor Koch and his team’s extensive research, the population of indigenous peoples throughout the western hemisphere – circa 1492 – was estimated at around 60 million and in a little over one hundred years (by 1610) that population was reduced to a mere 6 million. During that brief time frame, the lives of some 54 million indigenous human beings were snuffed out, mainly due to disease, warfare and genocide. That first one hundred years or so also marked the arrival of the first wave of European settlers to plunder the New World…which largely accounts for the tragic death toll. But the genocide didn’t stop there…it continued on into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the policies of outright extermination in the US and the (kinder, gentler) policies of assimilation in Canada.
It is remarkable, and at the same time a travesty, that little (or none) of the above information even shows up on Canada’s historical radar. This is especially true for the Canadian education system which I have been involved with for the past twenty-five years. This is our history…Canadian history. It didn’t happen in some far-off distant land, at some far-off distant time…it happened right here and quite recently. Canada was an active participant in a hemispheric genocide which claimed the lives of tens of millions of indigenous human beings over the past 500 years of colonization. And yet no one seems to know anything about it…especially our youth, especially our students. Why is this?
School boards do not set curriculum, governments do. The information in Canadian history books is what the government dictates our students learn. If there is information the government does not want Canadian students to learn, then they (the government) will not include it in our history books. Successive Canadian governments, over the past one-hundred and fifty years since Confederation, have been intent of assimilating Canada’s indigenous cultures ‘out of existence’…which is why the indigenous perspective and the indigenous experience have been ‘white washed’ out of our history books. The whole sordid history of European colonization and the ensuing genocide has been ‘white washed’ out of our history books as well. White washing and sanitizing a country’s history is tantamount to Canadian students being lied to by their governments. Religious folks refer to it as a ‘sin of omission’.
Canadian students (and adults) need to know – deserve to know – the truth about what happened in this part of the world in terms of European expansionism and colonization. Our students (and adults) need to be ‘shocked’ and ‘stunned’ by the genocide that claimed the lives of 70-80 million Indigenous human beings… a genocide that we (Canada) played an active role in.
(Note: Part Two will be added at a later date)