At the end of the promenade of The Rambla, in Barcelona, there is a statue set up as a signal of the navigator Christopher Columbus, the same who never knew where it came but was proud of having reached. The statue, 60 feet tall and also serves as a lookout point for tourists, it is a tribute to the feats of Columbus pergeñó in 1492, when he sailed again to the Indies imagined and he found the land that is today called America. It is a tribute, also, to the Catholic Kings, who by then had joined the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and expelled without the option to return to the moorish and jewish existed in its territory. And it is also, according to a left-wing party Spanish, a praise to the colonialism and slavery that were incubated from the time of the ignaro Columbus entered into indigenous region.
The party of independence times of left CUP calls for the statue to fall. "We just have taught the friendly face of this person —says Josep Garganté, one of their leaders— but, for example, in his diaries, Columbus says that with fifty men can subdue all of them (the indians) and make them very good servants". In addition to the historic demand that hope to formulate with the fall of the statue, the party expected that on the 12th of October, the day on which we celebrate the arrival of Columbus to the indigenous lands, be it a working day. Without party. Without omens of ornament or rest. A day like any other. Like almost all other: one day, forgettable.
The memory of Columbus has been challenged in the TWENTIETH century on several occasions and from several wings. Sociologists as the Hungarian Tzvetan Todorov reformulated the enthusiasm that follows the Conquest: yes, there will be that to accept that colonization happened and also that there was an invasion of horrific. That was the story, and told by the victors, because the losers was little. There are, however, matters that deserve proper treatment and that the official history has neglected.
Of entry, the discovery of America was not a discovery. The land already existed, they were there without the spaniards what to suspect. More than a discovery, an encounter. Perhaps the genocide largest in history: according to figures undecided which collects Todorov in his book The conquest of America: the problem of the other (Siglo XXI Editores), 70 million indigenous people were killed by direct or indirect cause of the conquest that drove the spaniards. Were killed by their spears and muskets; killed by the diseases brought by outsiders; died of maltreatment and hunger. America has always been a continent that can’t lament their dead.
And perhaps, as tantea the title, more than a game was a conquest: Columbus and his followers, and the Spanish adventurers of early that came from the strata more terminally ill, should encourage worship to the religion and to the Spanish Crown. Of entry, was a coup: a coup resounding. He did not know about forms of taxation of the indigenous people —that would be rescued in part by Bartholomew of the Houses, flew his spirituality and desollaba, as a lion that destroys a tapir helpless, their social customs. The conquest was immodest and unequal: here were the spaniards with their guns and their bullets and there were indigenous people with their poisons and their resistance of evil. The advantage was always —almost always, no doubt— from the Spanish side. They were the surprise, though at his time they were surprised. That’s why Cortez, with the general enquiries of the natives about his good judgment, he took his beard is plentiful, and its portent of chivalry to execute a ruse that no one will forget: impersonating a spirit toltec who came to avenge the quarrels which the aztecs committed on the people.
it Was a conquest smart, no doubt.
Columbus was, in a sense, a small naive child. His objectives were genuine, and they pursued their convictions: the expansion of the catholic Church and the honor of the eternal to the Catholic Kings. The indians had to do part of it. They had to speak Spanish and understand the language —the same year that Columbus came to indian land, was published the Grammar of Antonio de Nebrija— and should be adjusted, by divine command, because there was no doubt that their god had also created the torva indigenous nothing I understood, the precepts of the law and the right to live of the Spanish colonialist. Hundreds turned them into their slaves; raped the women; killed the children; sajaron to the rebels. A woman in what is today Mexico was condemned to the bites of the dogs, those small quadrupeds of sharp teeth that had never been seen. Others are dragged there tied to the legs of a horse until it is changed into shreds of nerves and flesh, rich heritage that retook the paramilitaries. The statue of Columbus, that on clear days the place the view of the tourists, it means all of that.
it Means, also, the intersection of two cultures. As you see, it means the death whole of a culture. How many indigenous languages were left alive after the Spanish settlement? How many books, of the few who recorded their history, were saved from the pyre? What was left of the religious traditions? The salvation ethno-indigenous cultures is, in some way, a sense of mea culpa late. Because the spaniards did not ask for forgiveness. Because the deaths occurred without anyone saying anything. Because the power was power, and who had sent him.
The historical revisionism, however, is useless. To judge the acts of Columbus six centuries later, it is unfair, even though we know what he saw Columbus when he landed on that island virgin: I did not see men and women, but to indians, to forms that should be under his command and that of God, (writes Todorov: "Columbus speaks only of the men who go, because, after all, they also form part of the landscape"); I saw mermaids when was fish long; I saw all the Greek mythology wrapped up in the jungles. That is to say, only he saw himself. Because Columbus never understood what were those lands, and who inhabited them. To learn how to unlearn, and Columbus was a fierce supporter of the Church and the power of the establishment: he was condemned to illiteracy real. Never understood their language, nor tried to understand it (Bartolomé de las Casas wrote: "upside-down understand of what the indians sign them, speaking to them"), and always thought that insurance was a stronghold report of the languages of the roman empire. He never went out of their ignorance. He lived in a place she never knew. By pure moral chastisement, the statue should continue where it is: to remember just how dangerous ignorance.
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