PERCEPTIONS OF HISTORY -- THE "DISCOVERY" OF AMERICA:

What is History and what uses does it have? As Herodotus noted, history-writing, means "inquiry", a thought further developed and applied by Thucydides. Ideally, History should be a contextual timeline of true events, reflecting the five "C-s"of historical analysis -- chronology, comprehensiveness, context, causality and comparison. Yet, as can be easily demonstrated, historians throughout the ages have manipulated the record -- primarily by omitting crucial facts, sometimes by inventing them, a phenomenon attributable to opportunism, career expectations, political correctness, literary enthusiasm, poetic license (se non è vero è molto ben trovato!), optimism (feel good stories), and even greed. Let's face it, many historians -- like lawyers -- write what they believe is expected of them, or what will render social and economic benefits. This is why historical accounts that raise uncomfortable questions, upset the established order, i.e. are not black and white, neatly separating good and bad, heroes and villains, are seldom written, and if written, are difficult to place with commercial publishers, are often marginalized and ignored by the corporate press.

Let us now revisit a major historical event that is mostly perceived as a success story, a romantic adventure, the winning of the golden West, i.e. the classical caricature known as the "discovery" of America.

Now, did the Europeans really "discover" an empty continent, which they then settled and developed, or were our ancestors more like "migrants" to new frontiers? Throughout history, migration has been a natural behaviour of the human species, hardly "deviant conduct". Yet, one of the many differences between 21st century migrants and 16th-20th century migrants is that 21st century migrants do not come to destroy our crops, slaughter our buffalo or wipe us out. Basically, all that modern migrants (we often call them "illegal aliens") want is a better chance for themselves and their families.

Let us look at Europe during the "age of discovery". Our European ancestors were pretty poor, our cities were squalid, overcrowded, unemployment and disease were rife. The 16th, 17th, 18th. 19th century migrants -- the Spanish, the Portuguese, the British, the French. the Germans, the Poles, the Irish and other "colonizers" -- were adventurers, mavericks bent on getting rich fast, followed by simple folk hoping for a new start. The historical fact is that what we know today as North Armerica (the Western hemisphere north of the Rio Grande) was a rich land, ecologically-balanced, populated by some 10 million human beings, minding their own business and posing no threat to Europeans, when in 1492 Christopher Columbus landed on Guanahani, an Island in the Bahamas, thinking that he had found a western route to India. Columbus went on to Cuba and the Antillies, conducted in all four voyages to the Americas, still thinking that the inhabitants were "Indians".

Unlike the Spaniards who "Christianized" the indigenous popultions and used them as cheap labour, our Anglo-Saxon forebears had little use for the natives, whom they referred to as "devils" and "wolves". The Massachusetts Puritans, who also burned witches, killed the native "Indians" who taught them how to survive, while the Reverend John Cotton of the first Church of Boston, and the Reverend Cotton Mather of the Second Church of Boston held their racist, rabble-rousing sermons worthy of a Julius Streicher. In the course of three centuries 98% of the native North American population was not only displaced pursuant to the official policy of "manifest destiny" -- it was deliberately exterminated. The founding fathers of the "land of the free and the home of the brave", Benjamin Franklin ("the design of Providence to extirpate these savages"), George Washington ("beasts of prey") , John Adams ("blood hounds"), Thomas Jefferson ("merciless Indian savages"), James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson ("the wolf be struck in his den")-- all called for the extinction of the American "Indian". These dreadful historical facts lie sleeping in the archives, if anyone cares to consult them. But most historians and the mainstream media seem only to remember "Thanksgiving Day" and the story of Pocahontas.

What we know as Meso-and South America, was also a rich land, densely populated with some 70 million human beings, with magnificent cities like Tenochtitlán (today Mexico City), capital of the Aztec kingdom, with towns, villages, impressive architecture, acqueducts, sports facilities, science, astronomy, art, and vast agricultural lands producing such wonderful foods as avocado (aoacatl in Aztec, originating in the Tehuacan valley near Oaxaca), beans, blueberry, cacao, cashews, cassava, cayenne pepper, chilli peppers, cranberry (native to the region around Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada), gourds, jalapeños, maize (mahiz in Arawak language, commonly known as corn), maple sugar and maple syrup (produced by the Ojibwe and Algonquin peoples of Northeast Canada), passion fruit, peanuts, pecans, pineapple, quinine (tonic water!), sunflowers (helianthus), sweet pimentos, potatoes (papa or patata in Inca language), pumpkin, squash, tapioca, tomatoes (tomatl in Nahuatl language), topinanbour, vanilla, "wild rice" (anishinaabe manoomin, hand-harvested by Anishinaabe peoples in central-north America), zucchini, etc., not to mention that very bad import to Europe -- tobacco (from the Arawakan or Taino word referred to by the Dominican friar, later Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas), hitherto unknown in Europe (until introduced in Spain in 1558 by Francisco Fernandez).

As we can read in the writings of Las Casas, our Spanish ancestors brutally aggressed the indigenous population, murdered and enslaved millions of the men, raped their women, and eventually mixed with the suvivors to create the "mestizo" society we know in Latin America today. If you travel to Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia -- you will see the descendants of the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Incas. Presidents Toledo of Peru, Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia have Spanish surnames, but they certainly also have as many indigenous forefathers (a mucha honra!). So much for the "discovery" of the Americas and for the legal fiction of "terra nullius".

It is worth remembering that, far from being xenophobic, the first nations of the Americans received Cristobal Colon with remarkable hospitality, as Columbus himself acknowledged in his writings. -- The European newcomers, however, were migrants with the sword. Perhaps the only good thing that can be said for Spanish colonization is that the human rights activities of Friar Antonio de Montesinos ("are these not also men"?) and Bartolomé de las Casas before Emperor Charles V led to the adoption of the "New Laws" of 1542 which recognized the human nature of the indigenous population and forbade their ill-treatment and enslavement. The great disputations of Valladolid and Salamanca have gone down in history as a milestone in the development of the concept of human rights. Admittedly, Charles' laws were violated with impunity, which only illustrates the truism that norms and their enforcement are not identical. Yet, if we had no norms, we would be totally subject to the law of the jungle, otherwise known as "might is right". (Bartolomé de las Casas, Brief History of the Devastation of the Indies, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; David Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 1992; Richard Drinnon, Facing West, University of Oklahoma Press, 1997; Frederick Hoxie (ed.) Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, in particular the entry "Population: Precontact to Present", pp. 500-502 by Russell Thornton, UCLA), Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America, Chappel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, Cambridge 2007. R. W. van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, Oxford 2010, Reginald Harsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy 1983-1812, East Lansing Michigan State University Press, 1967. Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, Penguin 2010, pp. 16-24.

I cannot help wondering how our world would look if instead of the Europeans "discovering" America, the Iroquois, the Cree, the Dakotas, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Arawacs had crossed the Ocean to "discover" Europe. Would they have slaughtered the Europeans, as our ancestors slaughtered them?