Gherush92

Date: 2012-05-16
Author: Gherush92

YEAR 1492

MASSACRE AND DEPORTATION OF JEWS
MASSACRE AND DEPORTATION OF ROMA
MASSACRE AND DEPORTATION OF ISLAMIC MOORS
GENOCIDE OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS
SLAVERY AND DESTRUCTION OF AFRICANS
EXTERMINATION OF THE INDIGENOUS OF THE CANARIES

In 1492, Isabella of Spain massacred and expelled Jews, Moors and Roma from Spain. She also set up the tribunal of the inquisition and began a campaign of genocide of the Indians of America and of Africans. This genocide was on a scale vaster than any other in the history of the world. Hunger and extreme poverty in the Americas and in Africa today are the result of those criminal actions promoted by Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand with the backing of Pope Alexander VI and the Franciscan, Dominican and later Jesuit order. It is estimated that in one century more than 100 million indigenous peoples fell under the invasion of the Christian Europeans and were exterminated. The mass transatlantic slave trade began under the authority of the Dominican Bartolome’ de Las Casas. The slave trade is perpetrated by Spanish and Portuguese Christians with the approval of the Pope. The result is the extermination of million and million Africans.

Following Isabella’s orders in 1492, Christopher Columbus encountered the continent that today is named America. A mere 25 years later the Caribbean area of the discovery that corresponds to present-day Cuba, Santo Domingo, Jamaica and Puerto Rico is already spiritually conquered, materially drained and emptied of 90% of its original population. In a few more years, the population will be completely wiped out. A few decades after the invasion of Mexico that took place in 1519, the native population of the original 25 million had been reduced to just over 1 million. A century after Columbus’ arrival, the original 90 -100 million inhabitants of the Americas had been reduced to 3.5 million or around 5% of the original population. The original 10-20 million inhabitants of the Amazonian forest has been reduced to around 220,000. Later the figure of 10-12 millions for the aboriginal population of North America was reduced to 230,000. To solve the problem of growing despoblación, shortly after the discovery, Ferdinand the Catholic arranged for the Casa de Contratación of Seville to send African slaves to the West Indies on behalf of the Royal Treasury. With the incorporation of Portugal into Spain, the slave trading of Africans assumes the dimension of a colossal business enterprise involving tens of millions of people. One century after the discovery, the American and African land, that had produced precious nutritional products for thousands of peoples and nurtured many longstanding civilizations were regions that had become subject to widespread famine until today. But at least they had been Christianized.

Columbus Day, the anniversary of the landing in America of Columbus in 1492 has been recast in many countries of Americas and Europe the Día de la Raza (Day of the Race), or as Día de las Culturas (Day of the Cultures), as Discovery Day, as Día de la Hispanidad (Spanish Day) and National Day in Spain.

These holidays have been celebrated unofficially since the late 18th century, and officially in various countries since the early 20th century.

A careful, dispassionate analysis of the entire period reveals not an epic of honor, heroism, adventure and discover but an epic of vile actions, greed, arrogance, ignorance and violence. To analyze together the tragedy of the involved Indigenous people: Jews, the Roma, Islamic Moors, the American Indians and the Africans of entails the pointing out of the principal historical figures who are responsible for the theory and the carrying out of the destruction of these peoples, based on the theory of inferiority. This is not a matter of colonial exploitation since there was no economic plan to transform the areas by instituting a more complex system of production of goods. On the contrary, what took place was the pure and simple robbery of wealth possessed or produced by others.

The Holy Inquisition was abolished in 1834 and the edict of expulsion of the Jews was set aside in 1869. Slavery was prohibited on the continent only in 1888. For the sake of attributing a positive and universal value to the discovery of America, one must remain completely indifferent to the murder of millions and millions of human beings and the annihilation of civilizations and cultures, the destruction of entire ecological systems, the colossal depredation of riches and resources and mass slavery. This kind of imposition does not allow us to probe the connections between the Christian assault on the New World and the massacres that were being carried out in Europe against Jewish life, the life of Moors and so many others.

The campaigns included forced conversions, matanzas, the terrorist work of the Inquisition, the mass expulsions, the destructive practice of holy wars. As if the Christian conquistadores and missionaries that discovered, attacked, plundered and destroyed cities and villages, subjugated and converted the Indians, the Theologians who in the University halls, while they were working out their reassuring theories to confirm that the Negroes were slaves by nature, discussed in learned fashion the question of whether Indians were beasts or humans, the encomenderos who forced them to compulsory labor, were not children of that very Christian Spain that was intoxicated by the smoke of the stakes where, in the autodafe together with the Jews, Roma, Moors, diversity, innovation and reason were also being condemned and destroyed.

To put together Jews, Moors and Indians means singling out the key word that explains the source of the problem: evangelization. Both peoples were subjected to this process- first the Jews and Moors and then the Indians. The former were designated as perfidious ones and rejected ones. The latter were called children by nature and barbarians. The Jews had to pass from the Inquisition to ghettos and to the gas chambers during the Shoah in order for the pressure to convert might be relaxed a little and in order for a few consciences to begin to reflect on the monstrosity of the Christian invention of Anti-Semitism.

For the Indians, the massacre and the evangelization that began 500 years ago continue without let up and the extinction of these peoples is considered a symptom of the unstoppable progress of modernity.

The celebration of Columbus Day represents the commemoration of the massacre of millions of Indigenous peoples and represents for this reason a violation of human rights. Even the process of canonization of Isabella of Castille constitutes a violation of human rights because it signals acceptance of the greatest genocidal campaign in human history: it is therefore an illegal attempt to justify crimes against humanity on the basis of the Convention for the Prevention and the Repression of the Crime of Genocide (1948).

The official celebration of Thanksgiving also was originally founded as a commemoration of a massacre. Thanksgiving was proclaimed for the good fortune enjoyed by the community to celebrate the victory against the "Heathen Natives” (1676 Thanksgiving Proclamation), the same Native Americans who had received and shared territory with the pilgrims from Europe. It is no coincidence that the seal of the today celebration of Thanksgiving is the ritual of turkey whose massacre seems to evoke the genocide of indigenous peoples.

We therefore ask the US President and the UN Secretary-General to consider initiating a path of understanding with the peoples that have suffered mass killings and massacres based on three principles:

- reparation
- negotiation
- solidarity

STOP CELEBRATING OCTOBER 12 !
Official revocation of the Bull Inter Caetera, May 4, 1493 and request for pardon and reparation.

PUT AN END TO THE BEATIFICATION OF ISABELLA OF CASTILE !
Official revocation of the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews, the Moors and Roma people from Christian Spain and Portugal and request for pardon and reparation.

FOR THE RECOGNITION, SAFEGUARD
AND PROTECTION OF THE CULTURAL DIVERSITY!

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Gherush92 Committee for Human Rights

STOP CELEBRATING OCTOBER 12!

An open letter to the President Obama and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Gherush92
Committee for Human Rights