Justify this

When Christopher Columbus left Europe in 1492 to sail the ocean blue, he was looking for an alternate western route to the Indies, which was rich in silk and spices, after the land route east had been cut-off by the evil Muslims. After years of trying to get backing for his trip, the Spanish King and Queen decided to back his endeavor, giving him generous terms believing that that he would fail in his quest. As he crossed the Atlantic, Columbus proved his doubters wrong and sighted land, but it was not the Indies that he ran into – instead it turned out to be an island that made up a chain that today we call the Bahamas. With this discovery, as well as that of other islands like Cuba and Hispaniola, which today is split into the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Columbus set off an age of exploration that would have such an impact on the world, that few geological or human events would ever match it.

In what the Europeans would come to call the New World, Columbus had stumbled upon a land that was rich in resources, especially in gold and other valuable items like fur, timber, and fertile soil. These riches brought European nations wealth with which to build bigger armies that they would then use to conquer even more lands across the world in order to make even more money and gain even more power. The only thing that stood in the way of the Europeans and the resources was the fact that there were a large number of people living on the lands that they coveted. Albeit they were darker people living a different way than they did, and whom had different beliefs about the world, the supernatural, and their place in all of it – but they were people nonetheless and they were living there, and at the start, there were a lot more of them than their were Europeans. Estimates for the population of the Americas at the time of contact are anywhere from between 8 and 120 million, with many different cultural groups making up what Europeans would later call “Indians.” Theories abound about how long they had lived in the Americas for before the white man came - traditional Aboriginal peoples believe that they have lived there since the beginning of time, while others believed they immigrated from Asia over the Bering Strait land bridge 12,000 years ago (source). Regardless of how many there were or how long they had been there, Europeans were presented with a challenge - how do you justify dispossessing a large group of people of their land, liberty, and ultimately, their way of life?

Colonization was nothing new for the people living the “one right way” – it has been something we had been doing since the beginning of our revolution 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. But questions were raised over whether the people who possessed these lands in the New World had any right to it? They were humans, but were they that human? Did their needs usurp our own, or did ours come first? In the end, it didn’t matter what rights the Indians had or didn’t have, what was important was that their land and its resources could make European nations rich and powerful, like it did the Spanish, who got off to the best start in the colonization game, conquering much of South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and parts of North America, and in the process toppled the mighty Aztec and Incan empires. As a result of these actions, gold funneled into the Spanish monarchs coffers and fuelled their Empire that led to them being the 16th and 17th C superpower. In the end, that was what was important to the Spanish – to be rich, to be powerful, and be better at both of those things than all the other European nations. Ultimately, it didn’t matter to them what it would take to achieve those ends - the end always justified the means.

In order to undertake the actions, namely killing, stealing, lying, cheating, and sometimes even raping, they needed to see the results they desired Europeans had to legitimize their actions – in a sense, make it seem as though what they were doing was the right thing to do. Being good, civilized people who were better than the heathen savages they encountered, Europeans had an image to maintain, and that meant saying anything they could to make sure they kept the moral upper hand. In her article, Old World Law and New World Political Realities, historian Olive Patricia Dickason argues,

…European monarchs continued to act on the assumption, as they had done during the days of the Crusades, that they were within their rights if they wished to claim lands not under the control of a Christian prince. If they encountered resistance, they assumed the right, particularly if they had papal sanction to evangelize, to attack, and to conquer.

It was a good thing for the Europeans, then, that the vast majority of Indians they found weren’t Christian, because now they had all the justification they needed to slaughter whoever they encountered in order to gain access to the land their resources. What luck for them. In order to prove the savagery of the Indians, and further cement in the minds of the people that what they were doing was the right thing, priests and others would send home reports to the people of Europe to tell them how grotesque the customs of the Indians were, including such un-Christian and un-godly things as eating each other’s flesh raw, despite the fact that the accounts were, for the most part, fabrications (for a great example of missionary fabrication check out the book The Jesuit Relations). Dickason claims that even some people living during this time period dismissed the savage image as “being wildly exaggerated.” But as most people know, the first rule of war is to always dehumanize your enemy, and everyone from Hitler to the Israeli’s and Palestinians has tried to make their enemies out to be inhuman, unworthy, value-less creatures, making them easier to kill and get what they want – land, money, and ultimately, power.

Europeans convinced themselves that the world was full of heathen savages, everyone other than them in fact, and this made it easy to take what we wanted from them, whether it was the land itself, their gold, or their children. The truth, however, was that the people the Europeans encountered were actually pretty nice and accommodating. They had different spiritual beliefs, and lived communally, but generally they were good-natured humans and in many cases did what they could to help us survive in the New World when we first arrived. True, they fought back when we tried to push our limits in their land, but hey, I’m sure we can understand that – I mean most people do push back when someone tries to take something from them. This doesn't make someone a savage.

In case the Europeans weren’t totally convinced that it was OK to take people’s land by force because they didn't believe in the Christian God, Europeans also decided to redefine what it meant to “occupy” land in legal terms. This justification was probably for some of the more intellectual Europeans as it was a less crude justification than they are heathens, do what you want to them. So the monarchs, clergymen and scholars if Europe got together and said, well, yeah those people are living on the land, but they aren’t really using the land in the way that’s intended. Civilized people built settlements, planted food in the ground, had cattle and other livestock, chopped down forests in the name of progress, and tried to grow as big as they could. The Indians of the Americas weren’t doing that, well, except for the Inca and the Aztec whose settlements were bigger than most in Europe, but we’re not talking about those people – we’re talking about the hunter/gatherers who live in small tribes – those guys weren’t using the land right and it was an affront to nature and God’s plan that people used it in that way. So since they weren’t using the land the way it was meant to be used, it was terres nullus, or empty land, and everybody has the right to take empty land, by force if you have too. It was just what had to be done – it’s the natural order and all those things.

Soon it was accepted that what was being done in the New World was a good and moral thing – Europeans were getting rich and powerful and we were helping the poor savages at the same time. Everybody wins, well, except the Indians who were dying at genocidal rates, but they were heathens so, what the hey. It all worked out in the end.

I think that today, many of us like to believe that we were destined to become the dominant peoples of the world. Some like to believe that God allowed us to dominate the world, while others think that it was just hard work, skill, determination, and the superiority of our culture. There is no doubt that our ancestors worked hard to conquer and then develop the lands of the Americas and turn them into the economic powerhouse that they are. But as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel, we were also really fucking lucky - including the little fact that Indians had no immunity to small pox and other diseases, killing much of the population (estimates range up to about 90% of the original indigenous population of the Americas) and greatly weakening the communities, which made it easier to conquer them. Diamond also argues that geographically we lucked out, because there are only a small number of animals in the world that can be domesticated, and Europe happened to be home to the majority of them. In short, sure we worked hard, but we also got lucky with our environment.

While some may believe that we were either pre-destined to conquer the world, we worked hard at it, or that we just got lucky, I like to believe the biggest reason we conquered the world is because we have an unbelievable ability, and still do, to justify unbelievably bad behaviour, including invoking our favorite deity, as long as we make money out of the endeavor. In our path, we left a wake of destruction, from which most of the world’s population is still struggling to recover from, but we justified it all because it resulted in us benefiting economically from those actions. Today we continue to justify idiotic actions, whether it is destroying the rain forests, over-fishing the oceans, damaging ecosystems, wiping out species at historical rates, and polluting the biosphere all in the name of profit. We even justify not doing things, such as taking action against climate change, because we feel it will cost too much money. At the end of the day, we can justify any action. Pedophiles justify their actions by saying that children are more sexual than we give them credit for and need/want an older person to show them the way. Slave traders justified their actions by saying that blacks were inferior and in some cases, more like wild animals than humans. People even justified the burning of innocent women because they thought them to be witches. I once justified cheating on a girl by saying that "she wasn't nice enough to me." At some point, we need to stop justifying our actions and realize that not all actions can be justified - some actions are just wrong no matter how hard we try to make them out to be right. Making money and furthering progress are no longer good enough reasons to do things that are harmful not only to the environment, but other humans, both those in the present and in the future. If we don't, we might just end up justifying ourselves all the way into extinction.

Cross-Posted at Dodosville.