Yet another take on Columbus and his ilk, this one placing him in a
Christian context of intolerance and genocidal tendencies; by Univ.
of Hawaii historian Stannard (The Puritan Way of Death, 1977;
Shrinking History, 1980, etc.). Starting with the fact that the
Admiral of the Ocean Sea abducted natives on his first voyage and
participated in the wholesale slaughter of innocent Indians by his
crew, and, on his second voyage, sailed back to Spain with hundreds
of slaves, Stannard notes that the massive job of depopulating the
Americas was accomplished largely by the pestilence brought by the
Europeans - everything from swine influenza and the bubonic plague
to smallpox. In North and South America, natives were killed off so
rapidly that, between disease and the lethal practices of Spanish
and other conquerors, tribal groups bad been decimated by an
average of 95% in the first century of contact - about one hundred
million dead, according to current estimates. Genocide on this
scale has no parallel, but Stannard carefully links the New World
bloodbath with Christian assaults against other groups of
nonbelievers and perceived subhumans through the centuries, from
Jews and Muslims to the tribes of Africa, showing a consistent
pattern of extermination based on racial preference, sexual
asceticism, and the tenets of faith - a pattern from which the
Nazi's Final Solution was, he says, a logical outgrowth. Vivid and
relentless, combining a formidable array of primary sources with
meticulous analysis - a devastating reassessment of the Conquest as
nothing less than a holy war, one that continues today from
Guatemala to the sands of Arabia. (Kirkus Reviews)
Arguing that the European and white American destruction of the native American people was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world, Stannard attempts to set the records straight on what befell American Indians over the last five centuries.
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