A Darker Side of Humanity

Humanity is capable of truly terrible things, and Bartolome wastes no time in proving that in his Journal. The Destruction of the Indies shows a gruesome depiction of what can only be described as the predecessor to the Holocaust. The atrocities described in this book are truly staggering, mind-blowing, disgusting, aweful, horrid, and many more terrible things that I will not bother to list.

 Throughout this journal, Las Casas provides numerous (perhaps too numerous) accounts of the Spaniards comeplete disregard, and lack of respect for human life. At one point in the book, Las Casas describes a scene where a Spaniard's dogs become hungry, and so in an effort to appease the hungry pups, he takes a human native child, cuts off its arms and legs, and feeds the live babe to the animals. The complete lack of value for human life shown in this passage left me utterly appalled. Did they really value their dogs more highly than their fellow man? Being Xenophobic is one thing, but the mass genocide described by Las Casas is something else entirely.

At one point in the book, Las Casas describes a situation where one of the Native leaders escapes torture, and flees to a nearby island where other natives are living. The Spainards chase after the man, over the course of several islands, and when they finally catch him, they burn him alive. Whether they chased the man out of pure sport, or out of a feeling that they might lose pride if one 'got away', I do not know, but this example goes to show how adamant Las Casas makes the Spaniards out to be in their intent to kill/ enslave every last native.

I recall learning about the pilgrims arrival in America, and how the natives helped them to grow them survive the winter, and celebrated a Thanksgiving, and when I got older I remember looking back at what I learned in retrospect and thinking, 'there's no way things went that peacefully...'. Even so, I never would have imagined that it would have been this violent. How the Spaniards could have committed these heinous acts, and then go on to call themselves Christians is baffling, I wonder what the Pope of the time would have said if Las Casas had been writing to him instead.

I'm sure that some of this story is exaggerated, but I'm also sure that not all of this is false either. Books of today profess how barbaric the natives seemed to be, but this book shows that the pilgrims and Spaniards were not so civilized in their relations either. The truth usually lies somewhere in between; maybe both sides were guilty of committing crimes against one another. I say this because I am sure that the Natives did not take this as nicely as Las Casas made it seem that they did.

While I have to say that I did not find this book particularly enjoyable, I do think that it is important for people to read. It recounts a history of humanity at one of its lowest, most horrible points, and hopefully by reading it, we will understand the mistakes that our predecessors made, and be able to learn from them.