Sunday night

Sunday night roundup
At the moment I am being the very worst of my book junkie self and reading first chapters of lots of different books. Last night I read the first chapter in Howard Zinn's People's History of the USA, I am a great hedger of bets when it comes to allying myself with different schools of history, I don't completely discount the idea that 'great men' have in some instances, had an impact on history, but I am far keener on the idea that it is historical forces that are far beyond the control of individuals or movements that determine things to a far greater extent. A people's history can be loosely described as a view of the world that is the story of mass movements and of the outsiders. Society's curent default setting when coming to evaulate the past is heavily influenced by today's hyper induvidualism. A society that worships the self above all things is hardly likely to pay any attention to the notion that their current wealth and prosperity is based in large part on a forgotten notion of solidarity, collective struggle and sacrifice for ideals greater than the individual. It's far easier for the children (and in some cases grandchildren) of the ME generation to look at history as a succession of 'great men' who did things becuase they were determined, single minded and above all 'right'.

The first of these 'great men' that Zinn looks at is of course Columbus. The Venetian weavers son and master mariner decided to try to emulate Marco Polo but this time to find a sea route to Asia, knowing, as all the most educated men of the age knew, that the world was round. He did not expect for the continent of the Americas to be in the way. He discovered the Bahamas, then Cuba, and then Haiti and in doing so began the genocide of the Arawak people. The figures vary, whether Columbus and his successors murdered one million, three million or eight million people is unclear, but surely on of the most monstrous and bloodthirsty campaigns in history was perptrated against the peoples of the Carribean, and it was their extinction that made the Spanish think next of African captives to replace them. Columbus was desperate for the Arawak's gold, gold that barely existed, in order to pay back the loans underwriting his voyage, so desperate that he forced every Arawak to deliver a quantity of gold per month, those that did got a copper trinket, those found without the trinket had their hands chopped off. Columbus will never, ever be mentioned in the same breath as Hitler, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible or Mao, even though he is guilty of comparable crimes. the reason for this is because the ideologies underpinning the Nazis or the Russian or Chinese Communists is too alien to us, to contrary to our ways of understanding the world. Greed we can get, empire, we understand. The idea that in creating something as glorious as the Americas, a few eggs had to be broken along the way is something that most of us have assimilated and naturalised a long time ago. It does not make for comfortable thinking that a large part of the West (and therefore our) way of life is built upon genocide. Columbus the Mariner is the limits of what we can accept, not Columbus the mass murderer.
Other books I perused last night were a couple of second hand titles on the Wilson Plot and Kenneth O. Morgan's The People's Peace. More on both later.