More on the Spanish in the New World

As many people are aware, there were many atrocities, mass murders, and genocides in the twentieth century.

Toward the end of the century there were the genocides in Rwanda and Kosovo. During World War II, cruel treatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese resulted in the famous Bridge on the River Kwai episode, and the Bataan Death March--not even mentioning any of the terrible things, such as experiments with germ warfare, that the Japanese performed on the Chinese in the 1930s. Nor Allied bombings of World War II, which--aside from the casualties of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--killed 250,000 in Tokyo alone.

Of course there was the Holocaust in which an estimated 6 million Jews, Slavs, clergy, gypsies, and homosexuals perished in the Nazi concentration camps, from being gassed, starved, or worked to death, or from disease.

And, as many an Armenian knows well, early in the twentieth century an undetermined number—but believed to be a 7-figure number—of Armenians perished due to actions of the Turks.

The last two examples are among the larger and more egregious examples of modern times. But there is one story not as well known.

It all started when the Spanish conquerors of the New World learned of silver deposits at Potosi, in Bolivia. This turned out to be a fabulously rich silver mine; but it was high in the Andes, at 13,000 feet. Spanish workers were unwilling or unable to work at that altitude. Similarly for African slaves. So the King of Spain, Philip II, issued an order permitting native peoples to be enslaved to work in the mines.

By 1800, enough silver had been mined to form a string of ingots stretching from Potosi to Spain. Also, unfortunately, 4 million people died in those mines by 1800, again enough corpses to form a chain stretching all the way back to Spain.

So that has to count as one of the largest mass murders of the last 500 years. Of course all over the New World, once the Spanish arrived, an uncertain number of Native Americans died—through being deliberately killed, through disease, and through being overworked as literally or virtually slave labor—starting, in fact, with Columbus himself.

With Columbus Day coming shortly, it might be time to contemplate some of these facts and consider that maybe Columbus' arrival in the New World is not unequivocally an event to be celebrated.

© 2012 by Richard Stein