Following yesterday’s terrorist bombing in Brussels, I have reread the first thirty pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.  The statistics for North America north of Mexico tell a story that is familiar in a global world now…

“The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million.  Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by the whites.  A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in 1656 that ‘the Indians. . . affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians, and before the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease,whereof nine-tenths of them have died.’  When the English first settled Martha’s Vineyard in 1642, the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand.  There were no wars on that island, but by 1764, only 313 Indians were left there.  Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered perhaps 12,00 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.

“What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas?  For a brief period in history, there was the glory of a Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere.  As Hans Koning sums it up in his book Columbus: His Enterprise:

"For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer.  It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars.  They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor  poorer, and a ruined peasant class."