Today’s Persecuted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Having persecuted the Moslem and Jewish “Other” back home, the Spanish conquistadors did not hesitate to do the same to Native Americans. One Spaniard observed that they enslaved so many that the Indians “no longer approach their wives, in order not to beget slaves.” Another claimed that “the Spanish treat them worse than slaves.” The Spanish philosopher Sepulveda called the Mexicans “uncivilized, barbarians, wild beasts.” He lumped together Indians, women, and animals, all creatures without a soul of their own. Considered unable to govern themselves, they were identified with savagery and evil. Sepulveda argued that because Indians were vastly inferior to the Spanish, it was just to wage war on them. By the same argument he could have justified the witch hunts, a war on women. Speaking of Indians as cattle, Columbus said, “They have brought me back seven head of women, girls and adults.” Tzvetan Todorov concludes that the Spanish saw Indians as “inferior beings, halfway between men and beasts.”
Having seen what followed when women accused of witchcraft were declared to be less than human, we can be prepared for the way some of the Spanish went about subjecting these “inferior beings.” They cut off the hands, noses, tongues, penises of captives; they cut off women’s breasts. They branded slaves’ faces with the initials of their owners. They tore children from their mothers’ arms to feed them to dogs. They tested the sharpness of their swords by randomly cutting off heads or disemboweling the nearest Indians. They beat female captives to force them to submit sexually. To make a shot of their power they burned captives alive at public executions. When Cortés put down the uprising at Panuco, he burned alive all the chiefs, while forcing their songs to watch. Even the most outspoken critic of this fury, Bishop de Las Casas, ordered a disobedient Indian to be burned to death.
Culled from: Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts