Growing up, reading school textbooks, I always had a great respect for the man who was known as Christopher Columbus. You do not have to be a nerd to know his story – how he wanted to find a direct route to Asia, and how he landed up in the Caribbean and discovered the continent of America. We were all taught only half of the truth (and this means the time when I was in school). The complete truth is that this voyager was also a tyrant, murderer and a person who can be said to have globalized slave trade. He lead a conquest, which made the native Indians commit mass suicides (estimated to be around 100,000). His men tortured the natives, violated women, and chopped off hands or executed whomsoever did not give them gold. 56 years after Columbus's first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 native Indians remained on Hispaniola (present day Dominican Republic). Here’s one of your childhood heroes dusted.
We are taught democracy is government of the people, for the people and
by the people. It’s any day better than dictatorship, aristocracy or military
regime. However, a certain German guy was a very popular democratic leader too
(wasn’t the most popular) and was responsible for one of the worst genocides in
the human history. Democracy is better than whatever available, but just
blindly mugging up ‘of the people, for
the people and by the people’ just because Abraham Lincoln said so, makes
you so conditioned that we start believing that all our elected representatives
work for us (and not for another term). Democracy is the best of what is
available, but democratic governments should not be free from criticism.
We’ve learnt about Hitler, and how he was responsible for killing
thousands. What is seldom discussed is the British genocide in Kenya. Between
1952 and 1960, it is estimated that hundreds and thousands (some even estimate
it to a million) Kenyans were killed by the British. No one knows what this
number actually is, since the British burnt the documents just before leaving
Kenya. We also had someone known as King Leopold II of Belgium – who ruled
Belgium between 1865-1909 and his regime was responsible for the death of 10
million Africans (that’s one crore!). Recently,
when King Leopold’s statue was defaced in Belgium, his ancestor said that
Leopold wasn’t responsible for the deaths in Congo because he himself did not
go there (smh!). As early in the past as 1958, Belgium had a ‘human zoo’ which displayed
Congolese people. Not quite long in the past, but still something not many of
us know. Let’s put it this way, if Hitler is to be declared as the greatest
villain in human history, he sure has some serious competition at his hands.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The Spanish conquests of South
America and the French colonization of Africa were quite terrible too. It is
baffling, that our history books do not teach us about some of the worst
atrocities done to man. What’s even more baffling the regimes that were
responsible for committing these crimes have seldom offered direct apologies to
the countries where these acts were committed. It is the same reason why Shashi
Tharoor delivered a famous speech at Oxford Union, where he discusses why
Britain owes India reparations. It is a remarkable speech, and one needs to
watch it if he/she hasn’t (link below). It won’t mean much of course, after all
the damage that has been done, but it is the least that they can do. Some of
these nations, are still suffering from the problems that were created out of
these regimes, and these problems have only amplified with time.
Rather than trying to mug up what year a King died, how many wives he
had or what was the name of his horse, I would have liked to study learn things
which caused some of the problems that the world is facing today. Only after
one is well aware of the brutalities of the past, will we have children growing
up being sensitive to other communities of the world. Only then, history won’t
repeat itself.
Yours bitterly,
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