SOURCE: "Las Casas, or a Look Back into the Future," translated by Michael Roloff, in The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account by Bartolomé de Las Casas, edited by Michael Roloff, translated by Herma Briffault, The Seabury Press, 1974, pp. 3–34.

"The Indies [that is: the West Indian Islands and the coasts of Central and South America] were discovered in the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-two. In the following year a great many Spaniards went there with the intention of settling the land. Thus, forty-nine years have passed since the first settlers penetrated the land, the first soclaimed being the large and most happy isle called Hispaniola, which is six hundred leagues in circumference. Around it in all directions are many other islands, some very big, others very small, and all of them were, as we saw with our own eyes, densely populated with native peoples called Indians. This large island was perhaps the most densely populated place in the world … And all the land so far discovered is a beehive of people; it is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind.

"And of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native masters and to the Spanish Christians whom they serve. They are by nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome. These people are the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or desire for vengeance of any people in the world. And because they are so weak and complaisant, they are less able to endure heavy labor and soon die of no matter what malady …

"Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening beasts, wolves, tigers or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before …

"We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million …

"Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies. And also, those lands are so rich and felicitous, the native peoples so meek and patient, so easy to subject, and that our Spaniards have no more consideration for them than beasts. And I say this from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed. But I should not say 'than beasts' for, thanks be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like excrement on the public squares."

So begins the Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, which Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote in 1542.

Whether it is true what this book says, whether its author should be believed—this question has produced a quarrel that has been smoldering, burning and flaming up for four hundred years. This quarrel has been waged by scholars and their tracts and dissertations, their investigations and commentaries could fill an entire library. Even in our day a generation of specialists in Spain, Mexico, South America and the United States is poring over the faded prints, letters and manuscripts from the pen of the Dominican monk from Seville. Yet the quarrel about Las Casas is not an academic one: what is under dispute is genocide, committed on twenty million people.

Since such a state of affairs does not sit well with the preferred contemplative stance of historical writing without anger and prejudice, it is scarcely surprising that the colleagues from the monk's fraternity, the theologians, historians and legal scholars have dropped all niceties in their choice of weapons. Where they

lacked arguments they reached for rusty knives. They are, as we shall see, in use even today. The Brief Account had scarcely been published when the Court historian of Charles V, the famous Dr. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, produced a pamphlet Against the premature, scandalous and heretical assertions which Fray Bartolomé de las Casas has made in his book about the conquest of the Indies, which he has had printed without permission of the authorities. The very title signals with the fence posts of the Inquisition. Later Las Casas was called a traitor and a Lutheran. In 1562 the Council of the City of México petitioned the King that Las Casas' writings had caused such an uproar that they had had to convene a commission of legal scholars and theologians to draw up an expert opinion against this "impudent frater and his teachings"; the King ought to reprimand Las Casas publically and prohibit his books. A few years later the viceroy of Perú wrote: "The books of this fanatic and malicious bishop endanger the Spanish rule in America." He too demanded a royal prohibition; he too commissioned a refutation: for the official historians the fight against Las Casas turns into a flourishing business. The assessor, a man by the name of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, has the following to say: "The devil has made a cunning chess move by making this deluded churchman his tool." In 1659 the censor of the Inquisition office in Aragón rules that "this book reports of very horrifying and cruel actions, incomparable in the history of other nations, and ascribes them to Spanish soldiers and colonizers who the Spanish King sent forth. In my opinion such reports are an insult to Spain. They must therefore be suppressed." Thereupon the Holy Tribunal of Zaragoza finally issued a prohibition of the book in 1660. Yet new editions keep appearing: in 1748 the Seville Chamber of Commerce has a Latin translation confiscated, and even in 1784 the Spanish ambassador to France demands a confiscation of a reprint.

Since the seventeenth century Las Casas' opponents have developed an even more elegant method to extirpate him. The historian Juán Meléndez, a Dominican, simply declared at that time that the Brief Account was a forgery; noted authorities, whom he asked, had informed him that the book was written by a Frenchman and had been translated into Spanish with a forged title; something which should surprise no one: as the Spanish enjoyed the greatest fame as proclaimers of truth, the forgers had no choice but to camouflage their lies in this manner. Even in 1910 a Spanish historian seriously maintained that the Brief Account, to the best of human judgment, was not by Las Casas.

The reputation of the accused was not notably improved by this astonishing acquittal. Recent historians who write in Spanish have characterized him in the following words: "mentally ill" (1927); "a pigheaded anarchist" (1930); "a preacher of Marxism" (1937); "a dangerous demagogue" (1944); "a leveller possessed by the devil" (1946); "delusionary in his conceptions, boundless and inopportune in his expression" (1947); and the most respected Spanish historian of the twentieth century, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in 1963 in Madrid, at age ninety-three, published an extensive book, which sought to exorcise the spirit of Las Casas once and for all. The American Lewis Hanke, who has devoted his life to the study of the Conquista, remarks about this work of exorcism:

Don Ramon passionately denies that Las Casas was an honorable man. He calls him a megalomaniac paranoid. In his retrospective look at the conquista Don Ramon scarcely detects a single dead Indian through his colored glasses: instead he sees a scene of well-being and of cultural progress for which America has to thank the Spaniards.

Only the unparalleled success which the Brief Account has had makes these tenacious and furious polemics comprehensible. Las Casas wrote a great deal: largescale chronicles, theological and legal disputations, petitions and tractatuses. To this day there is no complete edition of his works. The scientifically most significant of them were first published in 1877 and 1909. Their long submersion in darkness has obvious reasons. The Brief Account, true to its title, is nothing but a concise synopsis of the investigations and experiences which Las Casas elaborates in greater detail elsewhere. It was meant for a single reader: his Catholic Majesty, Charles I of Spain, as Charles V Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet the Brief Account's appearance in book form, at a time when printing was just beginning to flourish, acquainted all of Europe with it. Its original publication in 1552 in Seville was followed by translations into all the important languages of the time: Paris 1579; London 1583; Amsterdam 1607; Venice 1630 were the first foreign places of publication, followed by Barcelona, Brussels, Lyon, Frankfurt, and later by Philadelphia, New York, Havana, Buenos Aires, Lima, São Paula, México and Santiago de Chile.

The book's sensational effect provides an early example of the power of the press. The Brief Account reached one of its climaxes during the rivalry between Spain and England at the turn of the sixteenth century. A second wave of translations was brought on by the French Enlightenment. The third flood of reprints occurred between 1810 and 1830 in Latin America: at that time the Brief Account won direct influence on the leaders of the wars of independence against the Spanish colonial power; Simón Bolívar valued Las Casas, and the fact that he himself was a descendant of the conquistadors did not prevent him from making the book serve his revolutionary intentions. Las Casas had to serve as the chief witness against the Spanish even during the Spanish-American War in 1899, which secured control over the Caribbean area and rule over the Philippines for the United States.

The Brief Account was not spared by the tumult of power-political interests. Time and again Spain's opponents used Las Casas, often in a pharisaical manner, and so it is not surprising that the Hispanic world to this day discusses the book from a perspective which seems foolish to us: namely, whether or not it "sullies" the honor of Spain. Las Casas has become the exponent of the so-called Black Legend. Leyenda negra as the Spanish historians with a terminological trick call every conception of the conquest of South America which does not sing the official song of praise: as though what disparages the "honor of Spain" had been seized, willy-nilly, out of the blue.

This whole polemic is antiquated and superfluous. Spain's honor does not interest us. The French enlightener Jean François Marmontel, in his work on the destruction of the Inca Empire, referring to Las Casas, already stated in 1777 what there is to be said on this subject: "All nations have their robbers and fanatics, their times of barbarousness, their attack of rabies." The question of national character is not on the agenda. The extermination of the European Jews by the Germans, the Stalinist deportations, the extinction of Dresden and Nagasaki, the French terror in Algeria, the Americans in South East Asia have demonstrated even to the most obtuse that all peoples are capable of everything: and while the Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies is being published once more in a new English translation the last of the Indians in Brazil are being inexorably exterminated.

The historians of the nineteenth century tried tenaciously, at times desperately, to invalidate Las Casas, and not alone out of chauvinism or cowardice, but because the events he describes would have destroyed their historical picture. They believed in the mission of Christianity or in the "values" of European civilization and what transpired during their own time in the Congo, in Indonesia, in India and China they would have regarded as impossible as the genocide Las Casas describes.

We have no such doubts. The news we receive on TV each day would suffice to disabuse us of them. The actuality of the book is monstrous, has a penetratingly contemporaneous smell to it. Of course our way of reading it is not devoid of an element of deception. Every historical analogy is ambiguous: for whoever rejects this analogy history becomes a pile of insignificant data; for whoever accepts it at face value, leveling the specific differences, it becomes aimless repetition, and he draws the false conclusion that it has always been this way, and the tacit consequence that, therefore, it will always remain so too. No, Las Casas was not our contemporary. His report treats of colonialism in its earliest stage; that is, the stage of robbery pure and simple, of unconcealed plundering. The complicated system of exploitation of international raw materials was as yet unknown at his time. Trade relations did not play a role during the Spanish conquista, nor the spread of a superior material civilization; no "development policy" of whatever kind served it as justification—only a veneer of Christianity that proposed to convert the heathen, inasmuch as they survived the Christians' arrival. In its primal state colonialism could do without the fiction of partnership, of bilateral trade. It did not offer anything, it took what it found: slaves, gold, anything it pleased. Its investments were confined to the indispensable essentials of every colonial exploitation: to armed power, administration and the fleet. For these reasons the Spanish conquerors could also ignore the dialectic of enslavement which Sartre describes in a few sentences:

That is what is so annoying about slavery: if you tame a member of our species, you diminish his or her profitability; and as little as you provide him or her with, a human being as a workhorse is always going to cost more than he or she earns. That is why the colonial masters are forced to stop their breaking-in process halfway. The result: neither human being nor animal, but native … Poor colonial masters: that constitutes his dilemma. He should really kill those whom he robs. But that is just what he cannot do, because he also has to exploit them. He cannot transform the massacre into genocide or the enslavement to the point of brutalization, and that is why he must necessarily lose control.

Such a dilemma only occurs when the colonialists set themselves long-term objectives, when they begin to calculate the profitability of their venture. Such a rational procedure of exploitation was unknown in the sixteenth century. The conquista did not know double bookkeeping, not even the tally of the simplest statistics; the continent's depopulation did not trouble it.

Las Casas' opponents did not hesitate to make him responsible, as it were, for the irrationality of the genocide. There is no trusting his figures it was and still is said; they betray a medieval relationship to arithmetic. South and Central America never held 12, 15 or 20 million inhabitants during the time of the conquest; as in the reports of the crusaders the word "million" simply means many people. Such an approach has something repulsive about it from the very outset. It would like to prove Las Casas a liar but let the murders go scot-free because they only killed 8, 5 or 3 million Indians instead of 20 million. That is the way the National Zeitung protects the German fascists, claiming that not 6 million Jews were killed but at most 5.

Aside from the moral insanity manifested by such sophistry, it is also factually wrong. Two American scholars who have investigated the demographic conditions in old México in recent years reached the conclusion that in the 30 years between Cortez's landing and the writing of the Brief Account the population Central México dwindled from 25 to roughly 6 million. That means that the conquista alone must have had 19 million victims in México alone; Las Casas names only 4. Even if mindful of the virus illnesses, of malaria, of the famine and forced labor, that is of the indirect causes of the depopulation, one reaches the conclusion that Las Casas was probably rather too careful with his figures.

Let us leave these examples of arithmetic aside. Las Casas spent more than forty years in the American colonies. What he reports are to a large part observations and firsthand experiences. The witness's life testifies to their authenticity. Where it contradicts the reports of other witnesses the historical investigator must engage in lengthy comparisons. We are not engaged in anything of the kind. What is decisive for today's reader of the Brief Account are two critieria that academic investigators usually ignore; that is, first of all, the inner cohesiveness of the book, its eye for detail, its care in sketching the episode. Las Casas rarely spends much time with abstract thesis, and he not only describes the most horrible cruelties but also shows the grinding everyday life; he shows us, if the abbreviation be permitted not only the torture instrument but also the fight for the daily crust of bread.

A second, external, criterion of Las Casas' credibility is the precision of his view of the structure of colonial rule. Since these structures still exist today his statements are verifiable. For this one does not need to be a Hispanic scholar, a visit to South Africa will suffice.

If one tests the Brief Account from this perspective one notices first of all its author's economic acuity. The cleric Las Casas did not confine himself to theological observations, he analyzes the basic structure and exposes the technique of colonial exploitation whose first step is the recruitment of forced labor. For this purpose there existed the so-called encomienda system. Encomienda means as much as recommendation. A random number of Indians was distributed by the local commanders to the individual Spanish landowners and "recommended" to them for the reason that they required this protection for their prompt conversion. In reality the status of these protégés was that of serfs: they were totally at the mercy of their new masters, and received no wages or upkeep for the work that their protector (encomendero) asked them to do.

The economy of the colonializers concentrated on two forms of business which dominate the economy of many South American nations to this day: mining and plantations. But whereas the North American concerns now extract tin, copper, lead and vanadium, the conquistadors were interested in one metal only: gold.

Contact with the motherland during the time of the conquista was expensive, time-consuming and dangerous; exploitation of the overseas possessions thus had to confine itself to the most valuable commodities. That explains a further specialty of the colonializers: the pearl fishing in the Caribbean of which Las Casas provides an unforgettable description.

The pearl fishers dive into the sea at a depth of five fathoms, and do this from sunrise to sunset, and remain for many minutes without breathing, tearing the oysters out of their rocky beds where the pearls are formed…. It is impossible to continue for long diving into the cold water and holding the breath for minutes at a time, repeating this hour after hour, day after day; the continual cold penetrates them, constricts the chest, and they die spitting blood, or weakened by diarrhea. The hair of these pearl divers, naturally black, is as if burnished by the saltpeter in the water, and hangs down their back making them look like sea wolves or monsters of another species.

That is not a hearsay report: only someone who has seen the burnished hair and the encrusted shoulders with his own eyes speaks like that. This description by Las Casas led, incidentally, to a royal prohibition of pearl fishing—one of the few, and shortlived, victories which fell the valiant bishop's way.

Another enterprise which Las Casas had in mind could only develop when one region after the other had been depopulated: the slave trade. After the Indians had been cut down by the millions, and tormented to death, the colonializers noted with astonishment and even with a certain regret that they were running out of labor power. At this moment the savage became a commodity and the deportations became a profitable business in which the military and officials, who formed primitive corporations, engaged on their own account.

The colonized world is a divided world. The dividing line, the border is marked by barracks and police stations. The rightful and institutional interlocutor of the colonized, the spokesman of the colonial masters and the repressive regime is the cop or the soldier … The agent of power employs the language of pure power. He does not conceal his sovereignty, he exhibits it … The colonial master is an exhibitionist. His need for security makes him remind the colonized, with a loud voice: "I am master."

These sentences are from a modern phenomenology of colonial rule. Frantz Fanon developed them in the first chapter of his book The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Las Casas' observations, made four hundred years earlier, coincide with them exactly. Even the manifestly senseless cruelties, even the conquistadores ' terroristic arbitrariness had its psychological function in that it demonstratively cut the New World in two. Proof of the fact that the Indians were not human beings was provided by the Spaniards anew every day when they acted as if they were not dealing with human beings: "But I should not say 'than beasts' for, thanks be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like excrement on the public squares." …

But the blind terror with which the colonial masters demonstrate who they are and that the colonized are nothing leads to a new dilemma. It assures the colonizers of their identity while simultaneously endangering their ideology. Once they become afraid of the colonized their terror robs them of their justification which they would not like to relinquish. For the colonial master not only wants to have power, he also wants to be in the right: to the point of nausea he keeps asserting that he has a mission, that he serves God and the King, is spreading the Christian teachings and the values of civilization; in one word, that he basically has something higher in mind. He cannot do without a good conscience. But this means that he must hide the terror which he practices so ostentatiously and must deny his own demonstration. Something peculiarly schizophrenic, an absurd formalism thus is attached to all colonial undertakings. Of this too, the Brief Account provides an excellent example:

And because of the pernicious blindness that has always afflicted those who have ruled in the Indies, nothing was done to incline the Indians to embrace the one true Faith, they were rounded up and in large numbers forced to do so. Inasmuch as the conversion of the Indians to Christianity was stated to be the principal aim of the Spanish conquerors, they have dissimulated the fact that only with blood and fire have the Indians been brought to embrace the Faith and to swear obedience to the kings of Castile or by threats of being slain or taken into captivity. As if the Son of God who died for each one of them would have countenanced such a thing! For He commanded His Apostles: "Go ye to all the people" (Euntes docete omnes gentes.) Christ Jesus would have made no such demands of these peaceable infidels who cultivate the soil of their native lands. Yet they are told they must embrace the Christian Faith immediately, without hearing any sermon preached and without any indoctrination. They are told to subject themselves to a King they have never heard of nor seen and are told this by the King's messengers who are such despicable and cruel tyrants that deprive them of their liberty, their possessions, their wives and children. This is not only absurd but worthy of scorn.

This wretch of a Governor thus gave such instructions in order to justify his and their presence in the Indies, they themselves being absurd, irrational, and unjust when he sent the thieves under his command to attack and rob a settlement of Indians where he had heard there was a store of gold, telling them to go at night when the inhabitants were securely in their houses and that, when half a league away from the settlement, they should read in a loud voice his order: "Caciques and Indians of this land, hark ye! We notify you that there is but one God and one Pope and one King of Castile who is the lord of these lands. Give heed and show obedience!" Etc., etc. "And if not, be warned that we will wage war against you and will slay you or take you into captivity." Etc., etc.

The sentence that not the murderer but the victim is guilty becomes the dominant maxim under colonial rule. The "native" is the potential criminal per se who must be held in check, a traitor who threatens the order of the state: "Those who did not rush forth at once," Las Casas says, "to entrust themselves into the hands of such ruthless, gruesome and beastial men were called rebels and insurgents who wanted to escape the service of His Majesty."

But this guilty verdict is the very thing that helps the colonized to perceive their situation. For it leads to its own fulfillment: fiction becomes reality, the raped resort to violence. Las Casas describes several instances where it came to armed actions of resistance, even to small guerillas. He calls the Indian attacks where "a considerable number of Christians" lost their lives a "just and holy war" whose "justifiable causes will be acknowledged by every man who loves justice and reason." Without hesitating, in three sweeping sentences which have been left unscarred by the centuries, Las Casas thinks his thoughts to their conclusion:

And those wretches, those Spaniards, blinded by greed, think they have the God-given right to perpetrate all these cruelties and cannot see that the Indians have cause, have abundant causes, to attack them and by force of arms if they had weapons, to throw them out of their lands, this under all the laws, natural, human, and divine. And they cannot see the injustice of their acts, the iniquity of the injuries and inexpiable sins they have committed against the Indians, and they renew their wars, thinking and saying that the victories they have had against the Indians, laying waste the lands, have all been approved by God and they praise Him, like the thieves of whom the prophet Zechariah speaks: "Feed the flock of the slaughter; whose possessors slay them, and hold themselves not guilty: and they that sell them say, Blessed be the Lord; for I am rich."

The book that Las Casas left behind is a scandal. In its original sense the word scandal means as much as trap. The scholars who warn us of him have entangled themselves in that old skandalon. They do not sense that their quarrel is only a distant echo of a huge conflict. The storm in the water glass of their profession points to other storms. The ruffle in the historical consciousness indicates enormous tremors in historical reality. The process which began with the Conquista is not yet over. It continues in South America, Africa and Asia. It does not behoove us to speak the verdict about the monk from Seville. Perhaps he has spoken ours….

Bartolomé de las Casas was not a radical. He did not preach revolution. His loyalty to the Church and to the crown are undisputed. He fought for the equal rights of the Indians as subjects of an authority which he acknowledged. A radical transformation of the social order was as unthinkable for him as for his contemporaries: he wanted to bring the one that existed to the point where it would redeem its ideology. Every social order contains a utopia with which it decorates itself and which it simultaneously distorts. Las Casas did not guess that this promise, which was also contrary to the idea of the state of his time, can only be fulfilled at the price of revolution, partially, occasionally, as long and insofar as a new form of domination does not encapsulate and negate it again.

Yet utopian thoughts were not alien to Las Casas. He was the contemporary of Thomas More and of Machiavelli, of Rabelais and of Giovanni Botero. In 1521 he tried nothing less than the founding of his own Nova Atlantis. The undertaking shows the unity of theory and practice which characterizes all his work. It ended catastrophically.

At his audience with Charles V Las Casas suggested to the emperor, as proof that his principles withstood the test of practice, to found a model colony of "the plough and the word." The emperor decreed the district of Cumaná in Venezuela to him with the proviso that "no Spanish subject may enter this territory with arms." Las Casas recruited a group of farmers, outfitted an unarmed expedition and started to build his colony. Attacks by Spanish soldiers and by slave dealers into the peaceful territory, uprisings by embittered Indians, whiskey smuggling and acts of violence destroyed the colony in a short time. None of the defeats which he suffered hurt Las Casas more deeply than this one.

The proof of the experiment has not been exhausted to this day. There is no peaceful colonialism. Colonial rule cannot be founded on the plough and the word but only on the sword and the fire. Every "alliance for progress" needs its "gorillas," every "peaceful penetration" is dependent on its bomber commando, and every "reasonable reformer" such as General Lansdale finds his Marshal Ky.

Bartolomé de las Casas was not a reformer. The new colonialism which today rules the poor world cannot invoke his name. In the decisive question of force Las Casas never wavered; the suppressed people lead, in his words, "This fight is occurring before our very eyes." The regime of the wealthy over the poor, which Las Casas was the first to describe, has not ended. The Brief Account is a look back into our own future.