Yelling for freedom, while killing and enslaving!

Barely into a tenth of the book, one truth emerges--the hypocritical and contradictory beliefs of the Europeans who settled in the new world.  On the one hand, they claim to be fleeing persecution, and are in search of freedom.  On the other hand, they annihilate Native Americans and bring in humans from Africa as slaves.  All these well before the Declaration of Independence!

Jill Lepore compels us to think about a number of questions, which she then proceeds to discuss.  Questions such as:

In December 1511, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, delivered a sermon in a church on Hispaniola. Disagreeing with the king's ministers, he said the conquistadors were committing unspeakable crimes. "Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do yo wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?  And then he  asked, "Are they not men?"

That was less than 20 years since Columbus discovered America!

When Columbus landed on the shores of Hispaniola--his "India"--"there were about three million people on that island."  A mere fifty years later, "there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung."

Columbus couldn't care. The King of Spain couldn't care.  The Pope couldn't care.

Five hundred years later, trump couldn't care either--Haiti was his primary target when he specifically referred to a few countries as "shitholes."

"Are they not men?"

That was perhaps the first of the questions, to which there was no end.

As European invaders raped women, or even fell in love with them and stayed with them, the land now had "mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women,"  Soon, these outnumbered Indians, whose population sharply decreased.  "An intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color." Awful, "as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob."

And, therefore, "pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?"

In the contemporary US, trump and his 63 million toadies have clearly stated, over and over, that all people are not equal. 

The guy who co-chaired trump's campaign in Iowa, who had been spewing white supremacist and white nationalist talk for ever, recently said:

what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Oh, and what was the response to Montesinos' question?  The conquistadors were required to read aloud to anyone they proposed to conquer and enslave a document called the Requiremento.  If the natives accepted the story of Genesis the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen, then their lives were spared.

The Evangelicals' support for trump is a mere echo of this 500-year old beginning!