Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

The Transition from Columbus Day to Indian Resistance Day

By Franz J. T. Lee

The oligarchic "opposition" and its national mass media have no respect for anything: currently, Radio Caracas TV (RCTV) is preparing commercials for its mind-controlled adherents to celebrate "Día de la Raza" (Colombus Day) next Tuesday -- October 12, 2004.

This big lie, this hoax ... about the 'discovery' of America by Christopher Columbus, still infects the minds of millions in Latin America.

Although the name of this public holiday has officially been changed to the 'Dia de la Resistencia Indigena' by the Bolivarian Government, the mass media continues their mind control, indoctrination and manipulation -- with a trans-historic European Mental Holocaust launched against the peoples of the Americas and elsewhere.

Columbus was not among the first to know that the earth was round ... the ancient Mediterranean peoples already had this knowledge. He did not 'discover' America ... already centuries before, the Africans had fleets that crossed the Atlantic and they had a vivid, healthy, trans-cultural intercourse with the American indigenous peoples. Their artefacts and traces of their ancient cultures can be found all over Central America.

* Based on their maritime knowledge and astronomic maps, Columbus organized his own infamous travels ... and he knew exactly where he was sailing. In fact, in his own diary he confirmed the African presence in America.

What the oligarchic Latin American ruling classes are still celebrating these days is the beginning of the Conquest ... of the pillage and genocide, that their forefathers had disseminated in the 'New World.'

Columbus himself confirmed the capitalist aims of his voyages: "to sum up the great profits of this voyage, I am able to promise, for a trifling assistance from your Majesties, any quantity of gold, drugs, cotton, mastic, aloe, and as many slaves for maritime service as your Majesties may stand in need of."

In this way, he launched the "Bermuda Triangle" of the World Market, the international division of labor, that would eventually blood-suck the whole continent ... especially Central and South America.

In reality, Governor Columbus had discovered nothing ... on the contrary, he was the first to introduce a European, feudalist, absolutist 'government' in the Western Hemisphere, accompanied by brutal institutions of slavery.

Fray Bartolome de las Casas documented the horrors perpetrated by him ... for example, gambling to see who had the remarkable quality of perfectly cutting a slave in half with one stroke of the sword. This is the kind of atrocity, that the Venezuelan opposition is still celebrating till this day. In this way, Columbus' government was the first to institute an active onslaught of brutality against the native peoples.

Now, what are the masters of this world really celebrating on Columbus Day ... in fact, on the first Labor Day of the Americas?

* On a world scale, have over 5 billion obsolete manual labor slaves really something to be joyful about?
* Are we celebrating our discovery by Europeans to be massacred thereafter?
* To be told that we are inferior races?
* Are we celebrating the victories of alienated labor and capital in the Americas?

At least, here in Venezuela, the Bolivarians will be celebrating their victories over golpism, sabotage, racism and fascism, generated by Big Brother and his local lackeys on a global scale.

However, what are slave labor, wage slavery and exploited labor forces all about? Are they really things to celebrate?

Precisely these are the things that Columbus brought to America.

For those who have studied capitalism and imperialism in the Americas, it is no secret at all that the source of metropolitan wealth, of power and of so-called progress is simply exploited physical and/or intellectual human labor-force. It is also amply known that it is labor-force, and not labor in itself, which is the generator of capital, wealth, power and giga-Profits ... but at the same time, also of the production of arms of mass destruction, of most horrible and abominable misery and poverty.

Like elsewhere, ever since the days of the 'Discovery' here in the Americas, all social problems revolve around the phenomenon of labor ... exploited labor force.

Not to take this universal fact into account in Venezuela, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean is equivalent to not to understand that precisely by means of ruthless economic exploitation of fundamentally physical labor forces, millions of pauperized and dehumanized peoples ... also in the diaspora ... have already for centuries been heinously plundered, murdered by ruthless, oligarchic elites.

And they will still be pillaged mercilessly for many decades to come; that is, if we do not urgently change this current world order. Many of our indigenous peoples are already rooted out; in Africa, only a handful of BaThwa or San ... the so-called 'Bushmen' ... survived colonial and apartheid conquest.

In Europe, ever since the XII century until today, the process of labor, production, transformed itself progressively into industrial labor and eventually into corporate capital that dominates and determines all current global events, including Bush' Economic World War.

Today, as a result of the profound crisis of corporate capitalism, the matter is even more grave, grave-like. Consequently, the only way to annihilate the quintessence of current labor production is to transcend its economic exploitation, political domination, social discrimination (racism), fascist militarization and terrorist dehumanization (alienation). This can only be accomplished by global resistance, by world revolution, that transcends toward global emancipation, not of slaves, but of humanity itself.

What happened on the first "Day of the Race" in America ... what occurs on earth, in the universe, in the Clouds of Magellan ... have nothing whatsoever to do with bourgeois ethics, with religious norms, metaphysical formal-logic, fake human rights, racist absolute evil, fascist infinite justice etc.

Excluding all our authentic, sacred, indigenous beliefs and values, all of them are fantastic inventions of ruling class, megalomaniac, kleptocratic man, that were forcefully implanted into the very soil and soul of the Americas, to serve European colonial and imperialist interests.

We have to nurture our own Science, to cultivate our own Philosophy, and to make our own History.

* However, if we just look around, we'll notice historic, emancipatory relations all around us. Seek and ye shall find!

Concerning the current transition, the transmutation towards the galactic unseen, beyond the Milky Way ... at this very moment, knowingly or unknowingly, the Bolivarian Revolution, objectively, subjectively and transjectively, finds itself in the ALBA, in the Aurora of revolutionary emancipation.

Next Tuesday ... October 12 ... thanks to Chavez' revolutionary government, indigenous emancipatory efforts are really something worthwhile to wholeheartedly celebrate!


Franz John Tennyson Lee, Ph. D (University of Frankfurt), Author, Professor Titular & Chairholder of Philosophy and Political Science, University of The Andes, Merida (Venezuela) -- http://www.franzjutta.com ; http://www.franz-lee.org ; http://www.geocities.com/juttafranz/publications00001.html

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