by ANDRE VLTCHEK
Cristo crucificado by Diego Velázquez, 1632, showing a Baroque return to realism and emotion in the depiction SOURCE/Wikipedia
Motto: verse from Colossians 3:22: “Slaves, obey your masters.”
It is Easter and I am mourning for all those hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, who were forced to ‘die for Jesus’… They vanished so the Christian dogma of some crucified man from Nazareth, could be lubricated and substantiated with red oceans of human blood, and reinforced with a tremendous mountain of bones. Colossal flames have burnt countless millions of those who have found this entirely psychedelic tale, thoroughly unbelievable, even ridiculous.
Nobody asked Jesus to die for this world, or to wash away all of its ‘sins’ (always, always those ‘sins’!). But hundreds of millions had to vanish to give way for those ‘following him’; who held their crosses while cutting down people with their swords!
“In the name of the cross!” “In the name of Jesus!” Slaughter and torture, burnt flesh, mutilated bodies, beastly rapes. The history of this world, Mr. Fukuyama! It is mainly a history of Christian conquests, the enslavement of the planet, and murder in the name of the cross. Is it over; is it the end of such a history, really?
***
Today I want to remember, to mourn, those centuries of human sacrifice. That pointless, unnecessary, vile human sacrifice!
I want to commemorate those who have vanished; I want to do it with with red wine. Not with the wine that symbolizes ‘blood’ of someone, but with the wine of the Chilean people who produced it. As simple as that!
And I want to ask one simple but urgent question: “Isn’t it time to stop, to say enough? Isn’t it time to scrap that more than 2,000 years old violent dogma, which is most definitely responsible for the insanity, and for the arrangement of world as it today?”
…
Unbridled greed, religious fanaticism and oppressed sexuality (those very pillars of Christianity) played the most terrifying role in ruining this, (and many other) parts of the world.
The great majority of people from the so-called New World simply vanished.
“When Columbus landed in this hemisphere, there were probably 80-100 million people with advanced civilizations: Commerce, cities, etc. Not long afterwards about 95% of this population had disappeared”, explained Noam Chomsky, during our conversation, which led to our book “On Western Terrorism, From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare”.
Those who were not killed were brutalized savagely.
Abel Posse, a great Argentinian writer and diplomat, the author of the novel “Dogs of Paradise” (“Los perros del paraíso”), once wrote and also explained to me personally:
“The conquest was sick… And religious ‘guilt’ played a tremendous role in the violence. Local women were willing to engage in sexual acts with those pathetic conquerors who wore crosses and heavy armor in the tropical heat… And the conquerors were possessed by desire… but also by terrible guilt. They saw the willingness and desire of the local women as a sin… Therefore, they dragged those beautiful women into deep forests, tortured them for hours and days, and then raped them brutally!”
Whoever survived was forcefully converted to Christianity.
Both sexual torture (for which ‘ingenious’ instruments were invented and manufactured) and rape were not the only types of violence administered by ‘pious’ Christians, but they were the most common ones, for which they are remembered, until now, in Peru and elsewhere.
In the era of conquest, the much more advanced culture of South and Central America was ruined, people were captured and enslaved. Their languages were banned or made irrelevant.
Men and women were forced to take apart, stone by stone, their tremendous temples, and then build cathedrals and churches. Then, these Christian temples of worship were decorated with looted gold and silver, extracted by de facto slaves, chained in appalling mines around places like Potosi. This was what the great Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, described as the “Open Veins of Latin America”.
Counterpunch for more