Bartolome de Las Casas y Columbus.

I have been very concerned lately with the idea of the bystander. In my philosophy class on genocide and the holocaust we discuss the bystander on a regular basis and discuss whether or not we believe that a bystander is as immoral as a person who commits crimes against humanity. There tend to be a lot of gray areas (do you consider someone who made assignments in paperwork for the organization of the Nazi mass killings evil as the killer?) especially regarding the individuals who were both bystanders and victims in a sense. I tend to be forgiving of most of humanities cruelties, but at the same time, I believe a bystander is a necessary participant, though passive, in evil.
Bartolome de las Casas is an example of an active participant of justice, which changes the way that I feel about many of histories explorers and colonizers.
I used to give Renaissance Europeans the benefit of the doubt as far as how evil people were. I though that torture and murder were so implanted into their psyches that it made them ok, even if what they did was not. Casas shows that this is not the case by proving that at least educated people in the 16th century had a sense of right versus wrong. Included in the moral code, at least for Casas, is indigenous people, Africans and women (which I presume still was rare). This means that the acts committed by many of the conquistadors were morally wrong, without any room for cultural argument.
Casas really shocked me because he used Christianity to defend his claims, something mainly corrupted for the sake of imperial greed. Despite his Christian faith, he calls the Spanish settlers “The Christians”. I think this may be meant to make a point; that Christians too can be perverse, or that they are not acting according to the title they define themselves by. He discusses the way that, as Columbus said in earlier writings, the Native Americans had believed that the voyagers were gods; and how the Christians proved themselves not to be worthy of that status through their mercilessness. He describes the Christians as animals, much like how the Europeans had conceived the Native Americans. The Christians are basically greedy, warmongering, gluttonous rapists. The violence he describes is awful to read about, especially when one considers how innocent and unprepared the Native Americans were.
It all transfers me back to Columbus’ writing about the new world that he found from 1493. The letter, to Luis de Santangel, regarding the first voyage describes, very concisely, what he thought was Asia. He expresses great awe about this land where trees of a thousand kinds never lose their leaves and everyday is as beautiful as Spain in May. It sounds so much like another Eden. The Native, he expresses, never approach him, but run away at the sight of him. It all is a very depressing image, of these innocent people who would soon, as Casas relates to us, be destroyed, along with their paradise.