The Preface to Manifest Destiny

Christopher Columbus’s arrival to North America started what would become the template for colonizing a country. He came in search of riches? for the Spanish crown, but what he found was vastly more valuable than that. But the fertile land he had discovered was already home to a native population. His interactions with these people immediately set a terrible precedent for how countries would treat the people that could get in the way of having control of lands or resources that they desire. What he sparked would eventually lead to Manifest Destiny in the United States. The end result was a near-total re-settlement of the North American continent. A fundamental aspect of this historical narrative, as discussed by Tzvetan Todorov is how Columbus’s discomfort with the Native American’s differences led him to almost completely destroy their culture.

A key element that played into Columbus’s view of the Native Americans is the way in which human beings struggle to understand people who share different views, beliefs, or customs. Those who aren’t similar to us tend to be viewed as different or lesser because we as humans don’t feel we can connect with them as much. This is clearly  Columbus’s inability to respect the native’s form of ‘other’, coupled with his belief that his views were better, led him to strip them of their culture and replace it with his. For example Todorov discusses how Columbus sees their lack of clothing as animalistic in comparison to what Europeans wore at the time. Columbus’s gold-hungry view and feeling of divine right lead him to overlook the value of the Native American’s knowledge of the land and worth as people.

Both in the specific case of Columbus, and historically in the larger conflict between ‘us’ and ‘others’, a major bone of contention is differences is religious beliefs. Being that Columbus was just coming from Spain where they had successfully kicked the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula, the ‘successful’ spread of Catholicism was fresh in his and the mind of others. The trials and tribulations of Luther and the Reformation were still in Europe’s future so there was no doubt in Europe of the supremacy of their Catholic beliefs. As shown by those events, even small differences in religions challenge the most fundamental beliefs amongst humans about life and death, and right and wrong. Religion often dictates a lot about how people believe life should be lived.  By easily labeling others as ‘infidel’ and ‘non-believer’, the worst of human nature springs to life. Unable to match the disease, horses, and guns that the Europeans brought, the Native Americans were given a life and death choice of whether or not they would stick to their own beliefs or convert to Catholicism and submit to the ‘superior’ Columbus. Too much conquering and bloodshed is done in the name of religion  

            This lack of understanding and respect of cultures, religions, and people that are different from what is considered “normal” to one human being has led to the death of many peoples and their ideas. In the case of North America, Christopher Columbus came in with the desire of gold, and the feeling of divine direction, which lead to the near complete decimation of a whole continent of people.  The sense of superiority and entitlement is dangerous because greed and righteousness leads people to act without empathy for fellow people. Both Manifest Destiny and the feelings of the Spaniards following their successes caused people to strip other human beings of their culture, land, and livelihoods. In international relations today we have continued, and will continue, to see this if we do not make a conscious effort to better understand one another as individuals and value them as equals.