Published: Thursday, October 12, 2006
Bylined to: Franz J. T. Lee

Columbus Day: No racism without capitalism, no capitalism without racism
University of Los Andes (ULA) professor Franz J. T. Lee writes: Two years ago, in an article "The transition from Columbus Day to Indian Resistance Day ...," I wrote: "This big lie, this hoax ... about the 'discovery' of America by Christopher Columbus, still infects the minds of millions in Latin America.  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 artifacts and traces of their ancient cultures can be found all over Central America."
One of the basic elements of the misery and poverty of the Americas concerns race prejudice, racial discrimination, racism, apartheid.
In the meantime, the global order in severe crisis has changed itself to full recogniz-ability, it shows its true fascist grimace in the United States of America, Europe, the Middle East,, Colombia, and elsewhere.
From the Great Wall of China, to the Apartheid "color bar," the Bantustan "Homelands," to the "iron curtain," the Berlin Wall, to the Israeli Wall, to the coming Mexican Yankee Wall, that limits Bush's patriot "Homeland," we can trace this capitalist, imperialist bloody trails of racist fascism. That the "New World" was celebrating five centuries of the "Day of the Race" already shows how effective were "discovery," "Christian pacification" and genocidal militarization in America.

In the forward march of the Conquest of the continents of Asia, Africa and America, including the Caribbean, Oceania and elsewhere, the indigenous peoples were converted into slaves and wage-slaves; those that refused to be integrated into the European labor process preferred to die, and millions of the "native" peoples were just massacred in genocidal colonial wars.

This is what many Latin American states, excluding Venezuela, celebrate now.
It marks a dangerous low degree of transhistoric consciousness, completely outdated conceptions of history and a miserable social memory, the devastating reformist effects of a merciless ideological process of mind, thought and body control, of a physical and spiritual holocaust of hundreds of millions of enslaved, plundered and alienated peoples.
It is really time that we all wake up!
Also, it demonstrates the mortal effects of the religious onslaught of the Spanish Inquisition, the Dominican Order, Roman Catholicism, the Papacy and today the Vatican.
Not only were the poor serfs threatened by the "Second Death" in the Middle Ages, now Ratzinger is trying to rob us of our Limbo, where our un-baptized, innocent children, atomized by Bush's mother of all bombs, until now at least were resting in peace, and did not go straight to hell. Only Ratzinger and the devil know where Jesus Christ spent his last earthly stay between Golgotha and Ascension Day.

• Either with the stroke of a pen or with bombs Bush and Ratzinger eliminate concrete sacred places, and the Christians or believers do not even protest en masse anymore. In reality, in this line of hoaxes we find "Columbus Day."

At least the Bolivarian Revolution is eliminating these cruel vestiges of ideological racism, of bamboozling continents with great lies. However, there is still very much to do. With Dark Age religion and bourgeois "revolutionary" ideology we will not eliminate the "Day of the Race."
The racial roots of "Columbus" go much deeper, they are blood-sucking us in all social spheres, in our inherited, colonial cultural structures. This venom has infiltrated our most sacred emotions, sentiments and daydreams, it captured our very souls.
Within the current world order, within its world market that was constructed on the Bermuda Triangle of Columbus, we will never be able to annihilate racial discrimination and racism. The fascist racism that we are experiencing in the current wars of the Bush administration is inherent in master-slave relations, in capitalism. Imperialism lives and dies with its racist heart beat.
There is no racism without capitalism ... no capitalism without racism.
Hence, Venezuela and therewith the Bolivarian Revolution, get down urgently to your historic task, forever to eradicate capitalism from the Latin American soil, from our hearts, minds and actions.
Franz J. T. Lee
franz@vheadline.com

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