★★★★★ 5
EXTINCTION
Format: Paperback
Normally when the word extinct is used it is in reference to animals but after reading this book this term can legitimately be used to describe what happened to the original citizens of America the American Indians. Christopher Columbus and his minions (I refuse to call them soldiers) savagely murdered and killed countless numbers of these Indians, a vivid example of this is given on page 83 " One favorite sport of the conquistadors was "dogging." Traveling as they did with packs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that were on a diet of human flesh and were trained to disembowel Indians, the Spanish used the dogs to terrorize slaves and to entertain the troops. An entire book Dogs of the Conquest, has been published recently, detailing the exploits of these animals as they accompanied their masters throughout the course of the Spanish depredations. "A properly fleshed dog," these authors say, "could pursue a 'savage' as zealously and effectively as a deer or a boar.... To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to pursue and rip apart their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts." And also on pages 83-84 "Just as the Spanish soldiers seem to have particularly enjoyed testing the sharpness of their yard-long rapier blades on the bodies of Indian children, so their dogs seemed to find the soft bodies of infants especially tasty, and thus the accounts of the invading conquistadors and the padres who traveled with them are filled with detailed descriptions of young Indian children routinely taken from their parents and fed to the hungry animals. Men who could take pleasure in this sort of thing had little trouble with less sensitive matters, such as the sacking and burning of entire cities and towns, and the destruction of books and tablets containing millennia of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and religious belief."
After page 146 there's an illustrated unnumbered section titled Genocide the first nine pages of this section contain pictures of how the Spanish tortured and killed Indian women and children as stated on the second page of this section "[The Spaniards] took babies from their mothers' breasts, grabbing them by the feet and smashing their heads against rocks...They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. Then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive."
Not to be outdone the good old American cavalry also engaged in its' fair share of savage murder and killing as can be seen from the bottom of page126 to the top of page 127 "They turned their guns, Hotchkiss guns, etc., upon the women who were in the lodges standing under a flag of truce, and of course as soon as they were fired upon they fled....There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that was especially a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed." I personally do not celebrate Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day this book is ample proof and evidence as to why these two days should be set aside as a time for mourning not celebration, if you want your children to have a true understanding of American history then I strongly urge you to buy this book and have it as part of your home library.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2015