Hat tip to Hacking Christianity for this video portraying the text of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights set to music.
I thought I’d go ahead and post it today rather than later since today is the so-called “Columbus Day” in which Americans of all political stripes and social studies teachers across the country glorify a mass murderer and credit him with having “discovered a New World” when in fact he systematically exterminated and enslaved native peoples in the name — in American hindsight at least — of a dubious metanarrative of progress and enlightenment.
Why we still continue to celebrate a man who hung native peoples en mass and hacked their children into pieces for dog food (ht); exterminated eight million Arawaks — virtually the entire native population of Hispaniola — by means torture, murder, forced labor, starvation, disease and despair; dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3000 people in one encounter, cutting off the legs of children who ran from his soldiers; poured people full of boiling soap and made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half; loosed dogs that “devoured an Indian like a hog, at first sight, in less than a moment” and used nursing infants for dog food (ht) is beyond me.
If Columbus can be credited for anything it is the founder of the largest, the longest, and the most brutal and systematic campaign of indigenous genocide and extermination in recorded history1
And we give him a national holiday. What better way to continue our subjugation of native peoples?
People, by no other qualification than the fact that they are people, have rights. They had rights in 1492; they had rights in 1787 when the 3/5 compromise was ratified; they had rights in 1830 when the Indian Removal Act was passed and they rest of the 19th century when Native Americans were declared less than human; they had rights before the civil rights acts of 1875 and 1964 were passed; they had rights before the 14th and 15th amendments were passed; indeed, they had rights before the 1st amendment, the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Magna Carta were even conceived.
People had rights, people have rights, and people will continue to have rights — even when their governments fail to recognize them.
Enjoy the video.
- Numbers can always be contested but some estimates put the pre-1492 native population around 12 million. Only 400 years later that figure was reduced by 95% to around 237,000. [↩]
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