holiday...celebrate?

From an utterly fascinating book I'm reading right now called Lies My Teacher Told Me...this is part of an account from an Arawak leader who had fled from Haiti to Cuba following Christopher Columbus's slave trade, exploitative and genocidal activities shortly after "discovering" the Americas...

Learning that Spaniards were coming, one day (the leader) gathered all his people together to remind them of the persecutions which the Spanish had inflicted on the people of Hispaniola:

"Do you know why they persecute us?"

They replied: "They do it because they are cruel and bad."

"I will tell you why they do it," the (leader) stated, "and it is this - because they have a lord whom they love very much, and I will show him to you."

He held up a small basket made from palms full of gold, and he said, "Here is their lord, whom they serve and adore...To have this lord, they make us suffer, for him they persecute us, for him they have killed our parents, brothers, all our people...Let us not hide this lord from the Christians in any place, for even if we should hide it in our intestines, they would get it out of us..."

Columbus would have been proud of our modern, predatory form of capitalism, I think. It might be slightly more subtle on U.S. soil, but it's certainly not when conducted upon other lands (Iraq, Afghanistan, Central and South America, Africa and so on)...