A Different Holocaust

Im in Potosi...
The Infamous Mines of Potosi.

Its arguably the highest city in the world at about 4300m ASL, but what it is famous for is that it produced over 45000 tones of pure silver in the colonial era (1550-1780).
20% of that money went to the Spanish monarchy and the rest was to the wealthy Spanish colonial families who ran the mining operations... This was an enormous amount of money and it effectively paid for the whole Spanish naval armada, and arguably the "renaissance" in Europe... Lotsa Money!

But, sadly, as is always the case the "Lotsa money" was effectively extracted from the poor... And in the case of the Silver from the mines of Potosi, it was extracted in one of the most sustained and cruellest of fashions... And this is the infamy of the place.

The Spanish administration of the colonial period utilised a traditional Inca "labour tax" system called a "Mita" whereby every native male in the dominion of the Spanish had to contribute several months of work (5 I think) once every seven years.
Anyway, the Colonials took maximum advantage of this (why wait seven years to have them come back... Just use them up in the first session!) and the gruesome statistics look like this...
Over the 300 years of mining at this one mountain, it is estimated that eight million workers died!!! These were mostly indigenous peoples, but it also includes some 50,000 African slaves or so whom the Spanish had to import in the later years because there simply were no more indigenous men to enslave... Its also estimated that about 80% of the male population of the country died in these mines!!!

A quick bit of mathematics indicates that thats about 26600 deaths per year which is about 75 deaths per day!... For three hundred years in a row!!!!

Thats a Holocaust for sure... And I dont use that word lightly!

We all hear about the Holocaust against the European Jewish communities in the second world war, and there is no doubt at all that it was an absolutely horrific act of social persecution.
I say social because it was not an anti-religious program, but the social group that was targeted; And it happened very quickly (within about six years or so) in a very focused and systematic fashion.
As I understand it, about 6 million people died and that represented about 60% of the European Jewish population....awful!!!

But the world knows little about the "Holocaust" for the Peruvian/Bolivian Inca peoples... It happened in an earlier era I guess, and it was done slowly and steadily... But just as focused and systematic! In this case it was 8 million people representing 80% of the population. But Id guess Id have to say , it was a "racialy targeted" group.

Definitely a Holocaust!

And there are worse stories on larger and smaller scales throughout our history... Yes, we all know about Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, and to a lesser extent Joseph Stalin's Russia ... But if you want some real tough reading, then just read some non-fiction accounts about the things Mao Tse Dong did in China or Polpot... and then more recently Somalia and Bosnia/Serbia/Chechnya etc. Or perhaps Rawanda or Uganda... or any other number of African conflicts...
Or then again, just about any of the colonial "exterminations" of indigenous peoples anywhere in the world (though usually less focused and systematic)
... and the list just goes on and on...


What can I say but it just shames me to see the things that people can do to each other... All we seem to need to do to be able to commit these atrocities is to find some means of dividing "Us" from "Them" (anything at all will do, political, social, ethnic, religious... its all fair game) And then, once its "them" we can feel absolved of guilt for doing just about anything!


When, oh when will we ever learn that there is no "Us" and "Them"...
Its all just Us!