Page 2 of Zinn’s book, and I’m already annoyed. First, we hear the old, boring, idiotic trope that the Catholic Kings sent Columbus on his journey in search of spices. Columbus’s contract with Isabel and Ferdinand is widely available. Why not just read it and see what the actual agreement between the parties was? With a little more research, Zinn could have even discovered that in a highly legalistic state that Spain was at that time, such contracts had a profound importance.
Then Zinn informs us that by the time Columbus came to the New World, Spain had driven out the Moors. This is factually untrue since only the Jews were expelled in 1492. The Muslims were not expelled until 1609-15. And this is an extremely crucial fact for all of Spain’s history.
Then there is a boring disquisition on Spain’s search for gold, with not a single word about the powerful religious drive behind both the conquest of the new lands and the search for gold.
Marxists are so fixated on money that they keep forgetting that very very few people want money for its own sake. Money is always a means to buy something. That something is one’s true motivation. Yet Marxists keep dropping “oh, they just wanted to enrich themselves” like it explains anything.
I will continue reading, though, because my plan to master competing visions of the US history remains in place.
Let me guess what I will encounter on pages 5-15 of Zinn’s book: good, kind, ultra-progressive, super-feminist and profoundly Communist Indians encounter evil, capitalist, sexist Spaniards.
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