{"id":53167,"date":"2025-05-22T15:51:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T23:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=53167"},"modified":"2025-05-22T15:51:55","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T23:51:55","slug":"the-conquest-never-ends-horrors-inflicted-for-500-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/22\/the-conquest-never-ends-horrors-inflicted-for-500-years\/","title":{"rendered":"The Conquest Never Ends: Horrors Inflicted for 500 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally appeared at TomDispatch<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend.\u00a0A Chicago artist famous for large canvases<\/a> depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a \u201cJewish political artist.\u201d The painter\u2019s quick reply was that he wasn\u2019t a \u201cJewish political artist,\u201d he was just a \u201cpolitical artist.\u201d\u00a0In the end, though, Golub came to believe that he had let himself off too easily, that his answer was too pat. Yes, he was<\/em> a political artist. His paintings had focused not just on Latin America but on war-torn Vietnam and racism in the United States and South Africa. But he had consciously avoided Israel\u2019s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.<\/p>\n

Golub admitted that what it meant for him to be a successful artist was never to take the \u201chorrors inflicted on Palestinians\u201d as his subject matter. Only then would he be left free to paint his political opinions on anything else.<\/p>\n

Over the last year and a half, I\u2019ve thought of Leon Golub, who died in 2004, many times as the escalation of Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza and settler violence on the West Bank paralleled my own rush to finish a book (just published as America, Am\u00e9rica: A New History of the New World<\/em><\/a>).\u00a0<\/em>Among other things, it traces Latin America\u2019s largely unrecognized role in the abolition of the doctrine of conquest<\/a> and the creation, after World War II, of the liberal international order, including the founding of the International Court of Justice (today considering South Africa\u2019s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been writing critically on how the U.S. acted in Latin America for more than three decades.\u00a0 Unlike many scholars and students of the Middle East, I was able to do so and not be punished because, like Golub<\/a>, I mostly focused on the \u201chorrors inflicted\u201d on people other than Palestinians. As President Richard Nixon put it all too accurately in 1971, nobody of import in the United States gives \u201cone damn about Latin America.\u201d<\/p>\n

A general indifference to the region, as well as the fact that even the most diehard defenders of U.S. global power have been willing to concede that this country often acted in unhelpful ways in its own hemisphere (where Washington undertook at least 41 regime changes<\/a> between 1898 and 1994!), have made it remarkably safe to speak out about Latin America. Yet, in 2025, the \u201chorrors inflicted\u201d are everywhere and it\u2019s no longer possible to silo one\u2019s sympathies.<\/p>\n

Conquest, Then and Now<\/strong><\/p>\n

Consider the Spanish conquest of the Americas alongside Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza. In many ways, the two events, separated by half a millennium, are incomparable. The first was continental in scale, a fight for a New World that was then home to, by some estimates, 100,000,000 people.\u00a0 The second unfolds on a patch of land the size of Las Vegas with a population of just over two million. The conquest would claim tens of millions of lives, while so far, Israel is estimated<\/a> to have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands more.<\/p>\n

Yet there are uncanny parallels between the two conflicts, including the fact that each began in the wake of a communications revolution: the printing press then, social media now.<\/p>\n

Spain was the first empire in modern history to actively publicize its colonial atrocities, as printers in Madrid, Seville, and other cities stamped out sheet after sheet of conquest gore: accounts of mass hangings, of babies drowned or roasted over fire pits to be fed to dogs, and of torched towns. One Spanish governor described a post\u00adapocalyptic landscape filled with the walking near-dead, victims of mutilations meted out to Native Americans, this way: a \u201cmultitude of lame and maimed Indians, without hands, or with only one hand, blind, their noses cut off, earless.\u201d Today, the internet circulates countless photographs<\/a> and videos<\/a> with no less horrific images<\/a> of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers on Palestinians, of armless boys<\/a> and \u201cdecomposing babies<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Some photographs of children starved<\/a> by the IDF, according to<\/a> a New York Times <\/em>editor, were simply too \u201cgraphic\u201d to publish.<\/p>\n

In sixteenth-century Spain, common soldiers wrote, or paid others to write, their stories of mayhem, hoping to make a heroic name for themselves. Today, we see updated digital versions of a similar kind of conquering pride, as members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), on platforms like TikTok, upload<\/a> videos of Gazans \u201cstripped, bound, and blindfolded\u201d and others showing bulldozers and tanks razing homes.\u00a0Soldiers mock<\/a> the destruction of schools and hospitals or, as they rummage through abandoned homes, are seen playing<\/a> with or wearing the bras and underwear of their former residents.<\/p>\n

Both Spanish officials then and Israeli spokesmen now have openly declared their intention to \u201cconquer<\/a>\u201d their enemies by forcing their removal from their homes and concentrating them in more controllable areas.\u00a0Not all Spanish, like not all Israelis, believed their enemies to be subhuman.\u00a0But some did and do.\u00a0Juan Gin\u00e9s de Sep\u00falveda thought Native Americans were \u201cbrute animals,\u201d as \u201cmonkeys are to men.\u201d Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls<\/a> Palestinians \u201chuman animals.\u201d\u00a0Many Spanish priests and royal officials admitted that Native Americans were human, but considered them child-like innocents who had to be violently severed from their pagan priests \u2014 just as Israel believes<\/a> Palestinians have to be violently severed from Hamas. \u201cWe are separating Hamas from the population, cleansing the strip,\u201d said<\/a> Israel\u2019s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the IDF\u2019s extreme tactics.<\/p>\n

Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s had his men level Aztec temples, which he called<\/a> mosques. Those temples served as healing places, and their destruction parallels the ruin visited on Gaza\u2019s hospitals and other centers of refuge. Not even the dead were safe \u2014 neither in the Americas, nor today in Gaza.\u00a0As did the conquistadores, the IDF<\/a> has desecrated several burial grounds.<\/p>\n

Spanish violence in the Americas provoked a powerful ethical backlash. The Dominican jurist Francisco Vitoria, for instance, questioned the legality of the Conquest, while Father Bartolom\u00e9 de las Casas insisted on the absolute equality of all human beings, and other theologians of the time condemned the many varieties of enslavement imposed on Native Americans. Such declarations and condemnations were consequential in the long run. Yet they did little to stop the suffering. Arguments over the legality of the Conquest went on for decades, just as arguments over the legality of Israel\u2019s occupation of Palestinian lands have.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Conquest,\u201d as a singular uppercase event, might have been challenged, but all the individual battles that made up the Conquest, the morning massacres and midnight raids on indigenous villages, simply went on. Spanish settlers took it for granted that, no matter what priests said from pulpits or jurists argued in seminar rooms, they had a right to \u201cdefend\u201d themselves: that, were Indians to attack them, <\/em>they could retaliate.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s just one of many examples: in July 1503, Spanish settlers slaughtered over 700 residents in the village of Xaragua on Hispaniola (the island that today comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic), killings that Spain\u2019s Queen Isabella deemed \u201cjust\u201d because some members of the village had started to violently resist Spanish rule. Israel uses the same kind of legalisms to insist that its war on Hamas is indeed similarly just, since Hamas started it. Just as the conflict on Hispaniola is sequestered from the larger context of the Conquest, the conflict that started on October 7, 2023, is isolated from the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.<\/p>\n

From Cort\u00e9s to Hitler<\/strong><\/p>\n

The doctrine or \u201cright\u201d of conquest goes back to Roman times and, apart from the criticism aimed at Spain in the 1500s, remained mostly uncontested until the late eighteenth century, when \u2014 with the breaking free of the Americas from Europe \u2014 the doctrine found new champions and new critics.<\/p>\n

The leaders of the new United States reinforced the doctrine, invoking the right of conquest to justify their drive westward toward the Pacific Ocean and their taking of Native American and Mexican lands.<\/p>\n

Generations of law professors in the U.S. taught their students that the doctrine was legitimate.\u00a0 \u201cThe title of European nations, and which passed to the United States, to this vast territorial empire, was founded on discovery and conquest,\u201d as James Kent put it at Columbia Law School in the 1790s. The Supreme Court<\/a>, too, said that the United States was founded on conquest, and that its doctrine remained applicable. As late as 1928, a widely-assigned English-language law book insisted<\/a> that, \u201cas long as a Law of Nations has been in existence, the States, as well as the vast majority of writers, have recognized subjugation as a mode of acquiring territory,\u201d deeming it legal for \u201cthe victor to annex the conquered enemy territory.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, Spanish America\u2019s independence leaders fiercely repudiated the principle of conquest. They had to, since they had to learn to live with each other, for they presided over seven new Spanish-American republics on a crowded continent. If they had adhered to a U.S. version of international law, what would have stopped Argentina from conquering Chile the way the United States conquered the Creeks and the Mexicans? Or Chile from marching on Argentina to gain access to the Atlantic? The result would have been endless war. And so, the region\u2019s jurists and other intellectuals (drawing from earlier Catholic criticisms of Spain\u2019s subjugation of the New World) disavowed conquest. In its place, they cobbled together a new framework of international relations that outlawed aggressive war and recognized the absolute sovereignty of all nations, regardless of their size.<\/p>\n

For decades, Latin American diplomats tried<\/a> to force Washington to accept such a vision of cooperative international law \u2014 and for decades Washington refused, not wanting to be a Gulliver tied down by a gaggle of Latin Lilliputians. Over time, however, U.S. statesmen began to grudgingly accept Latin America\u2019s legal interpretations, with the far-sighted among them realizing that a reformed system of international law would allow for a more effective projection of Washington\u2019s power. In 1890, at the first Pan-American Conference, the United States signed a provisional treaty abrogating the doctrine of conquest. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to give up the right to intervene in Latin American affairs and to recognize the absolute sovereignty of all nations.<\/p>\n

At the end of WWII, with Adolf Hitler dead and fascism defeated, Latin America\u2019s nations gladly joined in the creation of a postwar \u201crules-based\u201d liberal order, the founding principles of which they had all already adopted, especially the rejection of the doctrine of conquest.<\/p>\n

Cort\u00e9s to Hitler, the age of conquest, it seemed, was finally over.<\/p>\n

The End of the End of the Age of Conquest<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not really, of course. Cold warriors found many ways to circumvent the \u201crules,\u201d and didn\u2019t need to cite Roman law doctrine to justify atrocities in Vietnam, Guatemala, or Indonesia, among other places. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, war began spreading again like wildfire in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the U.S.-led first and second Gulf Wars.<\/p>\n

Still, the liberal order globally held on to the idea that the world should be organized around cooperation, not competition, that nations had more interests in common than in contention.<\/p>\n

Now, though, that idea seems to have been tossed aside and, in its place, comes a new vision of conquest. We see its burlesque version in the boastful pronouncements of Donald Trump, who has casually claimed the right to use coercion to take the island of Greenland<\/a>, annex Canada<\/a> as \u201cthe 51st state,\u201d grab the Panama Canal<\/a>, and clear out Gaza<\/a>, supposedly turning the strip into a Riviera-like resort. Far more ferocious expressions of that vision of conquest are seen in both Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s war in Ukraine and Israel\u2019s in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Of those two wars of conquest, the second touches a deep nerve, in part because Israel\u2019s existence is so tightly bound up with the fortunes of the liberal international order. The United Nations in 1949 conjured Israel (legally at least) into existence. Latin American nations at the time voted unanimously to recognize Israel\u2019s nationhood, with Guatemala serving as Washington\u2019s whip, ensuring that the region would act as a bloc. And the Holocaust has served as the West\u2019s moral reference point, a nightmarish reminder of what awaits a world that forsakes liberal tolerance or doesn\u2019t abide by liberal rules. At the same time, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, the United Nations has also become the most persistent critic of Israel\u2019s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel ignores U.N. criticism while invoking<\/a> the U.N. charter\u2019s article 51, which grants nations the right to self-defense, to justify its assault on Gazans.<\/p>\n

As we enter what may be the final phase of the Gazan genocide, that long entwinement between a rules-based order and Israel has become a kind of death dance. Many turn away, unable to bear the news. Others can\u2019t turn away, horrified that those in power in this country offer nothing other than more weapons<\/a> to Israel, which continues to kill indiscriminately, while withholding all food<\/a> and medicines from those trapped in Gaza. As of April, about two million Palestinians had no secure source of food at all.\u00a0Babies continue to decompose.\u00a0\u201cWhen children die of starvation, they don\u2019t even cry. Their little hearts just slow down until they stop,\u201d said<\/a> Colorado pediatrician Mohamed Kuziez, who works with Doctors Against Genocide.<\/p>\n

In early May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s security cabinet unanimously\u00a0approved<\/a>\u00a0a plan dubbed Operation Gideon\u2019s Chariots<\/a>, which, if enacted, would drive all Gazans into a small containment zone in the southern part of that strip, with Israel controlling all food and medical aid to them.\u00a0The IDF would then, as one official described<\/a> the plan, complete \u201cthe conquest of the Gaza Strip.\u201d\u00a0Gaza, said Finance Minister Smotrich, will then be \u201ccompletely destroyed.\u201d He added<\/a> grimly, \u201cWe conquer and stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in the 1500s, the revulsion felt by some theologians and philosophers at the extreme brutality of the Spanish conquest began the \u201cslow creation of humanity<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the fragile idea, nurtured over the centuries and always imperfectly applied, that all humans are indeed equal and form a single community beyond tribalism and nationalism. Today, a similar brutality is undoing that work. Humanity appears to be dissolving at an ever-quickening pace.<\/p>\n

From Cort\u00e9s to Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump, the end of the end of conquest begins.<\/p>\n

Follow\u00a0TomDispatch\u00a0on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and join us on\u00a0Facebook<\/a>. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer\u2019s new dystopian\u00a0novel,\u00a0<\/em>Songlands<\/a>\u00a0(the final one in his Splinterlands series),\u00a0Beverly Gologorsky\u2019s novel\u00a0<\/em>Every Body Has a Story<\/a>,\u00a0and Tom Engelhardt\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>A Nation Unmade by War<\/a>, as well as Alfred McCoy\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power<\/a>, John Dower\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II<\/a>, and Ann Jones\u2019s<\/em> They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America\u2019s Wars: The Untold Story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Greg Grandin<\/strong> is the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism<\/em><\/a>, published in the American Empire Project<\/a> Series by Metropolitan Books; the Pulitzer Prize winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall<\/em><\/a>; and most recently, America, Am\u00e9rica: A New History of the New World<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Copyright 2025 Greg Grandin<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend.\u00a0A Chicago artist famous for large canvases depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a \u201cJewish political artist.\u201d The painter\u2019s quick reply was that he wasn\u2019t a \u201cJewish political artist,\u201d he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":663,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1345,1287],"class_list":["post-53167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"Then (the New World) and Now (Israel)"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/663"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53167"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53207,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53167\/revisions\/53207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53167"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=53167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}