Chapter Thirteen - Genocide, Inc.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Genocide, Inc.

WHEN PEOPLE SAY, “You can’t judge him by today’s standards,” they’re missing the point.

We’re not judging him for being a product of his time.
We’re judging him for creating a system that became time.

Columbus wasn’t a footnote.
He was a template.

A prototype for empire.

And Europe ran the playbook like it was a license to kill.

Columbus proved a terrifying idea:
You could monetize mass death.

Enslave people → Sell them.
Seize land → Mine it.
Kill resistance → Call it civilizing.
Export products → Justify conquest.
Rename everything → Rewrite the past.

This model wasn’t chaos.
It was strategy.

And it worked.

Other empires saw what Columbus did and industrialized it.

This wasn’t just greed.
It was law.

In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull declaring that any land not ruled by Christians could be claimed by Christian rulers.

That became known as the Doctrine of Discovery. It became the legal basis for colonizing Indigenous land, justifying slavery, erasing native sovereignty, and rewriting borders with zero consent.

The United States Supreme Court still references it to this day.

Columbus set the template, the Church wrote the doctrine, and empires pulled the trigger.

And the system never stopped.

It just changed outfits.

Slavery became mass incarceration.
Colonies became sweatshops.
Conversion became “foreign aid.”
Gold became oil.
Conquest became “peacekeeping.”

Columbus isn’t just a statue.
He’s in the algorithm.
In the real estate maps.
In the court rulings.
In the schoolbooks that still pretend he found something worth celebrating.

He’s the ancestor of every CEO who sees people as numbers.
Every politician who sees land as leverage.
Every system that looks at suffering and sees profit.

This isn’t about guilt.

It’s about recognition.

We’re not digging up the past.

We’re standing in it.