Summarization of Spanish Texts and My Personal Opinion of Them (3)

The first document I will be summarizing is a speech given by a Dominican monk,Anton Montecino. In his speech he protests that everything the Spanish are doing is wrong and sinful compared to what they should be doing to the natives. He says they are all giving way to the deadly sins and that the cannot see the outcomes of their actions. This causes them to just keep torturing, killing, and pillaging the natives. The second document is The Requerimiento made by King Ferdinand of Spain and philosophers he hired to help him make it. This document was to be read to any natives found in the New World to determine if they should be killed or spared. The document states that the Indians should comply to the will of God that has come through the pope, to the king, like all good savants should do, and if they decide to do so immediately, they will be saved from annihilation. The third and last document is written by Bartolome de Las Casas. This document on the treatment of natives in the New World by the Spanish shows his obvious disbelief and even disgust of the way natives are treated. He lists off the horrible things being done to the native peoples, such as burning, mutilation, baby genocide, and physically permanent torture. He exclaims that the Spanish army places bets on the ways they can kill the natives, create new and terrible forms of murder, and take advantage of their lacking technology to mutilate them further when the attempt to rise up against their Spanish oppressors. He also identifies a reason he believes the Spanish are so cruel to the natives, and that reason is their blind lust for gold and fame.

In the first document, Anton brings up a good point that almost any person should be able to identify, that the Spanish are giving into greed, lust, and cruel treatment of more innocent races that don't know what's going on other than a powerful nation is destroying them brutally tribe by tribe. I agree with Anton's statements that the actions being done by the Spanish troops are sinful, unjust, and don't agree with the Christian religion. In the second document, The Requerimiento, King Ferdinand's points make no sense. He states that by the word of God through the pope command all native people in the New World to kneel to the kings will immediately because since the king is following God, and God commands all the world, the Indians shouldn't try to protect their land. Then the document extends a grave warning, that if the Indians don't give in to the kings will, they will all be brutally slaughtered, even if they just think about it for a while, if it's not immediate, their dead. The interesting thing about this is that the text was read in Spanish, not Native American, so the Indians didn't know what was being said anyways. In any bible story I've read, where the Israeli people completely killed a foe, they at least extended a warning intelligible by the enemy or gave them a chance. Also, the killing of the enemy was in defense of their lives or their land, whereas the land of the Indians was not Spanish land. The third document by Bartolome, displays a disgust of the Spanish actions which seems somewhat similar to that of the speech by Anton. I agree with his view of the Spanish soldiers because it's true what they did and they deserve hate. Murdering and torturing innocent people isn't what a nation should start doing right off the bat, without trying to communicate with the victims. If the situation was that the natives were extremely hostile and needed some way of taming, it would be perfectly ok for the Spanish to kill, torture, and maim. Since the natives were completely vunreable to the Spanish weapons and tactics, killing them in mass genocides was not neccesary at all, even if the goal in the end was mass wealth.