Damato Columbus and the Indians

I believe that the authors thesis was "These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable for their hosipitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in Renaissance Europe."(Zinn,3) The thesis meaning that the Indians were willing to share everything while the Europeans only wanted to take and control everything, with no thought about what it did to others. His argument was that history is always written and told from the winners point of view. That when writting history many times what actually happened is either left out or altered in one way or the other. He wanted to tell the facts about how Colummbus and many other explorers killed many people in their selfish search for gold. Zinn's main idea is to tell the truth about what happened from the Indians point of view to show that though Columbus is known as a great man in America for finding this great country, he killed or ordered the killing of millions of people, women and children included. One of the questiuons i wondered is why if Columbus was such a religous man why did he feel that the killing and enslaving of innocent men, women, and children was not a sin, or not part of God's work. The second question i wondered was why did they kill and enslave the indians when they were almost always willing to comply with what the Europeans wanted as long as they asked and did not take? Why not just live together and help each other? Throughout the reading i was amazed with what i read. In many of the text books that I have read throughout school there was little that was touched on about the mass murder and the genocide. I always found it ironic that America is the home of the free where every man/women is equal, that the Europeans killed the Indians who actually lived this way. That even the children were as equal as the men and everyone worked together for the better of the whole community. I also was curious about how they can be so religous and be fine with killing all of these people. I liked how the indians had no money everything they did was just to survive. Also, that in many books Indians are portrayed as barbaric and so far behind the Europeans at that time, though they were farming and figured out how to grow corn and other plants and goods at about the same time as the rest of the world.