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Hey, this doesn't happen every day at TomDispatch! In my introduction to TD pieces, I usually focus on developing events on this strange planet of ours, but today let me focus instead on Greg Grandin's latest book, America, Ame'rica: A New History of the New World (from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to late last night), since it couldn't be more germane to the piece he's written today. As it happens, his book is now sitting by my bedside and will be my nighttime reading for a while to come, but though I've only started it, I'm already gripped and deeply impressed. After all, how many times does a book written by a TomDispatch author instantly hit number 14 on the New York Times bestseller list? (Superb as so many of them are, not often, believe me!) Or get a striking review in the Financial Times suggesting that he might even win another Pulitzer Prize (and yes, that "another" is no mistake, since he did win a Pulitzer for an earlier book of his).
His new book on the historic relations (or sometimes lack of them) between the United States and Latin America could hardly be more apt at a moment when Donald Trump seems eager to position himself as the overlord of these two continents. After all, he's made it clear that he wants to take back the Panama Canal, turn Greenland into an all-American ice pop, transform Canada into the 151st state (or am I confused in my numbers there?), while renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America (which was restrained of him, since he could have called it the Gulf of Trump). Oh, and don't forget that his secretary of defense, undoubtedly following his president's wisdom, has made it all too clear that "all options will be on the table" when it comes to dealing with Mexican drug cartels and so Mexico itself, which could, of course, become the 52nd state (as long as it got rid of all its inhabitants).
And mind you, we're not even four months into Trump's second term in office! It certainly seems like a grimly appropriate moment for Grandin's new book to focus on relationships in the Americas over the last 500 years. And with that, let me turn to him to offer his vivid thoughts on the subject and, aptly, on events in Gaza as well. Tom
The Horrors Inflicted for 500 Years
Then (the New World) and Now (Israel)
By Greg Grandin
Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend. A 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 "Jewish political artist." The painter's quick reply was that he wasn't a "Jewish political artist," he was just a "political artist." In the end, though, Golub came to believe that he had let himself off too easily, that his answer was too pat. Yes, he was 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's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Golub admitted that what it meant for him to be a successful artist was never to take the "horrors inflicted on Palestinians" as his subject matter. Only then would he be left free to paint his political opinions on anything else.
Over the last year and a half, I've thought of Leon Golub, who died in 2004, many times as the escalation of Israel's assault on Gaza and settler violence on the West Bank paralleled my own rush to finish a book (just published as America, Ame'rica: A New History of the New World). Among other things, it traces Latin America's largely unrecognized role in the abolition of the doctrine of conquest 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's case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza).
I've been writing critically on how the U.S. acted in Latin America for more than three decades. Unlike many scholars and students of the Middle East, I was able to do so and not be punished because, like Golub, I mostly focused on the "horrors inflicted" on people other than Palestinians. As President Richard Nixon put it all too accurately in 1971, nobody of import in the United States gives "one damn about Latin America."
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 between 1898 and 1994!), have made it remarkably safe to speak out about Latin America. Yet, in 2025, the "horrors inflicted" are everywhere and it's no longer possible to silo one's sympathies.
Conquest, Then and Now
Consider the Spanish conquest of the Americas alongside Israel's 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. 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 to have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands more.
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.
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 apocalyptic landscape filled with the walking near-dead, victims of mutilations meted out to Native Americans, this way: a "multitude of lame and maimed Indians, without hands, or with only one hand, blind, their noses cut off, earless." Today, the internet circulates countless photographs and videos with no less horrific images of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers on Palestinians, of armless boys and "decomposing babies." Some photographs of children starved by the IDF, according to a New York Times editor, were simply too "graphic" to publish.
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