Bartolomé de las Casas’s denunciation of Spanish rule in the New World was translated into numerous languages, illustrated with graphic engravings, and used as an international propaganda weapon against Spain.
Masayuki Takayama and Miki Otaka examine the lineage connecting the oppression associated with Matsukura Katsuie, Amsterdam’s publishing culture, Spain’s “Black Legend,” The Rape of Nanking, and the Spanish-American War.

2020-08-05
Background
This chapter examines how Bartolomé de las Casas’s denunciations of Spanish atrocities in the New World were subsequently used as an instrument of international propaganda by European powers competing with Spain.
Masayuki Takayama and Miki Otaka suggest that accounts of cruelty appearing in Las Casas’s work reached the Netherlands and may later have been incorporated into stories concerning the oppressive rule of Matsukura Katsuie in Japan.
They further discuss Amsterdam’s printing culture, translations into numerous languages, graphic engravings, the anti-Spanish “Black Legend,” and the propaganda structure linking politics, journalism, and publishing to the Spanish-American War.
Estimates of the Indigenous population referred to in the dialogue vary considerably among historians.
The following nevertheless preserves the speakers’ statements and arguments faithfully.
The Propaganda Strategy Built Around Las Casas’s Book
Otaka: They conduct their propaganda war by calling black white and white black.
Takayama: When the Spanish arrived in the New World, they worked the men to death as slaves and ultimately killed them.
They also killed pregnant women and babies, while virgins were used for sexual gratification.
In present-day Mexico, for example, ten per cent of the population is white, sixty per cent consists of people of mixed ancestry born to those women, and the remainder consists of Indigenous peoples, such as the Maya, who fled into the forests.
Otaka: Those people of mixed ancestry are known as mestizos.
China has done essentially the same thing to the Uyghurs.
Takayama: Exactly.
It was, so to speak, ethnic elimination.
When the Jews entered the land of Canaan, they did the same thing to the Midianites.
Moses said that all the men were to be killed and that the women were gifts bestowed upon the soldiers by Yahweh, to be treated as they wished.
Otaka: The Spanish followed that method as well.
Takayama: Las Casas reported the Spanish elimination of Indigenous peoples in greatly exaggerated and inflated terms.
He wrote, for example, of people whose hands and feet were bound, who were tied to straw and set on fire.
He also described a baby being taken from the arms of an Indigenous woman, its limbs being cut with a knife, and its body being thrown to starving hunting dogs.
A similar story has been handed down in Japan concerning Matsukura Katsuie, the second lord of the Shimabara Domain in Hizen.
It is said that he set fire to the straw raincoats of peasants who had failed to pay their taxes.
Otaka: Matsukura was beheaded for his oppressive government.
Takayama: There can be little doubt that his rule was tyrannical.
However, accounts of this kind of cruelty had already reached the Netherlands through Las Casas’s book.
I believe that stories taken from Las Casas were mixed into hostile accounts of Japan after it expelled Christianity.
The more remarkable fact is that the stories of Las Casas had reached the Far East at all.
The process began when the Spaniards, having recovered the Iberian Peninsula through the Reconquista, turned their attention to wealthy Jews who had prospered through cooperation with Muslims.
The Spaniards subjected wealthy Jews one after another to the Inquisition, burned them at the stake, and confiscated their property.
Torquemada, the Dominican inquisitor, burned eight thousand people at the stake.
Many Jews then fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Amsterdam was then a centre of movable-type printing.
There, they translated Las Casas’s book into numerous languages, and it became a bestseller.
People throughout the world condemned the Spaniards as a despicably cruel nation.
Otaka: It was therefore a propaganda strategy pursued by the European powers.
Takayama: They even produced engravings depicting cruel methods of execution and used them as illustrations.
Otaka: Iris Chang imitated that method in The Rape of Nanking.
Laughs.
Takayama: Exactly.
Any country would naturally become demoralised if the evil and brutality of its own people were publicised throughout the world.
The Western powers continued this kind of large-scale propaganda campaign for three or four hundred years and brought about Spain’s decline.
That is why Spain remains dispirited today, with scarcely a trace of its former glory.
It has also been exhausted by the coronavirus and has fallen into the condition of a country said to contain little but pickpockets for those who visit it.
Otaka: Even Princess María Teresa died from the coronavirus.
Takayama: The reason such a brilliant empire fell so far was that it lost the propaganda war in which the report of Las Casas was used against it.
Otaka: The United States also massacred Native Americans.
Takayama: That is true.
There were approximately thirteen million at the time, but ultimately only three hundred thousand remained.
It was a massacre greater than Hitler’s.
Yet atrocities against Indigenous peoples have been so strongly associated with the names “Spain,” “Cortés,” and “Pizarro.”
Otaka: And Las Casas was the original source!
Takayama: In the United States, an English translation with colour printing and engraved illustrations was sold toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Newspapers portrayed Spain as a terrible country and claimed that it was committing similar acts in Cuba.
That agitation contributed to the declaration of the Spanish-American War.
Politics, journalism, and the publishing industry joined forces to defeat Spain.
As a result, the United States placed Cuba under military occupation and acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.