[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
For the first time in decades, the leftist assaults on American history and heroes are getting pushback from the renewal of patriotism fueled by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and fulfilling his promise to Make America Great Again. Our institutions from the military to the universities are being restored to their proper functions consistent with the Constitution, as the Augean stables of DEI, open borders, unpunished rampant crime, and the politicized history and media that were besmirched by Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of our country.
Also recently cleansed by President Trump is the politically correct “Indigenous Peoples Day” moniker that replaced the traditional honorific “Columbus Day.” Trump restored Columbus Day in a proclamation reading, “Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.”
Christopher Columbus has been the arch-villain in the left’s Orwellian revisionist history of the West. Especially dangerous is the common leftist lie that America from its birth, like Columbus, has been and continues to be uniquely and irredeemably evil, tainted by slavery, one of the progressive left’s favorite historical weapons for undermining the patriotic solidarity that binds us together and undergirds our Constitution and its political freedom and equality.
This animus, of course, saturates global Marxism, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, once the left’s specious evidence of Marx’s brilliance and success. In compensation for that loss, America’s foundations that created the richest, freest, and most powerful nation in the world must be demonized and distorted, in order to show that America’s success has come at too great a price––the institutionalization of racist oppression and inequality that created slavery, “white privilege,” and “white supremacy,” which allegedly still infect every dimension of our society
Hence the Dems’ current orgies of question-begging smears like “racism” and “fascism,” the latter completely ignorant of the fact that fascism was, like communism, a socialist political religion, both of which were sworn enemies of free market capitalism and individual rights and freedom. Fascism and communism’s affinity for tyranny made allies of Stalin and the Nazis in 1939.
The U.S.’s alleged unprecedented brutal history against the “other” preached incessantly by the left is attributed to Columbus’s conquest and occupation of the peaceful New World. A “wanted poster” circulated by an indigenous people’s activist group in 1992 typifies the simplistic, cartoonish history taught in our schools and universities: “Wanted: Christopher Columbus . . . for grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a culture, rape, torture, and instigating the big lie.” No wonder Obama called for the “fundamental transformation” of such an oppressive, murderous state.
Of course, this propaganda leaves out much of the story. Left out of these slurs about Columbus’s sins, and especially America’s evil “genocide” of indigenous peoples, is the fact that the early European contacts with the Amerindians relied on ancient, often idealizing myths that influenced European and later American understandings and characterizing of the tribes they encountered.
Frequently they looked to the old Classical Golden Age myth of a simple people living in harmony with a maternal nature, without cities, laws, diseases, private property, or war. Sir Walter Raleigh explicitly invoked the Golden Age: “We found the people most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, such as lived after the manner of the golden age.” Amerigo Vespucci wrote of the Amerindians in 1505, “neither do they have goods of their own, but all things are held in common,” and they “live according to nature.” That first claim flattered Marxist collectivism historically honored in the breech.
These early positive judgements of the Amerindians have persisted up to the present. Only now today’s leftists have turned the earlier settlers’ admiration into “genocide” and “stealing land” from the “noble savages,” who respect nature and avoid violence and slavery––the clichéd plot of hundreds of movies like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, and worse yet, “scholarly” books that end up in university and high-school curricula.
For example, popular environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale explains in The Conquest of Paradise [sic!] that these wicked Europeans came from a “dark Other World, a world of sorrow and evil,” whose sole driving force was a “lust for gold” and the “imperative of human domination and control of the natural world,” assaulting it with “pollution, extermination, cruelty, destruction, and despoliation.”
Such tired, melodramatic indictments simplify the Europeans and Amerindians alike, reducing the humanity as well as that of the Amerindians. What’s ignored in these caricatures are the Europeans who called out the un-Christian treatment of the indigenous tribes.
In 1511, for example, the Dominican priest Antonio de Montesinos scolded his fellow Spaniards, “You are in mortal sin and live and die in it because of the cruelty and tyranny that you use against these innocent peoples. . . Are these Indians not Men? Do they not have souls? Are you not obliged to love them as you love yourselves?” Did the Aztecs ever express such sentiments about the Tlaxcalans whose hearts were torn from them and bodies devoured?
Similarly, Pedro de Cieza de León, who wrote, “It is no small sorrow to reflect that we Christians have destroyed so many kingdoms. For wherever Christians have passed, conquering and discovering, it seems as though a fire has consumed everything.” And the most passionate defender of the Indian, Bartolomé de las Casas, instructed priests to deny absolution, the forgiveness of sin, to anybody who abused and owned Indians.
Moreover, the reduction of Amerindians to noble savage victims is simplistic, and dehumanizes them by diminishing their agency. The reality of life in pre-contact America, of course, was radically different from our politicized myths, just as the promises of Marxism––like equality of wealth, or the “new man” that will be a “higher sociological type of superman,” as Trotsky predicted––who “will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle”––were radically different from the nightmare of gulags, torture, man-made famines, and 100 million murdered in the name of communism.
The natives of the New World were not peaceful, but like tribal bands across the globe were continuously raiding and killing each other, not to mention practicing, again like the ancient Celts or Teutons of the Old World, fiendishly cruel methods of torture. Neither were they natural ecologists, “living lightly on the land,” as today’s ecologists claim. They exploited their environment in order to survive, using fire to shape the landscape to that end, and fire-drives and stampedes of game over cliffs to kill more than they could ever use. Their impact on nature was limited by their small numbers, and by the crudity of their stone-tipped weapons.
In other words, like all human beings throughout history, their first priority was not protecting “mother nature,” but exploiting and managing it to ensure their survival.
That’s the historical truth that today’s self-loathing, rich Westerners ignore: the sins of the West are not sui generis, but have been the sins of a universal human nature. What makes the West exceptional is not those common flaws, but as we saw above, its self-criticism that acknowledged and condemned them, thus creating the possibility of overcoming them. And yes, that critical consciousness also led to a culture of technological improvements that made it superior in the long, global practice of conquering other peoples and seizing their resources.
We should not, like today’s rich, spoiled, well-fed Westerners, just demonize the West for being more efficient at indulging those eternal human sins because of the dynamic culture and technologies that brought Europeans to the New World and magnified their destructive power.
However, such a mature, realist understanding of history is beyond today’s progressives who––still enthralled by utopian political delusions––reduce non-Western peoples to idealized stereotypes that diminish their complex humanity and historical reality. But leftists have always been “terrible simplifiers,” as Jacob Burkhardt called all those utopian dreamers promising heaven on earth. That goal is useful for leftists, despite their lies and distortions, and the cost in blood and pain from their application––just as we see today in the political violence of the Dems sanctioned by their “leaders.”
Finally, demonizing American history and heroes like Christoper Columbus has nothing to do with justice or compensation for the long dead. The left’s goal is to discredit America’s success at not just creating the richest, freest, most powerful nation in history, but destroying the failed, murderous Marxist tyrant that too many privileged Americans embrace and strive to empower in order to destroy our freedom. Thankfully, we have a realist leader who knows the stakes and is working to restore and foster our patriotism.