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Undiscovering the New World by Larry DeWitt Editor's Note: The Un-Celebrations of 1992 To see postmodern history being practiced with its politically-interested flags flying high, we need look no further than the historical narratives produced around the occasion of the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World. As the anniversary approached, multicultural-postmodernists began gearing-up for an anti-celebration, to show their contempt for the Europeans "first contact" with the natives of the Americas. From his New Haven study, in 1990 Hans Koning launched an early pre-emptive strike on Columbus, hectoring Americans who might be tempted to celebrate the quincentenary, insisting the nation should mourn it instead. "Yes, Christopher Columbus was the first European to sail to America in recorded history. But Columbus set into motion a sequence of greed, cruelty, slavery and genocide that, even in the bloody history of mankind, has few parallels. He organized an extermination of native Americans." (1) Detailing the cruelty of the Spaniards, Koning wrote "The Indians of the Caribbean were destroyed within two generations by the Spanish discoverers. . . . They had their hands cut off when they did not bring in their quarterly quota of gold dust. Their chiefs were roasted on fires of green wood. When their cries kept the Spaniards awake, they were silenced with wooden slats put over their tongues." (2) Finally, Koning offered his take on the proper way to observe the quincentenary: "We must end this phony baloney . . . Our false heroes . . . have too long burdened our national spirit. We must set out for a new harmony of races, for an atonement of past crimes. In that way, we have a truly New World to discover." (3) "Post-Colonial" Scholarship Koning's attitude was not unusual among academics in the early 1990s. In fact, another strange turning in the historiography of the European encounter with the New World had been underway for some time. It was exemplified in Koning's one-sided recital of the brutalities of the period--only European brutality came in for scorn from Koning; native American brutality slipped unnoticed past his angry pen. This was a reflection of a whole trend that had been underway for several years in academic writing. Historians had been busy constructing a "positive image" for the native Americans, reconstructing their religions, their cultures, their "native points of view" in a noticeably celebratory, even Whiggish, manner. For example, in an anthology published in 1992 (America in 1492) (4) seventeen scholars tried to frame a portrait of America in its pristine condition before the arrival of the first Europeans. The editor of the collection, Alvin Josephy Jr., dedicated the book "To the Indian peoples of the Americas" and announced that the royalties from the work would go to fellowship programs for Native Americans, and in the Acknowledgments Josephy even boasted "We wish to recognize in advance the contributions these new scholars will surely make to the public's understanding of the Indian past as we collectively embark on a new chapter in the Indian future." These actions were clues that this work was as much political as scholarly. And in his Afterword, Vine Deloria Jr., made clear what the political moral of the story was to be:
So, this scholarly work on the history of the European encounter was most definitely about the settling of political scores. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that it presented such a one-sided version of the story. Throughout the anthology, every author writes of the Americas pre-contact as a highly-evolved, sophisticated, cultured, even idyllic place. For example, historian and anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla describes the world of the Aztecs in Mesoamerica this way: "On the eve of the Spaniards' invasion, Tenochtitlan was a most magnificent abode of men and gods. There one would see numerous tall-rearing temples, topped with awesome shrines . . . painted in a flowery gamut of colors; monumental palaces where the supreme ruler and his council met and where judges administered justice; a variety of schools . . . centers of high learning. . ." (6) And the fact that those "tall-rearing temples" with their "flowery gamut of colors" were actually platforms for human sacrifice is hardly even mentioned, and when it is, the description makes it sound almost as if this were some sort of quaint cultural folkloric, without much moral import, and somehow reflecting, as everything else in the postmodern narrative, only on the "grandeur" of these idyllic cultures:
When the Spaniards, led most prominently by Hernando Cortés and his expedition of 1519, invaded central Mexico they brought with them the technology, the beliefs, the agendas, and the savagery of 16th century imperial Spain. It is fair to say they conceived their imperialist conquests as bringing civilization to primitive cultures. It is also fair to say this was mostly a rationalization for greed and exploitation. So the cover-story told by Europeans for centuries about the Age of Imperialism was that it was mostly benign, and in many respects helpful to the development of the world, and it was, at least in the long run, in the best interests of the subjugated peoples. This was a false account of the history of European conquest in the New World; but it was not an entirely false account. It was a lie in that it denied, dismissed, overlooked, and dissembled on all the negative consequences the explorations had on the native peoples. But it did expand the world through voyages of discovery. It did bring centuries of learning and western culture to the Americas. It did alter in a profound way the whole course of western history. And it did, as I will discuss in a moment, bring a degree of civilization to some very savage and barbaric cultures. The historiography of this conquest for centuries followed the preferred storyline of the dominant Europeans who colonized the Americas. On both sides of the Atlantic, the exploration of the Americas was depicted as an heroic affair. The contemporary histories--written by the conquistadors themselves and the Catholic friars who followed in their wake--were celebrations of the moral superiority of Spaniards, and the providence of God. By the resurgence of imperialism in the 19th century the glory had been re-designated as that reflecting the superior knowledge and understanding of the world on the part of all European culture (since more European nations--and some in the Americas--were now in on the action.) The devastation visited upon the native cultures was depicted, if at all, as a kind of collateral damage, regrettable perhaps, but unavoidable in the cause of human exploration. These honorific accounts went largely unchallenged until the 1960s. By the 1960s, as part of the general multicultural rejection and disapproval of the Age of Imperialism, Columbus and his discovery of the Americas had come to be seen in a very different light. The dominant mood among the intellectuals and academics in America (and in Europe) was scornful and highly-critical. Columbus was not seen as any kind of hero, but as a 16th century Vandal. The politics surrounding Columbus and his voyages became shrill and accusatory. The historiography began, almost exclusively, to focus on the negative aspects of the Spanish conquests. Where the earlier accounts were hagiographic; the new historiography demonized the Spaniards in general and Columbus in particular. This new swing to the other extreme reached its apogee in the early 1990s with the nearing of the quincentenary of Columbus' first voyage. In fact, several books were published in 1992, timed to coincident with the celebrations of the 1492 voyage, so as to generate maximum publicity and sales. Thus David Stannard gave us his history of the period in his book, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. As the title obligingly revealed, Stannard's thesis was that the European invasion of the New World was the seed of the evils of the 20th century. As he put it, "The road to Auschwitz led straight through the heart of the Americas." (8) In case anyone doubted that the new history was resolutely about the politicization of history, the title of Francis Jennings' quincentenary book should have removed all doubt: The Founders of America: How Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered in It, and Created Great Classical Civilizations, How They Were Plunged into a Dark Age by Invasion and Conquest, and How They Are Reviving. And that was just the title! The perennial leftist gadfly, Howard Zinn, would tell his lecture audiences in 1991 that the Age of Discovery was "Five hundred years of conquest, of exploitation, of enslavement, of violence, of war, of colonialism . . . a generic truth about Western civilization." (9) A panel of scholars formed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) wanted this quasi-governmental agency to issue a set of recommendations that constituted an historical indictment of Columbus, and, in the words of the head of the NEH, Lynne Chaney, that "charged Columbus with genocide, but portrayed the Aztecs--who practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale--as a gentle, peace-loving people." (10) The central aim of most of these new history accounts was the same--to vilify Columbus, and indeed, European culture in general--not just in the 16-19th centuries, but up to and including the present day. The general theme of these "post-colonial" histories was that the native populations of central Mexico were innocent victims of colonization. The Spaniards were depicted as ignorant of native cultures; indifferent to their societies; and war-mongers bringing hellish violence to a land which, if not entirely peaceful, at least had achieved a kind of genteel homeostasis based on the native inhabitants mythological understanding of their world. It was a story, to put it in a phrase, of the rape of innocence. So the story that the post-colonial postmodernists want historians to tell about the discovery of the New World is one of the rape of New World innocence by the rapacious Europeans. Only thus can we, as Hans Koning said, "atone for our past crimes." But the postmodern histories offered around the quincentenary were breathtakingly one-sided accounts. The new historiography was as vast a lie as that which it sought to displace. (11) It seems to never have occurred to these New History critics that the moral failings they see so self-evidently on display in the conduct of Europeans were human failings, present in equal measure in the native cultures. Blind in one eye, as it were, the new historians saw the flaws in human beings from European cultures but failed to notice the flaws in human beings who were native residents of the Americas. Thus the story, for them, was one of angels and demons--a most improbable kind of story when dealing with the human species. The Arrival of the Spaniards in the New World Indeed, the Spanish Inquisition had just barely gotten under way back in Spain--the managers of the autodafé were still honing their skills in the art of torture--when Cortés descended into the valley of what is present-day Mexico City. He found there an impressive city, Tenochtitlan, with 200,000 inhabitants, of the Mexica Indian tribe, who had built their city on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. The city was three times the size of Seville--the coastal city in Spain from which voyages to the New World set sail--and it featured a large marketplace and many elaborate stone buildings. So did Cortés find an idyllic paradise of generous-spirited and sophisticated native peoples, with a rich and advanced culture, living in harmony with their environment and at peace with their neighbors? Hardly. There are many things which the Spaniards did bring to the New World, including new diseases and the technology and ideas of an alien world. But they did not bring slavery, which already existed in the indigenous cultures. They did not bring war-mongering--which was a permanent and regularized feature of Mexica culture. And they certainly did not bring savage cruelty. On this score, the Spaniards were amateurs compared to the resident natives. The Mexica were in fact subjugating the minority peoples of the Mexican basin, especially the Huaxtecs and the Tlaxcaltecs, whom they often enslaved, and against whom them made war literally on a regular schedule. These remote tribes lived under the threat of annihilation from the dominant Mexica. The Mexica agreed not to slaughter them in exchange for their services as peonage slaves, whose time was given over to cultivating the fields outside Tenochtitlan and whose lives were spared only so long as they delivered their agricultural products to the city to sustain the city-dwellers. In effect, the Mexica were world-class imperialists who did not have to leave home to ply their trade. Windschuttle makes an interesting point in this regard. Almost all the post-colonial histories tell the story of the impact on the Mexica of the arrival of the Europeans, and they tell that story from the perspective of the Mexica. But few if any post-colonial histories tell the story from the perspective of the people that the Mexica in turn colonized, the subjugated Huaxtecs and Tlaxcaltecs. "If the historians of the quincentenary were genuinely interested in sympathising with the indigenous peoples of the past," Windschuttle observes, "they might have done more to resurrect the views of the Huaxtecs and the Tlaxcaltecs and to have told us how these neighbors regarded the Mexica and their culture. . . . [they] have completely avoided doing this. This is partly because it would make their moral outrage appear ludicrous . . . The main reason, however, is because the interest of these writers in the events of 1492 derives only in small part from any real sympathy they might have for the natives and far more from their fervour to adopt a politically-correct stance against their own society." (12) Underlining Windschuttle's point is the fact that when the Spanish defeated the Mexica and overran Tenochtitlan, it was the Huaxtecs and the Tlaxcaltecs who formed the bulk of Cortés' army. They were very anxious to overthrow the tyranny under which they lived--not the tyranny of invading Europeans, but the home-grown one of their fellow "innocent" Indians. In fact, in the wake of the fall of the city, a massacre ensued (in which upwards of 40,000 residents are estimated to have been murdered) and this massacre was not done by the Spaniards, but by the Tlaxcaltecs, who insisted to Cortés that they should be granted this privilege. The Mexica were also expansive slave-holders who routinely enslaved defeated warriors from other tribes, and even lower-caste residents of their own, very hierarchical, society. If you were born into Mexica society near the bottom of the stratification, you were likely to either spend a relatively long life as a slave, or a relatively short one as a sacrificial animal. And--wrapped in a blanket of superstitious religious ideology which charms the sensibilities of cultural relativists--the Mexica were also among the most savage and brutal specimens of humanity on the planet. Human sacrifice and cannibalism were not incidental features of their cultural life, but a central focus. Those magnificent Aztec pyramids were not religious shrines, or scientific observation platforms, or works of high art or architecture; they were slaughterhouses for the butchering of human beings. Here is a description of how they were used:
Historians are uncertain how many people were butchered in this way. One Spanish conquistador reported seeing 136,000 skulls on hanging racks in Tenochtitlan when the Spaniards first entered the city. Even if this and similar reports (one soldier counted 100,000 skulls arranged in neat easy-to-count rows and stacks) are exaggerated, it is a virtual certainty that the Aztecs killed and ate thousands of people each year in Tenochtitlan (out of a total population of about 200,000). Were these willing victims, people whose religious ideology inclined them to a Jonestown-like mass suicide on an regular assembly-line basis? I am not sure an affirmative answer would lessen the savagery, but from the surviving eye-witness accounts we know this was not routinely the case. Consider, for example, the ritual slaughter of batches of the city's children:
Among the many hypocrisies of multicultural postmodernism is a professed concern, even outrage, over the treatment of female members of European and American cultures over the centuries. It is, indeed, a political and moral outrage that women could not vote in America until 1920; or own property in their own right during much of the Colonial Era; or work outside the home extensively until World War II; or that women and children in the Gilded Age were subject to the brutalizing effects of poverty and abusive male breadwinners; and a million other outrages, large and small. But for many historians sexism is now seen as manifesting in the most subtle and hidden of symbols and cultural practices. Feminist historians are outraged at the "phallocentric" metaphors they find littered like turds in the writings of male historians. The heightened sensibilities of contemporary feminists can read much into the exclusive or too-frequent use of masculine pronouns; or in the snickers at the use of pretentious neologisms like "herstory." They can sniff out the faintest traces of misogyny when even the males they accuse of the stain are unaware of their own complicity. You would think, then, that feminists and other postmodern multiculturalists would have some serious concern for how women and children were treated by the Mexica cultures which were displaced by the cruelty of the Spaniards. Well, consider this sample of the cultural practices of that 16th century Eden and its symbology of the female:
Whatever these madmen believed about whatever gods they imagined relished this sort of depravity, it was depraved, and no amount of cultural relativism can hide that ugly truth. Politicizing History But some postmodern historians fall all over themselves to serve as apologists for this native savagery. Some point to the mass murder of later centuries in western European societies to show that western Europeans were the real barbarians of history and that, implicitly, the natives of the Mexican basin are still relatively speaking the innocents in the story of conquest. The Spanish Inquisition did kill heretics, we are reminded, and often after torturing them. So here again, much is made of the false pretensions to civilized conduct on the part of the Europeans, while simultaneously glossing over the conduct of the native peoples of Mesoamerica. Some have even bizarrely argued that the Christian sacrament with its symbolic feasting on the body and blood of Christ, is just the same practice as that found among the Aztecs when they dismember and eat sanctified members of their tribe! (16) Tzvetan Todorov also explicitly compared the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica to the Jewish Holocaust--unfavorably. He baldly asserted that "The sixteenth century perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history." (17) I am not sure how one does the moral math here, but this seems to be rather hyperventilated, especially since most of the deaths of indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica in the 16th century were inadvertent on the part of the Spanish since they were the result of the unintentional introduction of smallpox and other diseases into the native population. Blaming the Spaniards for the death of Indians by smallpox is more akin to blaming the female airline passenger from Hong Kong for landing in Toronto in March 2003 and bringing the SARS virus along with her, and as a result sickening thousands and killing dozens of Canadians. The Holocaust was an intentional effort at genocide, the introduction of smallpox into the New World was not. (18) The moral agency is not identical. But I will not insist on this kind of awful moral calculus. Suffice it to say, tragedy and suffering of immense proportion was part and parcel of the European explorations in the New World. This bizarre tendency to defend villainy when the villains are in some way "on our team," by pointing to other, bigger, villains as a rationalization is, sadly, a recurring form of intellectual folly. Recall that in the 1930s W.E.B. Du Bois, after returning from a trip to the Far East as a guest of the Japanese propaganda operation, wrote a lunatic editorial in the American press in which he defended the Japanese conduct in the Rape of Nanking on the grounds that the injustices done to Africans by Europeans was even greater! Besides, according to Du Bois, since the Japanese claimed their rapes and murders were in the cause of liberating races of color from domination by the white race, this aim seemed so agreeable to Du Bois that even the spectacle of one race of color annihilating a quarter of a million members of another race of color was something he could look upon with equanimity. (19) Yes, Europeans of the 16th century were in many respects barbarians themselves. But the cultures and peoples they colonized were also barbaric. Fully and honestly told, New World imperialism was one evil doing battle with another. It was not the rape of innocence. Innocence was nowhere to be found in this long sad stretch of human history. Humanity had not yet evolved a level of civilization on either side of this Atlantic-exchange which merits anyone's respect or admiration. And a true and honest historical account would say so. It would not vilify the natives and exculpate the Europeans; and it would not vilify the Europeans and exculpate the natives. Lies of either sort are no better than the other. That the histories told of this era have all chosen sides between these two types of false accounts, is a scandal on our profession. And the shift from narratives supporting one side to narratives supporting the other, means nothing--except that too many historians would rather engage in politics than strive to tell the truth. This is one of the most vulgar examples of history as politics. This is precisely what happens when we abandon the traditional values of dispassion and objective reporting on the facts of the historical record--all the facts, positive and negative, in their proper balance--for the idea that since all history contains elements of the political, that historians are free to politicize their narratives to their avenging heart's content. The Columbus-bashing of the early 1990s was the settling of accounts by some historians on behalf of their political clients--the 16th century victims of colonialism, and their descendants, and their lost cultures. It was an attempt by 20th century historians to deploy their arts in an effort to somehow unwind the clock of the past--to somehow un-discover the New World, by recreating a fictional version of that world. It was an attempt to depict the imperialists as sinners and the native peoples as saints, even though there was never in truth any such world. So by virtue of ignoring the traditional ideal of striving to tell the truth about the past, and instead substituting the value of politicizing our narratives "to atone for our crimes," we end up with centuries of historiographical crap--including the varieties peddled by late 20th century postmodernists. And it really does not matter which team you are cheering for. Whether you lie to lionize Columbus, or you lie to lionize Montezuma, you are still a political whore and not an historian.
Endnotes 1. Hans Koning, "Don't Celebrate 1492--Mourn It," Op-ed article in the New York Times, August 14, 1990, A21. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., (ed.), America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus," (New York, Knopf, 1992). 5. Vine Deloria, Jr., "Afterword," in Josephy, 1992, 429. 6. Miguel León-Portilla, "Men of Maize," in Josephy 1992, 170. 7. Ibid., 174. 8. Quoted in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past, (New York: Free Press, 1997): 39. 9. Quoted in Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Frauds--American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis and Goodwin, (New York: Public Affairs, 2004): 97. 10. Ibid. 11. Much of what follows here is based on the discussion of these events that appears in Chapter 2 of Windschuttle's The Killing of History. 12. Windschuttle, 1997, 70. 13. ibid., 66. 14. ibid., 67. 15. ibid., 66-67. The first part of this passage, prior to the ellipsis, is Windschuttle's summary of the narrative offered by Inga Clendinnen in her book, Aztecs, the second portion of the passage is a direct quote from Clendinnen herself as reported in Windschuttle. 16. Believe it or not, this is an actual thesis put forward by the literary theorist and semiotician Tzvetan Todorov in his 1982 book, The Conquest of America. I think Keith Windschuttle had it exactly right when he wrote of Todorov's thesis, "Todorov's comparison of Mexican sacrifice with the consumption of wine and wafers at a Christian Holy Communion is a Pythonesque grotesquerie." (See Windschuttle, op. cit., 69.) 17. ibid., 41. 18. I am aware that there are some fringe historians who claim that the introduction of smallpox in the New World was a deliberate war-making strategy on the part of the Spanish. In one version, smallpox-infected Spaniards rubbed themselves with blankets and then distributed these infected blankets to the Indians. Even if this happened in some instances, the spread of smallpox was governed not by Spanish battle tactics but by the dynamics of contagious disease, which neither the Spaniards nor anyone else understood or controlled in the 16th century. 19. Justin Hart, "Making Democracy Safe for the World: Race, Propaganda, and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy during World War II," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, 70-71. | ||
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