TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052791/0527640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 135 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 74

Hail Columbus, Dead White Male


By Charles Krauthammer


    The 500th anniversary of 1492 is approaching. Remember
1492? "In Fourteen Hundred Ninety-Two/ Columbus sailed the ocean
blue." Discovery and exploration. Bolivar and Jefferson. Liberty
and democracy. The last best hope for man.

    The left is not amused.

    In Madrid the Association of Indian Cultures announces
that it will mark the occasion with acts of "sabotage." In the
U.S. the Columbus in Context Coalition declares that the coming
event provides "progressives" with their best political opening
"since the Vietnam War." The National Council of Churches (NCC)
condemns the "discovery" as "an invasion and colonization with
legalized occupation, genocide, economic exploitation and a deep
level of institutional racism and moral decadence." One of its
leaders calls for "a year of repentance and reflection rather
than a year of celebration."

    For the left, the year comes just in time. The revolutions
of 1989 having put a dent in the case for the degeneracy of the
West, 1992 offers a welcome new point of attack. The point is
the Origin. The villain is Columbus. The crime is the discovery
-- the rape -- of America.

    The attack does, however, present the left with some
rather exquisite problems of political correctness. After all,
Columbus was an agent of Spain, and his most direct legacy is
Hispanic America. The denunciation of the Spanish legacy as one
of cruelty and greed has moved one Hispanic leader to call the
NCC's resolution "a racist depreciation of the heritages of most
of today's American peoples, especially Hispanics."

    That same resolution opened an even more ancient debate
between Protestants and Catholics over the colonization of the
Americas. For Catholics like historian James Muldoon, the
(Protestant) attack on Columbus and on the subsequent missionary
work of the (Catholic) church in the Americas is little more
than a resurrection, a few centuries late, of the Black Legend
that was a staple of anti-Catholic propaganda during the
Reformation.

    The crusade continues nonetheless. Kirkpatrick Sale kicked
off the anticelebration with his anti-Columbus tome, The
Conquest of Paradise. The group Encounter plans to celebrate
1992 by sailing three ships full of Indians to "discover" Spain.
Similar merriment is to be expected wherever a quorum gathers
to honor 1492.

    The attack on 1492 has two parts. First, establishing the
villainy of Columbus and his progeny (i.e., us). Columbus is
"the deadest whitest male now offered for our detestation,"
writes Garry Wills. "If any historical figure can appropriately
be loaded up with all the heresies of our time -- Eurocentrism,
phallocentrism, imperialism, elitism and
all-bad-things-generally-ism -- Columbus is the man."

    Therefore, goodbye, Columbus? Balzac once suggested that
all great fortunes are founded on a crime. So too all great
civilizations. The European conquest of the Americas, like the
conquest of other civilizations, was indeed accompanied by great
cruelty. But that is to say nothing more than that the European
conquest of America was, in this way, much like the rise of
Islam, the Norman conquest of Britain and the widespread
American Indian tradition of raiding, depopulating and
appropriating neighboring lands.

    The real question is, What eventually grew on this
bloodied soil? The answer is, The great modern civilizations of
the Americas -- a new world of individual rights, an ever
expanding circle of liberty and, twice in this century, a savior
of the world from totalitarian barbarism.

    If we are to judge civilizations like individuals, they
should all be hanged, because with individuals it takes but one
murder to merit a hanging. But if one judges civilizations by
what they have taken from and what they have given the world,
a nonjaundiced observer -- say, one of the millions in Central
Europe and Asia whose eyes are turned with hope toward America
-- would surely bless the day Columbus set sail.

    Thus Part I of the anti-'92 crusade is calumny for
Columbus and his legacy. Part II is hagiography, singing of the
saintedness of the Indians in their pre-Columbian Eden, a land
of virtue, empathy and ecological harmony. With Columbus, writes
Sale, Europe "implanted its diseased and dangerous seeds in the
soils of the continents that represented the last best hope for
humankind -- and destroyed them."

    Last best hope? No doubt, some Indian tribes (the Hopis,
for example) were tree-hugging pacifists. But the notion that
pre-Columbian America was a hemisphere of noble savages is an
adolescent fantasy (rather lushly, if ludicrously, animated in
Dances with Wolves).

    Take the Incas. Inca civilization, writes Peruvian
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, was a "pyramidal and theocratic
society" of "totalitarian structure" in which "the individual
had no importance and virtually no existence." Its foundation?
"A state religion that took away the individual's free will and
crowned the authority's decision with the aura of a divine
mandate turned the Tawantinsuyu ((Incan empire)) into a
beehive."

    True, the beehive was wantonly destroyed by "semiliterate,
implacable and greedy swordsmen." But they in turn represented
a culture in which "a social space of human activities had
evolved that was neither legislated nor controlled by those in
power." In other words, a culture of liberty that endowed the
individual human being with dignity and sovereignty.

    Is it Eurocentric to believe the life of liberty is
superior to the life of the beehive? That belief does not
justify the cruelty of the conquest. But it does allow us to say
that after 500 years the Columbian legacy has created a
civilization that we ought not, in all humble piety and cultural
relativism, declare to be no better or worse than that of the
Incas. It turned out better.

    And mankind is the better for it. Infinitely better.
Reason enough to honor Columbus and bless 1492.