by Tom Atlee (igc:thinkpeace)
486 41st Street #3, Oakland CA 94609
(510) 654-0349
The Fall/Winter 1991 special issue of NEWSWEEK about Columbus,
entitled "When Worlds Collide: How Columbus's Voyages Transformed
Both East and West" is a brilliant co-optation of 1992 Quincentennial
protests. The content of this document tells us that the challenge of
anti-celebrationists is being taken seriously by the establishment.
If, as Todd Gitlin has pointed out, NEWSWEEK is the flagship of the
American media, this edition gives us a foretaste of how the estab-
lishment plans to neutralize our work for 1992.
It is significant that NEWSWEEK does not challenge our data about
European atrocities or Indian contributions. Rather, they simply
"spin doctor" the data to give it a seemingly-objective, non-radical
significance. To the extent this establishment frame of reference is
accepted by the public, the radicalizing potential of this data will
evaporate.
It is important to realize how depowering this propagandistic
tour de force is. We need to re-strategize and to create imaginative
ways to further our aims in a now radically transformed media
environment. We need to do it soon.
Below are just a few examples of the spin doctoring, with my com-
ments.
OF COURSE THE SPANISH COMITTED ATROCITIES, BUT THEY WEREN'T THAT CRUEL
NEWSWEEK claims that Spain's infamy ("The Black Legend") is
largely due to propaganda by their enemies Q Germany, France,
Holland, England and the US. Of course, Hitler's and Stalin's infamy
are also due largely to propaganda by their enemies (like us). But so
what? Does propaganda against a crime make it any less a crime?
The main source of Columbus atrocity data, the Dominican bishop
Bartolom de Las Casas, was, according to NEWSWEEK, "a skilled
politician" who wrote in "graphic and exaggerated detail." He was
also often the only source, and NEWSWEEK offers no evidence for their
claim that he exaggerated. And what do they mean by "skilled
politician"? They give no specifics. I suspect the label was chosen to
diminish de Las Casas' moral standing and credibility: politicians
are known for manipulating people to their own advantage.
NEWSWEEK gives eye-witness atrocity reports a positive spin by
saying they demonstrate "the broad freedom of speech [Spain]
permitted in its colonies" and "a Spanish moral impulse that led the
royal court to conduct a soul-searching ethical inquiry." Perhaps it
was like the soul-searching America did while Vietnam was being
laid to waste.
Spain also "recognized the need to mediate between the
conflicting demands of Christianity and profit." Who could have
imagined NEWSWEEK would make such a radical admission. We can
kick off some excellent classroom discussions with that sentence!
Stretching English to its limits, NEWSWEEK goes on to maintain
that, "if only for economic reasons, the Spanish cared deeply for the
welfare of the natives." If someone were to claim to "care deeply"
about someone else "for only economic reasons," wouldn't it be
natural Q even traditional Q to question the worthiness of their
caring?
"Spaniards believed they offered the Indians a gift worth any
earthly pain: eternal life in heaven." I find myself wondering if
NEWSWEEK would so blithely report a modern religious fanatic killing a
neighbor so that the neighbor could have eternal life in heaven. It is
also significant that NEWSWEEK chose to ridicule Aztec human sacrifice
as barbaric, some of which, I believe, had a similar logic.
Spaniards only enslaved those Indians who didn't accept
Christianity and, after all, "with so few colonists, Indian labor was a
necessity." Since when is "mining gold or silver or growing cash
crops" a necessity? For whom? The owners "would feed the Indians,
provide for their instruction in the faith and defend them." One
wonders what "instruction in the faith" was given to those enslaved
Indians who, according to NEWSWEEK, had rejected Christianity. And
who were they being defended against?
But those are minor points compared to the overriding question:
Are we supposed to ignore atrocities simply because the perpetrators
have cultural justifications for committing them? What has been, is
and will be the spiritual and social price for this attitude? That's
another question worth pursuing to develop critical thinking and
clarify values.
"It wasn't swords or guns that devastated the native Americans.
It was the germs the Europeans carried." At the very least, assuming
this is true, it is a heartless, self-serving claim that doesn't even try
to fathom how this must have felt to the Indians. For this reason
alone Indians would have no cause to celebrate Columbus, a fact only
disparagingly acknowledged by NEWSWEEK. The three page article on
the role of disease is clearly an effort to (1) establish firmly in people's
minds that disease, not barbarism, was the cause of Indian suffering
and (2) to demonstrate that those diseases were an inevitable,
natural event for which the Spanish cannot be held responsible. This
argument leads inexorably to the conclusion that the Spanish
weren't so bad, after all.
This claim that "the worst of the suffering was caused not by
swords or guns but by germs" is the keystone of NEWSWEEK's
argumentation. So it is all the more curious that they give no
statistics to back it up. The only statistics given are "that the New
World was home to 40 million to 50 million people before Columbus ar-
rived and that most of them died within decades. In Mexico alone,
the native population fell from roughly 30 million in 1519 to 3 million
in 1568." And this: "smallpox alone wiped out many millions." Well,
how many million are we talking about? How many died from
violence and mistreatment, and how many from disease? If
NEWSWEEK had such comparative statistics Q as their claim implies Q
why didn't they publish them? That would have simply and
conclusively proven their point. We can only suppose that, in reality,
statistics about abuse-caused deaths either don't exist or are not as
small as NEWSWEEK suggested. Were a million killed? Four million?
We civilized people are horrified by Hitler murdering 6 million Jews
in the Holocaust. However (and this is consistent with NEWSWEEK's
statements), 6 million Mexican Indians could have been killed by war
and oppression, and that would still be less than the 10-25 million
that may have died from disease. See? If you focus only on European
barbarism, "it's fairly easy to paint....a damning portrait. But it also
leaves a lot out." (Note that in 1500 the world had about a quarter of
the population that existed in 1945, which magnifies the relative
scope of all the deaths.)
To add insult to injury, NEWSWEEK claims that while Columbus and
the conquistadors carried "mumps, measles, whooping cough,
smallpox, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever," "syphilis may have
spread in the opposite direction," appearing in Europe in 1493.
Nowhere is it mentioned that this disease was probably picked up by
Columbus' men raping native women (which Columbus himself notes
in his journals). And this whole catastrophe Q euphemistically called
the "Great Disease Migration" Q is discussed in a voice of pseudo-
scientism and balanced journalism that reassures us that diseases
travelled east and diseases travelled west and such is the way of
opportunistic germs... (I wonder what would happen if students read
NEWSWEEK and other descriptions of these events and discussed why
the writers used the language they did, whose interests various types
of language serve, and what kind of language feels most appropriate
to the students themselves.)
In its ongoing effort to remove the onus from Spanish invaders,
NEWSWEEK points out that Indians had been enslaving and murdering
each other for years before Europeans arrived. Again, they offer no
statistics to demonstrate that Indian fratracide came anywhere near
the extent of Spanish slaughter and oppression. The Spaniards just
practiced the kind of violence that was normal in their era, and were
religious about it, to boot. You can't expect people to rise above their
times, can you?
And then, in a mind-boggling act of PR bravado, NEWSWEEK gives us
a quick peek in the historical closet to show us there are more
skeletons in there than on the stage: "The whole of Spain's treatment
of the Indians seems almost benificent compared with the way other
colonial powers dealt with natives." Spain made a place for the
Indians, says the smiling PR man, Gregory Cerio; they intermarried
and created the mixed Spanish-Indian population and culture which
we now think of as Latin American. They even "taxed the New World
colonists less heavily than their European subjects." [God knows
what help that was to the Indians.] In contrast, "North Americans in
many cases simply exterminated the Indians," who were "driven off
their land and eventually hunted down."
This murky bit of information is flashed in our faces without
warning in the final paragraphs of the article about Spain's
atrocities. At which point the closet door is slammed shut again,
before the full significance of what we've seen can register. Unless
we are alert, we don't realize that they've just admitted that, while
Spain may have committed atrocities, we committed genocide. After
a mere four sentences this delicate subject is casually abandoned,
which further affirms that we're not talking about us, because the
subject is Spain, because Columbus worked for the Spanish, you see,
and it's Columbus' quincentennial that we're talking about, not
Anglo-American history. End of discussion.
Interestingly, only a few sentences earlier NEWSWEEK had
dismissed accusations of "genocide" against Spain because the
Spanish didn't undertake "the intentional, systematic eradication of
a race." Which makes it nervy for them to note that Anglo-
Americans "exterminated the Indians." But they pull it off. I doubt
many readers noticed the close call.
Cerio then pontificates: "History offers no shortage of acts of
cruelty performed in the service of religious, social, political and
economic ideals." Were this a classroom, it would be instructive to
point out how such moral relativism contains a degree of truth only if
the writer is willing to view the crimes of enemies with the same
amoral objectivity. But we all know that that sentence would never
appear in a NEWSWEEK article about Mao, Stalin, Hitler, or Ayatollah
Khomeini. Cerio's use of the sentence is intended to nip in the bud
any reactions of moral outrage that might have been triggered by
discussions of the "intrusive spirit" of the Europeans. In that role, it
is not philosophy but a particularly virulent strain of propaganda.
Unfortunately, most NEWSWEEK readers probably succumbed to it. If
we don't like it, I fear we'll have to offer innoculations against such
disabling language.
The article ends with atmospheric questions about whether
human beings in general are good or bad: "The Black Legend casts a
shadow on us all." Including, one supposes, the dead Indians.
"THE GREAT FOOD MIGRATION"
It is fascinating that they even raised this issue. I mean, when
you think about Columbus, the first thing that comes to mind is FOOD,
right?
Of course not. So why do they spend five pages on it. I can't shake
the suspicion that NEWSWEEK's motive was to draw people away from
an extraordinary document: Jack Weatherford's 1988 book, INDIAN
GIVERS: HOW THE INDIANS OF THE AMERICAS TRANSFORMED THE WORLD. This book
uses the history of American Indians to deeply challenge Euro-centric
cultural arrogance and assumptions. I believe it is the first major
book to document the extent of Indian influence on international food
culture, and it has gained some notoriety for that. Its problem is that
it doesn't stop there. Among other things, it documents how our
cherished Anglo-American concepts of freedom, democracy and
federalism owe more to Native American traditions than to the
Greeks and the Magna Carta. It quietly notes the value of what we
know of Indian life, beliefs and knowledge and ponders the value of
what we have destroyed and ignored Q and what even today we are
ignoring and destroying. Weatherford's respect for indigenous
culture challenges us to question our own lives and culture, to face
our history and the reality of our world instead of molding them to
our arrogance. He challenges us to grow up. His is a quietly,
insightfully radical book.
And, since the subject of Indian influence on us is bound to
interest people in the quincentennial year, Weatherford's remarkable
book would attract a lot of attention. Which might start people
asking questions. Better to give them an alternative, something that
leaves out all the controversial stuff and focusses on food. Voila! WHY
WE EAT WHAT WE EAT: HOW THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD
CHANGED THE WAY EVERYONE ON THE PLANET EATS, by Raymond Sokolov,
brand new. (Will someone please find out who got this guy to write
this book?) The next step would be to publicize the book and feature
FOOD as the big thing we got from the Indians (aside from two
continents). Then, just to make sure no one thinks the Indians were
that special, people should be told how we gave the Indians food, as
well. That's better.
And so we find an article in NEWSWEEK, based on Sokolov's book,
saying that Europeans brought foods to the Americas and the Indians
contributed foods to everybody else and both kinds got swept up into
the million distinctive menus of today's wonderful global
smorgasbord. (As an example of "culinary subversion," the article
offers this: "the new McDonald's Cajun hot sauce tastes awfully good
on its Egg McMuffin.")
To further raise suspicions, we find that Raymond Sokolov has
written the final essay in this NEWSWEEK special edition: "Stop
Knocking Columbus: Fie on all this self-hating revisionism. Let's
raise a glass and hail our 500th." It reeks of cuisinary bigotry Q such
as dismissing Mexican algae as "nauseating stuff" Q and proclaims
that we should not be embarrassed to feel proud of the ingenuity of
our ancestors in creating a diet "at huge cost in human lives... After
all," he says, "didn't the rich civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas
have to be destroyed so that Belgians could eat french fries"? Calling
Columbus "the most influential man of modern times" and "only a
convenient scapegoat for our own self-hate and...very modern doubts
about the value of our culture," Sokolov proclaims that "we might as
well celebrate the mammouth achievement of five centuries" Q that
we have grafted every culture in the world onto ours and now every-
one in the world wants it. You have to admit that he lets his colors
show.
But I digress. Let us return to the food article, which goes on at
great length about cuisines and "jaded palates," but seldom
mentions nutrition. For good reason: the main contributions of the
Indians were corn, potatoes, tomatoes, beans and nuts Q whereas the
European contribution consisted largely of meat animals and sugar
cane. The article observes that "before Columbus, many native cul-
tures were relatively meatless." Nowhere does it even hint that meat
and sugar were disasterous additions to the healthy Indian diet of
corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers and "grubs, insect eggs and pond
scum." The pond scum referred to is the previously-mentioned blue-
green algae, which modern yuppies pay a pretty penny for as a
super-food.
In one of the rare references to nutrition, the article states that
"crops like potatoes and corn, which could produce far more nutrition
per acre than the grains that came before [like wheat and oats],
allowed for [European] population growth." However, "in Europe,
humans never really took to corn, but it became a major source of
fodder for animals and helped improve nuturition by making meat
cheaper....[Today] Americans consume an average of three pounds of
corn a day in the form of meat, poultry and dairy products." So we
even turned the nutritional blessings of potatoes and corn into the
nutritional and economic curse of meat (see John Robbins, DIET FOR A
NEW AMERICA). To question the fairness and consequences of "The
Columbian Exchange" would raise issues that no establishment
magazine can afford to raise: like how to build a sustainable, just
society.
IN GENERAL
NEWSWEEK needed apologists to say (a) that we Europeans are
culturally superior (this had to be communicated subtly enough not
to ruffle too many feathers in what they cynically call "our
multicultural, interdependent, ultrasensitive modern world"), (b)
that we "may have a lot to apologize for" (Sokolov's words) but we
aren't bad guys and that (c) therefore we don't have to fundamentally
change our ways or (d) look to anybody else (like the Indians) for
lessons about how to live decently on this earth. It is (c) and (d) that
make the quincentennial protests most threatening. In order to
prevent a springtime of radical insight and inquiry, the American
establishment is once again proving itself capable of admitting, in
the thoroughly controlled context exemplified by this NEWSWEEK, that
"mistakes were made."
So we find them saying that Columbus "put a lot of energy into not
seeing things as they were." (Do we?) They readily acknowledge that
"much of the old 'Columbus sailed the ocean blue' lore does need
refinement" and that for indigenous peoples "Columbus's arrival was
pretty much a disaster." (Yeah, pretty much so, I'd say.) After all,
"for all sorts of reasons, minority populations, non-European cultures
and tropical forests enjoy a lot of sympathy these days. If these are
your primary concerns, it's fairly easy to paint Columbus and the
early explorers as people who oppressed the local residents, smashed
alien civilizations and chopped down a lot of trees...."
Despite the great efforts of NEWSWEEK's fine publicists, the elite,
white perspective virtually drips off every page. The reference above
to "minority populations" (meaning the world's colored majority) is
simply one of the more obvious cases. You suspect that it wasn't an
African American who wrote, in the issue's ambivalent mea culpa
about slavery: "African slaves were the only possible remedy for the
labor shortages that plagued their New World dominions; slaves
mined the precious metals and harvested the sugar, indigo and to-
bacco that made colonization worthwhile." I doubt it was a black who
chose to feature a picture of blacks enslaving blacks, with the
caption: "Millions of Africans were sold into slavery by warring
tribes;" and then, almost as an afterthought, "more were captured by
European traders." Of course it doesn't even hint at the fact that
blacks wouldn't have sold other blacks into slavery without Europe's
insatiable demand for slaves. Again, the strategy of the publicists is
to admit in gory detail the travesty of slavery while trying to
minimize Europe's and America's historical responsibility and
avoiding the sticky implications that history has for our culture,
values and economic system today.
NEWSWEEK asserts that "the notion that blacks are inferior as a
group...may well be the central tragedy of American history" Q
apparently oblivious to the irony of that statement for Native
Americans. It brushes off the observation that neither the
destruction of the Indians nor the enslavement of Africans would
have happened without the European demand for profit "that made
colonization worthwhile." "It is too simplistic to picture...European
explorers as mere money-grubbers." They must avoid at all costs the
admission that enslavement is still happening today, that
decimation of indigenous peoples is still happening, that destruction
of the environment is very decidedly happening today and that all
these facts have a common root. That root is our sick, culturally
condoned, institutionalized compulsion to benefit ourselves at the
expense of anyone and everything else. It is a root that's very near
the surface, thanks to this 500th Columbus Day. It doesn't take much
digging to reach it. NEWSWEEK had to go through contortions to avoid
it.
1992 is the best opportunity we've ever had to challenge the
alienated, domineering assumptions and myths of our culture. In
many ways, this special NEWSWEEK edition is a desperate attempt to
block that opportunity. As brilliant a document as it is, the des-
peration shows through. It should be studied Q even publicized by us Q
as a masterpiece of propaganda, along with 1992 political campaign
speeches and Nazi war films. In every school, living room, computer
network, and church congregation in the country people should be
studying it as a classic. It should be held aloft, given prizes (like
Senator Proxmire's prizes to the Pentagon for spending hundreds of
dollars for toilet seats). Mad Magazine could do wonders with it. A
few thousand cancelled NEWSWEEK subscriptions would add some spice
to the effort. Media, PR and ad professionals in the movement might
get together to brainstorm and strategize other approaches.
Ultimately, though, we need to return to the pressing business of
learning real lessons from our history so we can "turn our attention
to making the next 500 years different from the past ones," as Suzan
Shown Harjo says in the only page (out of 85) that NEWSWEEK saw fit to
devote to an authentic Indian voice.