Yesterday I wished readers a Happy Human Sacrifice Abolition Day. Today let me expatiate on the increasingly common practice of treating history as a court room and our ancestors as either the accused in the dock or their innocent, wholly meritorious victims.
Columbus Day is the starkest instance of this phenomenon, though I expect it to spread in time to Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday. After that, it may reach the holiday named after Martin Luther King, Jr., the racist agitator who wanted to judge people by “the content of their character” without regard to intersectional identities of victimhood. President Biden’s Columbus Day proclamation had two themes. One was the “lasting contributions to our Nation” made by Italian-Americans. The other, longer and clearly more heartfelt, questioned whether that Nation was worth contributing to:
Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past – that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them. For Native Americans, western exploration ushered in a wave of devastation: violence perpetrated against Native communities, displacement and theft of Tribal homelands, the introduction and spread of disease, and more. On this day, we recognize this painful past and recommit ourselves to investing in Native communities, upholding our solemn and sacred commitments to Tribal sovereignty, and pursuing a brighter future centered on dignity, respect, justice, and opportunity for all people.
The President also issued “A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2021” that elaborates on the “vibrant and diverse cultures” of “American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians” in contrast with “the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country”. His occasional Veep came out of the Clueless Protection Program to deliver a speech lamenting how European “explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations – perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease”.
It is certainly true that European immigrants to what is now the United States – no doubt the Vice President wishes there had been a big, beautiful border wall back then – fought wars with the Indians, occupied and farmed land over which (by European notions) native tribes held sovereignty, and carried with them diseases that had never before been present in the New World (and which Europe would have been happy not to suffer). But it is also true that millions of people who had lived in poverty or under tyrannical rule in the Old World found in America better lives for themselves and their descendants and that the nation that eventually emerged from European colonization was the first to be founded on an unprecedented conception of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. It is conceivable that, had America remained the dominion of the Indians, our modern ideas of liberty and democracy would have taken root and flourished somewhere else, some other time. It is less conceivable that the time would have arrived already.
Our backward facing “progressives” don’t want to talk about any of that. They are most interested in passing moral judgment on the settlers. For present purposes, I’ll set aside arguments about the accuracy of their accusations and instead question the purpose of the inquisition. Two points are striking:
First, the inquisitors are, by and large, people who deny the existence of universally binding moral code. They insist that individuals create their own values and are not beholden to archaic moral precepts (or even, to an increasing extent, to the facts of biology). Yet that relativistic perspective is exchanged for the spirit of Torquemada when the past comes under scrutiny. It’s a fact of our era that those who have no church are the most zealous to burn heretics.
Second, the judging is far from even-handed. Did Europeans, in the Old World or the New, engage in wars whose objective was to capture enemies who would then be ritually sacrificed to appease literally blood-thirsty gods? Were any of them cannibals? Was slavery absent among the Indians? Did tribes never seize others’ territories, exterminate their menfolk and force their women into sexual servitude? For those crimes the progressive prosecutors never render indictments.
Why the discrepancy? Is it because the prosecutors see nothing wrong with human sacrifice or cannibalism and are unaware of Indians’ enslavement of other Indians (and of whites and blacks, too, after those races arrived in the hemisphere)? That sounds implausible. The self-evident explanation is that the aim of the historical inquest isn’t to discover malefactors but to instill feelings of shame and guilt in their descendants. It is a political tactic designed to silence opponents without the bother of grappling with their arguments.
The same tactic is available to the Right, of course, though conservatives who deploy it get much less media amplification. For roughly a hundred years after the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow, and resistance to integration was led almost exclusively by Democrats. Democratic Presidential candidates, including those like Adlai Stevenson who ostensibly supported civil rights legislation, balanced their tickets with Southern segregationist running mates. If all historical records between 1954 and 2020 were lost, a future historian might credibly hypothesize that the Democrats’ embrace of critical race theory descended in a direct line from “massive resistance”.
How America evolved from minuscule colonial outposts into a great and free nation is a fascinating story. If we are going to pass judgment on the dramatis personae, we should do so with awareness of the virtues of what they brought forth rather a prurient emphasis than on what we now perceive as their vices. Contrary to Mark Antony, it often happens that the good that men do lives after them, while the evil is interred with their bones. And if we do feel called upon to be judges, our verdicts shouldn’t be dictated by how aptly they will serve contemporary polemical purposes.
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