Crisis of historical identity
I recently finished a review for the News Weekly on an increasingly relevant book called Columbus and the Crisis of the West. Columbus, being the one to bridge the ‘New’ and ‘Old’ worlds, is a major figurehead in the shared history of Western Civilization.
The legacy of Western Civilization has faced increasing scrutiny over the last few decades, and the famous explorer has also come under fire - both for his pivotal role in our history and for controversy around his governance in the New World.
The author Robert Royal wrote the book to rebut some myths and misconceptions about Columbus and to correct the record on the legacy of the U.S. and the West. Aiming to debunk certain claims, the book still provides a balanced account of the controversies. Royal includes testimonies and records both critical and affirming, and shows that most situations are rarely ‘black and white’, with the actions of those involved often being a mixture of good and bad.
As I read and gained a fuller appreciation of the facts around Columbus, colonization, and how what we now know as ‘The West’ came to be, the thing that stood out most is the sheer ignorance of history conveyed by the modern generation - intentional or otherwise.
Royal rightly points out that one of major factors in the overwhelmingly negative portrayals of Columbus and other historical figures by contemporary critics is the significant bias in academia and falling standards in the education system. The next generation are not just being taught an incomplete version of our history, but often a seriously twisted version of it.
Omissions and Misconceptions
For example, it seems more common now that when Christopher Columbus comes up in discussion, there’s someone around who says something like “didn’t that guy rape women?”. This claim implicating Columbus in rape and violence against natives isn’t entirely new but has become widely touted as fact.
For context, the original claim is actually that he allowed the “slavery and rape” of natives while he was governing the new colony. And what’s more, this claim is considered to be weak or exaggerated among historians. Yet still more often than not, we hear Columbus decried as a rapist.
The ignorance is often not deliberate, however the main drivers behind unfairly negative portrayals like this one are intentional omissions and cherry-picking of data by those who should know better…
Political/environmental activist and author Kirkpatrick Sale chose in his book to selectively quotes Friar Francisco de Vitoria in a way that appears to support Sale’s claim that the European philosophical tradition sanctioned imperialism and ecological exploitation. In doing so, he completely ignores the context of said quote and the vast majority of Vitoria’s work in developing the principles that eventually formed the foundation of international law and the recognition of universal human rights.
Those like Sale have received a wide uptake of their work among teachers, journalists, and the public, despite a lack of historical support for their misleading views. To give another brief example, an erroneous view now commonly held among academia is that of the ‘noble savage’; peaceful, passive natives living in perfect harmony with nature… until the Europeans arrived and ruined everything.
Contemporary critics seem to have a tendency to portray historical figures as either purely good (the natives) or purely evil (the Europeans & Columbus), yet the reality is far more mixed, and not in their favour. In fact, the archaeological record and testimony of observers paint a macabre picture of many Native American societies.
Besides some tribes who were relatively peaceful following the ravaging of disease, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and brutal torture of captives (perhaps even brutal by Inquisition standards) were far more common than your liberal professor wants you to believe.
The results of ignorance
These are but a handful of examples that show a sharp decay in the integrity of academia and education regarding history. The result of this trend has been to produce a movement of entitled, misguided, and (ironically) violent anti-Western activists that seek to expunge many of our greatest people and their achievements from memory, replacing them with caricatures that are entirely oppressive, tyrannical, and evil.
Outbursts of this ignorant activism manifested in 2020, when rioting, vandalism and looting broke out in several U.S. cities, with smaller riots in other locations across the UK, Canada, and Australia. Leaders of these movements claimed to be fighting “systemic racism”.
Several statues were pulled down including a few of Columbus’s. One of the statues belonged to Black abolitionist Frederick Douglas (yes, you read that correctly) with more being toppled the following year.
The antidote is responsibility
This movement and its adherents are merciless and misguided. While they declare their targets to be tyrannical and oppressive by a moral standard they cannot attain themselves, they forget that the very society and institutions they spit on gave them the freedom to get on their soap boxes in the first place, without fear of retribution.
Royal puts it much more eloquently: the radical critique of the West could not have happened without the very values — equality, human dignity, liberty — that spring from the Western tradition itself, and more specifically the Christian universalism that sees every human person, however imperfect, as a child of God, something that has existed in no other civilization
If the institutions and ‘experts’ will no longer do their job to correct this propagation of ignorance, then we must take responsibility for our own education. We can empower ourselves and the next generation to debunk the malicious critique of our heritage, faith, and values.
If we don’t, we will continue to see history butchered and rewritten to serve political agendas, and the consequences will be dire. The danger is summed up in a prophetic line from Orwell’s often quoted 1984; “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”.