The US is in the process of reviewing its statuary. [pharyngula]
Some wind up face down, some remain standing. Why, and which? It’s not just that we want to glorify the winners, or the gloriously defeated – the people who put the statues up do so to memorialize something. Was it the people, or their ideology? To me, it’s inescapable that statuary is memorial, and that it’s sometimes a reminder of a great wrong. Other times, it’s narcissistic propaganda for the rich and powerful. “Look at me upon my horse!”
US Troops tearing down a statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Baghdad
Where it gets weird is when people internalize the messages of the statues and misunderstand (deliberately, or because they are victims of propaganda) the purpose of the statue. It’s not necessarily there to remind us of history – or there would be a statue of Ho Chi Mihn near the Vietnam memorial, or perhaps a bronze of the dead at My Lai. Instead of a movie theater and dining complex where the Homestead steel mill used to stand, there would be a heroic bronze of a mill-worker getting beaten up by a Pinkerton’s man, or – perhaps – of the Pinkerton’s men later running in fear for their lives. As Howard Zinn puts it so eloquently: it depends on your perspective.
I must explain my point of view. It’s obvious in the very first pages of the larger People’s History when I tell about Columbus, and emphasize not his navigational skill and fortitude in making his way to the western hemisphere, but his cruel treatment of the indians he found here, torturing them, exterminating them, and his greed for gold – his desperation to bring riches for his patrons back in Spain. In other words, my focus is not on the achievements of the heroes of traditional history, but on all those people who were the victims of those achievements, who suffered silently, or fought back magnificently.
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors, as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize the genocide, is not a technical necessity, but an ideological choice. It serves unwittingly to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn, Columbus in absentia. It’s too late for that. It would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities, as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress, Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save western civilization – Kronstadt and Hungary to save socialism, nuclear proliferation to save us all. That is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks.
This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is, therefore, more deadly. The treatment of heroes – Columbus – and their victims, the Arawaks, the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress, is only one aspect of a certain approach to history in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance. As if they, the founding fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of congress, the famous justices of the Supreme Court – represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “The United States” – subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels but fundamentally a community of people with common interests.
A friend of mine recently ran across someone on facebook claiming that the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast 1619 [1619] was “revisionist history” by attempting to place black slaves in the larger frame of pre-southern slavery. In the sense that Howard Zinn talks about history, all history is revisionist because the historian had to choose what to leave in and what to leave out. It’s the stuff that you leave out that is more subtle and pernicious than what you leave in.
The main purpose of bronze statues is so the pigeons have a place to shit.
“his cruel treatment of the indians he found here”
Starting with calling them “Indians”…
You mean that Gérard Depardieu movie wasn’t a documentary? (Selected quote: “We come in peace and with honor. They are not savages, neither will we be. Treat them as you would your own wives and children. Respect their beliefs. Pillage will be punished by the whip. Rape, by the sword.”
Yeah. Made in 1992.
I wish they could leave the horses up and cut the people off them; it wasn’t Traveler’s fault his owner was a racist. Yeah; I realize that’s not practical.
I’m still mad about all the stuff the left out in history class. Apparently this is still going on. I remember hearing Aron Ra saying that his children’s friends did not know that Martin Luther King was black. I guess one thing they left out in that history book was a photo or any mention of that tiny, unimportant fact. And yet it kinda makes a difference.
sonofrojblake@#1:
“his cruel treatment of the indians he found here”
Starting with calling them “Indians”…
,,, Feeding comedy sketches ever since.
It really was an amazingly buttheaded move.
One important point that is made in Charles Mann’s 1491 is that Columbus’ mission was more like a smash-and-grab raid in intent, than an exploration mission. The Spanish were there for gold and other valuables and anything they could haul away.
Side topic:
FDA warns about methanol-based hand sanitizers
I think it was in The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin where he made a comment that Columbus was lying to his crew the whole way as well. He would use reckoning methods to figure out how far they had sailed (there weren’t clocks good enough to really determine longitude yet) and he recorded them in his log. He then lied to his crew and told them lower numbers, so that when they got to the distance Columbus had originally said India would be at and they hadn’t found anything yet, he wouldn’t have a mutiny on his hands. We know this because he recorded the specific lies in the log book as well so he would know what he had told everybody.
(Amusingly, based on the best guess as to where he actually first landed, Columbus apparently regularly over-estimated his travel distances, and the lies told to the crew were actually more accurate than his private numbers.)
He also threatened anybody on the crew who even suggested that where they had landed wasn’t India. A lot of the descriptions of his behaviour sound a lot more like somebody desperately trying to avoid getting caught in a lie than someone who actually believed what he said he was going for.
Pretty much Columbus was a con-man and grifter of his time, and just wound up absurdly lucky.
jenorafeuer@#5:
He also threatened anybody on the crew who even suggested that where they had landed wasn’t India. A lot of the descriptions of his behaviour sound a lot more like somebody desperately trying to avoid getting caught in a lie than someone who actually believed what he said he was going for.
He was all over twitter, saying “Stupid and lazy crewmembers saying we are not in India! Fake news! Someone’s going to be sleaping with the fishes.”
Reginald Selkirk@#4:
Side topic:
FDA warns about methanol-based hand sanitizers
Well, at least I wasn’t using it in a hand sanitizer.
Asking for a friend: what about kerosene?
@ Marcus, tell your friend that kerosene is a poor hand sanitizer, and it won’t get absorbed through your skin very easily, but its direct contact with the skin should still be avoided, as should be breathing in of the fumes.
Skin contact and fumes-breathing should be avoided for all organic solvents just as a matter of course. From those most commonly used, the least harmful are isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol), ethanol, and acetone, but AFAIK everything else should be used only with gloves and in well-ventilated spaces even in small amounts. The problem often is not absorption through the skin, but the destruction of skin cells through their high lipid-affinity. It can cause irritation and in prolonged use, the skin might just peel off as if burned.
Charly@#8:
@ Marcus, tell your friend that kerosene is a poor hand sanitizer, and it won’t get absorbed through your skin very easily, but its direct contact with the skin should still be avoided, as should be breathing in of the fumes.
I’ve been using a can of kerosene as a degreaser/oxygen block for stainless steel welding. You cannot imagine how stressful it is to stick your hand into kerosene and pull out a bunch of dripping metal, then go after it with an arc welder. The reason I am using kerosene is it’s got a pretty low vapor pressure and I’m not likely to have a fuel/air explosion. On the other hand, I’ve got to be ready to slam the lid on the can if it catches fire and if I knock it over I probably get to die.