Posted on 05/20/2004 7:10:03 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
The Spanish Empire fell with a cataclysmic crash after its armada sank off the coasts of The British Isles. Its infamous reputation lived for centuries and tarred generations of Hispanic people with an unfair reputation for duplicity, inhumanity and barbaric cruelty. This horrible reputation, known by historians as "La Leyenda Negra", or The Black Legend resulted primarily from the writings of a Catholic Monk; Father Bartolomeo De Las Casas.
De Las Casas observed the encomienderos and all of the misery which these people inflicted upon South and Central America. His account sickens any person with a rational mind. When rock singer Neil Young wrote his PC Jeremiad "Cortez Was a Killer", he riffed off the fundamental conceit posited by the writings of De Las Casas. Five hundred years after De Las Casas died his message of self-loathing and grief resounded across the ages and profoundly affected the thinking of a man who probably never studied Spanish Literature and History.
The 9/11 Commission will compose the primary source historical document that will inform future generations of historians, school children and pop culture entertainers of what happened on 11 September 2001. These men and women seem too shortsighted to recognize what they have in their hands. They are the ambassadors that will introduce our society and our traditions to the world of the future. These commissioners are writing the American History that people five hundred years hence will gripe about having to read in high school or college.
Like Bartolomeo De Las Casas, the 9/11 Commission presents an antiheroic picture of our people and our society. Their description of the NYPD and the NYFD does not even remotely give these men and women credit for valor and initiative. The Monday Morning Bart Starr's cast their aspersions on these officers and firefighters from the overfed and very comfortable perspective of The Inquisitor's Chair.
They portray the rescue workers who toiled in desperation amongst the fires of Ghenna as bumbling caricatures of Henry Blake and Frank Burns in a profoundly sickening and distasteful episode of MASH. My grandchildren may never see the heroism of these people because a bunch of retread, hack politicians have usurped the mantle that should have been given to people vastly better. The shortsighted and cupiditous are writing the first draft of the history of our age.
I have read Bartolomeo De Las Casa and took a very light lunch after doing so. I have no objective way of knowing whether his history is a fair and accurate account of how Spaniards behaved in The Caribbean Islands. Enough other people support his version of events that this seems likely. Thus, what I learned about Latin American History heavily reflects De Las Casas' appraisal of Spanish imperial policy and society. Judging from Neil Young's musical protest, a lot of other people learned the same version.
Some historian 500 years hence will read the report of the 9-11 Commission. They will then read a few editorials from The New York Times. After that, our notional historian will plug America's own low-budget Sergei Eisenstein, Michael Moore into his DVD player. Amazingly, Michael Moore, the respected and widely read New York Times and Jabba the Haw Haw, Michael Moore all corroborate one another.
The historian will write a moving and elegant text that plants this revisionist view as the axiomatic view of ancient and corrupt America. The author will win tenure and go on to renown and acclaim.
My point is simply this. We have to start paying attention to who writes that first rough draft of Post-Modern American History. The authors thereof can do for our nation what Vergil did for Rome or they can do to our culture what Bartolomeo De Las Casa did to the Hispanics. Nothing would prove more tragic and wrong than allowing the despicable Michael Moore to proceed through the eons as the legendary historian of our corrupt and immoral age.
The Black Legend was mostly the work of British and Dutch Protestant propagandists of the seventeenth century. The British have always been superb at the craft of propaganda, and they did a job on the Spaniards, which of course was helped along by the cordial hatred of Catholicism current among most Protestants and sons of the Enlightenment in the following centuries.
The Black Legend focused on the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada, and events in Spain as well as on the history of the new world.
The cruelty of the Conquistadores is still famous, although as I once pointed out to a friend, How come if they were so cruel most of the Indians of Latin America are still alive, and intermarried with the Spanish settlers, while most of the Indians of North America are dead?
Not to say that there wasn't cruelty, but it was hardly unique to the history of humanity. Recent studies of the Spanish Inquisition similarly demonstrate that, although cruel by modern standards, it was far more just and fair than most of the secular courts in northern Europe at the time. The Inquisition executed only a few witches in Italy in Spain. In Germany and the north, thousands were burnt at the stake. But for centuries the Black Legend obscured these historical details.
Excellent observations! The Black Legend was based on Las Casas' work, but like any legend, it needed to be cultivated. It was the Protestants who seized on this opportunity and took one man's exaggerated, self-serving acccount and turned it into "history" because it served their purposes. Just like the Dems with the 9/11 commission.
BTW, Las Casas was an odd figure, someone who defended "inculturation" to the point that he defended the human sacrifices of the Indians as being simply a cultural phenomenon that should be LEGALLY PROTECTED by the legal system the Spanish were building in Mexico. He also estimated the number of Indians killed by the Spanish to be a number that would have been something like 3 times the number of indigenous people even living in Mexico at the time. And, with one exception, everything in his books are "accounts" with no names, no places, no dates. As someone else pointed out, the most important word in his writings, furthermore, is "yo" ("I").
There was definitely cruelty practiced by the new Spanish landholders, but it was not religiously motivated and indeed Ferdinand and Isabel, as well as the Pope, had attempted to prevent it.
But all it takes is one egomaniac with a fast and furious pen (or mouth) and an audience willing to believe, and the "legend" is established.
Father Bartolomeo de las Casas is perhaps best remembered today as the "father of African slavery" in the Americas. His writings about the physical hardships instilled by the Spaniards upon the Indians, whom he described as having a soul (which was controversial at the time among Europeans) and also as having too weak a consistency to toil in the fields under the hot Caribbean sun for hours on end, convinced the Spaniards that enslaving the Indians was inhumane. I'm not sure if De las Casas himself suggested the importation of black Africans---deemed to be of much stronger consistency and more able to work under the hot sun, so their slavery supposedly wouldn't be "inhumane"---as a substitute work force, but if it wasn't him it was someone who based the idea on De las Casas' writings. I recall a highschool professor telling me that De las Casas had also claimed that Indians had souls but black Africans didn't, but perhaps my professor was jumping to conclusions because De las Casas wrote that Indians had souls but may have been silent about black Africans. In any event, the well-intentioned Father Bartolomeo de las Casas did more for the spread of evil than most evil men of his day.
De las Casas had black slaves himself.
Good observations and perspective.
Send this piece to the Commissioners, as they are surely only primping themselves for the next face time in front of the TV camera; the future of their scribbling is of no importance of theirs after July 26, 2004.
"Wow, they sure present an edited version of De Las Casas in undergrad Latin American History."
"The cruelty of the Conquistadores is still famous, although as I once pointed out to a friend, How come if they were so cruel most of the Indians of Latin America are still alive, and intermarried with the Spanish settlers, while most of the Indians of North America are dead?"
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