Letters to the Editor
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@Back of Beyond
Ok Back...I give up. You win. I wasn't there. I'm just making this up. I knew it all along. They told us all about it in the 2nd grade I just wasn't paying attention. Despite the fact that I was an A student all throughout my schooling, I'm just being unfair to the world class history lessons presented to me forty years ago in a KY classroom in a small town in the western part of the state. I was asleep. I didn't care. What exactly is your point? I'm describing what the American history taught me was like forty years ago and you're insisting that I am wrong about it? How do you know? Are you bragging that you got it and the dumb KY classes I attended didn't? I don't recall anyone ever saying that all classrooms and all schools are equal. They never have been and they still aren't. I'm describing my experience and I'm describing what most of the people know whom I've worked with and around my entire adult life. It hasn't been MY experience that many people? most people? a few million of them? know much about the kind of American history as presented in these kind of books. Most of them could give a rat's ass frankly one way or the other and are just as comfortable with the myths and fables as they are with the actual facts. Forgive me if it sounds like I'm trying to say your history classes were full of fakery. Good for you that they weren't, but you're the exception. Which is MY point.
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PIRATE CIVILIZATION
Our scroll
from Genesis to Apocalypse is one of ignorance, conquest,occupation,oppression, more ignorance and now globalized exportation of the plague of our bounties and pieties. By "we" , I do not mean just the €uro demons of steel and black powder searching for El Dorado, I mean "we businesspeople", "we venture capitalists"; "we takers".
Pre €urope Africa had slaves, precolumbian Americans had ti too, and disease and ecocide but €uropean conquest in the name of wealth and religion remains the olympic record-holding champion of geoproblem in its durable and ever replicating legacy.
Our story goes on.
Mother Nature waits us out.
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everything we know?
Take a college history class and you'll learn all of this. I'm sure the book is excellent and I'm not panning it, but to say that you'd be "hard-pressed" to find Americans who are aware of this history is a wild exaggeration. This isn't the first pop non-fiction book to address these stories either. Might I recommend Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"? Next time you should probably do your homework before telling us that "everything we know" is wrong - since I suspect quite a few Americans are already in the know.
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Zinn Revealed American History Years Ago; Horwitz Expands
Howard Zinn did more than "cover this ground" many years ago. He is the first historian who turned American history (as we learned it in public schools) upside down with his emphasis on the lived experience of the American and indigenous peoples, rather than the treasured myths and lies produced those who govern us.
Like any nation state throughout the world, our government fills the brains of public school students with pap and propoganda, twisting our history of genocide against indigenous peoples, our legacy of slavery, and the continued use of state violence against its own citizens into an idealized tale of our progress march toward truth, justice, equality, and national superiority.
If we are "number one," it is not because we are freedom-loving democracy. It is because our police and military have ruthlessly crushed hundreds of thousands of human beings underfoot for hundreds of years and into the modern day without pause.
If Americans would only learn the truth about American history from historians like Zinn and journalists like Horwitz, we might be capable of recognizing the horror and injustice of the American government's ongoing imperialism and terrorism toward indigenous people of color by US military and police actions. So it was at the birth of our nation, and so it is today.
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Meanwhile, on the west coast...
China sent explorers to what is now the US Southwest and Mexico, allowing them to wander for 25 years. Find a book called "Pale Ink" by Henriette Mertz (1437530818), available in a lovely now February 2008 edition.
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@Ballsee
I'm not disputing your assertion that you weren't taught history in that way, Ballsee. I'm disputing Tonny Horwitz's assertion that history has not been taught that way, even in the 1960s when I was learning it. There are good and bad schools, curricula, teachers and students. My point is that Horwitz doesn't seem to have been a particularly good, or curious, student.
Further (and this again is not a comment on what you know), I'm with someone above who said that no one is restricted to knowledge they acquired in K-12. There's the History Channel. There are museums which constantly update their exhibits and interpretations based on new information. There are popular magazines like National Geographic and Smithsonian. There's the Internet. And there are dinner-table conversations with children about what they learned today. (Yes, some children have neither parents nor dinner; again, it doesn't follow that none do.)
I agree completely that the way history is told is shaped, and sometimes dramatically skewed, by the tellers. I just don't agree that Americans have no critical thinking skills and have swallowed those tales whole. Most kids at least will ask themselves, "How does this jive with what I know about my own family's experience?"
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Black legends and current history
The review, and not having read the book I cannot judge it, may be a "new" history of the Americas but it reproduces the old Black Legend of unique Spanish cruelty. I do not wish to suggest that the Spanish were uniquely good either but that the much more complex story of Spanish colonization has much more to tell us about our world than the redacted version presented in the review. For example, the Requirement is true as far as it goes, but before the quoted: "I assure you that, with the help of God, I will attack you mightily..." it goes on for some 800 words (in the English translation) establishing the Christian authority of the conquerors and ordering the natives to convert:
"...If you do this...His Majesty, and I in his name, will receive you with love and kindness, and relieve you, your wives and children, free and exempt from servitude, and in the enjoyment of all you possess...will bestow upon you many privileges, exemptions, and rewards. But if you will not comply, or maliciously delay to obey my injunction, then, with the help of God..., I assure you," etc.
How different is this from British General Stanley Maude's 1917 “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators” during the invasion of Iraq or our high-flown 2003 rhetoric, suitably accompanied by Shock and Awe bombing?
Likewise, "Moral introspection was not the Spaniards' strength..." Perhaps not all or even most of them, but what other monarch sponsored a debate on the treatment of the Indians as Charles I of Spain (Charles V of Austria) did in 1550? Bartolomé de las Casas argued that the natives of the Americas were in many ways morally superior to the European Christians who corrupted and oppressed them. Las Casas won the debate, and his work, along with that of many others, led to laws meant to protect the Indians. That such laws failed or that they, like the Requirement, seem ridiculous in retrospect, is no more surprising than that the best laid plans of the neo-cons failed to yield a democratic Iraq complete with flower-hurling crowds.
The fact is that moral introspection was familiar to those Spanish leaders who grappled with how to balance greed, brutality, and power with a sincere desire to convert everyone to their (one and true, they were certain) religion. That history, and not the one-dimensional portrait of cruel Spaniards (like the picture at the top of the article, drawn from the cover of a Dutch imprint of las Casas's descriptions of Spanish atrocities - meant to promote the Black Legend) is germane to a time when the most anti-war of politicians are certain that we must keep troops in Iraq for the forseeable future and for the good of the Iraqis. The Spanish, no doubt, found it necessary to destroy more than one village in order to save it. Good history might help us figure out why we continue to do so.