(2 of 2)
The real question is, What eventually grew on this bloodied soil? The answer is, The great modern civilizations of the Americas -- a new world of individual rights, an ever expanding circle of liberty and, twice in this century, a savior of the world from totalitarian barbarism.
If we are to judge civilizations like individuals, they should all be hanged, because with individuals it takes but one murder to merit a hanging. But if one judges civilizations by what they have taken from and what they have given the world, a nonjaundiced observer -- say, one of the millions in Central Europe and Asia whose eyes are turned with hope toward America -- would surely bless the day Columbus set sail.
Thus Part I of the anti-'92 crusade is calumny for Columbus and his legacy. Part II is hagiography, singing of the saintedness of the Indians in their pre-Columbian Eden, a land of virtue, empathy and ecological harmony. With Columbus, writes Sale, Europe "implanted its diseased and dangerous seeds in . the soils of the continents that represented the last best hope for humankind -- and destroyed them."
Last best hope? No doubt, some Indian tribes (the Hopis, for example) were tree-hugging pacifists. But the notion that pre-Columbian America was a hemisphere of noble savages is an adolescent fantasy (rather lushly, if ludicrously, animated in Dances with Wolves).
Take the Incas. Inca civilization, writes Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, was a "pyramidal and theocratic society" of "totalitarian structure" in which "the individual had no importance and virtually no existence." Its foundation? "A state religion that took away the individual's free will and crowned the authority's decision with the aura of a divine mandate turned the Tawantinsuyu ((Incan empire)) into a beehive."
True, the beehive was wantonly destroyed by "semiliterate, implacable and greedy swordsmen." But they in turn represented a culture in which "a social space of human activities had evolved that was neither legislated nor controlled by those in power." In other words, a culture of liberty that endowed the individual human being with dignity and sovereignty.
Is it Eurocentric to believe the life of liberty is superior to the life of the beehive? That belief does not justify the cruelty of the conquest. But it does allow us to say that after 500 years the Columbian legacy has created a civilization that we ought not, in all humble piety and cultural relativism, declare to be no better or worse than that of the Incas. It turned out better.
And mankind is the better for it. Infinitely better. Reason enough to honor Columbus and bless 1492.