Hildegarde

So it’s the day after Columbus Day, and I would have posted this yesterday, except that the inevitable happened on a three day week-end:  that cold or whatever it is that has been threatening to hit me all week landed on my head.

That, and I had a screaming fight with Matt the night before.  He hung up the phone and went off to play in Philly with his friends.  I couldn’t sleep.

But yesterday being Columbus Day, I had a number of posts on FB urging me “not to celebrate genocide,” almost all of them from people I like, and I figured it’s about time I said this.

Go ahead.  Celebrate Columbus Day.  You won’t be celebrating genocide.  There wasn’t one.

The great “genocide” of indigenous peoples following on the European discovery of the Americas is in the same class as the “burning times” of witches in Medieval Europe and the “genocide” of aborigines in Australia in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century.

It never happened, and any look at the actual numbers will make that obvious in very little time.  Somewhere in this office I’ve got a book with all the footnotes not only on this one but on the other two, and I’ll post in a day or two.

But in the meantime, I’d like to make a couple of points.

The first is that genocide is a word with a meaning, and it isn’t “killed a lot of people in a war of conquest.”  It means to attempt to eradicate a racial or ethnic group from the face of the planet or, at the very least, from the larger local area. 

It’s not that genocides have never been attempted, or never happened, because they must have.  There was the obvious example–meaning Hitler and the Nazis–but also some other smaller ones here and there. 

I write about Armenian-Americans, after all, and they’re sincerely concerned with what the Turks did in 1915.  And what the Turks did was systematic enough so that there is at least an arguable case that what was attempted there was genocide.

But the fact is that genocide is actually very rare, and vanishingly rare in literate societies.  That’s what makes the Nazi episode so shocking. 

What’s always makes that episode sound so insane is the simple fact that actual genocide is insane.  It’s insane even if we don’t look at the moral level. On a practical basis, it makes little or no sense. 

In the long history of the world, conquest has been a generally good thing for the conquering countries (and on some levels also sometimes for the conquered), but it would not be if it was carried out by invading a country and then slaughtering every last man, woman and child in it.

Ancient peoples had a much more rational alternative to genocide when they conquered whole peoples:  slavery. 

The second thing is this:  while the “burning times” seem to have been made up out of whole cloth in an collective spasm of orgiastic victim-identity politics, the Columbian and Australian “genocides” were at least based on something that did in fact happen.

What did in fact happen were wars of conquest. 

And here’s where I get really interested, because something really interesting is happening here.

And all the pseudo-historical nonsense about genocide obscures it.

Consider this:  wars of conquest are the rule, not the exception, throughout all of human history, in every single society that ever learned how to read and write.

Virtually all the epic poetry that has come down to us is about “war,” but what it really is about is the attempt of some people to take over others by war.

No society prior to the 19th century ever found this circumstance morally reprehensible. 

In fact, Empire was generally considered a good thing, proof that your nation and people were great. 

And Empires were respected as long as they were strong, even by their own conquered peoples, and even when they were simultaneously resented.  Paul of Tarsus was a Jew who later became a Christian–but he was proud of his Roman citizenship to the day he died, executed by his fellow citizens. 

Paul was willing to give his life for Christ, but it may be a good thing that nobody ever asked him to give up his status as a citizen.

The old adage is “civilization spreads through conquest,” and throughout all that history it was in fact true.  When you did come upon a people who had been isolated by geography from being taken over by others, what you found was not pristine pastoral idylls, or great shining civlizations that practiced peace and tolerance.

You found, in general, what the English found when they got to Australia:  people who had not yet emerged from the stone age, who lived on a level that the lowliest slave in Rome would have considered unacceptable.

What interests me is this:  when, and why, did we stop seeing Empire in that light?

I think it’s tempting to believe that we got so morally sensitive that we were able to think of conquest as evil in and of itself, that we began to understand that every society has a right to self determination whether we like its practices or not.

But there are a couple of problems with this formulation, not the least of which have to do with its practices.

Do we really think that it is better for the people of the Sudan, for instance, to go on practicing slavery, executing homosexuals for their homosexuality, and repressing and murdering their women–than it would be for them to be ruled by someone else who would establish a rule of law and begin to eradicate those things?

Was it really better for India before the British came, when the practice of suttee was widespread?

Does it matter that even the Indians don’t think it was?

The actual practice of imperialism and colonialism was much more complicated than we allow for these days.  The Brits could be first class sons of bitches, but most of the leadership of the Indian generation that sent them packing was educated at Eton and Harrow and Rugby and Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge.

And to this day, Indian standards of education are based on the British public school system you’d think they’d reject and resent as a vestige of “colonialism.”

I’m not, as I said, in favor of a return to colonialism.  But I do think we’ve gotten so knee-jerk to the term that it’s become unuseful as an intellectual category.  Calling a country “colonialist” or “imperialist” is like calling a person “racist.”  All discussion comes to a halt.  The charge is meant not to uphold moral standards, but to strangle even the possibility of debate on a hundred questions and more.

So let’s stipulate that we are none of us in favor of colonialism, or imperialism, or conquest.

Do we have any obligations to the peoples of places like the Sudan?  Does it matter that slavery is practiced there, and in other places, in the 21st century?  Does it matter that homosexuals are executed for their homosexualityor that women are murdered and mutiliated for being raped or on the slimmest charges of adultery? 

In the 19th century, the British–imperialists that they were–went on a crusade to end slavery, everywhere.   They didn’t care if your self-determination meant that you thought you ought to have slaves.  They put their boats out into the ocean and made the slave trade virtually impossible for anybody, anywhere.

That was imperialism.  Was that a bad thing?  Would the world have been a better place if the Brits hadn’t done it?  Would the Brits have been a better people if they hadn’t done it?   Is Africa better or worse off, in the long run, because those same Brits put an end to the kidnapping of one set of tribesmen by another and the selling of the kidnapped to Arab slave traders?

Maybe it’s just that we’ve gotten to the point where we no longer feel confident that any of our standards of morality and civilization are universal and objectively true. 

The British Empire did not think that they were “imposing their values” on anybody.  They thought that at least some values applied to everybody.  Slavery wasn’t “wrong for them.”  It was wrong for everybody.  And therefore they could put an end to it.

We’re not going to go back to colonialism and imperialism any time soon–and there are enough drawbacks to both that that’s a good thing–but there are other ways of spreading civilization these days, and I’m not sure we’re doing that, either.

In Sweden, the law enforcement system has begun to turn a blind eye to honor killings among the immigrant Muslim population.  After all, that’s they’re culture, and what right have the Swedes to impose Western culture on these others?

Is that really a more moral course of action than…well, than all kinds of colonialism and imperialism down the ages?

Do you think the women murdered in those honor killings would think so?