Reconsider Columbus Day

Excerpts from Eqbal Ahmad's quite insightful article on this subject:

"The expansions which followed Christopher Columbus' s voyage to the Americas resulted in the destruction of great civilizations the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. The Indians of North America suffered a similar fate. Nearly all of God's creation including land and labour were turned into commodities in the capitalist sense of the word. People were kidnapped, bought, transported and sold. The demographic colour of continents changed with white settlers and black slaves displacing the brown natives in the Americas and the Caribbean.

A world system of unparalleled political, economic and cultural dimension, was created and continually reinforced by new technology. In the industrial age, the expansionist drive moved on to Asia and Africa most of which was colonized. At the start of the 20th century, nearly all of the world's non-Western peoples were under some form of Western domination, and remain hopelessly trapped in structures of extreme inequality which is not merely economic...

"While the menace of miscegenation haunted imperial cultures and barriers of policy and social sanctions were erected to prevent it, complex mechanisms emerged to break the barriers to conquest and domination. There was the notion of mystery, as in the mysterious East, an invitation to exploration. Mysteries, after all, demand solution by enlightened, knowledgeable men. Or the idea of darkness, as in the dark continent to which one should bring light. Or the notion of empty lands which of course needed filling up. Or the veritable literature on identifiable, collective mind the Arab mind, Hindu mind, etc. that is still prevalent. All led to a set of common conclusions: they are not like us. They are different. Hence they can be treated differently, according to standards other than those that apply in civilized places. The outlook was so embedded in civilization that it traversed centuries. One finds strange bedfellows, separated in time and space. 'We must save Chile from the irresponsibility of its people', Henry Kissinger was reported to have said while proceeding to destabilize the elected government of Salvadore Allende. A century earlier Karl Marx had written: "They cannot represent themselves. They have to be represented. " Third World dictators give precisely this argument to justify their tyranny. This culture is pervasive, it cuts across continents and penetrates our outlook by a variety of mediums. As I outline this talk in the flight from Islamabad to New York, Pakistan International Airlines shows Star Trek: First Contact. I snip at what looks like a high-tech, outer-space replay of an earlier voyage into an 'undiscovered' world. Commander Jean-Luc Picard plays a modern-day Cortes, leading the crew of the newly commissioned Enterprise E to war against the Borg "an insidious race", informs the PIA flier.

Those "half organic aliens" appear like Indians in the early Westerns mysteriously, ubiquitously and sometimes seductively. Violence flows freely as 'contact' is made. Fallen aliens are shot even as they beg for mercy. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew commit quite a holocaust with an insouciance we are expected to appreciate only because they have vanquished an alien race mysterious, dangerous, seductive and, ultimately, vulnerable. The Borgs have no individual identity, only a collective one. Their defeat is deemed final only when their roots are destroyed, when their head which assures life's motion to the entire race is cut off. An idea redeems this "mission"; once contact has been made the world will change. Promises Captain Picard: "Poverty, disease, and war will end."

Star Trek is but a crude, popular expression of the culture of imperialism. This culture is not Western any more. Rather, it enjoys hegemony, it has become global. Note an irony: Pakistan International Airlines, which will not serve wine to passengers, happily serves up Captain Picard on its flights. "

Full Text: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9803/eqbal_ahmad/imperial.html

I should point that the use of the word "great" in the above article is probably relative, stressing that there were people and civilizations already inhabiting this place before Columbus - a lost sailor - came and "discovered" this land.

On a related note, see the following story:

Columbus Status Toppled in Venezuela, October 12, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/734