Columbus Day II

 

October 12, 1992 was marked in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, by the toppling of a statue of Diego de Mazariegos, conquistador. 

 

Resistance to foreign conquest is seemingly coded into the Mayan DNA. They gave the Spanish their first and bloodiest of noses when the first shiploads showed up on the mainland, and a pattern of often violent push back continued into the twentieth century.

This had a couple of interesting features which are worth remarking on. Firstly, during the Caste Wars — ending 1901 — the insurgents were as likely to target their rage at the Hispanic population — those who'd long been busy blending, assimilating — as the Criollos of 'purer' European descent.

Secondly, although they seemingly rejected the non-'original' civilisation imposed on them, they typically did so in the name of the Middle Eastern prophet Jesus of Nazareth, who had kind of tagged along for the ride with Columbus. (A socially-radical Jewish thinker fully committed to a non-violent approach to imperialism…but they sort of skipped that rather significant bit of his teachings. You won’t find ‘by any means necessary’ in the New Testament.)

These Maya retained the sense of having been politically and culturally overrun, while filtering out the promise of eternal reward, which they regarded as the best part of the whole bad situation.

Contrast the indigenous peoples of North Africa and elsewhere who were conquered by the Arabs from the seventh century onward.

 

 

The recent Mohammed Salah British Museum meme has a relevant double-edge to it, as the joke is both that much-loved Mo is standing before small pieces of Egypt taken by light-fingered British colonialists, while at the same time he may be unaware that he is himself the representative of an invasive culture that came and stole the entire place; The Full Montu, so to speak.

In effect, he's one of those long term assimilators that the Mayan indigenous resistance would likely have singled out for punishment.

Arabs have spent far more of recorded history as colonial oppressors than as the victims of incursions from outside, rolling out conquests which featured many of the most repellent features of imperialism wherever or whenever it has occurred, such as brutal mass enslavement — particularly of black Africans — yet they consistently get a free pass on this today, not just in western academia, but also in the history that is generally understood in the conquered populations, like Egypt or indeed, Persia.

It seems rather obvious that it will remain difficult to engage in rational debate about some of the most pressing issues in our contemporary world until that blanket is removed.

Islamism, Jihadism and so on are leftovers of that first 'inflationary period' after the Caliphates formed, but they are also, crucially, products of contact with twentieth century totalist systems of thought which first emerged in Western Europe.

A grown up approach to this threat to the liberal democratic way of life requires us all to ditch the hackneyed models and simmering hatreds peddled by the intellectually-bunged up ideologues of Left and Right.

As I mentioned in part one, the first Iberian arrivals in this hemisphere came with a package of intentions and plans for the future. Religious and secular motives were often intertwined and difficult to unravel, both then and now, yet it had always been an abiding feature of European Christianity since the religion had been adopted by Constantine, that the majority understood on some fundamental level that a separation of the things of Caesar and the things of God was not only possible, but desirable — and the Maya appeared to have grasped this concept when they started cherry-picking which parts of forced Europeanisation would need to go.

There have been and will continue to be theocratic variants of all the monotheistic faiths, but Islam will always be the most problematic in this respect, because there are ultimately no real protections for lay society, with the political and spiritual far harder to prize apart.

This was perhaps Mohammad's great innovation, and its legacy has been complex. It possibly explains why many North Africans see themselves as 'Arabs' in a manner that would seem bizarre indeed to Mexicans or Central Americans, who would never refer to themselves as 'Spanish', not even the ones who have retained a fully European DNA admixture.

They appear unable to conceive of themselves as peoples still living with a legacy of colonial conquest, because they cannot find a way in their minds to separate the political imposition from the religious one.

So, unlike the Maya, they'll rarely conclude that while it is a good thing to have adopted a foreign religion, all the other stuff that came with it needs to be considered with a less worshipful frame of mind.

And alongside this cultural constraint, we see how the Arabs and their useful idiots abroad consistently blame the West in their rhetoric for all forms of colonialism, which helps maintain the smokescreen.

Their task has been made easier by the fact that, more than any other time in history, Western intellectual life is now dominated by cultural streams gushing out of the USA, and Americans are often by nature, historically myopic and somewhat self-obsessed.

 

Columbus Day I

Ignorant of the historical narrative beyond the report which had landed on his or her desk, the Reuters hack responsible for this topical piece for 'Columbus Day' appears to have concluded that the evidence now points to the Admiral having been Spanish rather than Italian, which was almost certainly not the case. 

Anyway, the basic finding of the study, that Columbus was a more or less closeted Sephardi Jew, has always been an open secret (though not of the Keir Starmer sort.)

Cue all the 'stealing other people's countries' comments from the would-be wags.

Yet, if there is an historical parallel that is worthy of consideration it would be the context in 1492 of a mass expulsion and persecution of Jews, leading to the extremely urgent need for a safe haven.

The Colón family had in all likelihood moved to Genoa a century earlier after the pogroms of 1391, the beginning of a wave of massacres and forced conversions in Spain and Portugal which targeted the Sephardi population.

 

As he sought investment for his project to go east by heading west, Columbus's key ally at the court of Queen Isabella was Luis de Santangel, the royal treasurer, himself a secret Jew, who at one stage offered to fund the voyage out of his own pocket. 

 

On April 17 1492 Columbus signed up to the Capitulations of Santa Fe which would limit his rule over any territories accumulated to his own lifetime, thus also limiting his ability to limit state interference, but with Santangel, he continually pressured King Ferdinand, and in the end sailed with the right to hereditary enjoyment of his 'discoveries', the key to his hidden agenda.

A group of Jewish youngsters came along for the ride, children of wealthy conversos in Spain who had helped provide much of the funding. They looked upon the Admiral as their Moses, which fitted nicely with his own self-image.

This group would be instrumental in the settlement of Jamaica, eventually achieved by Columbus's son Diego along with a chap called Juan d'Esquivel — also a converso — who had captured Melilla on the North African coast in 1497 and helped establish it as another part of the empire which would be exempted from the expulsion order.

Jamaica’s role as a Sephardi outpost and sanctuary would persist, even after the island was taken by Oliver Cromwell.

The sudden urge to push out into the wider world, from a relatively ‘backward, part of western Europe, which would lead to this (ultimately inevitable) contact between 'Old' and 'New' has typically been explained as a blend of 'Gold, Spices and Christians' e.g. one off personal enrichment, steady commerce and a chance to come up upon Islam from behind by locating hitherto isolated Christian communities long rumoured to exist in Asia.

But the repressive policies of the Catholic monarchs targeting both Muslims and Jews, seemingly led the latter to reach the conclusion that they rather urgently needed a new homeland abroad where no one would expect the Spanish Inquisition. 

 

And it turns out that this fourth spur to conquest would be almost as significant as the other three.

The Substance (2024)

 

There are almost too many things to say about Coralie Fargeat's movie, that one hardly knows where to start.

And I am conscious that there are perhaps a few things one ought NOT to say, especially as I believe I am personally acquainted with a few people who might be inclined to take this deal, or at least some version of it.

Beyond all the more gender-specific themes, this worked for me most as an examination of selfhood, provoking questions like: 'What would it be like to interact on some level with the person we were a generation (or perhaps two) ago?' And, 'How weirdly unfamiliar would this individual be now, leading to potential hostility?'

And this part of the film's payload was where I detected some weaknesses, where I wanted a bit more than mere metaphor, which was working for me extremely well in all other areas. At Cannes The Substance was recognised for the director's own screenplay, yet this was for us the least excellent part of it.

V also griped a little about how extreme the finale became. I didn't mind that so much, but it did whiff a bit of one of those OTT endings that emerges because the writer has not quite encountered a more elegant manner to wrap things up.

Speak No Evil (2024)

 

An excellent film, based on a the gag that if you ever come across some British people abroad and they say you must come and visit them at their home in the countryside some day, something has to be seriously off!

McAvoy has always creeped me out a bit, but here he becomes the consummate on-screen avatar of all the darkly manipulative individuals I have ever rubbed up against — individuals who seem to actively seek out 'polite society' where they will always be on the edge of weird transgressions committed with a twisted smile, and who appear to like nothing more than making sure that acquaintances, especially new ones, join them in doing whatever they want to do, particularly if there is an element of danger, or indeed of weird transgression, involved.

Killer Heat (2024)

Monozygotic twins have a Chekhovian quality, the Russian author having established the principle that if you mention something with an obvious narrative use in your story, you are required to have it used later on. 

 

And how else does one use identical human beings in a whodunnit/love-triangle ‘mystery’ like this?

 

Jo Nesbø’s source novel had a different title which one could almost take as an additional spoiler, ramming home the message that readers were not going to have to tax their brains all that much to get to the bottom of things. 

 

This adaptation is a truly terrible movie, yet at times entertainingly so. Joseph Gordon-Levitt wanders around Crete in a Roland Garros Panama doing his routine (and associated background monologue) as the wounded, alcoholic PI, and it all feels pleasingly spoofy, almost like a comically noirish take on Inspector Montalbano.

There's this one scene where the self-mockery seems to come out of the closet, so to speak, where a supposedly Greek character drops a remark about how the modern Hellenes have a word for people who act as if they are Greek, at which point it must already have popped unaided into the heads of many Greek-conversant viewers, because this is a Mediterranean island where locals seem very thin on the ground, certainly locals with significant speaking parts.