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.