One way that I make a connection between Columbus and who we are today involves the ideological process at work that allowed the Europeans to feel superior and thus engage in brutal behavior.
I see a great deal of dehumanization of Iraqis in our public discourse. While some of it is straight out racism, there are other ways that we make the victims of our occupation less than human, or at least not worth our concern.
How can we justify invading a country that posed no threat to us, was successfully contained, a country whose skies were already patrolled by US planes over 2/3 of the land – in violation of the principles of international law? How can we justify the bombing from the air we continue to do into residential neighborhoods? The estimated 650,000 dead?
How can we justify firing missiles into Somalia to strike terrorists (and then hit the wrong people)? How can we justify or accept people being kidnapped, tortured and killed all over the world – paid for by our taxpayer dollars? How can we justify a concentration camp where people who are known to be innocent, and who have no legal recourse, have been held for five years? How can we justify kidnapping a Canadian citizen and sending him to Syria – a country supposedly so evil that we cannot even deign to negotiate with them – to be held in a boxlike cell and tortured? How can we justify holding a brown-skinned man with a Spanish sounding name in solitary confinement -- without any human contact – in a secret brig in South Carolina for two years – long enough to drive him out of his mind?
Well, I think the first way we justify and accept all this – to ourselves – is to ignore it all, at least in the details.
But an essential element in our rationalization is the thought or feeling that the people who are dying do not count for much. We may not see them as less-than-human, like Spanish explorers and priests often did, and this attitude may not be “racist,” but there is a similar psychological process going on within individuals and as a society.
We are able to accept the mythology of Columbus – or minimize the significance of his actions (“he was just a man of his time”) – and maybe that is okay. But when our national identity begins with him, that mythology provides the basis for action.
I guess the simple way to explain this is to say that it is no coincidence that thousands of people have to die while we spread freedom.
I am not even arguing the merits of the Bush policies – I am not getting into whether these things really need to be done in the name of “national security” -- I am simply saying that this dehumanization and violence have evolved in tandem with ideas of freedom and American mythologies.
No comments:
Post a Comment