"In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” And, after 33 days of dead reckoning navigation, he bumped into the Western Hemisphere on October 12. Spain’s colonization began as a military conquista, coupled with the extraction of precious metals. Within fifty years, Spanish colonists had built cathedrals and libraries in Mexico and Peru. A century later, British civilians colonized North America. Throughout the hemisphere, colonists overwhelmed indigenous populations quantitatively, as well as with religion, literacy, learning, sanitation, and technology as they developed their own civilization. Immigrants flocked from throughout the Old World to the colonies and joined in celebrating October 12 as the beginning of their blessings.
In this century, however, some of their descendants choose to identify vicariously with the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples and, in their name, indict colonialism as an evil to be remedied by giving power to themselves. They do in the language of war and, not infrequently, by violence including pulling down statues of Cristoforo Colombo. More important, substantial proportions of America’s ruling class seem also to have concluded that having colonized, peopled, and civilized the New World is something to be regretted rather than celebrated. Like the pseudo-indigenous, they demand power to inflict collective penances for colonialism’s sins but do not advocate removing themselves from the Americas.
This leads us to reflect on colonialism itself, and its relationship with war.
The species Homo sapiens, it seems, originated in East Africa. We have no record of origination elsewhere. Finding various sub-species (races) and sub-sub species all over the globe forces the conclusion that they traveled there in self-sustaining groups from somewhere else—the definition of colonies. Colonizing is how human communities spread. Except possibly for Australia, we have no record of the original colonization being undisturbed by subsequent ones. More often than not, new colonies intrude on old ones. Seldom are intrusions wholly non-violent. Sometimes, the newcomers kill off or enslave the old. On other occasions, such as in late antiquity Europe or medieval China, when less developed peoples invade more developed ones, they amalgamate physically and are absorbed culturally. In India, the Muslim colonists who arrived subsequent to the Mughal conquest were roughly on the same civilizational level as the Hindus among whom they settled. A millennium later, the colonists and the indigenous are not at peace with one another.
Julius Caesar, echoed by Machiavelli, described populations moving to settle on land which intend to clear of the indigenous as if they were weeds. Roman colonization aimed less at dispossession and more at control and ultimate assimilation. In short, colonizing is as inherently human as movement itself, and comes in many different kinds. In the Americas, it seems that human presence dates only to some ten thousand years ago. Yet by the time Europeans arrived, a mere half-millennium ago, any number of tribes had successfully colonized areas inhabited by other tribes. In the U.S. Southwest, the Anasazi disappeared under the weight of the Navajo. Mexico’ Aztecs and South America’s Inca did not kill all whom they conquered. They enslaved most. The United States of America is unique in permitting and even soliciting the arrival of colonies from around the world, subject only to the acceptance of its basic premises.
All this is to say that colonization is the rule of life, and that life in any given time at any given place—chiefly the degree of peace therein—results in part from how previous generations overcame the element of force inherent in all large scale movements of populations and established peace.
That is why some Americans’ use of the anniversary of the Western Hemisphere’s colonization as a pretext for claiming a greater share of power for themselves augurs civil war as much as it shows rejection of historic reality. The colonization’s original protagonists, long since dead, are beyond reaping benefits or making concessions. Hence, attacks on Columbus and his progeny are really attempts to incite hate of domestic foes, who can only respond in kind. In America even more than in most places the character of which has been affected by colonization, the passage of centuries had adjusted the sooner and later arrivals’ ways for better and for worse into some kind of peace.
The demonization of colonialism, however, breaks the peace by reviving whatever elements of friction existed in the original mingling of peoples. Pretending to adjust controversies among dead people can only enliven controversies among living ones, and lead many of these to untimely deaths.
