Among the Intellectualoids/Columbus Go Home
Falcoff, Mark
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS COLUMBUS GO HOME Do you hate yourself? Do you wish Li you had never been born? Do you regret the fact that your country exists? Then have we got a commemoration for...
...Presumably everybody knows—or do they?—about the Aztec penchant for ripping out the hearts of sacrificial victims or waging incessant war against neighboring communities to obtain people to sacrifice in the first place...
...In a country the size of Ohio, with fewer people (16.7 million) than Mexico City, the MIS employed some 85,000 staffers, with 5,000 full-time tails, 6,000 listeners, and 2,100 mail censors (600 in East Berlin alone...
...A poisonous mushroom with the mycelium, the network of countless strand-like threads that run beneath the surface of the ground, stuck to nearly every one of us...
...Anthropologist Kenneth Good, whose book on the Yanomami' was published earlier this year, confesses that even after living among them for several years, he found it difficult to endure cer'Into the Heart...
...Eventually the MfS decided to "show the sloppy Poles how it's done" by dispatching special units to the East German embassy in Warsaw and the consulates in Gdansk, Wroclaw, and Szczecin, with orders to monitor subversive ongoings in Catholic Church and Solidarity circles...
...Maybe Kirk Sale isn't getting invited out to the right places...
...Jan Eliot, a North Carolina Cherokee and editor of the monthly Indigenous Thought, adds, "Columbus was a mass murderer...
...The American label is not a neutral label," intoned Bryan J. Wolf, professor of American Studies and English at Yale, at a recent symposium on the American West at the Smithsonian Institution...
...OOnce the ideologues got hold of Columbus, strange things started to happen out there where Culture Is Brought to the People...
...after all, the grant proposal in question had received the "highest recommendation" from five "peer panelists...
...All the races aremixed...
...G' by simple, direct company slogans like "Everything is suspicious" and "Get everything," the MfS collected intelligence with great zeal: sexual habits, personal finances, medical records, books checked opt from libraries (who, for instance, might expressinterest in the operation of hot-air balloons or scuba gear...
...The National Endowment for the Humanities got into hot water again with those who imagine themselves its only constituents—this time for refusing to give a half-million-dollar subsidy to a TV series called "1492: Clash of Visions...
...The MIS was a formidable instrument, to be sure, but the real success of the feared and despised Stasi agents, or GHG (Gucken, Horchen, and Grejfen —watching, listening, and nabbing), as the Stasi were also known, depended on an army of Mitliiufer—those average, respectable citizens of a dictatorship who, for a thousand reasons, some pardonable, others unforgivable, agree to surrender their consciences and collaborate with the state...
...For one thing, he is an unabashed racist...
...Only now it isn't "discover," and it isn't the "New World...
...His book The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the Collapse of East Germany, will be published in January by AEI Press, aspects of totalitarian proficiency...
...In Atlanta, the Sciliek Museum was picketed by protesters because it dared to exhibit a scale model of the Nina...
...It failed, and they are now working on a King holiday that would not exclude the October 12 observance...
...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT THE STASI FILES by Jeffrey Gedmin rri he Stasi is like a poisonous I mushroom," the woman said in a dark, musing way to her husband as they lay in bed just before falling asleep...
...Good, trained not to "take sides and make value judgements," discovered painfully (though not as painfully as the luckless Indian woman) that his values (you know, the kind associated with Western civilization) were not current just now in the jungles of the Amazon and, as long as the Yanomami are kept in their edenic state, are not likely to be anytime soon...
...Mielkeeven had a tap on the phone of his number-two, the spymaster Markus Wolf, who orchestrated Stasi efforts abroad...
...I'm assuming the Czechs will feel obligated to shoot, but the Germans will consider it their duty always to hit their target...
...According to one former Stasi officer, "The Soviets were never able to get themselves properly established in Poland...
...The American Library Association has passed a resolution urging its members to approach the quincentennial with materials that "examine the event from an authentic Native American perspective, dealing directly with topics like cultural imperialism, colonialism, and the Native American holocaust...
...It's wrong to say that America was "discovered" in 1492, because that makes it sound as if the indigenous peoples existed only once Europeans were aware of them...
...First of all, we are instructed, there is the question of terminology...
...nearly half a million were actu26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991...
...The Columbus celebrations may set ordinary folk to thinking about things—like comparative civilization and universal values—that might not otherwise have occurred to them...
...Everything in the world here, everything in these countries is mixed up," he complained to the Times...
...21.95...
...When East Berlin became impatient with the inability of Poland's regime to control the re-emerging Solidarity virus in the early 1980s, Honecker ordered the MfS to keep tabs on exiled Polish dissidents in Western Europe...
...They don't have blood of their own...
...At least that's what the officer of East Germany's Ministry for State Security (MfS) thought at the time, as he monitored the couple's conversation from his listening post...
...Nobody can argue with that...
...Anti-Russian sentiment . . . was strong, even with people in the security apparatus...
...A case in point: Last April a certain Davi Kopenawa Yanomami left his communal hut in the Amazon for Manhattan...
...Perhaps also because German discipline and Grlindlichkeit allowed East Germany to outpace its Slavic neighbors in most Jeffrey Gedmin is a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute...
...While speaking to the reporter he lovingly eyed a poodle on the street...
...Yes, we have practiced things like rationalism and humanism and science and progress, and even occasionally nationalism, and for quite a long time now...
...Even before perestroika, the MfS had taken it upon itself to serve as Communist Europe's beacon of orthodoxy...
...After all, from the perspective of the Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, etc., the Americas are the Eastern hemisphere...
...As for the event itself, we are to regard it with deep and genuine regret...
...But Professor Wolf and his fellow-travelers had better watch it...
...The poisonous mushroom, the Stasi itself," he reflected, "is in fact relatively small . . . but [our] network of informers—the Jasager, the opportunists—is vast...
...the animal's hair, he explained, "would substitute wonderfully for the feathers used to decorate the Yanomami headdresses...
...And as MIS chief Erich Mielke liked to say, "Every individual is a potential security risk...
...Nonetheless, John Yewell, a Minnesota writer who is editing one of the many anti-Columbus books now in the works, boasts that "we're not striving for balance here . . . we're striving for the truth...
...As NEH Director Lynne Cheney pointed out, one of the programs preferred to gloss over or ignore completely the "distressing aspects of Aztec culture" (human sacrifice, slavery, wars of conquest against other native peoples), and to concentrate on the excesses of Spanish conquest...
...When I asked what made him think the Czech border guards would react any differently from their East German comrades, he answered, "Ah, but that's the law of averages I've chosen to play...
...Formerly a holiday on which Italian-Americans took on other claimants to the Great Mariner's ancestry (or those who held that the Vikings got here several hundred years before), October 12 is now the rendezvous of choice for "multiculturalists," nativist nostalgics, and critics of Western civilization...
...Moreover, even the Times conceded that the Yanomami were a "fierce people" because of their tendency to, well, kill each other with axes, clubs, and long, bamboo-tipped arrows...
...Simon & Schuster, 352 pp...
...Several academics interviewed by the New York Times were disturbed by this sudden "politicization" of culture...
...In Arizona, a dozen or so liberals (probably the total number resident in that state) sponsored a referendum that would have replaced Columbus Day with a commemoration of the birthday of Dr...
...His discovery [Oops!—the D-word again] of America is definitely nothing to celebrate unless you want to celebrate all the lives of our people who died...
...South of the border, leftist Mexicans are negotiating the return of Moctezuma's armor from the Vienna museum, and radical Catholics in other Latin American countries have been trying to raise money in Italy by Mark Falcoff to send Columbus's three ships back to Europe—this time named the Resistance, the Christian Base Community, and the Theology of Liberation...
...Nothing is separated...
...The town council has just commissioned Ecuadorian sculptor Oswaldo Guyasamin to fashion a monument to the "victims of the European invasion of 1492...
...Though he had already played to SRO audiences in London and Oslo, in New York Kopenawa ran into problems, since he turned out to be something short of a Politically Correct Indigenous Person...
...tam incidents...
...But west of what...
...It in no way excuses the conduct of the Spanish soldiers and adventurers who conquered Mexico, the Caribbean islands, Peru, and other (subsequently) Latin American countries to say that some of the societies they destroyed were even less humane (and, for that matter, less respectful of the environment...
...It was particularly stressful, for example, to "stand around with your notebook in your hand" while young braves dragged a woman into the forest for what the braves must have regarded as a bit of naughty fun...
...Kirkpatrick Sale, whose recent trashy biography The Conquest of Paradise excoriates Columbus, has at least been honest enough to admit it openly to a reporter from the Washington Post: I regard [Western civilization] as a desperately sick and inwardly miserable society that doesn't realize that it is suffering from a terminal disease called affluenza...
...The good old days...
...On October 12, the Native American Council will hold a week-long festival in New York City and sponsor an hour of silence "to emphasize the environmental damage caused by Columbus's heirs...
...The Yanomami of Brazil are part of the hemisphere's largest tribe of unacculturated Indians, and Kopenawa, described in the New York Times as a "shaman-in-training, village notable, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 25 and primary hunter-gatherer of his family," was in the United States to raise money for an emergency health project and a school, as well as to lodge a protest at the United Nations and the Organization of American States against the gold prospectors who have recently invaded Yanomami territory—decidedly post-Columbian activities, one would have thought...
...After many squabbles over the proper term, most cultural relativists have settled on the supposedly neutral word "encounter" (which recently led John Leo of U.S...
...You needn't be an anthropologist or a historian to grasp this point, because the press periodically reports on the lifestyles, so to speak, of the indigenous peoples who survive in the jungles of South America...
...In the case of Herr Honecker, Mielke sought to document the East German leader's less than heroic behavior during ten years of Nazi incarceration in Berlin and Brandenburg...
...It is the most powerful and successful society the world has ever seen, you got to give it credit for that, but it is founded on a set of ideas that are fundamentally pernicious, and they have to do with rationalism and humanism and materialism and nationalism and science and progress...
...Good eventually married a woman from the tribe, but they now live in the United States—in Tbrrance, California, I hope) Since the death of socialism, the only thing the left has left in this country is anti-Americanism—a provincial branch of the larger phenomenon of Self-Hatred...
...Naturally, people who fashion themselves Native American (as if the rest of us had been born on Jupiter or Saturn) tend to agree...
...The purpose, the officials said, was to "render just homage to the Hispanic-American peoples"—the very same who would not exist at all without the "invasion" thus deplored...
...This month is the 500th anniversary of Columbus's departure from Spain, to discover—as we used to say—the New World...
...An acquaintance of mine, a blacklisted academic in Erfurt, traveled every few weeks in the mid-1980s to neighboring Czechoslovakia to inspect spots along the border where he might slip into the Bavarian countryside...
...Their principal message is that nothing good has happened on this side of the globe ever since a certain Genoese navigator flying under Spanish colors landed in what is now the Dominican Republic...
...Rape crisis activists, check your beepers...
...And from Puerto Real, in Spain's southern Cadiz province, comes this late-breaking item...
...And the conclusions they reach may not be the ones printed in the Teacher's Answer Book...
...Guilty as charged...
...The National Council of Churches has told us that what happened in 1492 was "an invasion and colonization . . . with Mark Falcoff is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Martin Luther King...
...Poor Mr...
...Over this past year, museum, library, educational, and foundation officials who failed to keep up with the Zeitgeist were quickly brought up short...
...Suzan Shoan Haijo, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian nations, says that her Morning Star Foundation prefers to celebrate 1491, "which we call the last good year...
...But have we really postponed "singing, dancing, laughing and sex" in these parts for the last five centuries...
...Hence "the firm" kept six million personal files (two million on West Germans), on everyone from the maintenance man at a high school in rural Thuringia to Communist leader Erich Honecker himself...
...In Poland as elsewhere, the Stasi often did proxy work for the KGB...
...Imagine if [our civilization] had singing, dancing, laughing and sex as its regular components...
...Thy that one on for size...
...In Stasi jargon, they were die Blauen (the Blue Ones, as their informers' files originally had blue covers) or, more romantically, die roten Lampen, the "little red lanterns" that kept the Communists' project aglow...
...When it comes to domestic surveillance, the Stasi was likely the most impressive apparatus of its kind in the Soviet Bloc, perhaps because it was able to draw on the tradition of the Gestapo as well as that of the KGB, perhaps because a divided country gives an excuse for greater ideological vigilance...
...The Stasi bugged phones, faxes, offices, homes, hotels, restaurants, automobiles, and gas stations, even Catholic confessionals and seats in the Dresden Opera House...
...In a society where so much was forbidden, there was simply an abundance to keep track of...
...News & World Report to quip: " 'Encounter' as in 'My car has encountered a large truck going 80 miles an hour...
...Likewise, the term "New World" should be discarded in favor of "Western hemisphere...
...Several hundred native groups in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Guatemala plan to sail to Spain to present a list of grievances at the 1992 World's Fair in Seville...
...genocide, economic exploitation, and a deep level of institutional racism and moral decadence...
...Animal rights activists, call your office...
...Those are, to my mind, just pernicious concepts...
...That's the current take on what used to be called Columbus Day...
...What's really at issue here evidently is not what happened 500 years ago but the world we live in today...
...But the truth, alas, is that the Noble Savage myth is just that...
...The Stasi's 20,000 case officers ran some 109,000 active informers in 1989, the year the East German regime capitulated...
...And besides, there's nothing to celebrate...
...Then have we got a commemoration for you...
...It was the perfect analogy...
...It's difficult to imagine any other recent issue that has generated so much foolishness in print...
...The Stasi wanted to know which of its citizens traveling abroad committed adultery, and who at home would steal a visit to a trash dump in search of foreign literature (Authorities kept watch at special sites for refuse collected from the highway linking West Germany to Berlin...
Vol. 24 • October 1991 • No. 10
