From: Thinkpeace Date: 27 Nov 91 21:36 PST Subject: Newsweek Propaganda Analysis Message-ID: <1563600090@igc.org> THE NEWSWEEK COLUMBUS CHALLENGE by Tom Atlee (igc:thinkpeace) 486 41st Street #3, Oakland CA 94609 (510) 654-0349 The Fall/Winter 1991 special issue of NEWSWEEK about Columbus, entitled "When Worlds Collide: How Columbus's Voyages Transformed Both East and West" is a brilliant co-optation of 1992 Quincentennial protests. The content of this document tells us that the challenge of anti-celebrationists is being taken seriously by the establishment. If, as Todd Gitlin has pointed out, NEWSWEEK is the flagship of the American media, this edition gives us a foretaste of how the estab- lishment plans to neutralize our work for 1992. It is significant that NEWSWEEK does not challenge our data about European atrocities or Indian contributions. Rather, they simply "spin doctor" the data to give it a seemingly-objective, non-radical significance. To the extent this establishment frame of reference is accepted by the public, the radicalizing potential of this data will evaporate. It is important to realize how depowering this propagandistic tour de force is. We need to re-strategize and to create imaginative ways to further our aims in a now radically transformed media environment. We need to do it soon. Below are just a few examples of the spin doctoring, with my com- ments. OF COURSE THE SPANISH COMITTED ATROCITIES, BUT THEY WEREN'T THAT CRUEL NEWSWEEK claims that Spain's infamy ("The Black Legend") is largely due to propaganda by their enemies Q Germany, France, Holland, England and the US. Of course, Hitler's and Stalin's infamy are also due largely to propaganda by their enemies (like us). But so what? Does propaganda against a crime make it any less a crime? The main source of Columbus atrocity data, the Dominican bishop Bartolom de Las Casas, was, according to NEWSWEEK, "a skilled politician" who wrote in "graphic and exaggerated detail." He was also often the only source, and NEWSWEEK offers no evidence for their claim that he exaggerated. And what do they mean by "skilled politician"? They give no specifics. I suspect the label was chosen to diminish de Las Casas' moral standing and credibility: politicians are known for manipulating people to their own advantage. NEWSWEEK gives eye-witness atrocity reports a positive spin by saying they demonstrate "the broad freedom of speech [Spain] permitted in its colonies" and "a Spanish moral impulse that led the royal court to conduct a soul-searching ethical inquiry." Perhaps it was like the soul-searching America did while Vietnam was being laid to waste. Spain also "recognized the need to mediate between the conflicting demands of Christianity and profit." Who could have imagined NEWSWEEK would make such a radical admission. We can kick off some excellent classroom discussions with that sentence! Stretching English to its limits, NEWSWEEK goes on to maintain that, "if only for economic reasons, the Spanish cared deeply for the welfare of the natives." If someone were to claim to "care deeply" about someone else "for only economic reasons," wouldn't it be natural Q even traditional Q to question the worthiness of their caring? "Spaniards believed they offered the Indians a gift worth any earthly pain: eternal life in heaven." I find myself wondering if NEWSWEEK would so blithely report a modern religious fanatic killing a neighbor so that the neighbor could have eternal life in heaven. It is also significant that NEWSWEEK chose to ridicule Aztec human sacrifice as barbaric, some of which, I believe, had a similar logic. Spaniards only enslaved those Indians who didn't accept Christianity and, after all, "with so few colonists, Indian labor was a necessity." Since when is "mining gold or silver or growing cash crops" a necessity? For whom? The owners "would feed the Indians, provide for their instruction in the faith and defend them." One wonders what "instruction in the faith" was given to those enslaved Indians who, according to NEWSWEEK, had rejected Christianity. And who were they being defended against? But those are minor points compared to the overriding question: Are we supposed to ignore atrocities simply because the perpetrators have cultural justifications for committing them? What has been, is and will be the spiritual and social price for this attitude? That's another question worth pursuing to develop critical thinking and clarify values. "It wasn't swords or guns that devastated the native Americans. It was the germs the Europeans carried." At the very least, assuming this is true, it is a heartless, self-serving claim that doesn't even try to fathom how this must have felt to the Indians. For this reason alone Indians would have no cause to celebrate Columbus, a fact only disparagingly acknowledged by NEWSWEEK. The three page article on the role of disease is clearly an effort to (1) establish firmly in people's minds that disease, not barbarism, was the cause of Indian suffering and (2) to demonstrate that those diseases were an inevitable, natural event for which the Spanish cannot be held responsible. This argument leads inexorably to the conclusion that the Spanish weren't so bad, after all. This claim that "the worst of the suffering was caused not by swords or guns but by germs" is the keystone of NEWSWEEK's argumentation. So it is all the more curious that they give no statistics to back it up. The only statistics given are "that the New World was home to 40 million to 50 million people before Columbus ar- rived and that most of them died within decades. In Mexico alone, the native population fell from roughly 30 million in 1519 to 3 million in 1568." And this: "smallpox alone wiped out many millions." Well, how many million are we talking about? How many died from violence and mistreatment, and how many from disease? If NEWSWEEK had such comparative statistics Q as their claim implies Q why didn't they publish them? That would have simply and conclusively proven their point. We can only suppose that, in reality, statistics about abuse-caused deaths either don't exist or are not as small as NEWSWEEK suggested. Were a million killed? Four million? We civilized people are horrified by Hitler murdering 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. However (and this is consistent with NEWSWEEK's statements), 6 million Mexican Indians could have been killed by war and oppression, and that would still be less than the 10-25 million that may have died from disease. See? If you focus only on European barbarism, "it's fairly easy to paint....a damning portrait. But it also leaves a lot out." (Note that in 1500 the world had about a quarter of the population that existed in 1945, which magnifies the relative scope of all the deaths.) To add insult to injury, NEWSWEEK claims that while Columbus and the conquistadors carried "mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever," "syphilis may have spread in the opposite direction," appearing in Europe in 1493. Nowhere is it mentioned that this disease was probably picked up by Columbus' men raping native women (which Columbus himself notes in his journals). And this whole catastrophe Q euphemistically called the "Great Disease Migration" Q is discussed in a voice of pseudo- scientism and balanced journalism that reassures us that diseases travelled east and diseases travelled west and such is the way of opportunistic germs... (I wonder what would happen if students read NEWSWEEK and other descriptions of these events and discussed why the writers used the language they did, whose interests various types of language serve, and what kind of language feels most appropriate to the students themselves.) In its ongoing effort to remove the onus from Spanish invaders, NEWSWEEK points out that Indians had been enslaving and murdering each other for years before Europeans arrived. Again, they offer no statistics to demonstrate that Indian fratracide came anywhere near the extent of Spanish slaughter and oppression. The Spaniards just practiced the kind of violence that was normal in their era, and were religious about it, to boot. You can't expect people to rise above their times, can you? And then, in a mind-boggling act of PR bravado, NEWSWEEK gives us a quick peek in the historical closet to show us there are more skeletons in there than on the stage: "The whole of Spain's treatment of the Indians seems almost benificent compared with the way other colonial powers dealt with natives." Spain made a place for the Indians, says the smiling PR man, Gregory Cerio; they intermarried and created the mixed Spanish-Indian population and culture which we now think of as Latin American. They even "taxed the New World colonists less heavily than their European subjects." [God knows what help that was to the Indians.] In contrast, "North Americans in many cases simply exterminated the Indians," who were "driven off their land and eventually hunted down." This murky bit of information is flashed in our faces without warning in the final paragraphs of the article about Spain's atrocities. At which point the closet door is slammed shut again, before the full significance of what we've seen can register. Unless we are alert, we don't realize that they've just admitted that, while Spain may have committed atrocities, we committed genocide. After a mere four sentences this delicate subject is casually abandoned, which further affirms that we're not talking about us, because the subject is Spain, because Columbus worked for the Spanish, you see, and it's Columbus' quincentennial that we're talking about, not Anglo-American history. End of discussion. Interestingly, only a few sentences earlier NEWSWEEK had dismissed accusations of "genocide" against Spain because the Spanish didn't undertake "the intentional, systematic eradication of a race." Which makes it nervy for them to note that Anglo- Americans "exterminated the Indians." But they pull it off. I doubt many readers noticed the close call. Cerio then pontificates: "History offers no shortage of acts of cruelty performed in the service of religious, social, political and economic ideals." Were this a classroom, it would be instructive to point out how such moral relativism contains a degree of truth only if the writer is willing to view the crimes of enemies with the same amoral objectivity. But we all know that that sentence would never appear in a NEWSWEEK article about Mao, Stalin, Hitler, or Ayatollah Khomeini. Cerio's use of the sentence is intended to nip in the bud any reactions of moral outrage that might have been triggered by discussions of the "intrusive spirit" of the Europeans. In that role, it is not philosophy but a particularly virulent strain of propaganda. Unfortunately, most NEWSWEEK readers probably succumbed to it. If we don't like it, I fear we'll have to offer innoculations against such disabling language. The article ends with atmospheric questions about whether human beings in general are good or bad: "The Black Legend casts a shadow on us all." Including, one supposes, the dead Indians. "THE GREAT FOOD MIGRATION" It is fascinating that they even raised this issue. I mean, when you think about Columbus, the first thing that comes to mind is FOOD, right? Of course not. So why do they spend five pages on it. I can't shake the suspicion that NEWSWEEK's motive was to draw people away from an extraordinary document: Jack Weatherford's 1988 book, INDIAN GIVERS: HOW THE INDIANS OF THE AMERICAS TRANSFORMED THE WORLD. This book uses the history of American Indians to deeply challenge Euro-centric cultural arrogance and assumptions. I believe it is the first major book to document the extent of Indian influence on international food culture, and it has gained some notoriety for that. Its problem is that it doesn't stop there. Among other things, it documents how our cherished Anglo-American concepts of freedom, democracy and federalism owe more to Native American traditions than to the Greeks and the Magna Carta. It quietly notes the value of what we know of Indian life, beliefs and knowledge and ponders the value of what we have destroyed and ignored Q and what even today we are ignoring and destroying. Weatherford's respect for indigenous culture challenges us to question our own lives and culture, to face our history and the reality of our world instead of molding them to our arrogance. He challenges us to grow up. His is a quietly, insightfully radical book. And, since the subject of Indian influence on us is bound to interest people in the quincentennial year, Weatherford's remarkable book would attract a lot of attention. Which might start people asking questions. Better to give them an alternative, something that leaves out all the controversial stuff and focusses on food. Voila! WHY WE EAT WHAT WE EAT: HOW THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD CHANGED THE WAY EVERYONE ON THE PLANET EATS, by Raymond Sokolov, brand new. (Will someone please find out who got this guy to write this book?) The next step would be to publicize the book and feature FOOD as the big thing we got from the Indians (aside from two continents). Then, just to make sure no one thinks the Indians were that special, people should be told how we gave the Indians food, as well. That's better. And so we find an article in NEWSWEEK, based on Sokolov's book, saying that Europeans brought foods to the Americas and the Indians contributed foods to everybody else and both kinds got swept up into the million distinctive menus of today's wonderful global smorgasbord. (As an example of "culinary subversion," the article offers this: "the new McDonald's Cajun hot sauce tastes awfully good on its Egg McMuffin.") To further raise suspicions, we find that Raymond Sokolov has written the final essay in this NEWSWEEK special edition: "Stop Knocking Columbus: Fie on all this self-hating revisionism. Let's raise a glass and hail our 500th." It reeks of cuisinary bigotry Q such as dismissing Mexican algae as "nauseating stuff" Q and proclaims that we should not be embarrassed to feel proud of the ingenuity of our ancestors in creating a diet "at huge cost in human lives... After all," he says, "didn't the rich civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas have to be destroyed so that Belgians could eat french fries"? Calling Columbus "the most influential man of modern times" and "only a convenient scapegoat for our own self-hate and...very modern doubts about the value of our culture," Sokolov proclaims that "we might as well celebrate the mammouth achievement of five centuries" Q that we have grafted every culture in the world onto ours and now every- one in the world wants it. You have to admit that he lets his colors show. But I digress. Let us return to the food article, which goes on at great length about cuisines and "jaded palates," but seldom mentions nutrition. For good reason: the main contributions of the Indians were corn, potatoes, tomatoes, beans and nuts Q whereas the European contribution consisted largely of meat animals and sugar cane. The article observes that "before Columbus, many native cul- tures were relatively meatless." Nowhere does it even hint that meat and sugar were disasterous additions to the healthy Indian diet of corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers and "grubs, insect eggs and pond scum." The pond scum referred to is the previously-mentioned blue- green algae, which modern yuppies pay a pretty penny for as a super-food. In one of the rare references to nutrition, the article states that "crops like potatoes and corn, which could produce far more nutrition per acre than the grains that came before [like wheat and oats], allowed for [European] population growth." However, "in Europe, humans never really took to corn, but it became a major source of fodder for animals and helped improve nuturition by making meat cheaper....[Today] Americans consume an average of three pounds of corn a day in the form of meat, poultry and dairy products." So we even turned the nutritional blessings of potatoes and corn into the nutritional and economic curse of meat (see John Robbins, DIET FOR A NEW AMERICA). To question the fairness and consequences of "The Columbian Exchange" would raise issues that no establishment magazine can afford to raise: like how to build a sustainable, just society. IN GENERAL NEWSWEEK needed apologists to say (a) that we Europeans are culturally superior (this had to be communicated subtly enough not to ruffle too many feathers in what they cynically call "our multicultural, interdependent, ultrasensitive modern world"), (b) that we "may have a lot to apologize for" (Sokolov's words) but we aren't bad guys and that (c) therefore we don't have to fundamentally change our ways or (d) look to anybody else (like the Indians) for lessons about how to live decently on this earth. It is (c) and (d) that make the quincentennial protests most threatening. In order to prevent a springtime of radical insight and inquiry, the American establishment is once again proving itself capable of admitting, in the thoroughly controlled context exemplified by this NEWSWEEK, that "mistakes were made." So we find them saying that Columbus "put a lot of energy into not seeing things as they were." (Do we?) They readily acknowledge that "much of the old 'Columbus sailed the ocean blue' lore does need refinement" and that for indigenous peoples "Columbus's arrival was pretty much a disaster." (Yeah, pretty much so, I'd say.) After all, "for all sorts of reasons, minority populations, non-European cultures and tropical forests enjoy a lot of sympathy these days. If these are your primary concerns, it's fairly easy to paint Columbus and the early explorers as people who oppressed the local residents, smashed alien civilizations and chopped down a lot of trees...." Despite the great efforts of NEWSWEEK's fine publicists, the elite, white perspective virtually drips off every page. The reference above to "minority populations" (meaning the world's colored majority) is simply one of the more obvious cases. You suspect that it wasn't an African American who wrote, in the issue's ambivalent mea culpa about slavery: "African slaves were the only possible remedy for the labor shortages that plagued their New World dominions; slaves mined the precious metals and harvested the sugar, indigo and to- bacco that made colonization worthwhile." I doubt it was a black who chose to feature a picture of blacks enslaving blacks, with the caption: "Millions of Africans were sold into slavery by warring tribes;" and then, almost as an afterthought, "more were captured by European traders." Of course it doesn't even hint at the fact that blacks wouldn't have sold other blacks into slavery without Europe's insatiable demand for slaves. Again, the strategy of the publicists is to admit in gory detail the travesty of slavery while trying to minimize Europe's and America's historical responsibility and avoiding the sticky implications that history has for our culture, values and economic system today. NEWSWEEK asserts that "the notion that blacks are inferior as a group...may well be the central tragedy of American history" Q apparently oblivious to the irony of that statement for Native Americans. It brushes off the observation that neither the destruction of the Indians nor the enslavement of Africans would have happened without the European demand for profit "that made colonization worthwhile." "It is too simplistic to picture...European explorers as mere money-grubbers." They must avoid at all costs the admission that enslavement is still happening today, that decimation of indigenous peoples is still happening, that destruction of the environment is very decidedly happening today and that all these facts have a common root. That root is our sick, culturally condoned, institutionalized compulsion to benefit ourselves at the expense of anyone and everything else. It is a root that's very near the surface, thanks to this 500th Columbus Day. It doesn't take much digging to reach it. NEWSWEEK had to go through contortions to avoid it. 1992 is the best opportunity we've ever had to challenge the alienated, domineering assumptions and myths of our culture. In many ways, this special NEWSWEEK edition is a desperate attempt to block that opportunity. As brilliant a document as it is, the des- peration shows through. It should be studied Q even publicized by us Q as a masterpiece of propaganda, along with 1992 political campaign speeches and Nazi war films. In every school, living room, computer network, and church congregation in the country people should be studying it as a classic. It should be held aloft, given prizes (like Senator Proxmire's prizes to the Pentagon for spending hundreds of dollars for toilet seats). Mad Magazine could do wonders with it. A few thousand cancelled NEWSWEEK subscriptions would add some spice to the effort. Media, PR and ad professionals in the movement might get together to brainstorm and strategize other approaches. Ultimately, though, we need to return to the pressing business of learning real lessons from our history so we can "turn our attention to making the next 500 years different from the past ones," as Suzan Shown Harjo says in the only page (out of 85) that NEWSWEEK saw fit to devote to an authentic Indian voice.