The bias against Europeans, their descendants, and the culture they begot and advanced has been intensifying since American politics turned sharply left in the last few decades.
A PBS documentary I watched in 1992 made me write the following, presented again because the bias it addresses continues to infect our times:
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“Barbarians of the West,” they are called in a garden path tour called Legacy, conducted by PBS television [in 1992] under the guise of a documentary on civilization. With the suppressed passion of a prosecuting attorney out to nail his defendant – in this case the Europeans – the host of the show travels to China, Egypt, Central America, and other centers of civilization to find all the evidence he can to damn the Graeco-Roman civilization – which furnished the language, the knowledge, and the technology for this production.
Legacy's thesis, that the world was fine until Europeans messed it up is, frankly, a dud. High craft keeps such a childish concept from becoming a comedy. Exciting images, choreographed against muted music, a host with an earnest and expressive face, talking and moving with impeccable grace, carefully avoiding the trapdoors of sophistry – all this fails, nevertheless, to redeem the Europe bashing or smooth the leftist warp of the script. Everyone enjoys a good yarn, but not when it’s offered as nonfiction. As with so many documentaries, investigative reports, and exposés, lately, Legacy is barely more than a political story line, illustrated.
Fascinated, as many of us are, by the Aztecs, our host holds up a fist-size crystal skull that brings to mind the eye and skill of Japanese Sung Dynasty sculptors. But our wonder sticks in the throat when he tries to justify the ritual gouging of thousands of human hearts, forming a sacrificial river of blood down the temple steps. We gasp and note the concession that Europe did not invent cruelty. In another breath, the host declares life sacred. That follows, we suppose. Then he goes on to include in the alleged European treachery a body of faith that still insists that life is sacred, the Catholic church. This all seems inconsistent.
A Fabian relic drops out of his pocket when the host goes to England and finds in the records there the emergence of “the institution of private property.” (The English invented private property?) He grimaces, nearly spitting the word property, that “invention” which, along with the free market, drives the West to a life of conquest and violence. Some key figures march past the “multicultural” court of justice. Alexander the Great is the Prometheus of plunder. Bacon is served as the dumper of divinity. Pascal gets a lotus in his cap for having said that the trouble with Western man is that he doesn’t know how to be content sitting in an empty room. (Pascal also said philosophers should get lost.) But in the lineup of cadre in the West’s infamous campaign, our tour guide never once mentions the famous European, Karl Marx. Why?
Could it be that the Marxist assumption that a society must be classless – which contradicts everything we know – is too obviously the keystone of so many myths and utopias, both published and still being dreamed up? Like the ever-blooming myth that people can function and prosper without a leader class? The few dominating the many, the host seems to moan. Has the Greek invention, democracy, provided a basis for making the leader class more sensitive and less despotic? – he never asks. The host speaks much of a culture’s – such as China’s – search for harmony between man and the Cosmos and speaks little of priesthood, without which any such search would be fruitless.
Applying contemporary and parochial orthodoxy to other times and places, a mistake revisionists love to make, he singles out the West for its slaves and mistreatment of women and minorities. But selective amnesia sets in. He forgets to tell us that slaves and mistreatment of women and minorities is typical of the great civilizations he so eagerly studies, for our edification.
To single out Europeans as war-prone barbarians is to overlook the commonality of violence and brigandage in every civilization at some stage of development. It ignores the territorial slayings by all “red-ant” societies, regardless of race or level of sophistication. The massive Khmer Rouge massacre in Cambodia is only a conspicuous example of non-European genocide. We wonder, who are these people who deign to form a kangaroo court and sit in judgment over a whole people on prime time television?
Why the gloss over the potential for conquest, even in the great civilization of China? It is easy to mistake Confucian tranquility based on lovingkindness and obedience with passivity. But I find it hard to believe that the makers of Legacy did not know that I Ching, while grounded in divination, is essentially a manual for making military decisions.
If the Manchus had been as canny as the English, they would certainly have – long before the British and Spanish and Americans – spent their wealth building a great naval fleet and military force in order to maintain their supremacy, rather than allow themselves to be ravaged by foreigners. Who is to say they could not have succeeded? Japan, offshoot of the Chinese civilization, shook the world in its attempt to dominate foreigners, a campaign that plundered and massacred untold thousands of Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians. The Chinese empire fell, not as a result of pacifism but of poor management. They were uniquely well suited. The Chinese had centuries of experience absorbing peoples, cultures and ideas, were highly advanced in government, scholarship, and technology. We know that their mariners sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and their military class tried to persuade the rulers to establish a presence in the Mediterranean, at a time when Europe was waking from its feudal slumber.
How long can any culture live in splendid isolation, like a rare flower in a remote niche? Does anyone really believe that if Europeans had not been the “barbarians” whose self-interest Columbus advanced, some other people would not have, soon or late, invaded the sitting-duck cultures of the world? Would their viruses and bacteria have been less deadly to a people living in isolation? The questions not raised by Legacy tell worlds about the pop politics infecting our times. Are we accountable for the mistakes of our ancestors? Can we take credit for their contributions? More to the point, are we more virtuous than they were?
Time to call the bluff. Either the Graeco-Romans were civilized or they were barbarians. A quick check. It was Western civilization, not barbarism that gave Judaism and Christianity a home, that gave us democracy, the Bill of Rights, a system of justice based on equality and the presumption of innocence until proved guilty by an impartial jury of peers, the piano and the boom box, Vivaldi and Duke Ellington, a system of notation that makes music survive its creators, a scientific methodology that moves limits of knowledge beyond any generation’s capacity to reach them, and the freedom of an increasing number of souls to partake of the fruits of Western civilization. Sure, maybe Iraqis could have given us the electronics we need to operate and communicate in all the ways we take for granted. Sure, maybe Guatemalans could have hit upon a constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights. But that’s not the way it all happened.
Cross-cultural enlightenment is one thing; cross-cultural bashing quite another. Western legacy – which is everybody’s legacy – cannot advance while it is under attack in our schools, our media, our universities, and our churches by actual “multicultural” barbarians and academic impostors. As with Legacy, the boorish elite are passionately fond of revamping history and knowledge in the murky light of their own ignorance and prejudice. A sitting-duck public is constantly being fed their lines, in ways despots of the past could only dream of.
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Anthony J. DeBlasi is a veteran and a lifelong defender of Western culture.
Image: Jorge Valenzuela A, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED
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