Simple Ideas, Robust Evidence, Part 12: Mass-Murdering Thieves as Heroes and Saints

The false idols presented to me in my youth

I led off this series with Ed Herman’s work on the media. That is for current events. The media became quite a study of mine after it smeared my companies for years (1), before I ever heard of Ed.

I did not study the media for long before I began reading of the heroic icons of my youth, and how their popular images departed radically from their actual activities. They were all a bunch of mass-murdering thieves and genocidists, presented as heroes, saints, and fathers of my country. The first one that I learned the truth about was Christopher Columbus. The first time that I saw any challenge to his heroic image was in Howard Zinn’s masterpiece, which I ironically read in 1992, when I worked in Columbus, Ohio, as the city mounted a year-long celebration of the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s feat, which initiated history’s greatest genocide. There was even an attempt to saint Columbus in the 1800s. Columbus was a mass-murdering thief who sought gold and slaves in what became known as the New World, although Columbus himself never realized it. He thought that he was near the coveted Asian spice trade.

That same year of 1992, I read David Stannard’s American Holocaust, which was my big wakeup call on what the “settling” of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans was really like. Even imperial-apologist Steven Pinker calls the European “settling” of the Western Hemisphere history’s greatest crime. In Stannard’s book, for the first time, I read an unflattering account of Padre Junípero Serra, the friar who brought “civilization” to the Indians of California’s coast, where I was raised. I attended a grammar school named for Serra, who was sainted in 2015. I saw a movie of his saintly life in fourth grade. After the revelation in Stannard’s book, I read up on Serra. He was the Hitler of California. Those lovingly reproduced missions that I visited as a child were the Californian equivalent of Nazi death camps. Serra’s chief legacy was a 90% extermination of the natives in mission country, and Serra literally called the genocide of native children a “harvest.”

With those startling revelations (I could still be startled back then, but not so much any longer), I began studying the American history that I was taught and comparing it to my adult investigations. I was born in Washington State and will likely die here. American schoolboys were steeped in American Revolution lore, and especially that of the greatest of Founding Fathers: George Washington. It did not take much study before Washington’s halo began dimming. Outright fairy tales were told about Washington, such as his being unable to tell a lie. On the contrary, Washington is arguably history’s greatest swindler. Slave-owner Washington crafted the plan to steal temperate North America from the natives, which worked brilliantly. This is not even debatable. The plan is in Washington’s own hand and it immediately became official policy until there was no more land left to steal. To this day, Wikipedia cannot bring itself to even mention Washington’s plan. All presidents for the century after Washington’s plan was implemented were land-grabbing empire-builders, and even an icon such as Thomas Jefferson was a legendary liar.

All of the Founding Fathers that I looked into fared similarly, to one degree or another. When grown-up schoolboys like me eventually learned the depth of the lies that we were raised with, the question became, “Why?” Why lie so thoroughly to children?

It took me many years to gain an appreciation of the why, and I am even a little sympathetic to it. All nations lie to their children, to create nationalistic consciousness, so that people will defend their nations, to the death if need be. My scientific studies made this much clearer to me. All social animals have methods of creating and maintaining social cohesion. Otherwise, the society will soon cease to exist. Ever since reading Frans de Waal’s seminal Chimpanzee Politics, I can’t look at any politician and see much beyond a posturing chimp.

In his 1984, George Orwell noted that the most heinous crimes are transformed into heroic deeds when members of the in-groups do them to out-groups. There have been a number of so-called Golden Ages of the human past, in the early days of exploiting a new energy source, before humans bred once again to the energetic limits, and then it was back to severe scarcity, violence, warfare, etc. We are seeing this on the world stage today, as humanity is quickly running out of the energy sources that power our industrialized societies.

Azar Gat said it the best that I have seen: the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is at the root of all violence. It also explains all nationalist and other in-group ideologies. In fact, all of the dominant ideologies are based on scarcity, fear, and justifying ill-treatment of the out-group. This is a human universal and explains a great deal about humanity’s brutal past and awesomely inhumane behaviors. Hobbes won that fictional debate. The only solution that I know of is eliminating scarcity once and for all, and only one thing can do that, which is what my work is all about.