ERRANT PARADOX

By Eduardo Galeano and - - Reprint | | Print |

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MONTEVIDEO, Dec 24 2007 (IPS) - A book of mine entitled \’\’Mirrors\’\’ is about to be published. It is a sort of -pardon the audacity- universal history. As Oscar Wilde said, \’\’I can resist everything except temptation,\’\’ and I confess I have succumbed to the temptation of recounting certain episodes of the human adventure in this world, events that are not well known, writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of The Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire. In this article, Galeano writes that John Locke, renowned philosopher of liberty, was a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company, which bought and sold slaves. At the dawn of the 18th century, the first of the Bourbons of Spain, Philip V, inaugurated his new throne by signing a contract with his cousin the king of France that allowed the Guinea Company to sell blacks in America. Each king would receive a 25 percent cut of the profits. The names of some of the ships that carried this cargo: Voltaire, Rousseau, Jesus, Hope, Equality, and Friendship. Two of the founding fathers of the US disappeared in the fog of official history. No one remembers Robert Carter or Gouverneur Morris. This amnesia is recompense for their acts: Carter was the first of the champions of independence to free his slaves. Morris, one of the authors of the Constitution, opposed the clause stipulating that a slave was equal to just three-fifths of a person. \’\’The Birth of a Nation\’\’, the first Hollywood mega-production, premiered in 1915 in the White House. The president, Woodrow Wilson, gave it a standing ovation. His writings were repeatedly quoted in the film, a racist hymn in praise of the Ku Klux Klan.

History is an errant paradox. It is the contradictions that keeps its legs moving. Maybe this is why its silences say more than its words, and frequently its words reveal when they are lying.

A book of mine entitled ”Mirrors” is about to be published. It is a sort of -pardon the audacity- universal history. As Oscar Wilde said, ”I can resist everything except temptation,” and I confess I have succumbed to the temptation of recounting certain episodes of the human adventure in this world, from the point of view of those who were left out of the picture.

To put it another way, it has to do with events that are not well known.

I’ll set out a few here, just a few.

*** When they were evicted from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve moved to Africa, not Paris. Some time later, when their children had embarked on their ways in the world, writing was invented. In Iraq, not Texas.

Algebra was invented in Iraq too, by Mohammed al Jwarizmi, 1200 years ago, and the word algorithm was derived from his name.

Names don’t usually coincide with what they describe. In the British Museum, to give one example, the sculptures of the Parthenon are called ”The Elgin Marbles” though they are really the marbles of Fidias. Elgin is the name of the Englishman who sold them to the museum.

The three novelties that made the European Renaissance possible – the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press – were invented by the Chinese, who also invented almost everything that Europe re-invented.

The Hindus knew before anybody else that the world was round, and the Mayans created the most precise calendar ever devised.

*** In 1493 the Vatican gave America to Spain and black Africa to Portugal ”so that the barbaric nations can be reduced to the Catholic faith”. At the time, America had fifteen times more inhabitants than Spain, and black Africa one hundred times the population of Portugal.

Just as the Pope had ordered, the barbaric nations were reduced, to say the least.

***

Tenochtitlan, the centre of the Aztec empire, was all water. Hernan Cortes demolished the city, stone by stone, and used the rubble to block the canals through which two hundred thousand canoes used to move. This was the first water war in America. Today Tenochtitlan is called Mexico DF. And where water once flowed, now automobiles throng.

***

The tallest monument of Argentina was erected in honor of General Roca, who exterminated the indians of Patagonia in the nineteenth century.

The largest avenue in Uruguay bears the name of General Rivera, who exterminated the last Charrua indians in the nineteenth century.

***

John Locke, renowned philosopher of liberty, was a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company, which bought and sold slaves.

At the dawn of the 18th century, the first of the Bourbons of Spain, Philip V, inaugurated his new throne by signing a contract with his cousin the king of France that allowed the Guinea Company to sell blacks in America. Each king would receive a 25 percent cut of the profits.

The names of some of the ships that carried this cargo: Voltaire, Rousseau, Jesus, Hope, Equality, and Friendship.

Two of the founding fathers of the United States disappeared in the fog of official history. No one remembers Robert Carter or Gouverneur Morris. This amnesia is recompense for their acts: Carter was the first of the champions of independence to free his slaves. Morris, one of the authors of the Constitution, opposed the clause stipulating that a slave was equal to just three-fifths of a person.

”The Birth of a Nation”, the first Hollywood mega-production, premiered in 1915 in the White House. The president, Woodrow Wilson, gave it a standing ovation. His writings were repeatedly quoted in the film, a racist hymn in praise of the Ku Klux Klan.

***

A few dates:

From the year 1234 and through the next seven centuries, the Catholic Church barred women from singing in church. Their voices were considered impure, because of the incident in the Garden of Eden.

In 1783, the Spanish King decreed that manual labour was no longer dishonourable. Until that time practicing any of the ”vile trades” would be punished by forfeiture of noble status.

Until 1986 it was legal in English schools to punish children with belts, sticks, and clubs.

***

In the name of freedom, equality, and fraternity the French Revolution proclaimed in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Men and the Citizen. Shortly after, the militant woman revolutionary Olympe de Gouges proposed the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. She was executed by guillotine.

Half a century later another revolutionary government, during the First Commune of Paris, proclaimed universal suffrage. At the same time it denied women the right to vote by a near unanimous 899-to-one vote.

***

The Christian Emperor Theodora never said she was a revolutionary or anything of the sort. But 1500 years ago, thanks to her, the Byzantine Empire became the first place in the world where women had the right to abortion and divorce.

***

General Ulysses S. Grant, who led the industrial north to victory in its war with the slaveholder south, was later president of the United States.

In 1875 responding to British pressure, he said, ”Within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection[ism] all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.”

And so in the year 2075, the most protectionist nation in the world will open up.

*** Lootie was the first Pekinese dog to reach Europe. He travelled to London in 1860. The English baptised him thus because he was part of the loot taken from China after the two prolonged opium wars.

Victoria, the drug-trafficker queen, imposed opium at the barrel of a cannon. China was transformed into a nation of drug addicts, in the name of freedom, freedom of trade.

In the name of freedom, freedom of trade, Paraguay was annihilated in 1870. At the end of a five year war, this country, the only country of the Americas that didn’t owe anyone a cent, inaugurated its foreign debt. Its very first loan reached it in smoking ruins. It was destined to pay gigantic reparations to Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Thus the assassinated country paid its assassins for their service.

***

Haiti also paid giant reparations. Since it won its independence in 1804, the new, razed nation had to pay France a fortune to expiate the sin of its independence. It paid for a century and a half.

***

Big businesses have human rights in the United States. In 1886, the Supreme Court extended the rights of humans to private corporations, and this is still the case.

A few years later, to defend the human rights of its companies, the United States invaded ten countries around the world.

Thus Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, proposed a new national flag with little skulls instead of stars. Another writer, Ambrose Bierce, observed : War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

***

The concentration camp was born in Africa. The English pioneered the experiment and the Germans developed it further. Afterward, in Germany, Hermann Goring applied the model that his father had tried out in Namibia in 1904. The masters of Joseph Mengele had studied the anatomy of the inferior races in the concentration camp in Namibia. The guinea pigs were all black.

***

In 1936 the International Olympic Committee did not tolerate insolence. In the games of that year, organised by Hitler, the Peruvian football team defeated the team from Austria, the Fuhrer’s birthplace, 4-2. The Olympic Committee annulled the game.

***

Hitler did not lack for friends. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the racial and racist medical experiments of the Nazis. Coca-Cola invented Fanta, at the height of the war, for the German market. IBM made possible the identification and classification of the Jews, which was the first large-scale use of the punch card.

***

In 1953, a labour protest erupted in communist Germany. The workers flooded the streets and Soviet tanks were deployed to shut their mouths. Bertold Brecht had this suggestion: Wouldn’t it be easier if the government simply dissolves the people and elects another?”

***

Marketing campaigns. Public opinion is the target. Wars are sold with lies, the same as cars.

In 1964 the United States invaded Vietnam because Vietnam had attacked two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. After the war slaughtered multitudes of Vietnamese, the Secretary of Defence Robert MacNamara, acknowledged that the Gulf of Tonkin attack never occurred.

Forty years later the same history was repeated with Iraq.

***

Thousands of years before the US invasion brought civilisation to Iraq, this barbaric land bequeathed the world the first love poem of world history. Inscribed in the Sumerian language in clay, the poem tells of the encounter of a goddess and a shepherd. For that night Inanna, the goddess, loved as if she had been mortal. Dumuzi, the shepherd, was for that night immortal.

* * *

Errant paradoxes, stimulating paradoxes.

Aleijadinho, the ugliest man in Brazil, created the most beautiful sculptures of the American colonial era.

Marco Polo’s book of his travels, an exercise in freedom, was written in a prison in Genoa.

Don Quixote of La Mancha, another exercise in freedom, was born in a prison in Seville.

The blacks who gave birth to jazz, the freest of all types of music, were the grandchildren of slaves.

One of the greatest jazz guitarists, Django Reinhardt, had only three fully working fingers on his left hand.

The great master of French cuisine Grimod de la Reyniere had no hands. He wrote, and cooked, and ate with hooks. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)