No one can accuse us of concealing the actions that cleared the New York area; the facts are, after all, readily available to everyone in Native American Place Names in New York City, prominently published by the Museum of the City of New York.

The spectacle of our "sensitivity to history" is too obscene to merit review, though neglect would not be quite the right word. Anyone who can recall the images and lessons of their childhood will know why; at least those whose childhood years came before the impact of the popular movements of the 1960s was finally felt, arousing a chorus of revulsion over the PC takeover of our previously saintly culture. My own memories were reawakened a few weeks after the exposure of the My Lai massacre in 1969, while thumbing through a fourth-grade text on colonial New England assigned in a Boston suburb noted for the quality of its schools. The children indeed read a fairly accurate account of the slaughter of the Pequots -- which was applauded, much in the manner of the Puritan record of 1643.⁴⁷

And so the story continues right through the 500th year. In the Times Book Review, historian Caleb Carr reviews a book on the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. The "Minnesota encounter," he explains, was "a total war between rival nations for control of a territory both groups were willing to die for." But there was a crucial asymmetry. For one nation, "settlement was generally their last hope"; they were "staking not only their fortunes but also their very lives on the hope of building new lives in untried country." For the natives, at least at first, "the terms of the conflict" were "less mortal"; they could, after all, trudge off further West. Carr describes the "encounter" as "less than inspiring," and praises the author for recognizing that both nations were guilty of crimes. Those of the Sioux are outlined in gory detail ("atrocious behavior," "sadism and blood lust," "a particular penchant for torturing infants and children," etc.); the tune changes markedly when Carr turns to the settlers seeking to build new lives (broken treaties, hanging of 38 Sioux, expulsion even of some who were not "guilty" of resistance, etc.). But the radical difference is only fair, given the asymmetry of need in the "encounter."

To conjure up a nightmare, suppose the Nazis had won the European war. Perhaps some later German ideologue might have conceded that the "encounter" between Germans and Slavs on the Eastern front was "less than inspiring," though for balance, we must recall that it was "a total war between rival nations for control of a territory both groups were willing to die for"; and for the Slavs "the terms of the conflict" were "less mortal" than for the Germans needing Lebensraum, "staking not only their fortunes but also their very lives on the hope of building new lives in untried country." The Slavs, after all, could trudge off to Siberia.⁴⁸

It is noteworthy that Carr's review opens with the predictable frothing at the mouth about the evils of PC, that is, the efforts of a misguided few to face some of the truths of history. That is a common posture; in the Times, de rigueur on this topic (among others). In a typical case, another Times reviewer, with bitterness dripping from every line, writes that a novel on Columbus "adheres closely to the new multi-cultural perspective," focusing on what the author "sees as the devastating effects that Columbus's arrival in the New World had on the native populations," including "the supposed deaths of thousands of people." Who but a fashionable "multi-culturalist" could believe that the effects of the conquest were "devastating" or could "suppose" that "thousands" of Native Americans died? A second Times reviewer of the same book, former Newsweek senior book critic Paul Prescott, chimes in with a hysterical denunciation of the "ideologically correct" author for daring to write that the Spanish harmed the natives of Hispaniola while suppressing "the kind of history is not politically correct": that the natives "told [Columbus] that their immediate problem was that they were being eaten by the Caribs." How they "told" Columbus this tale of woe, and why no record exists, Prescott does not explain; on the "immediate problem" as seen by the contemporary observer Las Casas, who denied the cannibalism charge concocted by Columbus, see pp. 198-9.⁴⁹

It is not unreasonable to suppose that the extremely crude but quite effective propaganda campaign about the takeover of our culture by PC left fascists was in part motivated by the forthcoming quincentennial, with the danger that it might elicit some "self-reflection," perhaps even "remorse."

⁴⁷ For details, see AWWA, 102-3.

⁴⁸ Carr, NYT Book Review, March 22, 1992. Of some interest, perhaps, is Carr's response to the comments above, which had appeared (in essence) in Lies of Our Times, May 1992. In toto: "The notion that there have been, in American history, episodes in which neither side behaved like much more than bloodthirsty animals is apparently too morally complex for many to bear" (Letters, NYT Book Review, Aug. 23, 1992, inserted irrelevantly into a response to criticism on totally different matters). I leave it to the reader to construct the Nazi analogue.

⁴⁹ Regular Times reviewer Michio Kakutani, NYT, Aug. 28; Prescott, NYT Book Review, Sept. 20, 1992; reviews of Jay Parini, Bay of Arrows. On the cannibalism mythology that so enthralls Western ideologists, see Sale, Conquest. Ethnohistorian Jalil Sued-Badillo writes that "Archeological studies have not to this day been able to confirm cannibal practices anywhere in America"; Monthly Review, July-Aug. 1992. For a second-hand report of ritual cannibalism in North America, see Axtell, Invasion, 263; for Indian reports, Jennings, Empire, 446-7.