Our freedom from China (Columbus Day)

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I was arrested by this piece of news: “The American Embassy offices, including the Public Affairs Section, Information Resource Center, and the student counseling service will remain closed today on the occasion of Columbus Day. . . . The Columbus Day is celebrated to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492, a US Embassy press release said.”

We owe it all to Columbus: the enslavement of the Native Americans, the enslavement and transportation of Africans, the destruction of indigenous civilisations. And it is telling that the entire world owes its misery to Europe, and not to China.

And the Pope recently rubbed salt in the wound when he proclaimed that the natives had been silently waiting for Christianity ere they were conquered and converted. One commentator observed that "As usual white Europeans continue in the most arrogant and insensitive ways to insult and humiliate the citizens of their former colonies. Perhaps this unconscious and addictive penchant for foot-in-the-mouth disease is written in the DNA of European Caucasians who just can’t seem to understand the immeasurable suffering that their contact with the peoples of the developing nations of the world has caused." (Michael Roberts, The Pope's Senior Moment).

Our gratitude to China must be, therefore in exact proportion to our antipathy for Europe: where China could have conquered the world, she didn't; and Europe did.

For Europe and China had the same technology: gunpowder, compass and printing press. These were Chinese inventions. Yet China refused to conquer the world and Europe did not. Had China gone on to conquer us, today we would be wearing pigtails, kowtowing and repeating ‘The Master said’ at every opportunity. For Cheng Ho, the eunuch, did in fact start to control the east. Between 1405 and 1433, Cheng Ho made his imperialist voyages to India and Africa, deposing rulers, installing them. And then the adventures stopped -- by bureaucratic fiat from the Middle Kingdom. China had no need to conquer the world, she was a unified, prosperous country, one of the two greatest civilisations the world had seen until that day, the other being the Muslim civilisation.

On the other hand, consider Europe. Europe was united only once by Augustus (there was an ephemeral union under Charlemagne around 800 AD). Europe was a fragmented unity, for one thing; for another, when kings tried to raise taxes, parliament opposed them. Hence kings tried to find a way around parliaments. Imperialist adventures offered an easy way out. The silver mines of the New World financed the European wars of Charles V. Notice the contradiction: the rights enjoyed by parliamentarians meant that ‘Red’ Indians and Africans had no rights whatsoever. They were not organised into parliaments. Thus began the new economy which ultimately led to capitalism.

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a bit of history for a Friday in August