Post by Marcus AureliusAustralia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective
http://www.kooriweb.org/gst/genocide/essayhol.html
Interesting tactic, to call the Australians, who fought
Hitler 'Nazis' - reminds me of the Rabid Right calling Jews
"Zionazis". I remind readers that there was a time when the
left allied itself with Hitler through the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact. Apparently the far far far left are as adept with their
pretzel logic as ever.
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/sept01/keith.htm
As a preview to the Sydney Olympic Games last September, The Wall
Street Journal ran a front-page story about the great issue it said was
dividing the Australian nation, the treatment of its Aboriginal people.
The two journalists who wrote the story opened with an account of an
incident near Hobart in Tasmania in 1804 when British soldiers fired on
a party of Aboriginal men, women, and children, who were out hunting
kangaroos and armed only with clubs. This was "the opening shot in a
war that would result in the near-extermination of Tasmanian
Aborigines," the journalists wrote. "Some of the 50 or so killed
that day were salted down and sent to Sydney as anthropological
curiosities."
The fate of the indigenous Tasmanians is today frequently described in
the liberal media as an example of British imperial genocide. This is
because they were a distinct ethnic group, physically different from
mainland Aborigines, and their last full-blooded member died in 1876.
To underline the political reach of these events, The Wall Street
Journal quoted the current federal senator for the Greens Party, Bob
Brown: "We have to come to grips with our horrendous past," he
said, "and nowhere is it worse than in Tasmania."
The New York Times took a similar approach. The day after the Sydney
Games began it published an editorial entitled "The Other
Australia," which admonished the country for its treatment of its
Aboriginal people and recounted the horrors of its history. The
editorial, which was reprinted around the world in the International
Herald Tribune, said:
The Aboriginal experience is depressingly similar to that of Native
Americans in the United States. European settlers viciously drove the
Aborigines from their land, massacring thousands with impunity.
At the same time, another article on this subject was syndicated to
English-language newspapers around the world. This was written by Ben
Kiernan, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Director of
the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. (My copy of his
article came from the Bangkok Post.) Kiernan is an expatriate
Australian, best known for his books on the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
Despite his academic credentials, Kiernan made no pretense to treat his
topic dispassionately. Entitled "Australia's Aboriginal
Genocides," his story was replete with terminology such as "ethnic
cleansing" and "transit camps" designed to draw comparisons with
the practices of Nazi Germany and contemporary Yugoslavia.
Kiernan wrote of British colonists in the nineteenth century mounting
"punitive expeditions" and committing "hundreds of massacres."
In the Gippsland district of Victoria, for instance, "a series of
horrendous massacres" reduced the Aboriginal population from 2000 to
126, he said. In Central Australia, he claimed, 40 percent of the
indigenous population had been shot dead. In northern Queensland, the
Aborigines "were hunted like wild beasts, having lived for years in a
state of absolute terror of white predators." He also recorded the
same 1804 incident at Hobart described in The Wall Street Journal,
putting the total killed at forty. Among a long list of atrocities
since the 1790s, Kiernan noted that as late as 1926 whites shot and
burned to death 100 Aborigines at Forrest River in Western Australia.
"The two police officers involved were acquitted and promoted." All
told, Kiernan wrote, 20,000 Aborigines were killed resisting the
British occupation of Australia between 1788 and 1901.
The desire by Australian authors to portray the history of race
relations in their country in the blackest terms possible reached its
nadir in a book by the journalist Phillip Knightley, Australia: A
Biography of a Nation, published in London last year. Knightley,
another expatriate who was a member of the famous team of investigative
journalists on the London Sunday Times in the 1960s, devoted a chapter
of his book to "Black Australia." He agreed that the story amounted
to "genocide," and he drew what he called "striking parallels"
between the Holocaust and the fate of the Aborigines.
Defeated in the Aboriginal Wars of the nineteenth century, they had
become a forgotten race, reviled, murdered, harassed, discriminated
against, and subject to cruel and unusual punishments. It remains one
of the mysteries of history that Australia was able to get away with a
racist policy that included segregation and dispossession and bordered
on slavery and genocide, practices unknown in the civilized world in
the first half of the twentieth century until Nazi Germany turned on
the Jews in the 1930s.
Instead of Kiernan's death toll of 20,000, Knightley claimed the
number of Aborigines killed in the "wars and massacres" of the past
two centuries was much higher. "Experts I have consulted say that
50,000 would not be an exaggeration. It could be as high as 100,000."
This is from a total pre-colonial indigenous population of about
300,000. Yet until recently, Knightley noted, very few outsiders were
aware of the scale of the carnage. "It is amazing that Australians
managed to keep from the rest of the world the fact that they were
massacring the Aboriginals."
Almost without dissent, the Australian liberal intelligentsia has taken
this story to heart. The Wall Street Journal is correct in saying that
it is now the most divisive issue in the nation. On the one side stand
the media, the arts community, the Labor Party parliamentary
opposition, almost all academics, and a large proportion of the
judiciary who accept this account of Australia's past. On the other
side is the conservative prime minister, John Howard, and many of his
constituents and supporters who argue that, even if true, the events
happened so long ago that current generations cannot be held
responsible for them. Howard's opponents, however, blame all the
current problems faced by outback Aboriginal communities-chronic
alcoholism, petrol sniffing, heroin addiction, domestic violence,
unemployment, and appalling health and education standards-on their
dispossession from tribal lands and the subsequent loss of their
traditional hunter-gatherer culture. Howard has faced enormous public
pressure to issue a formal apology over the issue and thus open the way
to large-scale claims for compensation, but so far he has refused.
In the 1990s, the High Court of Australia made two decisions that meant
large tracts of the continent would be turned into "native title,"
a new form of property that could be held only by people of indigenous
descent. One of the judges who made these decisions, Sir William Deane,
the recently retired Governor-General of Australia, based much of his
argument on the writings of Australian historians who had shown the
nation, he said, that it had inherited "a legacy of unutterable
shame."
Despite the certainty with which such pronouncements have been made,
and despite the political weight they carry, the body of historical
work from which they derive is actually very small. The history of
relations between Aborigines and British colonists only began to be
taken seriously at an academic level in the 1970s. Claims about
large-scale massacres and of a death toll in the tens of thousands date
from the 1980s and, in fact, derive largely from the work of one
historian, Henry Reynolds, and his book The Other Side of the Frontier
(1981). Reynolds and his colleagues have generated a number of academic
followers and have established an intellectual framework within which
most research on the subject has since been done.
Like several of his supporters who now hold prominent chairs of history
at Australian universities, Reynolds was a member of the generation of
Sixties radicals. He remains a political activist today and recently
wrote Aboriginal Sovereignty, a book that has inspired the leading
black radicals in the Aboriginal movement. The book argues for a
separate Aboriginal state governed by Aboriginal laws where traditional
Aboriginal culture can flourish. It identifies with the international
"first peoples" political movement that wants independence from
imperial domination for all indigenous cultures and which is currently
working through the United Nations to achieve that end. In Australia,
the current overt demand is for a treaty with the rest of the country.
For public consumption in the media, the activists justify a treaty
simply on the grounds of "rectifying past injustices." In writings
addressed to their own supporters, however, they see a treaty
establishing the grounds for a separate state and government.
In other words, what we have here is a version of Australian history
designed to serve highly politicized ends. To date, it has largely been
accepted without demur, except by a handful of older historians such as
Geoffrey Blainey, who has labelled it "black armband history." And
yet, in terms of acceptable scholarship, it has very little to
recommend it. When it is closely examined, much of the evidence for the
claims about massacres, terrorism, and genocide turns out to be highly
suspect. Most of it is very poorly founded, other parts are seriously
mistaken, and a good deal of it is outright fabrication.
Let me give an idea of the nature of the debate with two specific
examples. The first is the 1804 incident at Hobart. The British
officers who were there at the time said a settler and his wife had
been surrounded in their hut and threatened by more than 200 Aborigines
armed with spears. Soldiers from a nearby camp came to the rescue and
shot, at most, three people. One native man was killed on the spot,
another's body was found in a nearby valley, and a third was led away
by his companions bleeding from wounds. These officers had no
ostensible reason to lie in their reports or to downplay the conflict.
They were only doing their duty. At a government inquiry in 1830,
however, a former convict testified that in 1804 he thought "forty to
fifty" blacks had been killed, even though he acknowledged he had not
been at the scene at the time.
Despite this claim being no more than a rumour twenty-six years after
the event, it has allowed those historians who want to beat up this
issue to say that witnesses have claimed "up to fifty" Aborigines
were killed in this incident. Hence, when translated into general works
of history and into the press, a defensive action with three adult male
casualties has become a massacre of fifty innocent men, women, and
children. The Wall Street Journal's claim that the bodies were
"salted down" and sent to Sydney for anthropological investigation
is another rumor first made in 1830 that had no contemporary
corroboration.
The event at Forrest River in 1926, described by Kiernan as one of the
"hundreds of massacres" that took place in the twentieth century,
has more surface plausibility. The Western Australian government
appointed a royal commissioner to look into the allegations. The
commissioner found that two policemen, while on the hunt for an
Aboriginal who had murdered a pastoralist, had themselves shot eleven
natives in their custody and burnt their remains beyond recognition.
Until recently, historians had no good reason to doubt his findings.
The figure of 100 dead cited by Kiernan is in a different position. It
comes from Aboriginal oral history collected in the 1970s and has no
more status than local mythology.
In 1999, however, the Perth journalist Rod Moran published a detailed
analysis of the evidence and conclusions of the Forrest River Royal
Commission. In his book Massacre Myth, Moran proves beyond reasonable
doubt that no such killings ever took place. There were no
eyewitnesses, no forensic evidence of human beings killed, nor any
ballistic evidence. He produces a medical officer's analysis made at
the time, and largely ignored by later commentators, that charred bones
found at some camp sites were not of human origin or were of
indeterminate origin. They were probably the remains of animals cooked
over camp fires. The most incriminating evidence of a massacre had been
a list of twenty-nine Aborigines from the local mission who had gone
missing, presumed killed, at the time of the police patrol. Moran shows
this list, compiled by the head of the mission, is fraudulent. He
examined the mission's surviving documents and found several of the
Aborigines on the list were recorded on the attendance roll alive and
well two and three years later. Some of them were recorded as having
died well before the police patrol took place. Others had not been seen
at the mission for up to two years before the events concerned. Moran
persuasively argues that the mission head fabricated not only this list
but also other evidence upon which the commission had relied.
Research of my own has since found that this behavior was
characteristic of a number of well-known missionaries in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. These missionaries took any rumor about
violence towards Aborigines, no matter how unreliable or vague, and
propagated it without checking its accuracy. Why would they do such a
thing? They wanted to show the need for their own institutions. By
portraying colonial society as awash with violence towards the blacks,
they justified their policy of separating Aborigines from white
society. They wanted their missions to appear as havens in a heartless
world. This fulfilled the Protestant evangelical theology on which
their actions were based: the everyday, material world was full of evil
and corruption and the only road to salvation for Aborigines lay in a
closed religious community. Here they could be kept apart from the
modern world and separated from white society. It also meant the
missionaries would keep their funding and their jobs. They hoped to be
seen by their peers in the colony and their sponsors in London as the
saviors of the Aborigines.
The rumours and myths they disseminated have colored the whole record
of Aboriginal-European relations in Australia's early colonial
history. They have also influenced policy ever since. Those who claim
to be the friends of Aborigines have long supported separatism-from
the missions and government reserves of the nineteenth century down to
the proposals for a treaty and separate state today.
Recent academic historians have used the claims of missionaries to
construct a lurid series of massacre stories, adding an extra dimension
of their own. Until 1981 no historian had been confident enough to
estimate the total number of Aborigines killed on the frontiers of the
British occupation. No systematic count of bodies had ever been made,
and the handful of researchers then in the field knew many reports of
killings were unreliable. The most reputable historian in the field,
Charles Rowley, had said in 1970 that, compared to the impact on
indigenous peoples of other colonizing powers, the Australian story
amounted to "comparatively small-scale homicide." All this changed
with the publication of Henry Reynolds's The Other Side of the
Frontier. He estimated that settlers killed at least 20,000 Aborigines
between 1788 and 1901. Relative to the size of their population, this
figure suggested that between 5 and 20 percent of all Aborigines in the
colonial period died violently by white hands. This was, Reynolds said,
a shocking indictment.
Twenty thousand blacks were killed before federation. Their burial
mound stands out as a landmark of awesome size on the peaceful plains
of colonial history. If the bodies had been white our histories would
be heavy with their story, a forest of monuments would celebrate their
"sacrifice." In parts of the continent the Aboriginal death toll
overshadows even that of the overseas wars of the twentieth century.
This figure is nowhere near as great as the indigenous death toll from
disease in the early nineteenth century, but it is still a disturbing
total. It now entered the established record and become part of the
received wisdom of Australian historiography. It is the current
consensus among Australian historians. (The figure of 50,000- 100,000
cited by Phillip Knightley is pure invention. The only "authority"
to suggest a total this high is a book of popular history written by
Bruce Elder, a journalist whose normal specialty is rock 'n' roll
music. It is heavily ironic that Knightley, the author of a very good
book on war reporting and propaganda, The First Casualty, has himself
succumbed to the kind of atrocity stories he has criticized others for
accepting.)
Very few historians have ever questioned the veracity of Reynolds's
figure of 20,000 dead or traced its sources to their origins. It
derived from a compilation he made of estimates by historians of
various regions. One of these regions is Queensland where Reynolds's
source is his own research. In The Other Side of the Frontier, he said
that he had spent several years going through official records and
press reports and had found that Queensland was by far the bloodiest
area for Aboriginal-white conflict. As the Queensland pastoral frontier
expanded from 1850 to 1900, some 10,000 Aborigines were killed by
whites. In his book, Reynolds said he had published the actual details
of this research in 1978 in a small university monograph entitled Race
Relations in North Queensland. Even though 10,000 in Queensland was a
remarkably high figure-the other regional studies he cited produced a
combined death toll for the rest of the continent of less than 3000
-no scholar doubted Reynolds's claims nor investigated his
methodology. For the next twenty years, Australian historians were
happy to cite him as the authority.
In July and August 2000, I began a project to investigate the evidence
behind Aboriginal killings. One of the first works I looked up was
Reynolds's 1978 monograph, Race Relations in North Queensland, a
typescript volume held by only a few libraries. To my surprise, I found
it is not about Aboriginal deaths at all. It is a tally of the number
of whites killed by Aborigines. Nowhere does it mention 10,000
Aboriginal dead. It produces evidence that Aborigines may have killed
between 800 and 850 Europeans from 1850 to 1900. The only mention it
makes of Aboriginal deaths is in one sole footnote where the author
says that while it is impossible to do anything but guess at the number
of natives killed, their death rate "may have been" ten times more
than that of the Europeans. In other words, as well as being a false
citation of evidence, this document meant the overall historical
consensus about Aboriginal killings had a gaping hole in its empirical
foundation.
I presented this finding to a conference in Sydney last September,
arguing that it amounted to a major piece of academic deception. I also
presented some of the evidence now emerging about the exaggeration and
invention involved in some of the best-known events, such as the
Forrest River "massacre." Because Reynolds has a high media profile
(he has had a television series called Frontier made from his books,
and the liberal daily, The Sydney Morning Herald, recently nominated
him as one of the 100 greatest living Australians), my paper attracted
considerable media attention. Very little of it, however, was
sympathetic to my findings. Most commentary was outraged that I had
dared to question the orthodox position. Four academic historians and
the political scientist, Robert Manne-once the editor of the leading
Australian conservative intellectual magazine, Quadrant, but now a
member of the Left establishment-compared me in the press to the
Holocaust denier David Irving.
In a mainly ad hominem reply, Henry Reynolds himself conceded that his
figure of 20,000 was only a guess. He also conceded my critique that,
on the available evidence, most of the killings of Aborigines that had
occurred comprised individually small numbers. Almost all homicides
were in ones and twos and the phenomenon of mass killing was rare and
isolated. He completely ignored, however, the charge of academic
deception and stood by his original tally as an "educated and
conservative" guess. He had done "a mountain of research" and had
published his reading in a twenty-five-page bibliography. Because his
work rested on such a great body of reading, he said people should
trust his judgment.
While I had demonstrated that there was very little reliable evidence
for most of the claims about the killing of Aborigines, defenders of
the orthodoxy replied that this is just what you would expect in a
frontier war situation. Pastoralists displaced both Aborigines and the
game they depended upon. Faced with the loss of their land and
starvation, the Aborigines understandably responded with violence. The
orthodox view claimed that the frontier was a place where whites could
kill blacks with impunity. No other settlers on the frontier would have
reported them and the police either turned a blind eye or were
complicit in massacres themselves. Hence widespread killings would have
occurred without leaving any trace in the historical evidence.
This is, of course, a circular argument. To explain why there would be
no evidence of widespread killings, you claim there was a frontier war
situation, which, under this definition, is a place where there were
widespread killings but where no evidence of them remained.
The most revealing comment was made by Dr. Bain Attwood of Monash
University who wrote: "Most of the historical sources that might have
enabled us to enumerate the number of Aboriginal people killed on the
frontier have, for various reasons, either never existed or have since
been lost or destroyed." Attwood went on to claim that "very little
historical interpretation is verifiable in any strict sense," and
that historians arrive at the truth on the basis of a "scholarly
consensus." Now, the notion of a scholarly consensus might be
acceptable if there was sufficient evidence to support it. However, if
the evidence "never existed" or can no longer be found, then the
consensus can owe nothing to scholarship. It is no more than a shared
ideological position. To imagine that one can arrive at conclusions
without evidence, but simply on the basis of an agreement between those
currently in the field, is to abandon historical methodology in favor
of politics-he who has the numbers determines the truth.
Unfortunately, this postmodernist assumption now dominates the teaching
of history at our universities.
My critique of the current orthodoxy was published in a three-part
series of articles in Quadrant late last year. I am now expanding this
work into a book that makes three principal arguments. First, rather
than genocide and frontier warfare, British colonization of Australia
brought civilized society and the rule of law. Whites could not kill
blacks with impunity. In fact, as the British government regularly
reminded all its colonial governors, Aborigines were subjects of His
Majesty and entitled to the protection of his laws. The penalty for the
unlawful killing of an Aborigine was death, the same as for killing a
white man. This was enshrined in one celebrated incident, the Myall
Creek Massacre of 1838, where a group of convict and ex-convict
stockmen killed twenty-eight Aboriginal men, women, and children
encamped on a pastoral station. The overseer found the bodies and was
appalled. He reported the incident and identified those responsible,
who were subsequently tried for murder. Eleven were found guilty and
seven were executed for the crime. Modern historians try to argue this
event away by saying it was the exception rather than the rule. The
fact remains, however, that it was a highly publicized case of the rule
of law being upheld and justice being done in a way that could not fail
to impress even the most crudely racist member of the then penal
colony. There is a considerable body of other evidence from the
pastoral frontier that shows the colonial police did their duty and the
authorities scrutinized their activities closely.
Second, rather than evidence of Aboriginal killings "never
existing" or being lost or destroyed, the documentary record is
actually quite comprehensive. I am currently working on the archives of
Tasmania, a very small society where, except for a gap of two years,
there are good records of the activities of the entire British
population from 1803 to 1831. The leading orthodox historian of
Aboriginal-European relations in Tasmania, Professor Lyndall Ryan,
claims that 700 natives were shot dead in this period. She acknowledges
that half this figure is her own extrapolation based on guesswork but
she nonetheless claims the archival record directly confirms a body
count of 362 natives who died by gunshot. After surveying the secondary
sources and checking all their citations of reports of killings in the
original documents, however, I have found that a reliable figure of
British killings of Aborigines in Tasmania is less than one-hundred.
This is about half the number of colonists who died at native hands and
is a figure that makes the notion of "frontier warfare" look
absurd.
Third, the idea that Aborigines were patriots engaged in a brave but
futile defense of their territory against the firepower of British
imperialism is a piece of ideology derived from the anti-colonialist
movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It has little to do with the mentality
of tribal hunter-gatherers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century when colonization originally took place. Rather than
nationalist hostility, the Aboriginal response to the arrival of the
British was quite different. In some places, Aborigines were fascinated
by, and strongly drawn towards, white society. Some became quickly
dependent upon white food supplies and addicted to British products
such as flour, sugar, tea, tobacco, and rum. In other places, personal
quarrels between whites and natives, especially over women and the
theft of food, led to violence. Under the Aboriginal notion of
"payback" justice, an offense against a native could be revenged by
a violent assault on any white man. The great majority of killings of
both whites and blacks took place under these conditions. While they
involved a genuine clash between the two different cultures' notions
of justice and law, rarely did they amount to "frontier warfare,"
and certainly not the kind of anti-colonial guerrilla warfare familiar
to most historians who came of age in the 1960s. As for the Aborigines
being driven into conflict by starvation after native game was
eliminated, many frontier pastoralists reported that, after they had
removed the timber to expand their pastures, in most places they
suffered "a plague" of kangaroos, whose populations exploded to
take advantage of the greatly increased supply of grass.
It is true that the Aboriginal population declined dramatically after
British colonization but this was almost entirely due to disease:
smallpox on the north and east coasts (contracted from fishermen
visiting from present-day Indonesia), and influenza and pneumonia in
the rest of the continent and on Tasmania. The Aboriginal birth rate
also plummeted, primarily due to the spread of venereal disease. In
Tasmania and most of the south and east of the continent, the last
full-blooded Aborigines died in the nineteenth century.
The twentieth century, however, saw people of Aboriginal descent revive
their numbers to their current total of 386,000. The great majority of
these people today show little inclination to fulfil the romantic
agenda set for them by recent historians and political activists.
Rather than remain in outback communities, 73 percent of them today
have moved to the cities and large regional centers. In the suburbs of
Sydney alone, there are more people who identify themselves as
Aboriginal than in the entire Western third of the continent, outside
of Perth. Some 71 percent of Aborigines profess Christianity and a mere
2.06 percent adhere to traditional tribal religion. Two-thirds of the
adults are married to or cohabiting with a nonindigenous spouse. In the
cities, their employment, education levels, and health are much better
than in the outback communities where the activists want them to live.
In other words, at a time when Australian politics and the judiciary
are making extensive land grants in the outback, and when academics,
artists, and the news media are calling for the revival of traditional
culture on tribal land, the great majority of Aboriginal people
themselves are voting with their feet and assimilating into white
society.
Why then has the history of Aboriginal-European relations become such a
burning issue? It is more than a matter of the fabrication of evidence
by a group of radical historians. A proper explanation of the
phenomenon needs to tell us not only why so many prominent people have
been drawn into the issue, but also why the historians themselves
seized upon it in the first place.
As I have indicated, part of the explanation derives from the culture
of the Sixties. At the time, Australian radicals took their political
ideas largely from the United States. In race relations, they adopted
the notion of "Black Power," which claimed that policies for the
assimilation or the integration of non-white people into white society
were racist. The Marxist guru of the 1960s Herbert Marcuse and his
followers argued that just as capitalism co-opted the working class
into accepting capitalist ideology, so whites wanted to co-opt blacks
into a form of integration that would betray black interests and
suppress black culture. These ideas produced similar sentiments among
Aboriginal activists in this country.
Black power also coincided with the decolonization of Asia and Africa.
The emergent nationalist movements in these regions were
anti-imperialist and anti-European. Many activists in Aboriginal
politics came to identify British imperialism and racism as the cause
of all their problems. Many historians in Australia swallowed this
political agenda whole. They made their own contribution to it by
manufacturing stories about the widespread killing of Aborigines in our
past in order to shore up its separatist assumptions.
There is more to the issue, however, than the politics of the Sixties.
It goes much deeper into Western culture. Ever since Christopher
Columbus discovered the New World, there has been a heated debate
within Western society over its relations with the indigenous peoples
who subsequently came within its realm. The debate has been remarkably
consistent over the whole of this five-hundred-year period in that,
rather than focusing primarily on the indigenes, it has been far more
concerned to use their presence to mount a critique of European society
itself. European intellectuals have used the notion of primitive
peoples living in harmony with a beneficent nature as a contrast to the
complexity and restrictions of their own civilization. When Montaigne
wrote his essay "On Cannibals" in 1580, he knew very little about
the cannibals of the New World themselves, but he was able to imagine
that they lived in a "state of purity" that contrasted sharply with
all the institutions that were the bane of civilized man's existence.
This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no sort of
traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a
magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no
riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no
occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no
clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very
words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy,
belittling, pardon- unheard of.
In the seventeenth century, the English poet John Dryden coined the
term "noble savage" to refer to such "guiltless men." In the
eighteenth century, the French radical Jean-Jacques Rousseau portrayed
"the celestial and majestic simplicity of man before corruption by
society."
In his monumental survey of Western culture over the past five
centuries From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun records that a
yearning for what he calls "primitivism" has been a powerful force
over the whole of this time. Primitivism is one of the key impulses
that inspired those who were drawn to Martin Luther and the Protestant
Reformation. Barzun notes that this impulse is based on the perception
that complex social systems are both oppressive and corrupt. Hence it
repeatedly creates a demand for "the pure," not only in religion
and social organization, but across the whole of the culture: "pure
love, pure thought, pure form in art." It is the principal impulse
behind the notion of the "noble savage." Primitivism, Barzun
argues, is closely related to the demand for emancipation. Together,
the rejection of complex, rule-based society and the yearning for an
earlier, simpler, more natural state of humanity, have regularly
produced calls for the overthrow of existing social structures, in both
the church and the polity.
Another illuminating recent analysis of this issue is by the
Californian classicist Bruce Thornton. In Plagues of the Mind (ISI
books, 1999) Thornton provides a critique of the prevailing radical
cult of romanticism. He demonstrates the connection between the concept
of the noble savage and a number of contemporary radical impulses,
including the "deep green" environmentalist movement, American
Indian politics, and recent directions in "New Age" feminism. The
noble savage is manifest not only in recent Hollywood products such as
Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, but has also been a staple of
American political radicalism. Thornton argues that, since Rousseau,
the concept has nourished those revolutionary political
movements-from the Jacobins to the Khmer Rouge-who have wanted to
purge society of its failings and recreate the imagined purity of a
community of perfect beings. He observes that variations on the theme
go as far back as the poet Hesiod in 700 B.C. It represents a longing
for a return to a pre-civilized existence and to escape from a
rule-based social system. As such, it is a protest by the civilized
against civilization itself. It It is a desire that derives from a
fundamental misinterpretation of the object of its dissent. Thornton
writes:
By denigrating Western civilization-the imperfect but still best hope
for controlling humanity's penchant for evil and for providing the
greatest freedom for the greatest number of people-the myth of the
noble savage nurtures the false hope that human perfection and freedom
are possible without civilization.
Post by Marcus AureliusFrom The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 1, September 2001