It happened again last week, as the last episode of a long and worrying series of initiatives undertaken in recent years to change the historical memory of the United States. Even the statue of Cristoforo Combo, which until recently adorned Grand Park in Los Angeles, is now no more, eventually removed, despite the controversy, at the request of an association for the defense of the Native Americans. In its place could be a memorial for the massacre of the American Indians or, more likely, a simple empty space that tries to make you forget that in that place had been given a tribute to the now uncomfortable figure of the Genoese navigator.
Colombo has been accused over the course of several crimes and his reputation as a simple discoverer of America, which in Italy persists, in that continent has now been compromised by historical findings that confirmed some atrocities committed on his mandate in the colony of Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic). Beyond its individual responsibilities, however, it is not so much the biography of Italian that is at the center of the debate currently underway in the United States, but what it represents, namely the beginning of European expansionism in the Americas and the consequent extermination of indigenous peoples.
According to his detractors, primarily the descendants of the North American peoples, Columbus and his successors would seize the continent through organized genocide and would not bring anything to the places they colonized, if not ethnic and cultural substitution. This narrative fits perfectly with an increasingly polarized American inter-ethnic public debate, lately attentive to racial, sexual and religious dynamics rather than to any other line of political demarcation.
This new process of dividing American society among several minorities that contend public space is just the end of a path that began with particular virulence during the mandate of Barack Obama and that is certainly not finding a solution with Donald Trump. As is often the case, the historical memory, used and exploited by various groups that do not recognize themselves in the WASP identity (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) and which are united in order to downsize and contextualize all that it was done by descendants of Europeans in the United States, to promote instead the memory of civil rights activists (such as Martin Luther King) who should become the new "fathers of the American homeland". Christopher Columbus is therefore only one of the many uncomfortable characters, more or less famous, which are not functional to this project and consequently the subject of an unprecedented iconoclastic fury.
A case even more evident than that of the Genoese, for example, is that of the statues dedicated to the fallen for the Confederate States, which have become a symbol of rebellion against the central government (real cause of the American civil war) a simple metaphor of slave oppression and racial discrimination. The direction in which we are going is, moreover, clearly a removal of US historical memory to censor all the "shameful" or "spurious" elements according to the estabilishment: European colonialism, the history of the South, the prevalence of European and Enlightenment culture over the others. The past thus becomes a battlefield for several minority groups, oppressed over the centuries and then automatically real paladins of the American dream; the black American community, of course, but also the descendants of the natives, the LGBT movements, the Muslim minority and so on.
This minority dynamic is so deeply rooted that even the Italian-American community, in order to defend Columbus's memory, has in recent years been increasingly appealing to the discrimination suffered by Italian immigrants, by presenting the removal of the statues and squares dedicated to him as an attack on one's cultural identity. The Genoese explorer therefore has now become the discoverer of America to defend the Italian community on the one hand (he emigrated 400 annni after his death), and first oppressor of the American Indians on the other (peoples persecuted 300 years after his death and that he never met). The evaluation of his actions, deprived of its real meaning whatever it was, is therefore now prey to the balance of power between these two conflicting groups.
This historical paradox is possible and legitimate in a world in which only minorities have, as such, the right to speak, while the majority (or that which was such until recently) is deprived of it, morally inferior because guilty of crimes committed, at some point in history, by his ancestors. The consequence is that the historical events that are important for the community as a whole are politically colored and actualized, depriving them of their possible meaning for the community in favor of opposing and conflicting visions that aim, once again, to reread the events to their own advantage. The dynamic is perverse and unfortunately it is finding a more and more precise concretization in the American society, now entered into a series of paradoxes that are difficult to solve. Some characteristics of these contradictions are typical of the American world, like the idea of having to remove all the "dark" and "wrong" sides of the past, to remain consistent with the manifest destiny that must see, in any case, the United States as avant-garde of the free world. This perspective naturally leads to condemn without appeal everything that has happened in the history of the country that ill-blends with the modern good / evil dichotomy, and which must always be judged either in continuity or in rupture with contemporary ideals.
Clearly this search for political coherence is exactly the opposite of any historiographical objectivity, which instead asks us to understand not only the value of the actions carried out but the causes triggering them, as well as to always contextualize the climate and the thought of the time. Even more serious, however, and here the discourse is extremely topical because it concerns the entire West, is the constant attempt and a little underhanded by the minorities to acquire a special privilege of immunity from criticism only because of the injuries suffered, both in the present that in the past. This setting of the debate is in fact anti-democratic, because it tends to moralize the public confrontation prior to and not a posteriori, but is also based on a wrong assumption, that is enough to have been wronged to be on the right side of the story.
In our country, with its many faults, we understand this well. Who can be called innocent, in fact, among the thousand peoples who have made war on our territory or between our own Municipalities, in constant conflict between them? How could we rewrite history wanting to judge, according to the parameters of good and evil, the last millennia that saw us as protagonists?
The American trap that therefore sees the world perennially divided between oppressed and oppressors ill-suited to our tradition, and just the lesson of what is happening overseas should make us carefully judge all the attempts made to eliminate references to politicians, philosophers or thinkers who have contributed, for better or for worse, to building our national and European identity.
(photo: Twitter, MitchOFarrell)
