March 10, 2024

The bias against Europeans, their descendants, and the culture they begot and advanced has been intensifying since American politics turned sharply left in the last few decades.

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A PBS documentary I watched in 1992 made me write the following, presented again because the bias it addresses continues to infect our times:

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“Barbarians of the West,” they are called in a garden path tour called Legacy, conducted by PBS television [in 1992] under the guise of a documentary on civilization. With the suppressed passion of a pro­secuting attorney out to nail his defendant – in this case the Euro­peans – the host of the show travels to China, Egypt, Central America, and other centers of civilization to find all the evidence he can to damn the Graeco-Roman civilization – which furnished the language, the knowledge, and the technology for this production.

Legacy’s thesis, that the world was fine until Europeans messed it up is, frankly, a dud. High craft keeps such a childish concept from becoming a comedy. Exciting images, choreographed against muted music, a host with an earnest and expressive face, talking and moving with impeccable grace, carefully avoiding the trapdoors of sophistry – all this fails, neverthe­less, to redeem the Europe bashing or smooth the leftist warp of the script. Everyone enjoys a good yarn, but not when it’s offered as nonfiction. As with so many docu­mentaries, investigative reports, and exposés, lately, Legacy is barely more than a political story line, illustrated.

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Fascinated, as many of us are, by the Aztecs, our host holds up a fist-size crystal skull that brings to mind the eye and skill of Japanese Sung Dynasty sculptors. But our wonder sticks in the throat when he tries to justify the ritual gouging of thous­ands of human hearts, forming a sacrificial river of blood down the temple steps. We gasp and note the concession that Europe did not invent cruelty. In another breath, the host declares life sacred. That follows, we suppose. Then he goes on to include in the alleged Euro­pean treachery a body of faith that still insists that life is sacred, the Catholic church. This all seems inconsistent.

A Fabian relic drops out of his pocket when the host goes to Eng­land and finds in the records there the emergence of “the institution of private property.” (The English invented private property?) He grimaces, nearly spitting the word property, that “invention” which, along with the free market, drives the West to a life of conquest and violence. Some key figures march past the “multicultural” court of justice. Alexander the Great is the Prometheus of plunder. Bacon is served as the dumper of divinity. Pascal gets a lotus in his cap for having said that the trouble with Western man is that he doesn’t know how to be content sitting in an empty room. (Pascal also said philosophers should get lost.) But in the lineup of cadre in the West’s infamous campaign, our tour guide never once mentions the famous European, Karl Marx. Why?

Could it be that the Marxist as­sumption that a society must be classless – which contradicts every­thing we know – is too obviously the keystone of so many myths and utopias, both published and still being dreamed up? Like the ever-blooming myth that people can function and prosper without a leader class? The few dominating the many, the host seems to moan. Has the Greek invention, democracy, provided a basis for making the leader class more sensi­tive and less despotic? – he never asks. The host speaks much of a culture’s – such as China’s – search for harmony between man and the Cosmos and speaks little of priesthood, without which any such search would be fruitless.

Applying contemporary and paro­chial orthodoxy to other times and places, a mistake revisionists love to make, he singles out the West for its slaves and mistreatment of women and minorities. But selective amnesia sets in. He forgets to tell us that slaves and mistreatment of women and minorities is typical of the great civilizations he so eagerly studies, for our edification.

To single out Europeans as war-prone barbarians is to overlook the commonality of violence and brigandage in every civilization at some stage of development. It ig­nores the territorial slayings by all “red-ant” societies, regardless of race or level of sophistication. The massive Khmer Rouge massacre in Cambodia is only a conspicuous example of non-European geno­cide. We wonder, who are these people who deign to form a kan­garoo court and sit in judgment over a whole people on prime time television?

Why the gloss over the potential for conquest, even in the great civilization of China? It is easy to mistake Confucian tranquility based on lovingkindness and obedi­ence with passivity. But I find it hard to believe that the makers of Legacy did not know that I Ching, while grounded in divination, is essentially a manual for making military decisions.