Chapter 22

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The entity that crosses the great water in the ships of Cristoforo, in English “Christ-bearer,” is more than the Western Spirit. What crosses the water in three ships is a body, octopus-like as well as worm-like but lifeless and artificial, the body Hobbes calls Leviathan. The body is described by the Dis-coverer’s last name, Colonizer, Colon in Spanish.

This Colon, thought by some to be a Converso, namely a Christian more Catholic than the Pope, thinks himself a second Moses leading Israelites out of Egypt. As heavily armored as the first, the second Moses carries the wilderness encased in his armor, and wherever he leads his Israelites is wilderness. Were he to lower his mask, loosen his armor, be it only for an instant, he might see communities of human beings with relationships, emotions and insights far more complex than his own. But he cannot loosen the armor.

If communities nurture the freedom of their members, Leviathans nurture the repression of theirs. The Leviathanized police each other. Only the isolated can get away. Crew and captain stick together, slave sticks to master. Each forces the other to deny his own vision, to see what he expects the other to see. Thus after accomplishing the feat of traversing the impassable chasm, after crossing the unsailable Ocean, these blinded men find in the New World what is most familiar to them in the Old.

Analytical-minded precursors of Natural Scientists, Economists and Anthropologists, Christ-bearer and his accomplices find things, objects, which they automatically categorize as obstacles or as potential instruments.

Heirs of the savagery of Albigensian Crusades, Taborite Crusades, Inquisitions and Witch-hunts, they see communities of Arawaks but name them Savages.

Carriers and agents of Leviathan, synonym for Maneater, they see communities of Caribs but name them Cannibals, Maneaters.

The names are not only projections. They are also definitions. Once defined, the obiects can be manipulated. Savages are potential instruments; they can be put to work. Cannibals are obstacles; they have to be liquidated.

Thus the Blessed Isles are converted into a Leviathanic wilderness or, in the other language, the Wilderness is converted into a part of Christian Civilization.

One participant in this atrocity with few if any precedents, Bartolom‚ de Las Casas, thought by some to be another Converso, sickens during the implementation of this grizzly enterprise, shedding mask as well as armor. This supposed heir of the persecuted suddenly identifies with the persecuted, thus performing a feat as rare in his own as in any other age. Unable, with the Inquisition at his back, to express his view of the hounding of Spain’s Jews, Las Casas rails loudly and clearly against the hounding and extermination of Arawaks. The more he sees of his fellow-Christians’ deeds, the more victims of Christianity he embraces, until his lone voice pleads for the defense of humanity from the claws of the Leviathanic beast. What is this Conversion to Christianity if not enslavement and bestialization? he asks. What are these Christians who turn an Eden into an infernal labor camp — are they gods or demons? What is the god that calls for such bloodletting, such monstrous sacrifices? Let the victims resist, he shouts, if need be by sacrificing the sacrificers. If maneating be wrong in the eyes of some superior being, let that being condemn the greater wrongdoer.

But Las Casas no longer has faith in a superior being. He addresses his pleas to the King of Spain, to the monster’s very head.

And the beastly head gives the protester a hearing because it, too, is disturbed by the Dis-coverer’s feats, but for different reasons. Leviathan is able to slaughter the New World’s inhabitants, but it cannot make them work, it cannot enlarge itself by encasing them in its entrails. Soon after they are herded into the forced labor camps called Encomiendas, they perish, whole populations of them.

The King does not cry for the loss of the human beings but for the loss of what will later be called Capital and Technology.

Capital and Technology are not mere objects but relations of people to objects, not levers and drills but former human beings reduced to appendages of levers and drills. Without the human operators, the levers and drills are inert; they revert to Wilderness. And the point of the entire Leviathanic enterprise is to extirpate the Wilderness, to reduce lush tropical islands to the uniformity of plantations, to burrow through beautiful and precious places for stones, or in the beast’s own language, to make the desert bloom, to turn the savage and the wild into profitable gardens.

The legendary Midas cried because everything he touched turned to gold, even his food. The King of Spain cries for the same reason. Every living being he touches shrivels up and dies, not only the obstacles but the potential instruments as well. After all his borrowing from Genoese bankers, driving his realm into fiscal ruin, he wins only half an empire. The fields strewn with corpses no longer contain obstacles, but neither do they contain instruments.

The King’s ships have not only carried Conquistadores over the Ocean; they have also carried rats, viruses and bacilli. The Dis-coverers are not only carriers of Leviathan but also carriers of the Plague.

Disease, in fact, is the invader’s main weapon, but it is double-edged. It gives easy victory but it mangles the fruit of the victory. That’s why the King listens to Las Casas, pretends to become humane, revises the Encomienda laws. But it is all to no avail. The Blessed Isles become ever more depopulated, the labor camps remain inert, the gardens yield no profits, the empire of potential zeks is lost. To make up for the loss, the grizzly conquerors break up communities on an altogether different continent and import human beings immune to the Europeans’ diseases to people the labor camps with zeks and to bury the New World’s dead.

The New World is progressively emptied of its living beings. The double continent across the Ocean is on its way toward becoming the Europeans’ long-sought America.

Unlike the objects that turned to gold when Midas touched them, America is an object that glistens like gold but vanishes when Europeans touch it. The Spaniards who outdo each other in greedy grabbing cannot even hold on to the metallic gold which, melted down into ingots, finds its way into underground vaults of foreign lenders.

And the real gold, the one Hesiod named an age after — the sacred places, the myths, the cultures — vanishes from the very Biosphere, irretrievably.

At this point I can pose a rhetorical question of my own. If the implements that supersede the digging stick, if the notorious amenities of Civilization are so attractive, so irresistible, why do the prospective beneficiaries of all those wonders have to be decimated?

Despite beautification campaigns that outdo the very Church in sustained prevarication, the story of the Rise of Civilization in America will remain ugly beyond description. No amount of talk about Empty Continents that were filled with teeming life will be able to erase the memory of the teeming life that was turned into empty continents.

There will be talk of horses, of gunpowder and of rum. There will be talk of a superior technology and of a superior culture. There will be talk of everything but Death. Yet Death is the Conquistador, whether mounted on the horses or streaming from the guns. Death is the unspoken name of the superior technology. Death is the only superior culture of the community-less invader. And Death is no culture at all; it is the anti-culture, the eater of culture, Leviathan.

The cultured villagers gawk at the horses, but not for long. Horses they can understand. Horses are living beings, friends, cousins. Free human beings soon outdo the armored Europeans in horsemanship, they are soon equals of the mounted Turks of Eurasia’s steppes.

The gunpowder and the rum are stranger than the horses. The one serves only to kill, the other to stupefy. But even these are not strange for long to people already familiar with poisoned arrows and poisonous herbs.

What is strange beyond comprehension is the bearded entity inside the armor, an entity that looks and behaves like a human being but is clearly something else, for it takes without giving, is kin to none, exists in no community. What is strange and remains strange is the manlike limb of a dead thing, the spring and wheel of Leviathan.

The invaded are already familiar with Leviathan, but not so familiar as to have been evacuated by it. They’ve kept their communities intact, relegated Leviathan to the fringes, or expelled the beast from their communities’ very fringes.

The communities resist every incursion, every enslavement, every rape. The story of the invasion is also the story of that interminable resistance. It is interminable because it has no term, because it is not a cycle, because it is not part of the rhythm of life.

The resistance is not primarily a clash of arms, even if the spectacular battles of proto-Leviathanic Aztecs give the impression that the resistance is in the spears. The resistance is in the drums, not in the spears; it is in the music, in the rhythms lived by communities whose myths and ways continue to nurture and sustain them.

Nor is the invasion primarily a military venture, even if the successors to knightly Crusaders look like nothing but lethallimbed armors. The invasion is a silencing of music, a flattening of rhythm; it is a linearization of time, a destruction of the myths and ways that will later be called Culture, a war against communities that nurture freedom, vision and life.

The invaders are not ignorant of what they destroy. They are not only successors to Crusaders against Unbelievers but also to wandering Beghards and liberated Adamites. They are distant successors to communities that once resisted with music and myth. Themselves grandchildren of victims, they’ve been turned, like many before them, into passionate victimizers. They destroy with passion precisely because they know what they destroy. Themselves repressed, or in their own language Fallen, deprived of Eden, confined to a life of Sin, they are impassioned to repress the free, to universalize the Fall, to destroy Eden as irreversibly as Romans destroyed Carthage, to make Sin catholic or all-embracing.