Earlier: The Mob Desecrates Ex-Slave's Statue (Miguel de Cervantes)
Recently, the mob has been toppling or descrating statues of Spaniards, like Cervantes and Fra Junipero Serra, who was a missionary to the Indians on the West Coast of the Americas during the Age of Discovery.
The Spanish Embassy objects:
Fine statement by Spanish Embassy on attacks on Junipero Serra, Cervantes statues: "We are expressing our deep concern regarding these attacks to federal, state, and local authorities, asking that the memory of our rich shared history be protected." https://t.co/BDncRV8JlN
— VDARE (@vdare) June 21, 2020
Here's what the Spanish said:
We deeply regret the destruction of the statue of Saint Junípero Serra in San Francisco today, and would like to offer a reminder of his great efforts in support of indigenous communities.
It is also with great regret that we receive the news of the damages inflicted upon the bust of Miguel de Cervantes, who was himself held as a slave in Algiers for 5 years, and whose literature serves as a call for freedom and equality.
Defending the Spanish legacy in the U.S. is a priority of our foreign policy in this country, and we will continue to do so by intensifying our educational efforts in order for the reality of our shared history to be better known and understood.
We are also expressing our deep concern regarding these attacks to federal, state, and local authorities, asking that the memory of our rich shared history be protected, always with the utmost respect for the debates currently taking place.
Junipero Serra was a missionary to the Indians, and as such he tried to convert them to Christianity, turn away from murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, slavery and all the things that characterized Indian life in California before the white man got there. There's a modern controversy that accuses him of using forced labor and corporal punishment on the Indians in order to discourage the murder, rape, torture, or whatever they were doing wrong.
This is also how white Spaniards treated other white Spaniards at the time, and was certainly an improvement over their previous existence of, I repeat, murder, rape, torture, and so on.
He was canonized a saint by the Pope in 2015, which increased the hate:
Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man, refers to something the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne said:
Swinburne, in that spirited chorus of the nations in ‘Songs Before Sunrise,’ used an expression about Spain in her South American conquests which always struck me as very strange. He said something about ‘her sins and sons through sinless lands dispersed,’ and how they ‘made accursed the name of man and thrice accursed the name of God.’ It may be reasonable enough that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world should he say that the South Americans were sinless?”
Why indeed?
For what South America was like before the Spaniards, see Stephen Cox's November 1995 Liberty Magazine review of Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico—the review is called I Left My Heart in Tenochtitlan:
On November 8, 1519, Hernan Cortes and his Spanish expeditionary force arrived at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. They were greeted by the Aztec nobility at a place on the outskirts of the city called Malcuitlapilco, which means "the end of the file of prisoners." In 1487, when the Aztecs inaugurated the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, a line of prisoners waiting to be sacrificed on the city's pyramids had reached this point. It was two miles to the Great Temple, and there were four such lines of victims.
You can see them there, young men standing in the sunlight in the great city built on an island in the great lake of Mexico, a name that means "in the navel of the moon." The sky was blue above them, and the two lofty volcanoes, Iztaccihautl and Popocatepetl, rose in the distance. Throughout the day, the young men waited in line for the blood-caked priests of Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and the chase, to rip their hearts out and roll their bodies down the sides of the pyramid so that they could be dismembered and eaten. At the foot of the Great Temple, a carved stone was set in the pavement; this stone was called "Huitzilopochtli's dining table."
The interest of the Aztecs can never fade; the story of their conquest by the incredible strangers who came from beyond the sea can never lose its romantic power.
The part which stuck in my head since 1995, when I read this review in the deadtree Liberty was this:
In Mexico, pork became a favorite dish of the former Aztec nobility, "since it had a slight taste of human flesh" (p. 578).
