Inca Mummies, Lost Land, and Historical Revisionism. (04/22/2002)
George W. Bush declared, after Colin Powell returned from his Middle Eastern peace mission last week, that his trip had been a success. Just before Powell left the region he was supposed to meet with Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak but that meeting was canceled at the last minute. Calling Powell's trip successful either ignores the meaning of the word altogether or is an outright lie calculated to redirect the course of future historical evaluations of these events. In fifty or a hundred years, for instance, when people look back to write a history of the Middle East conflict they are likely to find George W. Bush praising Colin Powell's efforts to solve the problems of the intifadeh that began 18 months ago and has continued without ceasing until the present moment. Will they bother to look beyond Bush's declaration of success? If not, history in the next century will record the "fact" that Powell was instrumental in solving the problem during his trip in April 2002 when in reality he accomplished absolutely nothing whatsoever. What is particularly egregious in this situation is that Bush did not even wait a respectable amount of time before he began lying about the achievements of the mission. Ordinarily a President will wait a few weeks, at least long enough for six or ten memory-impaired imbeciles to forget what really happened, before he begins to spin the truth into a version that favors his re-election. Bush, however, has so little respect for the intelligence of the American voter that he begins the mischaracterization of historical fact as soon as he finishes debriefing Powell about his adventures with the Arab leaders who have since publicly stated that the Secretary's trip was a "disaster." There is not even an issue here about who you choose to believe. Powell came back with less than he had when he left, which is not to say, of course, that he gave anything away or lost something in Morocco. Bush was so busy flip-flopping from one side to the other in the weeks prior to Powell's mission that there was no position for him to lose and nothing for him to give up.
The habit of lying in order to bend historical reality into a more favorable perception of how things have been going for your administration of any governmental activity is certainly not something George W. Bush invented, though given the opportunity he would probably claim that as one of his achievements too. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a subsidiary of the Interior Department, for instance, is currently engaged, and has been for many years, in one of the largest rip-offs in governmental history. Beginning as early as 1820, whenever the Federal Government discovered anything of value on or under land given to native American nations to compensate them for ancestral lands stolen earlier by peaceful settlers, Oklahoma for instance which terminated the Trail of Tears and to which thousands of native were forcibly removed on foot from thousands of miles away, the new land was confiscated all over again in order to steal whatever of value had been found there. The new land was not stolen directly; rather, it was placed in a trust administered by the BIA and any money derived from its use (oil revenues, grazing fees, etc.) by white speculators was supposed to be paid out over time to the native people who "owned" the land being exploited. Natives were thought to be too naive, too childlike, too stupid, too primitive, too savage to be able to administer their own land and anything of value that was derived from its use, exploitation, or destruction by white people.
In the last 180 years, something like 100 billion dollars has been paid into the BIA trust. The problem with the money, however, is that no one knows how much has been paid into the accounts, no one knows how much or how little has been paid out, no one knows who has gotten any of the money, no one knows how much has gone hither and no one knows how little has gone yon. The BIA never saw any need for an actual accounting system. For a hundred and forty years the amounts paid in and out, apparently, were written down on small scraps of paper, whatever was handy, and thrown into a large cardboard box that was later moved to an abandoned warehouse here or there, usually as far away as possible from the nation whose "accounts" it held, where the paper was destroyed by floods, fires, and roiling masses of paper-starved insects and rats. Efforts were made beginning in the 1970's to clean up the mess. After thirty years nothing much has been accomplished. Some files and accounts were computerized but they were placed on web-sites where any hacker could access and bleed them dry in about ten minutes. Of course, no one knows how much money was stolen from them during the five years this ingenious system was in place. My accounting of this problem is not very exact, of course, and what I know about it was taken from an article in the Washington Post, "Lost Trust: Billions Go Uncounted," Ellen Nakashima and Neely Tucker (April 21, 2002, page A01).
I bring this issue forward here, not to blame George W. Bush for its existence, but to suggest that his total disregard for the truth of what happens in the real world, even as it is happening in front of everyone's face, is precisely the same model that has allowed the theft of native land, not once but twice, and then permitted the total mismanagement of the money that was supposed to be paid for it to its rightful owners by the BIA, an agency under the control of his Secretary of the Interior, even as I write these words. One point I can take here is that primitive savages are no longer the only targets of the greed that has always fed itself on the flesh of the powerless. This is true, even obvious, since many high-ranking executives at Enron, many of whom are now members of Bush's administration, did virtually the same thing in Houston, and did it in order to steal money from their own employees, and anyone else stupid enough to invest in their offshore accounting pyramid schemes. The people victimized by Enron were not primitive savages but were well-educated and trained white people.
Another article in the Washington Post that caught my eye recently (Guy Gugliotta, "Mummies Offer Look at the Culture of the Inca," April 18, 2002, page A03) actually goes a long way toward explaining how the ideology of lying has become a commonplace fixture in American politics, why it never fails to accomplish its purpose, and why Americans of European descent are so pitifully powerless to resist its manipulative force. Gugliotta begins his brief article with the following words: "Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of Inca mummies buried in dusty graves beneath a windblown Peruvian shantytown, offering an unprecedented look at the life and culture of South America's premier civilization on the eve of Spanish conquest." This statement is an epitome of journalistic practice because it summarizes and anticipates every important feature of the story that follows. Well done Mr. Gugliotta.
The reference to the "shantytown" probably holds the essential key to the story. The town grew over the Inca burial ground as more and more peasants were driven out of the higher elevations of the Andes by the spread of the Shinning Path terrorist network in Peru. These displaced people then began to destroy the mummies by the simple activities of daily life. Reports reached the ears of archaeologists eventually that mummies existed under the town and that the squatters in the "shantytown" were looting the graves of their ancestors. This, of course, required academic intervention of the worst kind. The University of Illinois at Chicago teamed up with the National Geographic Society and before anyone could count to three a field operation was mounted to save the artifacts of Inca civilization from annihilation by the descendants of the people who had been buried in the "dusty graves" under the "shantytown." Showing remarkable restraint, the archaeologists only removed 345 mummies from the estimated population of 15,000 that had been buried around the time of the conquest (1540 AD). So few were taken, it seems, because many years of work and research will be necessary for scientists to learn everything they need to know, and can discover, from the ones they did take. Why take more than you need?
The point here states that it is perfectly acceptable for scientists to remove mummies from native burial grounds, as opposed to looters doing the same thing, because the archaeologists are performing the necessary and laudable task of saving the ancient Inca culture from the loss that would occur if looters were allowed to plunder the graves. In terms of historicism, Gugliotta fails to mention the fact that very few Incas survived the first century of encounter with the Spaniards. Spanish rule over the Incas, which never rose above the level of forcing them as slave-labor onto coca plantations and into silver mines, where most died within months of being captured for that purpose, was so harsh that the culture contemporary archaeologists are so intent on "saving" actually disappeared after no more than 50 years beyond the beginning of the conquest. The idea that removing corpses from Inca burial grounds will somehow "save" a culture that does not exist is little more than a scientific lie meant to imply that contemporary descendants of Europeans in the Americas still care as much as they ever did for the lives and well-being of the native people their ancestors annihilated to recover the silver and gold that was hidden in the landscapes of the Andes. The lie works now because most people do not know the fate of the Inca at the hands of their European slave-masters, or, if they have heard some part of that story, do not believe its is true. What most compels the truth is the fact that modern scientists can desecrate native burial sites without fear of challenge from any empowered segment of contemporary society at all. Put simply: Incas in 1540 AD were worth only slightly more then than they are now. As slaves capable of enriching European masters they had a certain value. As corpses now they are valueless because their graves can be looted by descendants of European slave-masters, in the name of scientific research based on the lie of cultural preservation, which hopefully fools no one, without fear of challenge from anyone.
When George W. Bush rewrites history to draw beneficial effects to his re-election, he is simply following a trend established centuries ago when Europeans began slaughtering native people to steal everything of value they possessed and then pretended to themselves that "truth" stood them in the right. As soon as anyone began to forget the slaughter, history was rewritten to reflect a different image of the holocaust, one that claimed its victims deserved what happened to them and that the murderers were only following God's will. Since God clearly intends that George W. Bush should win his war against terrorism, and how could God will anything other than that resolution, it must be true that Colin Powell's mission to the Middle East was a success.