COWARDS OF US ALL

In 1982 Mexican university students demonstrated against the erection of a fountain with the statue of Cortes and La Malinche, Cortes’s Native American interpreter, mistress, and mother of their son. The controversy was too much for the authorities who removed the statue.

Malinchista is a term of disparagement in Mexico for those who colluded with the foreign invader. Many of the students demonstrating were likely descendants of women such as Malinche, who, by the way, owed nothing to the society that had enslaved her. If they had thought through their protest, they might have concluded that Malinche deserved gratitude, as we perhaps should not deny gratitude to our ancestors who compromised their values and deeply held beliefs and took on the role of coward and colluder for the sake of survival.

In Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox one of the author’s contentions was that Christianity survived not through the sacrificial examples of martyrs, however impressive and popular they may have been, but through those who, when threatened with death, reneged on their religious beliefs, visited the Pagan temples—offering food to the gods, rather than offering themselves as food to the lions—and then after the furor died down went back to quietly practicing their faith.

Divine plan aside, how many of us are descendants of those who lost their nerve at the critical moment? How many betrayed others to save their skin? How many submitted to tyranny to continue eking out a marginal existence? How many stomached their outrage as their property was plundered and their wives and daughters violated because to resist was to lose all? They carried their hate and bitterness to the grave. Human history is not a pretty story, and there are few superheroes.

Genghis Khan had a simple policy regarding towns and cities he wanted to besiege. If they resisted, all the males would be killed, all the women sold into slavery.

Some slaves on the Sugar Islands whose hardship was probably only equaled by Turkish galley slaves ate dirt to end their miserable existence. Some slaves didn’t.

A more apt name for the Silk Road would be the Slave Road. Vikings, initially participants in the trade, found greater profit in running a protection racket. How much would you pay a Viking to not be enslaved and, at that time as a man, not be castrated?

As many as 10,000 Continental soldiers starved to death on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. Their bones line Wallabout Bay. The only certain way off the ships was for sailors to join the British navy.

Genetic studies indicate that fifty percent of Iceland’s original female population came from the British Isles. It was unlikely they came willingly.

I believe the Stockholm syndrome applies equally to men and women who find themselves held captive. We read less about men giving in because the captors or conquerors tended to kill the males, thereby eliminating a hindrance to a greater selection of females.

Neanderthal genes survive in us. Was it love or an interchange of mates between bands that resulted in the first Neanderthal/Homo sapien child, or was it something more violent?

Native Americans, devastated by disease, alcoholism, and genocide, were herded onto reservations. By some estimates, more people today carry Native American genes in their blood than when Columbus landed.

Napoleon preferred the younger inexperienced soldiers because the veterans who had survived his campaigns had developed strategies for surviving combat and were not so bold.

I had an uncle who unashamedly boasted about cowering the entire six weeks of the Battle of the Bulge in a foxhole. He fathered two daughters.

Courage has been described as the rarest of virtues. I often celebrate courage in this blog, and once or twice I may have exhibited that virtue myself, yet under the hard glare of logic, I think that the fact that it is rare may not be a bad thing. 

It might be wrong to look down on the people who gave in to the powerful. They submitted out of fear and, as a result, survived. That is the purpose of fear, after all. There are those great and terrible individuals who risked all to change the world for better or worse, and then there are the others who made the necessary compromises to adapt, survive, and procreate. Every living human being today owes a debt of gratitude to those men and women who must be innumerable among our progenitors.