SPEAK FOR YOURSELF
Maybe it all depends on the vantage. David Rieff tells of a visit by the Argentine film maker Edgardo Cozarinsky, in the company of a Columbian, to the port of Palos, from which Columbus sailed. From there they stared west. Cozarinsky, a Jew from the pampas, said, “Here began our salvation.” But “he found himself fixed by a hard stare and a copper-hued grimace. ‘Here,’ the Columbian retorted acidly, ‘began our enslavement.'” Rieff quotes Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” It all, or much of it, depends upon who is standing where when. Taken from Harper’s, used in Context, January 1, 1991, Volume…
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