THE GREAT OPENING 77
promote ends over means and extinguish sentiments of decency and
humanity. To which Tzvetan Todorov would add the factor of
distance: the Spanish were operating far from home and exercising
their power and wrath on strangers, on an Other defined as
subhuman and hence outside or beneath the rules that governed
comportment even against an enemy. In such circumstances,
anything goes; nothing is forbidden. So they competed in imagining
and doing evil, which thus fairly exploded in collective frenzies.
Todorov adds: "The 'barbarity' of the Spanish has nothing atavistic
or animal about it; it is perfectly human and announces the arrival of
modern times."^22
Unhappy the day that brought together this monumental
amorality and the opportunity of conquest, that placed much weaker
peoples in the merciless hands of greedy, angry, unpredictably cruel
men.
In the effort to mitigate, if not excuse, this record of evil,
apologists, many of them descendants of these conquistadors, have
followed two lines of argument. One is to discredit the charges by
labeling them as myth or exaggeration. Hence recourse to the term
leyenda negm (black legend): black, thus by implication excessive (is
anything ever completely black?); and legend rather than history.
The aim is to dismiss rather than disprove, because disproof is
impossible. (The same tactic and the same terminology have been
employed to discredit the argument that Spanish intolerance and
religious fanaticism at home, culminating in the obsession with racial
purity [limpieza de sangre], and the pursuit of heresy even into the
solitude of dreams, crippled the nation's capacity for inquiry and
learning. Here, too, it is easier to dismiss bad news than to rebut.)
The second approach is to point out the misdeeds of other
colonizers, in particular the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant
Nordamericanos, whose strategy of conquest was different and
whose victims were fewer, but whose capacity for cruelty and
hypocrisy was supposedly similar.* As though the misdeeds of others
excused one's own crimes. This line of argument is not unrelated to
- Is that really so? The British colonists in North America were capable of cold mur
der; but hot torment and torture? And if one asks who can measure these things,
there does seem to me a significant operational difference here, namely, that if I were
an Indian, I would rather have died at British than at Spanish hands. Dead is dead, but
that way I might go to my death swiftly and reasonably whole.