They Were Monsters In Their Own Time
The nine-year-olds taken as sex slaves by Christopher Columbus were not like ‘this is a great guy’. While they were being raped or beaten and thrown overboard, they certainly knew that these men were bad.
The people being starved to death in Bengal were not like, ‘Winston Churchill, that man deserves a statue. And our food’. While colonizers took away their resources, they certainly knew that these men were cruel.
When people say, “we can’t judge historical figures by the standard of our time’ what they mean is ‘the monsters did not think themselves monstrous”. What they mean is ‘colonized lives don’t matter’. Because these human beings, living at the very same time, certainly knew that these were monsters. I don’t mean in an abstract political-issues-of-the-day sense, I mean in a very real sense of ‘They’re killing me and selling my children’.
These ‘historical figures’ were significantly outnumbered by their dead. They were a tiny minority of their own population. Yet we treat them as if they are the only people in history.
It’s as if we write about serial killers, but only from the perspective of serial killers. It’s as if Godzilla were not a problem because, by the standards of sea monsters, he was just…
