american-holocaust

154 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTto the high Middle Ages and before-when at least part of the Christians'willingness to destroy the infidels who lived in what was considered to bea spiritual wilderness was rooted in a rabid need to kill the sinful wildernessthat lived within themselves. To understand the horrors that wereinflicted by Europeans and white Americans on the Indians of the Americasit is necessary to begin with a look at the core of European thoughtand culture-Christianity-and in particular its ideas on sex and race andviolence.IIPopular thought long has viewed pre-Christian Rome as a bacchanalian"Eden of the unrepressed," in one historian's words, and a similar impressionoften is held of ancient Greece as well. Neither view is correct. InGreece, virginity was treasured, and a young, unmarried woman discoveredin the act of sex could legally be sold into slavery. "Given that this isthe only situation in which Solonian law allows a free Athenian to bereduced to slavery," writes Giulia Sissa, "it is clear that premarital sexualactivity constituted an extremely serious threat to the laws governing relationshipswithin and among families." 17 Athena herself, it is worth recalling,was not only a goddess of war, but also a virgin-a symbolic juxtapositionof characteristics that, as we shall see, was destined to resonatethrough many centuries of Western culture. And in Rome, no less a lightthan Cicero observed that since "the great excellence of man's nature, abovethat of the brutes and all other creatures" is founded on the fact thatbrutes "are insensible to everything but pleasure, and they will risk everythingto attain it,"from this we are to conclude, that the mere pursuits of sensual gratificationsare unworthy the excellency of man's nature; and that they ought thereforeto be despised and rejected; but that if a man shall have a small propensityfor pleasure, he ought to be extremely cautious in what manner he indulgesit. We, therefore, in the nourishment and dress of our bodies, ought to consultnot our pleasure, but our health and our strength; and should we examinethe excellency and dignity of our nature, we should then be madesensible how shameful man's life is, when it melts away in pleasure, in voluptuousness,and effeminacy; and how noble it is to live with abstinence,with modesty, with strictness, and sobriety. 18The idea is hardly a Christian invention, then, that immoderate enjoymentof the pleasures of the flesh belongs to the world of the brute, andthat abstinence, modesty, strictness, and sobriety are to be treasured aboveall else. Still, it is understandable why subsequent European thought wouldregard Greece and Rome as realms of carnal indulgence, since subsequent