Woke culture and the history of America: From colonisation to depersonalisation

Abstract The recent racial attacks that took the lives of several African-Americans in the USA have unleashed a whole social movement in defence of the rights of minorities who face discrimination. What began as a plea in favour of the black population has become a convulsive current throughout America, seeking to cleanse its history by disassociating it from its founding sins, which include slavery, but above all, colonization as a whole. This amalgam of revisionist and vindictive currents has awakened a new culture. The Woke movement has initiated the battle for the narrative: they cancel any tendency contrary to their principles, silence freedom of expression and tear down any statue that represents any symbol of oppression or authority, Christopher Columbus at the head. These are the premises of post-modern society: wounded by the culture of victimisation, it promotes ideological tribalism that destroys the truth. We are witnessing a phenomenon that seeks to deconstruct history, resignify the present and depersonalise the future. The black legend resurfaces with new force and America runs the risk of blurring its identity traits. Listening to the voices of experts is essential in order to interpret the shadows of a legacy in the light of truth, which shows us the deep richness of a common culture.


Columbus changes course: his turbulent exit out of America
Although the course of the redefinition of 12 October has followed various different paths in Latin America, they have all docked in the same port: no longer calling it the Day of Discovery, but rather celebrating ethnic multiculturalism, indigenous resistance and dialogue with native peoples. In other words, celebrating decolonisation. The least conciliatory were the reactions of L opez Obrador, President of Mexico, who replaced Charles Cordier's statue of Columbus (1877) on the Paseo de la Reforma with that of the Young Woman of Amajac; or the words of Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, who had no qualms about describing the discovery as 'genocide and plundering of natural resources'; or the surrealist judgement of a group of Chavista radicals on the statue of Columbus in Caracas, whose inexorable condemnation was its demolition (Viana 2021).
More than five centuries after Columbus, the historical wound continues to fester and calls for express repentance from the direct heirs of the guilt -Spain and the Church. The first to apologise out of an ethical imperative has been the president of Mexico (Osorio 2021), despite the fact that the Vatican has been asking for forgiveness for the abuses committed during the evangelisation of America since 1992, through the mouths of three Popes -John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis (Vatican News 2019). The Church's commitment is upward: re-reading the past, purifying the memory, cultivating open and respectful dialogue (Vatican News 2021). For its part, the Spanish government, less diplomatic, has not felt challenged and has considered its colonial sins redeemed. It seems to confirm the premise reiterated by Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes that 'forgiveness was asked for a long, long time ago'. In his view, the exaggerated self-criticism of De las Casas and the juridical and theological radicalism of Francisco de Vitoria, both Dominicans, are the best letter of apology (Hern andez Velasco 2021).
(Univisi on 2017), the most violent trigger was the death in May 2020 of the African-American George Floyd at the hands of a white policeman in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the genesis and instant and irrevocable consolidation of the Black Lives Matter movement. In its name, there are a succession of bellicose campaigns attributed to left-wing extremists, such as the so-called Antifawho, claiming to fight fascism, resort to violent, fascist methodsand radicals in favour of black civil rights. It is their way of responding to the racists and white supremacists empowered by Trump's arrival in the White House.
These activists do justice by looking for culprits in the past and silencing the voice of historical conscience. The main target of this new witch-hunt is everything related to the Discovery of America, as well as everything Confederate, everything related to the extreme or right or the defence of slavery. Thus begins the so-called Stataphobia (RTVE 2020; Moradiellos 2020; Pardo 2020), the aim of which is to stamp out anything that sounds like oppression, colonialism or racism, regardless of the historical truth. Its activists seem to forget that any iconographic destruction requires the relocation of roots which, even if one wants to, it is impossible to do without.

Iconoclastic tidal wave: losing history to win the narrative
In October 2019, social protests against the rising cost of living, low incomes and inequality in the face of certain policy measures claimed the 'lives' of approximately 60 statues across Latin America. Among the targets of the protesters were several figures linked to the colonisation process, Columbus at the forefront. The sculptures of the Genoese began to be questioned for the very reason they were built; according to historian Federico Navarrete, 'they were symbols of Western domination, of Catholic religious domination, of a somewhat entrenched idea of history in which it was said that America should be ruled by white men' (Valdez 2021). In short, they were the source of all America's current ills.
For its part, the USA, the most powerful country in the worldand a country in which Columbus actually never set foot (Lanni 2020)is in the throes of a national catharsis, forcing it to systematically remove dozens of ancient statues for symbolising a white supremacist, slave-owning ideology or the oppression of minorities. For the mayor of New York, Italian-American Bill de Blasio, it is necessary to keep alive a 'collective conversation' with the elements that represent the history of the United States; for others, the country must free itself from what they see as symbols of hate (Guimon 2020). The protests went on for weeks, and the revisionist demands have not stopped since. The Genoese explorer, considered by many to be one of the men who changed human history, is now one of the main victims of the BLM movement: they accuse him of playing a leading role in the transatlantic slave trade and the extermination of indigenous peoples. They seek to create a vacuum, not only historically, but also personally, socially, culturally, urbanistically … .
However, this iconoclastic rebellion has other victims, including the statues of Juan Ponce de Le on in Miami (The San Diego Union-Tribune 2020); Juan de Oñate, governor of New Mexico and creator of the first Thanksgiving Day in Alburquerque (Ansorena 2020); the Confederates Jefferson Davis in Richmond (La Vanguardia 2020c) and Albert Pike in Washington, DC (Plazas 2020); Roosevelt and Lincoln in Portland (El Universal 2020); the missionary Fray Jun ıpero Serra, first Hispanic saint in the USA, founder of nine missions in California and symbol of respect and service to the natives, in San Francisco (La Vanguardia 2020a; Ventura and Los Angeles, Alandete 2020a); and even Cervantes, painted with fascist symbols and with the epithet 'Bastard', also in San Francisco (El Mundo 2020). As a matter of interest, it is curious to note that the famed writer never knew America, and was kidnapped by African pirates, remaining captive for five years in Algiers. The presence of the monument to Edward Colston, who was a slave trader, as well as the presence of the monuments of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and Winston Churchill has been questioned; the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt has been removed from the entrance to the Museum of Natural History in New York, for appearing flanked by an Indian and a black man in a supposedly submissive attitude.
Although less intensely, such attacks are being replicated in Europe: the statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert in Paris was painted red with the title 'Negrophobia of the State', alluding to the 'Code Noir' with which Louis XIV's minister regulated slavery in French colonial territories (La Vanguardia 2020c). Similar actions around monuments of historical figures have recently taken place in the UK, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand (Garc ıa 2020).
Attacks on statues are not isolated; nor are they new. The removal of images of opponents with the advent of political change is a repeated occurrence. Suffice it to recall the toppling of Lenin statues after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The violent decapitation of these figures expresses the explicit desire to remove the head, a symbol of power and command. Rejecting the head ends up being an irrational amputation that kills the life of the whole body.
For Mexican historian Ursula Camba, these global protests are the exponent of a social change that has driven decolonial studies. In her opinion, what is desirable is to 'integrate in a conciliatory discourse'; she is more committed to inclusion than to the suppression or substitution of symbols (Carbonell 2021). The tearing down of statues, the passion for renaming streets and buildings as well as the cancellation of historical figures that have a mixed record of good and bad, stems from a refoundational ideology that seeks to reshape the past according to our contemporary moral principles (Kronman 2019). According to Alan Dershowitz, 'we should not judge the flawed heroes of the past by our own imperfect and ever-changing criteria'; the lives of so many historical figures 'must be viewed holistically, comparatively, and with generosity of spirit. They did much good that cannot be ignored in any calculation' (2020). To recognise the contribution of so many historical figures of their time it is essential to accept their vulnerability. 'Only he is a hero who has his part broken': without the weak point of the heel, Achilles 'would be a god but not a hero' (Fern andez Pedemonte 2020).
Iconography is becoming the scene of a 'war for the story': seeking to determine which characters are worthy of occupying a place along the public thoroughfare is the way to dominate the present. It is easy to forget that the past can become a prologue when it comes to repression (Dershowitz 2021): those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it. It is necessary to make, the effort to 'understand the world as it was and not to rewrite history as some might like it to have been' (Turner 2017).
Once the door of historical relativism is opened, it is almost impossible to hold back what is behind it: without logical limits, the purge can tend to infinity. All historical interpretations are allowed. After cleansing the country of racism, it should be cleansed of symbols honouring homophobes, sexists, anti-Semites and so on. In Dershowitz's view, the destruction of statues cannot be selective: if it is to be taken as a moral standard, it must be applied equally to all people who manifested bigotry against any group (2020). The problem is that all historical figures had views or behaviour appropriate to their times. It is impossible to meet the required standard of perfection (Kaiser 2020).
These are the after-effects of postmodernism, which reduces everything to narrative: there is no reality outside the subject that can be objectively defended; therefore, any attempt to reconstruct history on the basis of collected evidence is fallacious, mythological, fictitious. Interpretation always mediates between the invented and the evident; there is no exact correspondence between narrative and past. As Butler reminds us, 'history is therefore at base just another more or less socially acceptable narrative, competing for our attention and our assent; just another way of putting things, which will survive, or not, through a process of discussion and debate ' (2002). The past is inaccessible, world literature ambiguous and inconsequential, the standards of beauty constructed, and the use of every concept utterly arbitrary.
Consequently, the historical account of the West is understood as a form of self-justification that must be deconstructed, to use Derrida's term. The purifying force manufactures a version of history that leads us to detest the cultural identity that defines us. The old continent looks on with an inferiority complex as the humanities and philosophy, builders of the political, artistic, scientific and social foundations of all culture, are degraded by the civilisations they engendered beyond its borders. The European foundations have trembled in the aftermath of the American earthquake; the splendour of the conquest is submerged in the wreckage of a society in a crisis of personality as it seeks to overthrow its own history. 'He who cannot tell his life has an identity problem', in fact, 'Paul Ricoeur described the identity of the person as a narrative identity' (Fern andez Pedemonte 2020). After all, we are viatores, and our life stories are still travellers' tales.
Beyond the polemics, and taking into account all the possible readings of the same historical event, it cannot be forgotten that survival is assured when life is nourished by the roots. The outcome of this meta-history does not seem to allow for any other ending: to accept that we cannot change the past and avoid what we do not want to repeat in the future.
Meanwhile, voices continue to bellow that it is time for justice and the writing of true history. What began as a protest in favour of the value of a human life has become the defence of a race, the black race, suffering from the reality of slavery and racism. The pitched battle has naturally spread to the indigenous world, in a forced synonymy between xenophobia and colonialism, and equally against those who do not share gender ideology, liberalism or any of the woke principles. The imposition of a new culture has just begun to awaken.

Woke culture: when the ideological tribe supplants the person
Although it has been in the works since 2011 to raise awareness of the racial prejudice suffered by African-Americans, the 'great awokening' of the woke culture reaches its climax after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson (Missouri) and is popularised by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020 with the death of George Floyd. Progressive white America becomes aware of the injustice of a system that demands atonement for its guilt.
Originally the term referred to the permanent state of alertness in which some social groups lived because of the oppression of their race; today it has been extended to any area of oppression and social inequality related to gender, sexuality, violence against women or any legally unprotected group. Instead of promoting equality, it privileges the weakest social categories; instead of proposing concrete measures for improvement, it fights on the basis of cultural symbols. In theory, it aims to equalise people of all ethnicities; in practice, it favours them without integrating them (Vezzosi 2021). Its vindictive acts seek to promote an ideology with fundamentalist overtones that sees all human interaction as a power struggle. The neo-Marxist reference to conflict theory and class struggle is unavoidable: if social injustice is the cause of human suffering, social justice must be the solution that will force societal change (Mering 2021).
The dogmas promulgated by this identity politics are none other than the following: sexual liberation by breaking all restrictions in this field, gender equality; the reduction of the wage gap resulting from unjust gender discrimination; the generalisation that every man is potentially oppressive as a consequence of patriarchal and familial heteronormativity that enslaves women; as well as the defensive stance that immigration and diversity are necessarily positivedespite the failure, both economically and in terms of integration, of multiculturalism in seeking to equalise all cultures; that every Western Empire was inherently immoral and devastating for the colonies. In this way the differences between men and women are confused and diminished, women are supposedly empowered by objectification, and sex is stripped of meaning by removing responsibility from the people involved. Simultaneously, racial differences are amplified and exaggerated to the point of claiming that racial essentialism is engraved in the DNA of white privilege (Mering 2021).
This new cultural crusade is about liberating the country and its citizens from its foundational sins. The point is to destabilise the concept of being human, to fragment and eradicate hierarchy, history, meaning and fundamental human identity: a person must be nothing to be anything (Mering 2021). Human relations shift from being a source of connection to a cause of opposition; groups of people are reductively and discriminatorily simplified into certain categoriesoppressors or oppressedwhile ignoring others (Peterson 2019). Intersectionality contemplates that in one person there may be several oppressed identities or even a duality of privilege and oppression. The dominance of the oppressor is exacerbated by belonging to several dominant group identities, just as the status of victim gains moral stature with membership in different oppressed groups. According to Woke theory, the dominated perspective is invisible to the privileged dominant. This naturally leads to a spiral of conflict in which either injustices are fabricated, or real injustices are exacerbated rather than resolved (Mering 2021).
'Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy', Scruton comments, recalling the revolutionary spirit encouraged by Foucault (2003). Woke culture is not only destructive but incoherent, a supposedly benevolent struggle for justice in a world that allows everything and forgives nothing. According to Noelle Mering, 'growth for the woke movement is measured by fracturing' (2021), that is, in revolution rather than evolution. The result is a divided society in which citizens exploit their wounds rather than healing them, turning trauma into both a trophy and a weapon. Three are the axes on which the woke battle pivots: will over reasonthe unreasonable; the group over the individual the impersonal; and human power over higher authority.
When will reigns over reason, the honest confrontation of ideas is avoided, giving way to irrationality, to the dictatorship of feelings in which only individuality and the liberation of all social taboos that repress the true self count. What is desired becomes just by the mere fact of being desired; thus, there is no objective principle to limit or govern. Commitment to truth and democracy is renounced. Ayaan Hirsi Ali defines it as 'emocracy': a kind of subjectivist absolutism governed solely by emotions, in which the important thing is to feel good about what one says and does without offending anyone. It contemplates public self-flagellation when behaviour can be considered harmful (Kaiser 2020).
In this environment where critical theory and activism have replaced critical thinking and freedom of discussion, the violent collision of competing wills is inevitable. For these new progressives, heirs of Marcuse, resisting our desires leads to a performative and inauthentic society, detrimental to human freedom. They ignore the fact that to reject natural law is to deny the intelligibility of the world and human nature in favour of sentimentality and pragmatism. Then any action is justifiable for the sake of a good end, which leads to a moral consequentialism fraught with danger. This radical deconstruction of the human, applied only to certain categories of oppression, turns the person into a collection of social identities. It becomes easy to dehumanise and depersonalise the other (Mering 2021). A social tribalism is born whose sense of belonging is based not on love but on grievance, not on the individual but on ideological abstraction.
For Mary Eberstadt, the reason for this obsession with the identities of oppressed groups is the destruction of the family as a consequence of the sexual revolution. Losing the family means denying one's own identity, which forces one to cling desperately to whatever identity is offered, artificial or not (Eberstadt 2021). Personal uprootedness finds in the solidarity of the group the strength to confront a common enemy on which to project guilt. It is victimhood for the sake of division, not unity; it declares diversity while it promotes uniformity (Mering 2021).
Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning highlight how today's society is afflicted by the culture of victimhood. They see it as a transition between the culture of honourwith which it shares the aggressive response to reputational insults, and that of dignityfrom which it takes the appeal to legal authority for conflict resolution. Victimhood is established as a kind of moral status that increases according to the degree of suffering and offence suffered by the oppressed. And if victimhood is virtue, privilege is vice (Campbell and Manning 2014). The aggrieved develop a hypersensitivity to slights and an incapacity for resilience or benevolent interpretation of the other. They seek social control by publicly denouncing microaggressions, 'brief and common-place daily verbal, behavioural, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, and sexual orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group' (Sue 2010). For the perpetrator, who may also claim to be a victim, microaggressions have the power to be invisible. For those who suffer them, microaggressions are a threat to their security, since by them the domination of some people and groups over others is perpetuated. When nothing is wrong, anything can be offensive. Hence the interest in turning public opinionsomeone's interpretation matters more than the actor's intentionon the one hand into a moral tribunal that judges the rightness or wrongness of certain statements, and on the other hand into a support that assists the victims with protective measures (implementation of trigger warnings for those who have post-traumatic stress, or the creation of safe spaces for minority groups). The attractiveness of this competitive victimhood is thus uncovered: a higher moral status is achieved by combining several victimised identities and falsifying accusations without any risk (Campbell and Manning 2018).
Finally, the woke movement moves from justice to revenge, from revenge to the abolition of authority. To break all ties with authority, defined as existing around an irreconcilable axis of oppression, the woke movement proposes to rewrite history. Rather than being uncovered, history must be manipulated. Orwell's prophetic dystopian novel 1984 is suggestive in this regard: 'to reach into the past and say of this or that event, "it never happened", was far more terrifying than mere torture and death' (2021). The first step in this reprogramming is the destruction of memory. An endless series of victories over one's own memory will suffice to control reality, the British novelist insinuates. 'He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past' (2021).
Tearing down statues, burning instead of remodelling, are acts that will allow a new man and a new society to be erected out from the void left by their ashes. The iconoclastic fever is not only directed at marble or bronze, paper or text, but rather at the paternal icons they represent. It is the desire to mortally wound authority in culture (Mering 2021).

Shadows of awakening: cancelling freedom of expression to give minorities a voice
As an ideology of rupturerupture with a shared past, with the model of personhoodwoke culture has also begun the battle for words and meaning. Language shapes thought, affects what people talk about, what they pay attention to, how they understand problems and how they try to solve them; it impacts the course of social life (Campbell and Manning 2018). In order to control thinking and consequently the group, on the one hand, a terminology is being implemented that is permeating all social strata. This new vocabulary, which introduces terms such as the following: systemic or institutional racism, referring to unjust structures in society; white privilege and white supremacism, advantages that white people enjoy by virtue of being white and believing themselves superior to all other races, is already used in our cultural heritage; white guilt, hereditary and collective guilt for which whites have to make reparations for being the cause of historical discrimination against other racial minorities; intersectionality, overlapping of two or more forms of discrimination, confluence of several 'oppressed identities' in the same person or group (Meseguer 2020a); cisgenderism, heteronormativity, etc … . Our way of seeing the world is manipulated, new meanings make reality malleable.
On the other hand, words are corrupted, stripped of their power to reveal reality. The concept of truth becomes the first victim of this linguistic manipulation. If language loses its capacity to refer to universally comprehensible realities, it becomes unstable and gives way to complete irrationalism. Dialogue is compromised, and without dialogue there is chaos, frustration, persuasion, miscommunication, mistrust … a Tower of Babel where 'truths' multiply and can be contradictory to each other. To suppress meaning is the deepest form of oppression and slavery because meaning is intimately linked to suffering, and suffering deprived of meaning is the hardest to bear. In the vacuum left by this crisis of meaning, words become acts of violence (Mering 2021), and violence becomes a self-defence mechanism (Campbell and Manning 2018), a legitimate retaliation against insults (Dershowitz 2021). As truth does not exist or cannot be known, there are only diverse narratives competing for spaces of domination (Kaiser 2020). An emotion-driven narrative becomes all-powerful and unassailable and the conceptual expansion of what is labelled as abusive is infinite as well as arbitrary.
No discourse is protected (Campbell and Manning 2018). According to Woke culture, it is not the weight of the argument but the social identity of the speaker (skin colour, gender or sexuality) that determines the moral rightness or wrongness of the speech. Indeed, the white race is inherently conflicted: both its speech and its silence are interpreted as violence (Meseguer 2020a). The demand is laid upon it to be eternally repentant of its privilege but also eternally unforgiven (Mering 2021). An expiatory process without the possibility of redemption.
This climate of tolerance and freedom of speech for me but not for you is the first step on the way to freedom of speech for neither you nor me (Dershowitz 2021). This love of sin and hatred of the sinner marks out a one-way street for relativism. Tolerance is inverted, becoming an instrument of oppression against views opposed to one's own. Meaningful communication between divergent positions becomes impossible, the ability to empathise with others is destroyed (Kaiser 2020). Intolerance towards the enemies of the revolution is not only justified but necessary. Those who deviate from its dogmas are attacked and delegitimised: cancel culture is mercilessly applied (Mering 2021).
To cancel is to withdraw public support on social media, to threaten economic boycotts, or to not promote the work of public figures or organisations in response to unacceptable opinions and behaviour. A simple accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Muslim bias or lack of support for BLM, regardless of its veracity, is basis enough to call for boycotting or shaming (public shaming) or even ostracising anyone who disagrees with the identity politics of the woke generation. For Lisa Nakamura of the University of Michigan, this culture is related to 'the attention economy', since agreeing 'not to amplify, signal boost, give money to' deprives those affected of attention, which is the same as depriving them of their livelihood (Bromwich 2018). It is not irrelevant to note that the term has its origins in Nazi Germany's first political measures against Jews and opponents of National Socialism (Mortimer 2020).
Cancel culture has been boosted by the #MeToo movement, which, despite its good intentions, does not distinguish between guilty and innocent or refute false accusations. Accusation is condemnation, with no presumption of innocence or legal redress. Clear evidence of innocence may be insufficient to cancel the cancellation. The difficult part is to gauge the ratio of cancellation to sin committed. Scorn has unregulated digital platforms in the blind spot of censorship. In them, invisibility and anonymity guarantee exemption from responsibility, batting without prejudice to the pitcher. There is trust in the veracity of the media, which often do not investigate before publishing; as the story and the truth are distorted, any word can be considered malicious and therefore misinterpreted. Cancel culture is radical, it selects its victims and criticises them mercilessly. It is unforgiving; anyone who enters its sphere is permanently cancelled and stripped of credibility sine fine. This has not only affected individuals but companies as a well. The cancel culture campaign has conditioned the business and political world: the 'Get woke, go broke' sloganwith all that it entailshas driven business models and electoral programmes into crisis (Vezzosi 2021).
For woke activists, interacting with ideas they disagree with is a threat to their safety; it is a cause of feelings of anxiety and isolation that arise simply from being different (Campbell and Manning 2018). A traumatised tribe is being configured that is incapable of developing resilient individuals because, as cultural critic Bruce Bawer notes, it lives permanently 'preoccupied with an evil triumvirate of ismscolonialism, imperialism, capitalismand with a three-headed monster of victimhood: class, race, and gender oppression' (2012). Identity and privilege lay the foundations of this new hierarchy.
While they wield the weapon of censorship to defend themselves against the views they abhor, anonymous arbiters of the woke generation apply the double standard of cancellation. Positive action is sought for unprivileged speech and negative reaction for privileged speech (Dershowitz 2020). The writer Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right (2017), warns of the danger of neo-colonialism that this kind of all-or-nothing anti-establishment ideology can paradoxically lead. The blackmail posed by woke activists is the choice between accepting their ideological premises and blessing their methods, or being complicit in racism. Experience shows that defending just causes does not give the right to impose ideas or to have them accepted en masse (Meseguer 2020a).
The impact of silencing speech, regardless of whether it might be correct or partially correct, affects not only the individual who is silencedwhether an artist, academic, politician or whoeverbut also those members of society, who are denied the right to listen to the victims. The citizen is set up as a judge of certainty without hearing the other side. The constitutional rights of freedom of expression and due process, protectors against any dictatorship, are jeopardised. Political and moral diversity is nullified by the self-censorship of many voices that fear recrimination. For Sam Altman, founder of Y Combinator (Silicon Valley), this climate of persecution of heretics, imposed by political correctness negatively affects creative capacity, as 'restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation' (2017).
Cancel culture stifles creativity, kills fiction, ruins entertainment, destroys humour, impoverishes political debate, erases history, replaces the structure of meritocracyi.e. judging people by their achievements and virtueswith that of group identity, it denies the evidence of science and enslaves it in the service of ideology. In short, it is a cancer on democracy, without accountability or transparency. Freedom of expression suffers a thousand small cuts under the argument that these will help maintain social harmony. The use of hyper-subjective categories to define what constitutes 'hate speech' opens the door to unlimited censorship and massive arbitrariness (Kaiser 2020).
Against the intransigent outbreaks of political correctness, 152 left-wing intellectuals have reacted with a letter in Harper's Magazine (2020) warning of the risk of undermining norms that enable open debate in favour of ideological conformity, even if it is in the interests of racial and social justice. They call for a 'culture that leaves us room for experimentation', for risk and error without serious professional consequences, a culture that enables disagreement with the weapons of exposition, argumentation and persuasion. They try to redefine what is understood by common sense, based on the principle that minorities are not always right by default (Meseguer 2020b). At the same time, different proposals are being put forward to reverse the current tendency towards a dangerous uniform 'tolerance' that in fact silences the majority for fear of being silenced. The 'Campaign for Common Sense' (CCS) promoted by British professor Marik Lehain seeks to preserve spaces in which the capacity for expression is not limited, and he encourages those in power to pay more attention to social consensus in decision-making than to the opinion of minority groups. To restore visibility to a silenced majority, the academic Journal of Controversial Ideas allows publication under pseudonyms to protect authors in a hostile intellectual climate. Its editors argue that 'the best way to respond to ideas one opposes is to refute them, not to suppress them through coercion or intimidation' (McMahan, Minerva, and Singer 2018). Journalist Toby Young is the driving force behind the Freedom Speech Union (FSU), which makes freedom of speech an absolute value and offers support to those who suffer reprisals for their ideas (Meseguer 2020b). Axel Kaiser recognises that 'in the age of identity politics, anything that does not conform to the expectations of representativeness of various victimised groups falls into the purifying machinery of the new inquisition [ … ] Whoever breaks a taboo becomes a taboo himself'. That is why he dares to say that in this new puritanism, 'thinking is an act of sedition' (2020). According to Peterson, 'in order to be able to think you have to risk being offensive' (Newman 2018). Perhaps, cowed by those who, in the name of freedom, wield the doctrine of resentment or feed moral panic, our society lacks the courage to risk breaking with the culture of silence by defending what never dies: the truth. It is forgotten in this war, for as Cicero said, truth is corrupted as much by lies as by silence (Palomo Trigueri 2023). And, in the end, we are all left in doubt … lest, as Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan suggested, 'when people, especially those in a position of authority, like broadcasters, try so hard to shut a writer up, that writer must have something to say. When cultural arbiters try to silence a thinker, you have to assume he is saying something valuable' (2018).

Reasons for dialogue: whitewashing the black legend
While in countries such as Spain, the authorities have been advocating the recovery of historical memory for years, the American phenomenon seems to be a tendency towards oblivion. Perhaps one of the illnesses that most damages the social fabric on the other side of the Atlantic is what we could call historical Alzheimer's disease. It is hard to live and die without memories, because not remembering the good we have received makes us strangers to ourselves, in the words of Pope Francis, 'transients' of existence: we run the risk of uprooting ourselves from the ground that sustains us. 'To remember is to knot oneself with stronger ties, to feel part of a history, to breathe with a people; it is not something private, but the path that unites us to God and to others [ … ] it is transmitted from generation to generation' (Mart ınez 2020).
It is undeniable that the greatest civilizing enterprise in history is suffering a crisis. Spain, the dethroned mother, seems to have ended her idyll with the American republics, which prefer orphanhood and independence. The Spanish Empire has been demonised in Latin America and the West. For Gilley, the origins of anti-colonial thinking are political and ideological. He notes that there has been a systematic campaign of discredit against the Western colonising powers that has ignored the complexities that this adventure entailed (2018). The Rousseauian myth of the good savage, which depicted pure and innocent natives and which de las Casas was responsible for spreading, had little to do with the Aztec empire that the Spanish found in Mexico, where the level of criminality was genocidal, and slavery and human sacrifice were commonplace (Roca Barea 2017a). It also demystifies de las Casas, whose exaggerations facilitated the creation and globalisation of the black legend, in which Spanish colonialism was played out by cruel white men.
'Imperiophobia' sees Western empires as exploitative and oppressive forces that filled their conquered colonies with misery and blood. There is no doubt that the imperial powers of the West were responsible for great evils and crimes against the colonised population, but that does not mean that they were absolutely bad, or worse than the alternatives. This undifferentiated and wholly negative view of the issue has had a devastating impact on Western consciousness, engendering a self-flagellating discourse and exploiting a sense of guilt that is largely responsible for the existential decadence and exhaustionconsidered by many a deserved punishmentafflicting Europe, as well as the pathological levels of resentment emerging in the United States. In the face of such a scenario, Europe is silent, unable to value and defend its own (Kaiser 2020).
But what has caused an entire continent to want to forget itself, to erase a transcendental period of its history and to distort a formative past? It is essential to reflect on the causes that make history reopen unhealed wounds five centuries later. If history offends, it is necessary to know why, not simply tear down statues.
For the journalist and historian Miguel Saralegui, this way of acting arises from Latin America's mimicry of North America, rather than being justified as the anti-Spanish fruit of long and traumatic wars for independence. For him, it actually stems from the idea, present in the collective subconscious, that Spain has generated a social structure that disables the economic and political development of liberal America (Cervera 2021). Obrador's recent speech in which he dared to blame the Spanish conquest for the economic and scientific backwardness of Spanish America, as well as its current political crisis, is illuminating of this point of view. Yet it is hardly credible to blame the current corruption, poverty, violence, drug trafficking or social inequalities on conquerors who were expelled 200 years ago. Two centuries is more than enough time to revive a country, even if it starts from scratch (Galindo 2021).
The process of decolonizing history began a long time ago when, in the search for impeccable historical figures for whom new university centres could be named, biographies were examined so that those whose behaviour had been inappropriate could be discarded. Existing institutions were renamed, non-white and non-male persons were included in compulsory reading programmes. Authors who did not belong to groups disadvantaged by gender, race or sexual orientation were eliminated. It has been proposed to stop studying Greco-Latin culture because it favours racism and is distinctive of the educated classes, while it is forgotten that some of the great revolutionaries and most radical thinkers were formed in the classics … (Brague 2021).
In the genesis of this tsunami that seeks to rewrite world history, there is a distortion of reality that comes from the inappropriate use of history. According to R emi Brague, French philosopher and professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, the current phenomenon of demolishing and desecrating monuments, of renaming streets and buildings, is aimed at purifying and rectifying historical memory by means of summary judgments that fail to grasp the complexity of the past. It is impossible to cancel all negative memories of yesterday, to pretend that cultures are totally flawless.
The focal point is retrospective utopia: inordinate attempts to reinterpret memory make it possible to reorient the present but will not change history. According to Brague (2021), the reasons for this discrepancy are as follows: 1. Historical reductionism: the complexity of historical figures is reduced to one aspect, forgetting the others.
2. Use of an inadequate hermeneutic: their actions are judged according to our criteria, in a totally anachronistic way. For the historian Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, professor at the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and former president of the Elcano Royal Institute of International Studies, 'to judge the past with the gaze and moral criteria of the present would be like denying the moral progress of humanity' (Del Vecchio 2021). 3. Decontextualization: the historical context that allows us to understand the actions of so many historical figures is ignored.
If we analyse the conquest and evangelisation of America today, we find reasons that continue to fuel the anti-Spanish black legend and unnerve many who feel they are the protagonists of an event that is more than 500 years old.

Against the wind
One of the current fashions is to describe the conquest of America as genocide. According to Todorov, writer of The Conquest of America, none of the great massacres of the 20th century is comparable to this hecatomb (Villaverde 2016). For historian Miquel Izard, the repression of Somoza and Pinochet would be nothing more than the continuation of that initiated by Cort es and Pizarro, the greatest genocide in history, and comparable to the Holocaust (Villaverde 2016). It would be unfair not to recognize the atrocities that were carried out by the colonisers, but it would be equally unfair not to point out that they were carried out by both sides. Although the Spanish had more means, they were in a complete minority. There was never an express desire on the part of the Crown to exterminate a race, not least because the concept of race did not exist as such. For Fernando Cervantes, Mexican historian and professor at the University of Bristol, it makes no sense to use a modern term based on how we understand race biologically today, for a context and a time when it did not exist: 'they thought that race was something that was acquired, that if you lived like the indigenous people you became indigenous' (Hern andez Velasco 2021). Matthew Restall, one of the historians most critical of the Spanish, acknowledges that there was no such eagerness and that the Indians, who, for their part, learned very quickly to ride horses and use swords for defence, could do little to defeat an enemy against which they had no weapons: germs. The epidemics caused by germs are considered the main cause of the depopulation of America (2004). It is worth noting that the Spaniards were concerned about this significant demographic decline, among other things because they needed the Indians as a labour force. Another cause of the decline of the indigenous population that is not usually taken into account was mixed marriage, as the children of natives and Spaniards were not counted as natives (Powell 1972).
This situation of implicit submission of conquered to conquerors became in many cases a de facto slavery, although the term was, for legal rather than humanitarian reasons, not only unacceptable but also legally punishable as a crime: the Patronato Real claimed dominion over the conquered lands, meaning that its inhabitants, in this case the natives, were not considered slaves but subjects or vassals of the Spanish Crown (Hern andez Velasco 2021).
It is significant to note that slavery at that time was a normalised phenomenon throughout the world and practised by all races. So much so that, according to Christina Snyder, it was common in the USA before the arrival of Europeans and Africans (2012). The case piracy was similar: the pirates of the Costa Brava in Africa enslaved millions of Europeans. For Axel Kaiser, the history of slavery was based more on economic issues than on racial beliefs (2020).
Furthermore, to be fair it should be said that the first defenders of indigenous rights were the Dominicans, led by Antonio de Montesinos. Bartolom e de las Casas' defence of the rights of the indigenous people as subjects of the Crown is well known. Slavery existed in the Hispanic world, but slaves were imported from regions outside the dominion of the Crown, especially African slaves whose possession was regularized by clear stipulations. As Roca Barea points out, 'the only laws protecting the indigenous populations that have existed in America are the laws that the Spaniards wrote'. The indigenous populations of the Americas were left without legal protection when the Empire was dismembered. 'Everything that has happened since the Independences is not accounted for, because they were where the biggest disappearances of ethnic groups took place in the Americas in the Hispanic area' (Roca Barea 2017b). It is disturbing for today's intellectuals that, as Sowell perceives, it was 'businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world' (Sowell 2005).
Others focus on the evangelisation process, as if a long arm of Rome were inquisitorially forcing the natives to become Christians. Ecclesiastical resources for evangelization were scarce and it is hard to imagine how just 1000 Spaniards and 12 friars were able to impose a religion by force on Mexico's more than 20 million inhabitants. The reality is that very little intolerance emerges from the primary sources. According to Cervantes, 'it was a much more interesting and much more gradual process, more of accommodation and respect for heterogeneity, for diversity, where in general everything that existed was respected if it did not go completely against the postulates of the Gospel' (Hern andez Velasco 2021). This is why human sacrifice, sodomy, cannibalism and polygamy were so difficult to deal with.
Economic plunder and stealing of gold are other scourges that receive the most attention when it comes to magnifying the black legend. Clearly there was such plunder, especially in Peru, where it was frowned upon when Pizarro melted down all the treasures to send ingots to Spain. These riches did not solve the nation's economic problems, as they were destined to alleviate the costs of the wars of Charles V and Philip II. The Spaniards of that time had no aptitude for trade and Seville was invaded by traders of all European nationalities who saw the peninsula as their own particular India (Fazio 2015). However, the reality is that most of the wealth stayed in the Americas; when Alexander von Humboldt travelled to New Spain in the early 19th century he said it was the city of palaces. Mexico was at that time the centre of civilisation above major North American cities (Viñamata 2020).

Going with the wind
Not denying the barbarities that were done implies, in all honesty, also recognising the merits of many Spaniards in the Americas. Spain in the 16th century was admired throughout the world because it was a pioneer in something that everyone wanted to do, especially the English, who on arriving in North America found a depopulated country and civilisations that did not reach the calibre of those produced by the Incas and the Aztecs. But it was neither the English nor any of the seven monumental Chinese expeditions that discovered the new world. It was Columbus, by chance, who brought about a discovery, which was a discovery not only for Europeans but for the Americans themselves. The natives of the Americas barely knew their own territory and a little of their neighbours. Thanks to the great Spanish, Portuguese and later French, Italian and English deep-sea navigations, the limits of the newly discovered continent and later of the entire world were delineated. The cartography went around the world.
From that moment on, the encounter led to the creation of a mestizo civilisation linked by common roots. It gave way to one of the richest of cultures, one conveyed by language and steeped in education, art and religion, which may be contrasted with the expansion of Anglo-Saxon culture based on trade. Federico Garcia Lorca once said that 'the Spaniard who does not know America does not know what Spain is'. In the opinion of Carroll R ıos de Rodr ıguez, professor of politics, economics and history at the Francisco Marroqu ın University in Guatemala, it is essential not to ignore the positive aspects of miscegenation and the union of two cultures, the product of which was a new culture with Hispanic and indigenous elements (Camey 2021). He also stresses that America became another region of Charles V's Holy Roman-German Empire, which shared one of the kingdom's greatest riches: Christianity. It is interesting to confront the concept of identity with that of difference, to understand a common culture of completely different countries.
Finally, it is remarkable how some historians see the phenomenon of colonialism as not only positive but legitimate. A statement by University of Portland professor Bruce Gilley was considered offensive by lovers of political correctness and cost him the withdrawal of his article without any possibility of refuting the charge. He acknowledged that: European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons. Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonized to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processesall relatively voluntary acts. (2018) In the same vein, Harvard scholar Maria-Elvira Roca Barea, a Harvard scholar, points to the enormous contribution in terms of infrastructure, building, hospitals, justice and education that the Spaniards made in the colonies (2021). For Mart ınez Ferrer, for example, the universities of Lima and Mexico in the 16th century, as well as their precedent in Santo Domingo, are a reflection of the Crown's determination to 'provide the new empire with a cultural base that would reinforce its continuity in the European Christian horizon'. They responded to the request of individuals and institutions, both civil and religious, who urged their establishment. In addition to being configured as backbone entities of society, they are conceived as 'a process of translatio studii, of inculturation of the University of Salamanca in America' (2016).
In short, many authors agree that colonialism is still a civilising mission that improves the living conditions of colonised peoples: it is a commitment to human dignity in areas of chronic insecurity, thanks to the implementation of technical and institutional advances. As Gilley quotes Abernethy saying: 'Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull' (2018).

Navigation techniques
In order not to be swept away by these currents, it is necessary to implement some navigation techniques. Historians on both sides of the Atlantic suggest a common effort.
Choose between pardoning and condemning. According to Brague, what is at stake is not just a Western problem, but our relationship with the past. Today's culture is caught in a kind of perversion of the sacrament of penance: we force everyone to confess, we demand repentance but deprive them of absolution and forgiveness. Clearly, forgiving is not easy, especially when the traumas remain. 'The key is to recover our capacity to forgive' (2021). Past grievances can only be healed in the future, which is the space where we can all reconnect.
Search for what unites. Polanco proposes the path of education versus confrontation (Camey 2021). Today's society presents us with a mestizo realitywe are all quite mestizowhich allows us to value not being 'pure' without hating the race or ethnicity of others. The common good calls us to reflect on our roots and take the best of both worlds. In R ıos' words, 'it is not the colour of the skin that matters but the values that unite us with other people' (Camey 2021).
Liberate history. To purify a politicised memory of other interests, not to make inappropriate uses beyond a desire for historical reparation. According to Professor R ıos, the current rejection of the conquest is caused by a desire to overthrow history or deny it, because it is a history written by exploitative heterosexual men who created a system through which they can exercise hegemonic power over other races and other genders. 'For these groups, it is important to tear down the statues of Columbus in order to tear down the system as well'. The revolutionary mentality sees the need to destroy in order to build a different order (Camey 2021).
Do instead of saying, build instead of destroying. If what takes years to create and gestate can be annihilated in a short time, history invites us to act with caution: 'when we touch what previous generations built, our hand should tremble', suggests Brague. The idea of starting from scratch was already advocated by Descartes during the Enlightenment when he sought to start from a tabula rasa that would free us from all traditional prejudices. The proposal ended in Revolution. Although the Austrian Joseph A. Schumpeter speaks of creative destruction in the economic sphere, the French philosopher argues that 'true creation never breaks the link with the past'. This has been demonstrated throughout history by artists, musicians and novelists who, starting from the legacy of their predecessors, open a door to novelty.
Brague comments that this is more a destructive creation and compares these cancellation movements to the Bolshevik revolution, which, driven by hatred and resentment, swept away the old without making new proposals (2021). The philosopher John Gray agrees in comparing these insurgents to the pedagogy of fear used by the Bolsheviks to impose a single worldview. He does not deny America's founding crimesthe enslavement of black people and the confiscation of indigenous peoples' landsbut he doubts that racial antagonism, resentment and anarchy can bring any redemption. Rather, the opposite: 'The rejection of liberal liberties leads to the tyranny of the righteous mob' (Meseguer 2020a). Polanco agrees that many of these movements are based on a Marxist ideology, which tries to define and pit two ethnicities against each other, with one being victim and the other guilty (Camey 2021). Perhaps, given the experience of woke mobism, and for the good of all, it would be more interesting to propose a constructive way forward.
Restore the value of what is Spanish. To paraphrase Subcommander Mois es to whom we have referred earlier (2020), the Spain of Cervantes, of B ecquer and Espronceda, of Hern andez and Salinas, of Machado and Lope; of Vel azquez and Murillo, El Greco and Goya, Dal ı, Mir o and Picasso, of Gaud ı; of Morales and Guerrero, of Alb eniz and Falla, of T arrega and Sarasate; of Ignacio de Loyola and Francisco Javier, of Teresa de Jes us and Juan de la Cruz, of Domingo, of thousands of revolutionaries in literature, art, music and sainthood who have made Spain a world reference point for a culture with its own personality. Spain, with its successes and mistakes, has contributed much and will continue to contribute much to the history of humanity. The father of poetic modernism, Nicaraguan by birth, Rub en Dar ıo, at a time when Roosevelt's USA was the great invader, would cry out in his verses with great patriotic pride: 'I am a son of America, I am a grandson of Spain: Spanish of America and American of Spain' (Amor os 2021).
So much for some of the possible solutions to understand a history that, in addition to being stained and dark, seems to be interminable. The fact that it has been called a black legend is suggestive of what may be extraordinary about the story. The narrative presents several possible arguments to be chosen by the different main actors. The condition is clear: ending the story requires everyone's active collaboration in the re-editing of the novel.

Conclusions
The confusion generated around the concept of 12 October, both for those who celebrate Hispanicity and those who celebrate indigeneity, has prompted the historical revision of colonialism, and in addition to it, of racism, slavery or any kind of social discrimination. The phenomenon, through the expansive force of its dogmas, has become globalised. The US has involved the world in an issue with more protagonists than those involved in the Conquest. The peaceful defence of values has turned into revolt, into hate-filled destruction of the symbols of hatred. Restorative justice is applied: smashing statues. The collective imagination is emptied of false heroes, biased biographies are sifted under standards of perfection. A woke culture is born, which, in order to break free from the oppression of a history written by the victors, begins by relativising it, by retelling it. If truth is inaccessible for the advocates of this current, reality is un-named. Deconstructing history means depersonalising; this de-rooting is more like a suicide than a transplant. Three pillars of the human being are attacked: reason, under the dictatorship of democracy, renounces its commitment to truth in order to pour its own meaning into language; the person, and with it the family, is replaced by the social tribe; all authority, whether divine or civil, is abolished by human power, which destroys memory as a cultural reference. Moral status is determined by micro-aggressions, which, publicised on social media, turn public opinion into a judge in its own right. The accused are condemned without appeal. Self-censorship imposes a culture of silence. Freedom of expression is cancelled, and constitutional rights are jeopardised.
In this scenario, a Europe in decline, dwarfed by a historical reductionism of decontextualised hermeneutics, is bombarded by the scourges of imperiophobiagenocide, slavery, forced evangelisation, greed and gold. The real discovery is left behind: the cultural, social, economic and vital development of a mestizo population.
It is really difficult to position oneself in order to clarify the problem objectively: issues of land and blood have an emotional component that it is impossible to do without. And even more so if a centuries-old testament is called to account. The reason for this lies on both sides of the Atlantic. It is already clear that permanent confrontation will not solve anything. A historical interpretation from an a-historical perspective will prevent us from seeing that in fact the Spanish legacy left more gains in inheritance than debts to its credit. Post-modern society, defender of a victimising identity politics and promoter of a narrative of division, sets itself up in possession of the truth, the very same which it cancels in the name of freedom. History shows that time always discovers the truth. The woke man loses his memory and forgets that only truth liberates. currently studying for a degree in Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (PUSC).