Re: Misguided In Italian Free Download
Anastacia Iacono
Perhaps the best argument for the abolition of Columbus Day is that you already know all of this. It is widely understood at this point that he was a bad person who represented parts of our history we now recognize as shameful. Proposing that we cancel Columbus Day is not a radical idea and the only reason it still exists is because of people like T*cker C*rlson and some sincerely misguided Italian Americans.
Columbus Day sucks. Christopher Columbus sucked. We all know this, and we need not spend a ton of time talking about why he sucked. But for the sake of formality, let\u2019s cover some quick facts. Christopher Columbus was a brutal, greedy, racist, tyrannical monster who murdered countless people, facilitated rape and sex slavery, and was a key player in the origin of both the Atlantic slave trade and Native American genocide. He was a power-hungry, self-serving colonizer whose actions were inarguably influential, but only in that he greatly contributed to the near annihilation of vast numbers of both people and cultures, the trauma of which is still palpable and ongoing to this day.
Let\u2019s not just rely on the history books though, because Columbus is able to make the argument that he is one of history\u2019s greatest monsters all on his own. After encountering the native Arawak population of The Bahamas, he wrote:
\u201CThey brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks\u2019 bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants . . . with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.\u201D
Case closed! Beyond the abject evil, Columbus also wasn\u2019t nearly the first foreigner to land in the Americas. Most notably, Leif Erikson and the Vikings beat him by about 500 years (and as long as we\u2019re tracking the numbers, Indigenous people had occupied the land for about 15,000 years when Columbus arrived). Also, let\u2019s not forget that the dude landed in the wrong fucking place! He was looking for Asia, which is why he completely misidentified Native Americans, calling them Indians. He sounds like the worst kind of proud dullard you could imagine, and I would say that\u2019s actually quite American of him, but he wasn\u2019t American, which brings me to my next point: he was an Italian working for Spain! Our adolescent country was (and is) so desperate for the instant gratification of a heroic origin story that we pinned an entire holiday on a wobbly, grotesque, and only sort of apt figure. But his legacy is our legacy now\u2014as American as apple pie or unfortunately, the Fourth of July.
Of course, the distinction between Columbus and someone like Erikson isn\u2019t really about \u201Cdiscovery\u201D at all\u2014it\u2019s about honoring the person who colonized the territory. We don\u2019t remember Columbus because he was an explorer or adventurer. We remember him because he was a settler and a conqueror who successfully achieved European occupation with brute force, an unimaginable sense of superiority, and utter disdain for human life outside his race.
While we should have left Columbus Day behind long, long ago (people have apparently been writing into The New York Times about it since at least freaking 1989), we\u2019ve never had a better opportunity to break free from this bizarre loyalty than in 2020. After all, we\u2019re already in the swing of tearing down historical monuments, both literally and figuratively, including statues of Columbus himself. We might as well take it all the way and replace the federal holiday with Indigenous Peoples Day, as many cities and states have already done. I\u2019m not saying we should forget about Columbus\u2014we need to remember our white supremacist past to help illuminate our white supremacist present and guard against a white supremacist future\u2014but it\u2019s the perfect time to leave him behind as a figure of pride or achievement. That version of history is not only exclusionary, it\u2019s a toxic falsehood.
Demoting Columbus is of course about far more than just him\u2014it\u2019s an overdue gesture (truly the bare minimum) toward the millions of Indigenous people living in the United States today whose people suffered at the hands of Columbus and the many, many white settlers who followed. Native communities are still fighting for their land and against the capitalist-minded government-led projects that will further ravage the planet and directly hurt their communities. This year, coronavirus has devastated many tribes, including the Navajo Nation, which has had some of the highest infection rates in the country and lacks many of the basic resources, like clean water and government aid, to help contain it. This on top of the now \u201Cregular\u201D strains of climate change, racism, centuries of cultural appropriation and erasure, continual encroachment on Native land, and America\u2019s total failure to meaningfully address the atrocities of the past or present.
Beyond financial investment, it\u2019s a good day to refocus attention on ongoing activist causes like Standing Rock and the Wet\u2019suwet\u2019en crisis, read up on the struggles for Native communities with regard to COVID-19, and maybe think about decolonizing your bookshelf.
Claudia is a Teaching Fellow and Ph.D. student in Italian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her joint academic background in Italian Philology and Environmental Humanities fuels her research interests in contemporary literature, environmental ecocriticism, energy and material landscapes, and non-human animal studies within and beyond the Italian context.
She is currently working on the literary and artistic representation of damaged and resurgent landscapes within the Mediterranean basin, investigating cultural connections between energy and places and the misguided understandings of energy at the roots of environmental degradation.
"The Landscapes of Sicily. Literature, Ecology, and Perception in the heart of the Mediterranean", Italy, the Mediterranean, and the South - Interdisciplinary Workshop, University of Oxford, 15 June 2023.
Eli Roth's The Green Inferno tries to leave viewers with a moral lesson, but when subjected to any kind of scrutiny, that lesson turns out to be absolutely ridiculous. In the 1980s, Italian horror was a booming business, with directors like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Lamberto Bava churning out classic film after classic film. One crucial thing Italian horror had over most of the films produced in America at the time was a willingness to create content that was as sleazy and raw as possible, hitting viewers with extremely graphic gore, rampant nudity, and on-screen depravity.
Like American horror, Italian horror also contains specific sub-genres that proved popular in the 1980s, with perhaps the most infamous being the cannibal film sub-genre. Often set within the jungle, these films depict western characters that end up on the menu for remote tribes that are all too happy to turn prospective trespassers into carcasses for consumption. This is one sub-genre that quite rightly rarely gets explored nowadays, however, as the setup is ripe for racially insensitive or offensive depictions of indigenous peoples.
Of the many films that comprised the 1980s Italian cannibal movie boom, the most famous is Cannibal Holocaust, which was released at the start of the decade. In Cannibal Holocaust, characters head into the jungle to make a documentary called The Green Inferno. Thus, noted horror fan Eli Roth used that title for his 2015 tribute to the sub-genre. The resulting film has a lot of positives, but its ending, especially its apparent message, leaves much to be desired.
The Green Inferno centers on a group of college activists who head into the Amazon jungle to stage a protest against a petrochemical company operation. This operation is known to be destroying rainforests and displacing native tribes that have lived without contact with the outside world for generations. On the flight back, their plane malfunctions and crashes, and the survivors are captured by one of the very tribes they sought to defend. Unfortunately, this tribe is full of cult cannibal-style villains who proceed to brutally kill and eat most of the group. Eli Roth shows the deaths in excruciating detail, and as a horror piece, The Green Inferno succeeds by delivering shock-value-gore and scares.
In The Green Inferno's penultimate scene, the lead character Justine (Lorenza Izzo) manages to escape the tribe and ends up in the middle of a huge battle between the petrochemical company's militia force and the cannibalistic natives. She's able to identify herself as an American to one of the militiamen and manages to escape back to the US. This is where Roth's film stretches credibility, however, as back in the movie's little time spent in New York City, Justine lies and says that she was the only survivor of the plane crash and that the natives helped her to safety, before being unfairly wiped out by the militia. This follows multiple shots of the battle between the company and the tribe that seems to want to make the viewer sympathetic to the cannibals that just butchered and ate a group of innocent explorers.
The Green Inferno's message, therefore, appears to be that the native tribes were in the right to do what they did, due to their way of life being intruded upon. It also seems to go a step further and argue that they're more moral than a selfish, civilized society, whether pointing the finger at ill-informed activists or petrochemical mercenaries alike. Of course, the controversial Green Inferno's message glosses over the fundamental fact that this tribe consumes innocent people, in some cases dismembering them while they're still alive and screaming.
7fc3f7cf58