Tuesday, June 20, 2006

The Book of Hope

William Bennett quotes Chesterton in his most recent book America: The Last Best Hope:
No small part of the denunciation of Columbus and his successors in our times is an update of the leyenda negra — the Black Legend — that Protestant countries applied to the Catholic Spaniards. As the gifted writer G. K. Chesterton put it, many of the English histories of Spanish exploration and conquest reflected “the desire of the white man to despise the Red Indian and the flatly contradictory desire of the Englishman to despise the Spaniard for despising the Red Indian.”

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