When I first read this book shortly after it came out, I would have wholeheartedly recommended it because it really provides a wealth of information and exposes numerous biases and problems in standard history textbooks. That is despite the fact that its prose is preachy and dry throughout. But 15 years (and one edition) later, I think it is time for a re-examination. I think the book is still an important book, and history textbooks are still awful. At the same time, I think both reflection and new scholarship makes it clear that Loewen's book comes with its own biases and ideological agenda.
I won't focus on all the things the book gets right; look at the five star reviews for those. Here, I want to point out some of the problems that I see with the book, and I will stick to one of the most important examples from the book, the textbook view of Columbus.
Indeed, Columbus wasn't the first human to "discover America", a fact that textbooks often still gloss over. Furthermore, it also points out correctly that the consequences of Columbus's voyage to the Americas were dire for Native Americans. Modern textbooks should be clearer on both of those issues and present a far more critical view of Columbus, his motivations, and his background.
However, Loewen then interprets these omissions as somehow a deliberate attempt to fabricate a positive image of Columbus and "whites", while denying "blacks" positive role models and well-deserved credit for their prior discoveries. Let us look at this idea in a bit more detail.
While plenty of human beings had traveled to the Americas prior to Columbus, Columbus was the key figure in bringing the existence of the Americas to the attention of "our" culture. And I use the term "our" deliberately, because if you are reading this, you have become part of a global culture that is continuous with the European culture that Columbus was part of. You were either born into European culture through your ancestry, or you became part of this culture, directly or indirectly, through the contact Columbus established between Europe and the Americas--the trade, the exchange of ideas, the colonialism, the dictatorships, and the slavery. It was this contact that initiated this new era, and it is is fact gives Columbus such a central role in both American and world history.
Loewen bemoans that "our" history is dominated by "white" people (I put these in quotes because they describe modern US racial categories that Loewen, in my view, misapplies to historical contexts) and implies that the achievements of "blacks" have been excluded due to racial bias. But that is misleading. The major historical figures of European culture were "white" because, until the 20th century, "blacks" were prevented from contributing significantly and Europe failed to take as much advantage of the achievements other cultures. The achievements of "blacks" and others in African, Native American and Asian cultures are a testament to the fact that race does not determine achievement. But their achievements were not part of our culture. Both Columbus and Zheng He had impressive achievements, but Zheng He had no lasting impact on the world as it is today and therefore is little more than a footnote in mainstream history. Zheng He's significance is mainly in asking about the reasons for his lack of impact.
The criteria by which we assign credit to Columbus, as opposed to other explorers, are not much different from the criteria by which we assign credit in business and the sciences as well. Important achievements happen when luck and opportunity present themselves to individuals persistent and prepared enough to take advantage of them. And credit goes to those individuals who have the largest impact, not the individuals who were "first" or who were smartest or who were most benevolent. Ideas or discoveries made in obscurity and then forgotten simply are of no interest or benefit to society, and hence we do not usually mention them in anything but footnotes, if that.
Given the horrific consequences of contact between the Americas and the European and African continents, it is also contradictory for Loewen to complain on the one hand that Columbus is identified with this contact, while on the other hand bemoaning that African explorers don't receive credit for their "discovery" of the Americas. Of course, Loewen might argue that the African contacts didn't have the same negative consequences that Columbus had, but that's not because of some more enlightened and benign intentions on the part of the (putative) African explorers, but simply because they failed to establish any permanent contact of consequence. In the end, any pre-Columbian African travelers to the Americas have had little impact, which is why they neither receive the credit nor the blame that Columbus received.
Another common ideological pitfall that Loewen often falls into is in viewing the world in modern racial terms, world in which "blacks" are the victims of "whites" and in which the crime of slavery was primarily a white, European crime. In fact, slavery had been practiced extensively within white European societies, within black African societies, and within Native American societies, and after contact, all these groups continued the practice both as perpetrators and victims against themselves and against each other. Slavery in the Americas was only possible because "blacks" in Africa sold other "blacks" into slavery and often even were instrumental in delivering them to the Americas. In the end, it was simply black slavery in the Americas that has had the greatest impact on the modern world. But guilt and innocence, perpetrators and victims, in slavery were not historically divided along racial lines.
Loewen's discussion of pre-Columbian American societies can only be called disturbingly naive and is untenable in light of modern scholarship. He observes "Practically, nations like the Arawaks--without monarchs, without much hierarchy--stunned the Europeans. In 1516, Thomas More's Utopia, probably based on an account of the Incan empire in Peru, challenged European social organization by suggesting a radically different and superior alternative." It may have literally done all that, but it is irresponsible to let such statements stand as such. First, the Inca (as other great pre-Columbian civilizations) were just as war-like, hierarchical, and totalitarian as European empires and monarchies. It is true that in the Americas, there also existed less hierarchical societies, but there is no evidence that they had hit upon any new kind of social organization. Europe had a similar mix of societies before the Roman empire, and you can find similar "less hierarchical societies" today in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. They are not societies most people would choose to live in given an alternative, but then as now, some people demonstrated an irrational longing for such societies, mostly born out of ignorance and fuzzy thinking. Thomas More's Utopia itself, of course, expresses the constant desire of many people to achieve better government by fiat, and formed the basis of centuries of ill-conceived totalitarian regimes and dismal failures.
I did get a chuckle out of Loewen's attempt to criticize the portrayal of native American religions by rendering Christianity in an analogous way: "These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died." Inadvertently, Loewen actually gives an accurate and rational view of Christian dogma, exposes its ridiculous premises, and then discards this characterization because Christians would find it "offensive". This is quite revealing of Loewen's thinking: he is not so much concerned with objectivity and rationality, but with avoiding to offend feelings.
I think "Lies my Teacher Told Me" was an important book once: history textbooks really were written with a racially tinged bias and an agenda and any antidote to that was welcome and beneficial, even if the antidote itself had its own ideological agenda. If you are a progressive (in the political sense), you will like this book: it will be congruent with your world view and give you plenty of ammunition for political debates. But the book falls into the same kind of trap as the textbooks it criticizes: instead of viewing and presenting history neutrally, as a cauldron of competing ideas and groups and a vast lottery involving geography, armies, and disease, Loewen to likes to moralize and judge, to attribute qualities and intentions, guilt and innocence to people based on labels and ideology in ways for which there is little historical evidence. The response to putting Columbus on a pedestal is not to erect another bunch of pedestals to make more people feel good about themselves, it is to tear down the pedestals altogether and force everybody to face the unpleasant lessons of history and the cruelties and injustices of which all human beings, regardless of their race or religion are capable of.
Fifteen years ago, I would have given this book four stars (not five, because of its lackluster prose). But over the last 15 years, scholarship has progressed enormously and there are better books now to rid oneself of the biases inherent in textbooks, without simply substituting another set of biases for them. If you want to see the "lies your teacher told you" clearly exposed, there are now better choices. For pre- and post-Columbian history of the Americas, I recommend the books "1491" and "1493"; they are better researched and more up-to-date, and are less ideological and biased. They are also a great deal more fun to read.
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Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on September 29, 2017
