The conquest of America: How the Indian nations lost their continent

Brief Reviews for instance, the democrats’ key contention that only democratic institutions can protect Hong Kong’s freedoms from the inevitable attacks, not just from Beijing but also from opportunistic PRC and pro-PRC elements in Hong Kong itself. Overholt does better in explaining the dangers of the Clinton administration’s missionary zeal for promoting democracy in China while ignoring history’s lesson that the United States tries to change China at its own peril. Because Overholt draws liberally from his speeches and articles from the period of 1990, the book has a somewhat choppy, compartmentalized quality. Typographical errors and unnecessary repetition both suggest that the book was rushed into print. But for now, this is the best single book for the general reader on the current, momentous transformation of China.

LATIN AMERICA

by Michael Radu The Conquest of Amerle How the Ifdan Nations Lost Thdr Continent. By Hans Koning. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994. 150 pp. $10.00, paper. The main idea of this pamphlet is as simple as an old-fashioned Western turned on its head: Indians coops-native Americans) are good; whites are bad. But in the process of making and remaking that point, the author trots out quite a few other cliches. Indeed, the only practical use for this volume is in demonstrating that one can cram into a few pages almost all of the false claims, misinformation, and half-truths that revisionists have devised concerning the Americas during the last five centuries. Like his fellow revisionists, Koning has no sense of history. His trendy values-from the myth of the Indians’ environmental friendliness to the exaggeration of pre-Colombian cultural accomplishments-are simplistically applied to men who died centuries ago, in another time and moral world. The complex personality of a Heman Cartes is thus dismissed because he lacked “conscience and humanity.” But, of course, the Inca state was not even a tyranny: the emperor was just a benevolent “shepherd” of something called, in yet another amazing anachronism, the “Inca nation.” Columbus is a “false hero,” of course. And Indian agriculture was superior to European agriculture-no proof required. In sum, this volume both represents and encapsulates the ongoing contemporary effort to reinvent history on the basis of dubious facts, and to do so from the pompously self-righteous moral perspective of the contemporary Left. An informed reader may ponder whether the resulting product is worse considered as history or as philosophy. The uninformed should keep away. The Jesuit Murders in Fil Salvador. By Martha Doggett. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Washington, DC.: Georgetown University Press, 1993. 358 pp. $19.95,paper. Death Foretol&

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