This in an excerpt from a great book I’m reading called ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.’ It’s one of the most informative books I‘be read in years. This book is changing the way I see things
On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo 11astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities, and there is a story — or legend — describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals.
One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favour.
‘What do you want?’ they asked.
‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.’
‘What’s the message?’ asked the astronauts.
The man muttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they had memorised it correctly.
‘What does it mean?’ asked the astronauts.
‘Oh, I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the moon spirits are allowed to know.’
When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language, and asked him to translate the secret message. When they repeated what they had memorised, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully meant ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.’
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Though clearly apocryphal, this story has a ring of truth to it. It has always been a matter mostly of personal opinion and historic preference, whether any type of 'exploration' is a matter of pure quest for knowledge of the unknown, or rather a quest for knowledge which can then be subordinated to the interests of empire. For my own purposes I tend toward the latter view by default, especially but certainly not limited to undertakings of exploration subsidized by the American empire.
Just as with the enduring myth that US involvement in the second world war enjoyed an overwhelming majority of 'support' from the American people (which it did not, when examined from any number of angles), the Apollo project of the 1960s & 70s is similarly attended by such revisionist untruth in retrospect.
There was a war on in Vietnam, for one thing, and among those who wanted the US to prevail in that conflict (or even, as a start, decide what that might mean) there was much objection to the pure staggering expense of the moon missions. Just the pure optics of diverting mostly military personnel and logistical capabilities toward such an inherently unrewarding goal did not sit well with those who were at those same moments calling for a more firm commitment of American assets toward protecting US forces in southeast Asia and enabling that war effort's success. More than once I have heard, sometimes in person, Vietnam veterans state that the idea of their being enthused about Apollo while facing danger, disease and death every day in-country was something they found insulting, to themselves and to those who had not survived to go home and live in peace.
And among those who stood actively and militantly against the war, there had arisen a general sentiment that ANY investment of American power was a duplicitous exercise in imperialism, as though American global might was its own self-justifying reward. The stunning hypocrisy of expanding the cold war to the very surface of the moon, and advertising this to the world as some kind of mission of peace, was not lost on those who shouted in the streets against the war in Vietnam, any more than it managed to deceive those on the ground actually fighting in it.
I used to find it curious back during the Reagan years, that again and again those who would recall the wartime years of 1941-45 with jingoistic nostalgia, consistently turned out to be those who were young children during that time, people born during the late 1920s to late 1930s like my parents (born 1934); while the more I began to encounter and listen to actual wartime veterans, and those who had been adult civilians during the war, the more I began to recognize just how harshly they had objected to everything about the way a far-left liberal regime had managed it. It was this latter group who first brought into focus for me just how much of America's blood and treasure had been squandered on a project which benefited mostly the USSR. The former age group to this day seems hardly to have even noticed, all this time, the extreme and tragic irony of America's largest war being one conducted with the worlds largest communist terror-state as our principal ally.
I have long concluded that the perceptions of history, and the conclusions drawn about it, by any given age group, had largely been an outcome of what propaganda they had been exposed to as children. At their most vulnerable and impressionable ages, children and adolescents passing through any chapter of history are bound to base their assessments of it, from then on, primarily on the versions of history shown them in the form of entertainment, news coverage and popular culture as those events went on.
As one who was a ripe old seven years of age when Neil Armstrong uttered those legendary words, I simply assumed that whatever giant step mankind had just taken (?) by his stepping off a ladder, it must have been one worth taking. At that age it was effortless for me also to assume that the mostly backward and extremely costly steps my country was taking in southeast Asia were also ones worth taking, and that America could afford both, at any level we might decide to undertake and regardless of at what expense. We were, after all, America, land of the free, home of the brave, and all that.
Now I'm not so sure.
What did the space program of the cold war ever really bring us, as Americans or even as human beings?
JFK said, 'We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new, terrifying theater of war.'
Among other things....
What he didn't say was that we set sail on this new sea because the Russians already had, and that it didn't bode well for a 1964 election he was doomed not to survive long enough to campaign for.
Whether the benefits to mankind he envisioned, even while speaking with forked tongue and mostly cadging for votes and campaign donations, have ever been realized, is debatable. Tens of thousands of satellites now orbiting over our heads, mostly tasked either with spying on us or enabling a mass planetary addiction to consumer electronic devices, and nothing even resembling peaceful exploration anywhere in sight, tend to argue the opposite result.
But since it was my generation, the ones who were left stunned and starry-eyed and seeing nothing but glorious opportunity when we watched that first lunar landing in 1968, who went on to be the generation of adults nearing middle age who guided the young into this intensively deceitful and technology-addicted Century of Stupid by embracing each new capability as if it were our birthright, my generation now is more vulnerable to the jingoism and manipulation first field-tested on us in the 1960s than ever before. And most of us just keep falling for it, again and again.
So if that old Indian had said, these people are here to steal your SOUL, and not just your land, he would have been that much more on point. I personally have been fighting to get my own soul back, ever since. As for land, an empire stealing it from indigenous peoples never left me with any in the first place. My own people had long since sold off what land they ever had, to pay off debts.