Bartolomé de Las Casas is an unsung hero who wanted to convert the pagan Native Americans to Christ as well as stop the sinful aspects of the European conquest of the New World.
Ever since the advent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the “noble savage” in the eighteenth century, there has been a tendency to idealize or even idolize those who inhabited the Americas prior to the arrival of the Europeans. In the wake of “woke,” this tendency has become almost obsessive. Such idealization or idolization of the pre-European “natives” requires a willful blindness with…
