Eradicating Columbus

FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | 10/13/03 | Lowell Ponte

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PONTEFICATIONS

“IF THEY’RE ASKING US TO CHANGE THE NAME FROM COLUMBUS, then no way,” said Italian-American Tom Romolo on Saturday. “Our position is that as long as Columbus Day is a federal holiday, then this parade will be called the Columbus Day Parade.”

 

But in Denver, Colorado, where Romolo is co-chairman of this annual parade’s committee, this event named for Christopher Columbus has since 1989 been a target of Native American and other protestors. These protestors denounce Columbus as comparable to Adolf Hitler for launching the mass enslavement and murder of Indians by Europeans.

 

In 1991 protests grew so violent that Columbus Day parades ended for most of a decade. When Italian-Americans insisted on marching again in 2000, Denver’s Democrat Mayor and the politically-correct administration of President Bill Clinton tried to strong-arm the marchers into a secret deal to quietly erase the name of the Genoese explorer accused of genocide as a condition of being granted a parade permit. Proud Italian-Americans refused to go along with this violation of their rights as Americans.

 

What followed in 2000 were leftist threats, violence and disruption. Protestors carried signs that reportedly read “Mafia scum,” “Sons of Italy, Sons of Bitches,” and other expressions reflecting their commitment to love and light.  Police arrested 147 protestors for blocking the parade route with their bodies.

 

But with the departure of this leftist Mayor and the end of Democratic control over the White House, these racist protests have calmed.  Last year only seven protestors against the Columbus Day Parade were arrested.  This past weekend, reported the liberal Denver Post, Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman chose not to arrest protestors who illegally moved a barricade because he “didn’t want the situation to escalate.”  Whitman assigned 600 of his city’s 1,400 police to work the parade.

 

Protestors also found other channels for their anger. In 2001 they began alternative parades such as the Four Directions, All Nations March, which aims to turn this national holiday into a celebration for all nationalities, ethnicities and races. Columbus, they apparently hope, will become lost and forgotten by such dilution of his holiday.

 

The star of this counter-parade on Friday was an Italian-American, Richard Castaldo, who was turned into a paraplegic by the student shooters who shot up Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999.

 

Was Columbine named for Columbus?  No, but the names are linked. The columbine flower was said by 13^th Century gardeners to resemble a group of doves, thereby acquiring the Latin name Columbinus, “dove-like.”  (The Rocky Mountain Columbine is Colorado’s state flower, its blue, gold and silver hues reflected in the design of the Colorado state flag.)  Columbus’ Italian name Cristoforo Colombo, too, apparently comes from these gentle birds that since the biblical story of Noah have symbolized the spirit of divine harmony and peace.

 

What if these Denver leftists succeed in erasing the name Columbus from this parade and start a national effort to purge all use of this dead white European male (DWEM) name from our culture?  Just such revision of history was depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where feeble hero Winston Smith toiled constantly to re-write the past to show that Big Brother had always been correct.

 

At least a dozen American cities are named Columbus, including Ohio’s capital. We can imagine Colorado’s ruling academic leftists (whose virtual monopoly of power on many state campuses is now being challenged by David Horowitz and others) offering their favored new names for these cities – San Fidel, Marxotopia, Che City, Maotropolis, Clintonia.

 

At least a dozen more American cities mirror some variant of Columbus. Columbia is the capital of South Carolina. The District of Columbia is the capital of the United States.

 

The politically correct will also insist on replacing a host of other names, public and private, including the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River, Columbia University (the school that hired Al Gore), the song “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” Columbia Records (Bob Dylan’s record label), and its corporate kin – and home of Lefty Dan Rather – the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

 

The history re-writers will also demand that we rename at least one nation, Colombia in South America, and one Canadian province, British Columbia. 

 

The crusade to purge this hated name from every organization, such as the Roman Catholic service group the Knights of Columbus, and every hill, valley, creek and corporation, such as Columbia Pictures, will go on and on. But this must be done, because every such use of Columbus’ name honors a man they regard as evil.

 

The Politically Correct history taught by such professors is that the New World was an earthly paradise in 1491, and that the arrival of Columbus plunged it into hell and horror with the arrival of slavery, genocide and “white man’s diseases” like swine flu and smallpox.

 

This history contains much truth, but as only half-truth. The larger truth, e.g., as Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., documents in his classic history The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, is that Columbus and those who followed him brought diseases.  But they also caught diseases from Native Americans and took these back to Europe – including, argues Crosby, syphilis.

 

Europeans acquired a whole new universe of foods, including tomatoes and potatoes, from New World farmers, as Jack Weatherford documents in Indian Givers: How The Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. 

 

But Europeans also acquired from Native American farmers crops that do harm on a huge scale, such as cancer-causing addictive tobacco, overweight from sugarcane, and a plague of alcoholic harm from easily distilled corn whisky and sugar rum.  The New York Times Magazine, perhaps unconsciously, chose Columbus Day Weekend to publish an article about how a crop developed from primitive weed by Native Americans – corn or Indian Maize – today plays a major role in the obesity that scientists now say could shorten the lifespans of our younger generations.  The benefits and harm from this exchange of cultures has been mutual, not entirely one-sided.

 

“They made [Columbus] a saint, but he massacred thousands of people,” said Anthony Zapata, identified by the Denver Post as “a dancer with the Aztec dance group Tlaloc who marched with the protestors Saturday.”

 

But the warlike, imperialistic Aztecs also massacred and enslaved hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of their fellow Native Americans in surrounding tribes.  They sent war parties as far north as New Mexico and Arizona to demand tribute, part of which was in the form of young men to be sacrificed to the Aztec gods.

 

One reason Cortes was able to conquer the Aztecs with only a handful of conquistadors is that he had the help of Aztec-enslaved tribes, many of whom greeted him as a liberator.

 

All was not utopian sweetness and light before Columbus arrived, and all was not hell afterwards.  What happened was a mixed bag of blessings and curses.

 

As to the charge of genocide – as did happen in Cuba, and as Castro’s Marxist allies attempted to carry out against the Moskito Indians in Nicaragua – if it had happened in Mexico or elsewhere there would be no Native Americans left to protest.  Instead their genes live on, by some estimates, in more than 30 million Americans ranging from Secretary of State Colin Powell (who under the racist Clinton-Gore census rules is actually defined as an Indian, not an African-American) to Wayne Newton and Elvis Presley.

 

And scientists, much to the horror of the politically correct, have found fragments of evidence suggesting that the ancestors of today’s Native Americans actually committed genocide against the original white-skinned inhabitants of North America and the original black-skinned inhabitants of South America. 

 

If this is so, then Columbus was merely reclaiming land stolen by Native Americans from others of his European ancestry.  It’s easy to see why leftists such as Bill Clinton and their politically correct ilk continue efforts to suppress all such evidence.

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But instead of concocting historical re-writes, fictional half-truth dramas in which one side wears white hats and the other black hats, and instead of trying to erase the very name Columbus, why can’t we all just get along?  Let Italian-Americans take pride in their parade, and let others have parades of their own, too. The ancestors of all human beings include brutal killers and tender lovers.

 

On Saturday, the protestors in Denver were content to protest semi-silently, lining the Columbus Day Parade with their backs turned to the marchers.  If the name Columbus is not purged by next year, say some, they will stage “teach-ins” on local college campuses and find other ways to make their anger felt by the community.  

 

As my Comanche colleague David Yeagley righteously suggests, Columbus should, after more than five centuries of conflict and melding, now be acknowledged as a part of Native American heritage, too.  Columbus, with all the good and bad lessons he can teach us, has become the common heritage of mankind.

 As technology rapidly progresses, we will again be seek – and perhaps find – new worlds and civilizations in outer space. By studying Columbus honestly, we prepare ourselves for this future and for close encounters with others who embody life. Happy Columbus Day to all.

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Mr. Ponte hosts national radio talk show Monday through Friday Noon-2 PM Eastern Time (9-11 AM Pacific Time) as well as on Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and on Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Talk America network . Internet Audio worldwide is at TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.

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