Posted on 09/30/2005 8:54:26 AM PDT by curtisgardner
We're about a week away from Denver's annual Columbus Day confrontation. Each year at this time, Italian-Americans lawfully assemble to hold a parade honoring Christopher Columbus and celebrating their heritage while the usual suspects - professional Indian activists, assorted lefties and recreational demonstrators who do this kind of thing for fun - violate the civil rights of paraders and seek to block and disrupt the event.
There's one new wrinkle this year. The Denver City council, in June, passed new ordinances that specifically outlaw the obstruction or disruption of duly authorized parades like this. In the past, the law was vague enough to give disrupters enough wiggle room to escape the consequences for their goonish behavior. They were willing to do the crime, but didn't want to do the time. So they copped out and lawyered up to score a daily double: civil disobedience and a get-of-jail- free-card.
With the new laws in effect, it'll be interesting to see if there's a change in tactics this year. As always, protesters will have the right to speak their minds and stage a counterdemonstration, but they don't have the right to block the parade. The time-honored principle, here, is that your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
Steve Nash is a veteran anti-establishment activist who has branched out from his favorite pastime of demonstrating against Denver cops to support the anti-Columbus crowd. In a recent letter to The Denver Post he defended their brownshirt tactics, arguing that "temporarily" blocking the parade for "one or two hours" is merely an "inconvenience" for the Columbus Day celebrants who have no gripe because they haven't been fully "muzzled." How generous and tolerant of him.
Indian activism has become a lucrative career for the likes of Glenn Morris, Ward Churchill and Russell Means. Morris won himself a cushy position as head of the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado at Denver, Means has been a movie star and then, of course, there's Churchill. Hardly the victim of discrimination; he's exploited it to his advantage. The faux Indian used his dubious claims of ancestry to land himself an affirmative-action hire, a department chairmanship and a six-figure income.
The anti-Columbus Day demonstrators have been at this for the last five years. It's getting old. They've had their day in the court of public opinion. They make some valid points but lose credibility when they indulge in exaggeration and hysterical overstatement. Their campaign hasn't caught on, as evidenced by the fact that millions of government workers and others feel no guilt in taking the day off as a national holiday.
Indian activists resent the depiction of Columbus as the man who "discovered" America, arguing that their people were here first. Of course they were. So what? The point is that Columbus discovered America - the "New World" - from the perspective of Europeans, who later followed him here and imported their ideas, customs and system of government. Spanish conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa is said to have "discovered" the Pacific Ocean in 1513. But, of course, the fish were already there. Again, it was a European discovery. The only real "native Americans" were dinosaurs and cockroaches. Indians were Johnny-come- latelys, too, many crossing the land bridge from Asia.
Yes, Europeans brought with them diseases for which the earlier inhabitants of this continent had no immunities, but that was incidental, not deliberate. Medical science wasn't that sophisticated back then.
Columbus was no saint but he wasn't the devil, either. He was a bold and courageous explorer but a poor governor. He was responsible for repression, enslavement and killing but that's a far cry from "genocide," defined as a systematic program intended to destroy an entire national or ethnic group. Columbus' mission or intent wasn't to exterminate the Indian population. The world was less kind and gentle in those days (not that it's all that civilized in many places, today). There was no World Court or United Nations. Treaties were made and broken when it was convenient to do so. National boundaries were routinely established by right of conquest. Indians employed the same practices, killing and enslaving members of rival tribes.
The history of the Americas would have been no different if Christopher Columbus had never been born. It was inevitable that Europeans would find their way to this continent, that the two civilizations would clash and that the more rational and technologically advanced one would prevail over the primitive and outnumbered one.
That's history, traditionally celebrated by the victors and condemned by the vanquished. Taking the good with the bad, the American experiment has acquitted itself quite well by world standards. As a European-American, I say two cheers for Columbus.
I thought the Columbus Day Clash on one episode of "The Sopranos" was hilarious. Let's send Paulie and the boys to take care of Ward Churchill and company.
They're not "suspects" but self-described "victims". And, of course, they're maggots, too.
Columbus was a good person, but of course Lefties write today's history books.
This is the United States of America and Americans have
Every right to celebrate the man who discovered America for
Europe. Suspect CAIR will join with the Ward Churchill clones in protest of the parade if any of the Muslims in Denver have read Silent No More by Rod Parsley and see
documented that Columbus wanted the profits from his venture to help fund a "conquest of Jerusalem" (then held by the Islamic terrorists.)
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