Posted on 10/14/2014 10:03:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
In 1492, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and discovered the New World. And Oct. 12 was once a celebrated holiday in America.
School children in the earliest grades knew the date and the names of the ships on which Columbus and his crew had sailed: the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria. They knew his voyage had been financed by Queen Isabella of Spain, after the Genoese Admiral of the Ocean Sea had been turned down by other monarchs of Europe.
Oct. 12, 1492, was considered a momentous and wonderful day in world history: the discovery of America -- by men from Europe.
This year, Columbus Day passed almost without notice. And that Columbus Day has become an embarrassment to many and an issue of savage controversy to some reflects a receding belief in this country in the superiority of our civilization.
Haters of Columbus say he was an imperialist, a colonialist, a genocidal racist, and a slaver who brought dictatorship, disease and death to the native peoples he encountered in the Caribbean.
And, in truth, many explorers and conquerors like Columbus, Cortes, Magellan, Pizarro and the soldiers and sailors they led, engaged in acts we would call atrocities and war crimes.
Yet that is true of every great empire and great civilization. The ancient Greeks had slaves. Were the Romans not brutal conquerors? Ask the Carthaginians. The Spanish, British and French empires all have their own long chronicles of crimes against colonized peoples.
Today we say that the beheadings and crucifixions of ISIS remove them from the company of civilized men. They should be annihilated to the last man, we hear on cable TV.
But the Romans beheaded St. Paul and crucified Christ. Queen Elizabeth beheaded her cousin Queen Mary, even as her mother Anne Boleyn had been beheaded by her father Henry VIII, who also decapitated Sir Thomas More.
The French Revolution Jefferson loved used at its instrument of justice the guillotine, to which Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette were sent. Those heroes of the Revolution, Danton and Robespierre, were guillotined, as was Charlotte Corday, four days after she stabbed to death in a bathtub a third great man of the revolution, Marat.
Great men are rarely good men, and every great empire is guilty of great crimes. But the empires men still study and admire are those that created, built and advanced civilization, that brought mankind to a higher plateau, that left behind magnificent legacies.
And here we approach a deep-seated reason for the hatred of Columbus. He was a colonialist and an imperialist. He believed in the superiority of his Catholic faith and European tribe. He believed that what we call the West should rule, because its faith, of which God Himself had been the founder, and its culture and civilization, which excelled all others in arms, inventions, literature, governance and the arts, were superior.
Christopher Columbus was a Christian European supremacist.
When he landed in the Caribbean islands and found peoples there with no alphabet, who had not yet invented the wheel, Columbus did not think them equal. The only reason he would believe they had intrinsic worth as fellow children of God would be from the teachings of his faith.
Right up to our own time, Western men believed with Columbus that their Christian faith and their civilization were superior. Today, Columbus is denounced and rejected because he acted in his belief that the indigenous peoples he encountered should be converted and ruled by Europeans. Columbus rejected the idea of equality.
Yet how far from his view were Washington, Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe, slaveholders all. How far from Columbus' view was Andrew Jackson? Was Jackson's treatment of African-Americans and the indigenous peoples of Florida so different from that of Columbus?
Gen. Philip Sheridan, to whom Sherman gave command of the West, volunteered, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." His troopers often acted upon that belief.
The Spanish Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the United States all rose to power and greatness, motivated by a belief in the superiority of their race, tribe, religion, culture and country. All believed their innate superiority conferred upon them a right to rule what Kipling called "the lesser breeds without the law."
How else, these men would ask us, does civilization progress, if not through the imposition by superior men of superior ideas? What great nation, what great empire, what great civilization ever rose on a belief in the equality of all other peoples and all other faiths?
The United States, among the largest countries on earth, from sea to shining sea was carved out of lands seized from native peoples by Spanish, British, French, and Russian conquerors first, then taken by us.
We are the heirs of marauders, pirates, conquerors, colonizers, colonialists, and imperialists. And such knowledge is why so many have guilty consciences and seek to salve them by repudiating Columbus.
As they say in Seattle, Happy Indigenous People's Day.
Thank you Columbus!
The only problem with Columbus is that he let some of them live.
While I certainly don’t like the politically-correct, Liberal motives behind the assault on Columbus Day, I don’t view it as a sacrosanct holiday. It was popularized in the first half of the 19th Century. It has nothing to do with America per se. Columbus was no saint — he undertook a bold voyage that opened American to further European exploration but there is plenty of evidence that he was looking to get rich and was a dictatorial jerk to the people he ruled over when he was governor general. So if it goes away, it won’t bother me that much.
Columbus should have killed all native Americans?
Was this article satire because it seems to be making the case that ISIS equals all conquerors, which along a certain line of logic is pretty true. What is the point of this piece?
Common core does not teach America’s history or tell about the second World war or so I have been told. So Columbus may not be taught either. As well ... This is dangerous for our youths to not know our Constitution. To be taught it is old and not for today, is a turn in the wrong direction.
God help America stand for freedom and our way of life., in Jesus name, amen.
Equating ISIS with the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots? Huh?
Hey, I’m indigenous, I was born here!
Happy happy Columbus day!
from a Heinz 57 which includes feather-indian and Italian.
Of course, during his several voyages Columbus never set foot on North America. He did,however make one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Cuban Cigars. He found the native men there smoking them around a fire pit. He brought some back to Spain and the rest is history. Reason enough to toast and celebrate him!
Now I’m off to the man cave for a herd break.
I really don’t understand this. Columbus came from Europe. He and his kind get a bad rap and are blamed for anything bad that the while liberals can come up with. Hispanics came from Europe and they are praised and treated like princes and princesses by the liberal gringos. I fail to see the difference. Columbus takes the rap for bringing “disease and greed.” The Hispanics were searching for the seven cities of gold and killed a lot of “indigenous peoples” in the process. What’s up with that?
Yes, thank God that it was Western Civilization that arrived first. The leftist liberal meme is that but for Columbus the aboriginals in North America would still be hunting bison is in its face ridiculous. Some modern culture at SOME point was going to drag Geronimo kicking and screaming into the 21st century. And besides, the aboriginals were for the most part constantly at war, raping, pillaging, and killing each other continually. Serious-minded people thank God every day that English law, mores, religion, freedom, and culture won the day... A republic, if you can keep it.
Had ENOUGH Yet ?
Your “research” has been found wanting. Keep looking and you will find a man of robust courage. So easily we step over our monuments of flesh and blood... Your comment astounds me.
Indeed. The U.S. honors a person who discovered nothing & never set foot on its shores. Everyone gets a trophy.
You have a lot of questions, and there are no easy answers. Imagine if Columbus got funded by Italians of power instead of Spain. We might all be speaking Italian, all the way to the tip of South America. But the problem would still be here. Poor people flooding our nation from down south.
They have race problems down south. Whiter people of Spanish heritage see themselves as above the browner classes, who are mixed with native indigenous and black blood. It's those browner poorer classes who are flooding north into our nation. There is animosity between brown and white classes in Mexico and south of there.
I see Columbus Day as a celebration of all men who had BALLS.
And it took great big balls to get into those tiny ships and head out into the open ocean. Where life was precarious to say the least, and there was zero help if you got into trouble...you were on your own.
bump
The world is untold times more improved, and if those explorers had stayed home or perished before October 1492, we would all still be living in filthy hovels, dying young, and wallowing in ignorance as if we were freaking Islamists.
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