Posted on 10/11/2004 4:44:09 PM PDT by Coleus
Preparations for the anti-Columbus campaign began in 1990, when the 35,000 member American Library Association condemned the forthcoming 500th anniversary celebration. According to the ALA, events after 1492 “begin a legacy of European piracy, brutality, slave trading, murder, disease, conquest, and ethnocide. In 1991, the National Education Association weighed in against the Admiral of the Ocean Seas, urging its members at a national conference to promote the new multiculturalist party line that Columbus was a mass murderer and criminal. NEA Today predicted, “Never again will Christopher Columbus sit on a pedestal in United States history.” Lending its dubious moral weigh to the hate campaign, the National Council of Churches in 1991 issued a condemnation of Columbus’s voyages claiming, “For Indians, Christopher Columbus’s invasion marked the beginning of slavery and eventual genocide.”
In order to guarantee that the inmates of America’s public education system were force-fed the new party line, the National Council of Education activists produced a 97-page guide entitled Rethinking Columbus.
Christopher Columbus tried for years to get funds from France, Portugal and England before he hit it lucky in Spain.
King Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife and co-ruler, Queen Isabella of Castile, sponsored his venture. The king was grumpy about it but Isabella furnished three ships.
As every pupil knows (or should know) Columbus sailed west thinking he would land in Asia. A happy sailor sighted a West Indian island and on October 12, in the name of his sponsors, Columbus claimed the real estate for Spain. It turned out to be a small island, but no matter. Columbus made four trips in all, amid storms, threatened mutinies, and, on the third trip, envious palace hangers-on had him put in chains.
After his fourth voyage, on which he explored the coast of Central America, he returned to Spain. It was his ill fortune that the queen died before Ferdinand, and this left him without a friend at court. He died in 1504, in poverty and neglect. Ironically, he never knew that he had discovered a new continent, later to be called America.
Other explorers followed, settlers came, towns grew, a new form of government was devised, and trade, industry and agriculture flourished. The part of America called the United States had been not only a haven for the oppressed but an example to the world.
So one would expect Columbus to be honored every year in America, instead many democrats, teachers, clergy vilify him.
You may want to read the following book written by a liberal reporter for the NY Times:
Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle over Multiculturalism Is
Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, and Our Lives
by RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Rethinking Columbus - Rethinking Schools Online In order to guarantee that the inmates of America's public education system were force-fed the new party line, the National Council of Education activists produced a 97-page guide entitled Rethinking Columbus. The chapter titles in this booklet display a Mao-like gift for ideological pedagogy: "We Have No Reason to Celebrate an Invasion"; "Why I am Not Thankful for Thanksgiving"; "Helping Children Critique Columbus Books"; "Once Upon a Genocide"From: REPMilw@aol.com
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 22:41:10 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: new web site
You might want to mention our new web site,
http://www.rethinkingschools.org
The lead story in the current issue section is by Eric Rofes entitled, "Gay Issues, Schools and the Right Wing Backlash." It is available on the web.
A recent reviewer wrote about the website:
On May 1, the Rethinking Schools website went up. Rethinking Schools, for those of you who do not yet subscribe, is the best activist education journal I have ever read. Based in Milwaukee, it includes articles from all over the country.
Written by and for teachers, it is the leading grass-roots voice for reform of our public schools (which are our surest bulwark against anti-democratic forces in this country). Its widely-praised special edition publications (which you should definitely order for your local library and schools) include Rethinking Columbus, Rethinking Our Classrooms, and Selling Out Our Schools.
RS is a must-read for teachers, parents, and anyone concerned about educational equity and multi-cultural/anti-racist education. And its new website is a "must-browse." Check out the articles from current and past issues, the complete index, reviews of education publications, links with key education and social action URLs, a math corner, No Comment (reports of inane actions taken by bureaucrats and bombasts such as John Silber), and more. They took a lot of time and care in developing it, and I think the quality shows.
Please check it out and mention it to your internet friends: http://www.rethinkingschools.org
Hidden connections: the mystical side of Christopher Columbus
As the secular press tries to slander him as cruel to the Indians or to take away his credit, the truth is that Christopher Columbus was not only the true discoverer of America, but also a deeply devout Christian with mystical connections.
Indeed, few know that Columbus prayed at a shrine in Spain called Guadalupe before setting off on his great journey. This was a spot where an ancient image of the Virgin had been hidden in the first centuries after the death of Christ and where she later appeared to a herdsman, telling him in 1326 to have the bishop dig up the image and build a chapel. It is believed that Columbus took a replica of the image with him on his first trip across the Atlantic, and when he arrived in the New World he named an island after Guadalupe (it is now spelled "Guadeloupe"), and soon after, the Virgin appeared to an Aztec Indian near Mexico City at a spot that was also named Guadalupe!
The devotion of Columbus was tangible. He named his ship after Christ's mother (the Santa Maria) and every night he and his crew sang the Hail Mary. According to his diary, Columbus, looking for the correct course, was guided at one critical point by a "marvelous branch of fire" that fell from the sky.
That was on September 15, 1492. Once across the Atlantic, this faithful son named the first island he came to "San Salvador" for the Savior and the second "Santa Maria de la Concepcion" for Mary, in addition to Guadeloupe and another island, Montserrat, named for another ancient apparition site near Barcelona.
Upon landfall Columbus and his men prayed the Salve Regina.
Thus, the first Christian prayer recited in the New World was an entreaty calling Mary the great advocate and Mother of God.
While in an attempt to take away his credit many point out the Vikings arrived in North America long before Columbus and that he was brutal with the Indians, the fact is that the Vikings never established their discovery (for all practical purposes, they simply skirted the northern regions and then left), and it was the Indians who were brutal. The first Caribbean natives Columbus encountered were cannibals!
Thus, despite the yearning for secular scholars to erase the mystical foundation of America, its very discovery was rooted in Christianity. Other explorers were equally devout. The Mississippi was originally called the "River of the Immaculate Conception" and the Chesapeake the "Bay of Saint Mary." Quebec was known as the "Village of Mary," and Lake George was originally called the "Lake of the Blessed Sacrament." Indians reported apparitions of the Virgin from South America to Montana, and New York State was consecrated to her before it was even known as New York.
He was a bit of a b@stard in a number of ways, though. He did have every intention of enslaving the natives on his estates in the Caribbean, under the explicit charter of Queen Isabella. He did, in the end, regard the more violent of them as savages - which they were.
But most of the multicultis intermingle Columbus's voyages with the Conquista, of which they weren't really a part. What Cortes and Pizarro sailed into was quite another matter from the island peoples Columbus knew.
What changed their motivation was the presence of gold in incredible quantity in the hands of an empire that was brutally repressive and homicidal and whose fall was not only helped by disease but by the active opposition of other peoples who were sick and tired of having their lands expropriated and their hearts torn out with obsidian knives. It is highly questionable if the non-Aztec natives were conspicuously worse off under the Spaniards than they were under the Aztecs. New age Azatlan enthusiasts tend to idealize the Aztec conquista or ignore it altogether, but it was solidly in place and the pyramids of heads rotting in the sun long before the Spaniards ever made shore.
But none of this was Columbus's doing. As D'Souza points out, he was no more responsible for the epidemics than the natives were for the subsequent epidemic of syphilis in Europe, which disease Columbus's boys brought back with them. It happened. Let it go.
I saw a re-creation of the Santa Maria at a Tall Ship festival one time. It was a little cockleshell wooden thing I wouldn't sail in a bathtub, and this guy got on one and headed off into open ocean. That's what we ought to celebrate. I wouldn't have the guts to do it.
Probably the hundreds of thousands of students.
Excellent article, thanks for posting it.
He didn't know where he was going.
He didn't know where he'd arrived at.
And he did it on a government grant.
In other words...he was the first liberal (c8
Liberals love to piss and moan about Columbus 'bout this time every non-election year....kinda keeps 'em invigorated.
Too bad. I've got this block of cheese, see...
Western culture has been the most successful in the history of the world. By this very reason, it should be studied before any other culture. No, it's not perfect, but neither is any other culture, except in the clouded minds of utopian philosophers.
Wonderful post. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
If Chris Columbus had not have Discovered some other European would have. Good and bad thing would have happened no matter what. These "intelectuals" seem to believe that if you bitch hard enough history will change itself.
I'm glad Christopher Columbus did what he did. I'd not be alive since he discovered the island my mother is from Trinidad, named it as such for the Holy Trinity. That's what I was taught about him. Thankfully the Spanish abandoned Trinidad when they didn't find gold though and left it to the British! The whole phenomena of Christopher Columbus opening the new world to European colonialism has its good and bad. One has to overlook the bad in light of the fact that christianity went around the world with colonialism (most of the time).
LOL
It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and be able to executive it in such a manner as that it has subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous, and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests.
To be consistent, multiculturalists must also condemn Cro-Magnon man from invading and settling those areas occupied by the Neanderthals.
***So why did European attitudes toward the Indian, initially so favorable, subsequently change? ***
One word. BRUTALITY.
Consider this term. Sel-vedge. It means "dwellers of the green forest." This is what all natives everywhere were called at that time.
The term was corrupted to "salvage" and then "savage" and today is a euphamism for intense brutality. "Savage fighting. Intense Savagry. Uncivilized form of warfare," ect.
The Spanish were the first to find Indians scalping Indians. Later it was reported by the French and English explorers years before they were supposed to have taught the Indians to do so.
I like the discription of scalping as seen by Captain John Smith..."They cased off the hair with knives made of shell and reeds and hung them on a rope streached between two poles"
The beautiful engravings of Theodore de Bry shows several scalps, arms and legs also hung in such a manner.
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