Posted on 10/06/2004 12:23:05 PM PDT by Area Freeper
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, opening a sea route to vast uncharted territories that awaited the spread of Western civilization. Centuries later, the ensuing cultural migration culminated in the birth and explosive growth of the greatest nation in history: the United States of America.
On September 11, 2001, that nation came under attack by Islamic totalitarians who hate the distinctive values of Western civilization that America so proudly embraces--reason, science, individual rights, and capitalism--and who targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as symbols of those values.
These attacks could not be dismissed as aberrant acts by a lone band of zealots, not after it became clear how widely that same festering hatred of Western values is felt in the Muslim world, where Osama bin Laden is embraced as a folk hero, terrorists continue to receive help from sympathetic governments, and the United States is perpetually damned as the Great Satan.
America has responded since Sept. 11 with various military and political maneuvers. Notably missing, however, has been any clear principled statement of what we are defending, and why we deserve to win.
Without moral certainty, America cannot prevail.
We cannot win a war in which Islamic totalitarians loudly proclaim that their way of life is superior--while liberals trot out the cliches of multiculturalism, claiming that there is no objective standard by which to judge a society good or evil, and conservatives downplay the religious motives driving Islamic terrorism, clinging to the notion that religion promotes peace despite blood-soaked centuries of evidence to the contrary.
This moral uncertainty is dividing Americans into two equally ineffectual camps. Liberals, mortified by world opposition, want to demilitarize the conflict in favor of a criminal-justice approach, granting every Muslim killer his day in court. Conservatives, although seemingly willing to address the conflict militarily, wring their hands if a stray bullet chips gold leaf off the dome of a mosque.
Americans can escape this quagmire of moral vacillation only by becoming fully, rationally convinced that our values are objectively worthwhile--that they are worth pursuing, worth upholding, and worth defending, by force if necessary. One way to attain such moral certainty is to understand, with full clarity, why we celebrate Columbus Day.
On one level, Columbus Day honors the explorer himself, for his many virtues. Columbus was a man of independent mind, who steadfastly pursued his bold plan for a westward voyage to the Indies despite powerful opposition--a man of courage, who set sail upon a trackless ocean with no assurance that he would ever reach land--a man of pride, who sought recognition and reward for his achievements.
We need not evade or excuse Columbus’s flaws--his religious zealotry, his enslavement and oppression of natives--to recognize that he made history by finding new territory for a civilization that would soon show mankind how to overcome forever the age-old scourges of slavery, war, and forced religious conversion.
On a deeper level, therefore, Columbus Day celebrates the rational core of Western civilization, which flourished in the New World like a potbound plant liberated from its confining shell, demonstrating to the world what greatness is possible to man at his best.
On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose philosophers and mathematicians, men such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Euclid, displaced otherworldly mysticism by discovering the laws of logic and mathematical relationships, demonstrating to mankind that the universe is knowable and predictable.
On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose scientists, men such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, banished primitive superstitions by discovering natural laws through the scientific method, expanding the reach of man’s scrutiny to the farthest galaxy and the tiniest atom.
On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose political geniuses, men such as John Locke and the Founding Fathers, showed how bloody tribal warfare and religious strife can be supplanted by constitutional republics devoted to protecting life, liberty, property, and the selfish pursuit of individual happiness.
On Columbus Day, we celebrate the civilization whose entrepreneurs, men such as Rockefeller, Ford, and Gates, transformed an inhospitable wilderness populated by frightened savages into a wealthy nation of self-confident producers served by highways, power plants, computers, and thousands of other life-enhancing products.
On Columbus Day, in sum, we celebrate Western civilization with the utter certainty that it is good according to an objective standard: man’s life. America therefore deserves to prevail against the religious totalitarians who would destroy industrial civilization and return mankind to the Stone Age.
Randtastic
you post: "On one level, Columbus Day honors the explorer himself, for his many virtues. Columbus was a man of independent mind, who steadfastly pursued his bold plan for a westward voyage to the Indies despite powerful opposition--a man of courage, who set sail upon a trackless ocean with no assurance that he would ever reach land--a man of pride, who sought recognition and reward for his achievements.
We need not evade or excuse Columbus’s flaws--his religious zealotry, his enslavement and oppression of natives--to recognize that he made history by finding new territory for a civilization that would soon show mankind how to overcome forever the age-old scourges of slavery, war, and forced religious conversion....."
Well - hate to disagree with a fellow blogger - BUT Columbus didn't discover anything - nor was he virtuos...
I'm a writer - and this was my piece this week:
Columbus Come Lately
Why do still celebrate Columbus Day?
Why do we call America, America?
Why do we still call the Native Peoples of this land, Indians? (Well, we did for generations. Now we call them "Native Americans." But I don't know why. This was not "America" before the advent of the white men. They called themselves "Deni" - The People. I like that. It designates original, having nothing to do with any "foreign" names foisted upon them.)
Why do we think America was "discovered?"
Because we are like dogs with a bone. Even if the bone be only artificially flavored plastic, we won't let go.
We call it America because it was long thought that Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian merchant-explorer, was the "first" to explore on the continent, (South America,) in 1497. He sailed along what we now call Brazil and up the Amazon.
And a hundred years before Vespucci, there was Sir Henry Sinclair, a wealthy Scotsman, who having heard about the "New World," sailed across, in 1398, and spent a year in Nova Scotia and even explored, as a plaque in Massachusetts commemorates, our New England shores. His voyage was also known back in the "Old World."
And even Columbus and Vespucci were Johny-Come-Latelys. The ancient Viking Sagas, and archeological sites, tell us about Eric the Red who settled in Greenland and about his son Leif, who explored down the coast after getting blown off course. The sagas tell that he may have established a winter camping area as far down as the south shore of Cape Cod and explored up the Hudson. They took shiploads of lumber back to the "Old World." They planned on putting up permanent settlements, but had some unpleasant run ins with the natives, who far outnumbered them
Columbus was aware of these voyages. His plan was to sail below North America and across what they then thought was only one ocean and into the back end of the Indies. (It was Vespucci who came back with the astonishing news that there was another ocean, vaster than the Atlantic and another continent below the islands.) Columbus's goal was riches and power, unlike the Vikings who just wanted to establish communities and Vespucci who was more interested in exploring, discovering and charting the world.
Even though Columbus made three separate voyages to this hemisphere, he died never having stepped foot on the mainland’s of North or South America. He set up shop in the islands, thinking they were the back end of the Indies. He also set about slaughtering the native people by the tens of thousands, in barbaric ways that would've made Saddam Hussein proud to call him a son. He was finally hauled back to Spain in chains, not for his barbarous treatment of the People, but for his plans to set himself up as sovereign ruler in the new lands. The Queen did not appreciate that.
He dubbed the natives of these lands "Indians."
It was not the Indies.
It was not even "new" lands to be discovered. Like one Native American said, in the typical tongue-in-cheek way the old chiefs had of putting things: "We did not need to be discovered. We knew we were here."
These continents have been here every bit as long as the "Old World." The "Indians" are descendants of highly evolved cultures that flourished and rivaled, in advancement, any civilization of the old world at that time. The Conquistadors stood in amazement at the vast cities, beautifully laid out, far more beautiful than any they had ever seen. (And within a decade, they destroyed them.)
So why do we still celebrate Columbus Day, in honor of one of the worst explorers to ever come across the Atlantic?
Ping for one of my childhood heros.
Much as I admire Columbus, I have greater admiration for Hernan Cortes.
Who, pray tell, are "they" who used this name? The tribes of the Western Hemisphere used thousands of different languages.
Why do we think America was "discovered?"
Because we, and our culture, are descended from people who didn't know that America was here, until that fact was discovered.
The "Indians" are descendants of highly evolved cultures that flourished and rivaled, in advancement, any civilization of the old world at that time.
Scintillating nonsense. Some of the societies of the Americas were reasonably advanced. Cahokia was a great city. Tenochtitlan was a great city. The Inca were proficient at mathematics. The Anasazi were proficient architects. But the "flourishing" Aztec culture was a bizarre death-cult of human sacrifice, from which the Spaniards were initially welcomed as liberators. The Iroquois routinely engaged in continent-spanning wars of genocide. And the Amazon basin was home to countless tribes without a culture or society to match the meanest rustic hamlet in 1492 Europe, let alone the Muslim world.
The diaries of Columbus show that he believed he was on a mission from God to bring Christ to the Western Hemisphere. Who cares if he wasn't the first to "discover" America?
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