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Columbus, the West, and the Myth of the Noble Savage
Townhall.com ^ | October 9, 2017 | Jack Kerwick

Posted on 10/09/2017 5:44:53 AM PDT by Kaslin

Well, it’s Christopher Columbus Day again.

And this, of course, means that it is but another occasion for leftists everywhere to repudiate their own civilization.

For a few decades now, the 15th century European explorer’s face has been held up as that of Western civilization, i.e. the face of all that is evil in the world. Columbus is the proverbial poster child for the White, Christian, Heterosexual Male, i.e. the contemporary left’s version of Public Enemy Number One.

Columbus Day assumes a new significance this year, however, for monuments to Columbus are no longer alone in being targeted for destruction by leftist agitators. They are now in the company of monuments to Robert E. Lee, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and, yes, even legendary Philadelphia mayor and Police Commissioner, Frank Rizzo.

It is now clear that the campaign against monuments to Columbus has always has been and remains a campaign designed to subvert the Western world’s historic identity as a predominantly European (white) and Christian civilization.

The leftist historian Eric Foner recently remarked that there is a conflict over monuments because the latter signify “power.” There is some truth in this—but only some truth. If the monuments signify power, this is only because there is power, self-empowerment, in knowing oneself:

Essentially, monuments are expressions of identity.

In attacking monuments to historically famous white men, the vandals strike blows against, not this or that aspect of the Western world, and certainly not this or that person. They attack, and mean to attack, the very being of the West.

The enemies of Columbus convict the West with having introduced violence to the New World, a “Native American” idyll in which indigenous peoples lived in total harmony with one another and nature.

This, though, is a Big Lie.

For starters, those who were long recognized as American Indians constituted anything but a monolith but, rather, many tribes or nations.

Secondly, American Indians comprised numerous tribes or nations that were continuously at war with one another.

Thirdly, these wars were distinctively bloody and savage.

The Myth of the Noble Savage, a uniquely European fiction that Columbus himself initially endorsed, has long exposed as just that by anthropological and archaeological research.

Consider the Yellowknives, a tribe that once inhabited Canada. It has no present descendants, and for a very good reason: The Dogrib Indians launched a series of massacres against its members, effectively purging them from the planet.

There’s also evidence of plenty of intra-tribal warfare.Between the borderlands of what is now Brazil and Venezuela, the various Yanomami tribes would continually slaughter each other for purposes of status or in order to abduct female members.When Yanomami warred with others, like the Macu, they would enslave the latter’s members.

Studies have found that over a third of Yanomami males died from warfare.

In his War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, the professor of archaeology Laurence H. Keeley determines that only about 13% or so of the indigenous population(s) of the New World did not partake of warfare annually.

Some Indian groups observed the practice of collecting human scalps as trophies. The Iroquois would slowly torture to death their victims—men, women, and teenage boys—over a period of many days. Torture was a ritual. It was also a communal event, a public spectacle, in which everyone, including the children, participated. If the prisoner of war was a “warrior,” he was expected to remain stoic during his tribulations and even sing “death songs.”

Captives were burned, not over a pyre, but by way of hot coals that were applied individually to exposed body parts over an extended tract of time. Additionally, the tortured were stabbed with knives and beaten with sticks and switches.Their fingernails were ripped out and their fingers broken. Children would then yank and twist the broken fingers. Captives were made to consume pieces of their own flesh.

To insure that the ritual lasted for as long as possible, those who lost consciousness while being brutalized were revived with food and water so that their torture could resume. Eventually, they were scalped…alive.

Those tribes that inhabited the American Northwest would enslave war captives to such an extent that an enduring slave class formed.Slaves were regularly traded and given as gifts.

In South Dakota, over 100 years before Columbus was born, about 60% of the members of a tribe at Crow Creek were murdered.Archaeologists found a mass grave containing the remains of over 500 men, women, and children who had not just been killed, but dismembered and scalped. About 800 dwellings were destroyed, burned to the ground.

Those who survived appear to have been young women who, it is believed, were taken as captives.

Not only is it a great lie that the West introduced violence to a world that had never known it. It is a lie as well that the West made a relatively violent world of indigenous peoples more violent. The European technology characteristic of modern warfare accounts for why far fewer people died in war throughout the 20th century than died in “pre-historic” tribal wars.

About 60% of combatants in the close-quarter conflicts of non-Western, premodern tribal peoples were killed. In glaring contrast, about 1% of combatants involved in the wars of the 20th century lost their lives.Whether considered in terms of a percentage of total deaths due to war or in terms of average deaths per year from war as a percentage of the overall population, tribal warfare is about 20 times deadlier than the wars of the 20th century. To put this in perspective, Nicholas Wade, science writer for the New York Times and author of Before the Dawn wrote: “Had the same casualty rate [as tribal peoples in warfare] been suffered by the population of the twentieth century, its war deaths would have totaled two billion people” (emphasis added).

None of these facts are intended to deny, much less justify, those injustices that some American Indians undoubtedly suffered at the hands of some European explorers.

They are, though, meant to undermine guilt-inducing lies regarding Columbus, yes, but, ultimately, Western or European civilization.

Happy Columbus Day!


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: christophercolumbus; civilization; columbus; indians; multiculturalism; noblesavage; pc; scc; theleft; westerncivilization
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1 posted on 10/09/2017 5:44:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

And, in Africa where the noble savages also lived and were studied, capable, superior tribes captured and sold the inferior as slaves to European buyers


2 posted on 10/09/2017 5:48:02 AM PDT by bert (K.E.; N.P.; GOPc;WASP .... The Fourth Estate is the Fifth Column)
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To: Kaslin

We should change the name to Siberian-American Day to celebrate the slaughter of whomever preceded the Siberians into the Western Hemisphere.


3 posted on 10/09/2017 5:52:00 AM PDT by Daveinyork
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To: bert

For the most part in Africa, in tribal warfare...it was a choice of being a slave or just outright killing the captured guy. The stronger tribes survived and exist today....the lesser tribes? Long gone.

When you have lazy historians who just sit around and watch movies mostly....you get lousy history lessons.


4 posted on 10/09/2017 5:53:08 AM PDT by pepsionice
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To: Daveinyork

That assumes we celebrate Columbus Day because he slaughtered someone. Typical liberal ignorance.


5 posted on 10/09/2017 5:53:58 AM PDT by CodeToad (CWII is coming. Arm Up! They Are!)
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To: Kaslin

Proud to be a Knight of Columbus.


6 posted on 10/09/2017 5:54:58 AM PDT by teeman8r (Armageddon won't be pretty, but it's not like it's the end of the world.)
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To: CodeToad
Typical liberal ignorance

Exactly

7 posted on 10/09/2017 5:58:07 AM PDT by Kaslin (Politicians are not born; they are excreted -Civilibus nati sunt; sunt excernitur. (Cicero))
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To: CodeToad

Apparently you don’t recognize sarcasm.


8 posted on 10/09/2017 6:00:24 AM PDT by Daveinyork
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To: Kaslin

Excellent article. BTTT


9 posted on 10/09/2017 6:03:48 AM PDT by Constitution Day
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To: Kaslin

God bless Christopher Columbus!


10 posted on 10/09/2017 6:06:00 AM PDT by GreenHornet
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To: Kaslin

God bless Christopher Columbus!


11 posted on 10/09/2017 6:06:00 AM PDT by GreenHornet
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To: bert

The people that are known as “American Indians” are a highly diverse and widely dispersed over a geographic span of two continents. They also seem to have come from varied and diverse racial stock. Those in South America may in fact be descended from the Pacific Samoan people, those of northeastern part of North America may be descended from Indo-European stock. If you see an Ojibway (Chippewa) of relatively pure lineage, they are much different from their neighbors to the west, the Dakota (Sioux), who have much higher cheekbones and an almost Asiatic appearance. And the further west you travel, the more the tribal people resemble persons of Oriental descent. The various waves of those that crossed over from Asia differ again from each other. The most recent arrivals are not classified as Indians at all, but are Inuits or Aleuts (commonly called Eskimo, but that is a pejorative term).

“Nobility” is also a highly variable term, as not all people are of high moral character, but are shaped by their environment.

Until some years after the arrival of the Spaniards. NO tribes of the North or South American continents had horses. But when they did acquire them, they probably became the finest light cavalry the world has ever seen.

General Custer learned that the hard way.


12 posted on 10/09/2017 6:11:45 AM PDT by alloysteel (Guilty until proven innocent, while denying defense, justice, mercy or any appeal. No pardon, ever.)
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To: Kaslin

The left hates Columbus because he brought Christianity to this land.
The left has shown that it loves savages more than civilized people, when the civilized people are Christians or Jews.
The goal is to eliminate Christianity from this country.


13 posted on 10/09/2017 6:12:56 AM PDT by I want the USA back (*slam is a violent political movement that hides behind the illusion of religion.)
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To: Kaslin

“Captives were made to consume pieces of their own flesh.”

The captors would also eat their prey; cannibalism was rampant in the tribal wars in the Hudson Valley.


14 posted on 10/09/2017 6:22:36 AM PDT by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action is economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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To: Kaslin

My grandfather, an Army veteran of the Pancho Villa campaigns, grew up on the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico. When I was 13 or 14, he took me to the “Rez” to meet some of his friends and talk about tribal history. Although my great-grandmother was Mimbres/Mimbreno, not Mescalero, the two bands shared a lot of history. I’ll never forget what one of the elders told me one evening: “Before the white man came, we were doing to one another what the white man did to us.” The Apache especially hated the Mexicans and I was told of the many horrors that they inflicted on Mexicans who ventured into Apache lands well before non-Spanish Europeans settled the Southwest.

With respect to this Native American PC term coined by Caucasian liberals, go to the Mescalero, Jicarilla, Acoma, White Mountain, San Carlos or probably any other reservation in the Southwest and you’ll see bumper stickers and license plates with the words, “Indian and Proud” on most of the cars and trucks on the rez.


15 posted on 10/09/2017 6:22:52 AM PDT by ManHunter (You can run, but you'll only die tired... Army snipers: Reach out and touch someone)
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To: Kaslin

I grew up around Indian reservations.

Never had any illusion about the noble savages. They are people. Just like some of the bass tards everywhere.

Liked the Sioux more than the stories I heard about the Comanche. Maybe because the the Sioux were local, and settled down quicker than the Comanche. The Sioux are prejudiced, bigoted, cheats, but by God they are OUR prejudiced, bigoted, cheats. We didn’t have to like them, and they didn’t like us, but we were in the community so we would pitch in together.

The older I get, the more I realize the area I grew up in was very odd.


16 posted on 10/09/2017 6:22:54 AM PDT by redgolum
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To: ManHunter

I just finished this book. It confirms that tribal elder’s statement very clearly: https://www.amazon.com/Apache-Wars-Geronimo-Captive-American/dp/0770435815


17 posted on 10/09/2017 6:30:48 AM PDT by Dr. Zzyzx
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To: Kaslin

1492 Columbus sailed the blue.

1492 Queen Isabella kicked the Jews out of Spain.

Connect those dots...

- who financed the voyages, the manifests, etc


18 posted on 10/09/2017 6:46:30 AM PDT by Chauncey Gardiner
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To: redgolum
"Liked the Sioux more than the stories I heard about the Comanche."

I read an interview MANY years ago. A sports commentator who happened to be a full-blooded Comanche made a comment along these lines....."..the white man came in, kicked our asses, and took our land.....just like the Comanche did to those who came before them."

19 posted on 10/09/2017 6:53:05 AM PDT by Wonder Warthog (The Hog of Steel and NRA Life Member)
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To: Kaslin

There were no noble savages. Look at the Mexican Indians invading the US today. Even with several hundred years of western civilization, they are still ignorant savages.


20 posted on 10/09/2017 7:12:41 AM PDT by Reno89519 (PRESIDENT TRUMP, KEEP YOUR PROMISES! NO AMNESTY AND BUILD THAT WALL.)
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