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Sorry leftists, we SHOULD be celebrating Columbus Day

Sorry leftists, we SHOULD be celebrating Columbus Day

A culture battle we will not yield

https://richardoster.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/figure02-columbus-pepperdine.jpg

A post I wrote in 2017 that bears repeating, Sorry leftists, we SHOULD be celebrating Columbus Day.

Since then, the likeness of Columbus has been removed from the wokest of establishments in the ultimate display of virtue signaling (and also ignorance). We have covered many:

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Of all their sins, progressive insistence on revisionism and transposing modern day mores onto history is one of the worst. The anti-history movement is a scourge on our culture and intellectual heritage.

When I was a kid we spent this time of year learning about the great explorers, sitting on the graveled blacktop squashed against one another inside chalked drawings of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. They were much smaller ships than I’d imagined.

Mere years later and Columbus Day is an annual mini-culture war. Leftists insist Columbus is heroes greatest villain. As is their standard policy, everyone must be remembered not for their greatest achievements, but for their biggest flaw.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles dedicated his entire show today to Christopher Columbus and rightly argues that Columbus has the ability to extract so much vitriol from progressive anti-history types because he embodies western civilization. Once championed by progressive intellectuals, western culture is now responsible for everything wrong with humanity, so we’re told.

So obsessed are these anti-historians that they’ve started a nationwide attempt to rename Columbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day, which as The Federalist points out, is far worse:

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to “Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865,” by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Facts and things though.

Columbus’ motivations have been largely mischaracterized and lost in the discussion is his dedication to spreading Christianity to newly found lands. The Daily Signal writes:

The truth is that Columbus set out for the New World thinking he would spread Christianity to regions where it didn’t exist. While Columbus, and certainly his Spanish benefactors, had an interest in the goods and gold he could return from what they thought would be Asia, the explorer’s primary motivation was religious.

“This conviction that God destined him to be an instrument for spreading the faith was far more potent than the desire to win glory, wealth, and worldly honors,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison over a half-century ago.

In fact, as contemporary historian Carol Delaney noted, even the money Columbus sought was primarily dedicated to religious purposes. Delaney said in an interview with the Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus:

Everybody knows that Columbus was trying to find gold, but they don’t know what the gold was for: to fund a crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims before the end of the world. A lot of people at the time thought that the apocalypse was coming because of all the signs: the plague, famine, earthquakes, and so forth. And it was believed that before the end, Jerusalem had to be back in Christian hands so that Christ could return in judgment.

Columbus critics don’t just stop at accusing him of greed. One of the biggest allegations against him is that he waged a genocidal war and engaged in acts of cruelty against indigenous people in the Americas.

But historians like Delaney have debunked these claims.

Rather than cruel, Columbus was mostly benign in his interaction with native populations. While deprivations did occur, Columbus was quick to punish those under his command who committed unjust acts against local populations.

“Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect,” Delaney said. “There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.”

Lastly, I leave you with my favorite Columbus meme. Makes me chuckle every time:

Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekaye

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Comments

Columbus was a nitwit who got lucky. The Catholic Priests who advised against giving ships to this madman didn’t think the world was flat. They were just better at math than Columbus, so they knew how far away Asia really was and that it was outside the range of the sailing ships of the time.

    NotCoach in reply to Dennis. | October 10, 2022 at 12:32 pm

    And Columbus didn’t even walk on the moon first either, the Vikings did.

    healthguyfsu in reply to Dennis. | October 10, 2022 at 1:00 pm

    Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. The history of other important fields like science and technology are rife with happy accidents from bold explorers and experimenters.

    Also, Columbus’ theory was that the world was Pear Shaped. He believed that you could travel to Asia more quickly if you circumnavigated in the Northern Hemisphere. Of course, he was wrong, but no one was truly right at that time, hence America!

    texansamurai in reply to Dennis. | October 10, 2022 at 1:02 pm

    wouldn’t characterize him as a nitwit or a madman–takes a bit of cojones to set sail in three comparatively tiny vessels with a sextant, a compass and any facsimile maps of the time that were available–stocked with whatever provisions as space allowed–acey / ducey–he’d either return or not–and across the atlantic no less in practically the middle of hurricane season–not for the faint-hearted at all–a brave and confident sailor / explorer

      Milhouse in reply to texansamurai. | October 12, 2022 at 3:03 am

      Not a nitwit or a madman, but a crackpot. He had a crackpot theory, that turned out to be completely wrong, and all his critics turned out to be exactly right. And yet had he not pursued his theory he wouldn’t have made the discoveries he did.

      He basically expected Japan to be just over the horizon from the Canary Islands, an easy sail without running out of resources. The plan was to resupply in Japan and then go on to India. Everyone else told him exactly how far it was from the Canaries to Japan, and they were right. But none of them knew there was an entire continent in the way.

    alaskabob in reply to Dennis. | October 10, 2022 at 2:54 pm

    Columbus knew that there was land within some sense of sailing distance from reports of others blown west by storms. That the sailors got back proved that. Local tribe was very happy to see the Spaniards as the other tribe on the island was cannibals. For all who hate Columbus because he prevented them from being princesses and princes of the Aztec, Inca or Mayan lands… reality shows that they would be serfs, slaves, sacrifices or super.

    Dennis in reply to Dennis. | October 10, 2022 at 3:09 pm

    When Columbus saw his first Manatee, he complained that Mermaids didn’t look as good as he’d been led to believe.

    Kepha H in reply to Dennis. | October 11, 2022 at 5:22 pm

    The geographers at the courts of Ysabel and Fernando has read Eratosthenes.

      Milhouse in reply to Kepha H. | October 12, 2022 at 3:06 am

      Yes, they had. Columbus had read him too, but he thought he knew better, because he’d also read (and spectacularly misunderstood) Marco Polo.

I thought it was memorial day when the bank is closed today.

Nevertheless there is a mnemonic

In the year fourteen hundred and ninety three
Columbus sailed the dark green sea.

Columbus Day will soon be replaced by Cortes Day—Feb 19th—the day Cortes brought civilization to Mexico. It’s spreading north across the border so fast, it makes Hitler’s Blitzkrieg seem like a snail in comparison. Para Español, marque el numero dos

    JHogan in reply to Peabody. | October 10, 2022 at 6:43 pm

    Not to mention that to defeat the Aztecs Cortes united and led neighboring tribes who were extremely ‘oppressed’ (to use the lefties’ favorite word) by the Aztecs. He had a lot of help from ‘oppressed indigenous peoples’ who were very happy to see the Aztec empire destroyed.

I used to celebrate Cinco de Mayo u til Obama renamed it Cinco de Quatro

    Peabody in reply to r2468. | October 10, 2022 at 4:58 pm

    Biden used to celebrate it too, until he lost track of time. Reporters have started shouting, “What year is it, Joe?”

    tbonesays in reply to r2468. | October 12, 2022 at 4:19 pm

    I can’t find the video of Obama celebrating “Juneteenth” while he was President.

BierceAmbrose | October 10, 2022 at 5:37 pm

The only folks who declare that Columbus or similar folks flaws erase their achievements, are so oblivious they can’t see their own errors.

The only folks willing to utterly dismiss Columbus, or similar folks contributions because of their flaws, are unwilling to look at their own bundle of flaws. Besides, what have the whiners done but complain? Built a bridge? Explored somewhere? Had an adventure?

People’s lives are complex, themselves “contain multitudes” and any one may “contradict myself.”(*) What do you do in the real life muddle with what you’ve got? Clean answers, known to be right, and stuff you can do, are homework problems: contrived to be that way.

Idiot people grasping at clean answers give us mandated renewables and electric cars. How’s that dependence on Russian gas working out for you? Windmill disposal? E-vehicles as fire hazards?

People who — “those who”, of which “there are” some — want to have an opinion about real life, ought to get out of their heads and do some actual thing. Let’s start easy: don’t be a garbage person for a day or two. Then have an opinion — a little one.

Leftist ‘Columbus was evil’ reasoning and ‘logic’ applied to our time…

If, just as an example, Mexico starts offering up human sacrifices, and the inhabitants of Mexico City start confiscating the property of and enslaving the populations of neighboring districts, we shouldn’t do anything about it. Because we shouldn’t interfere in the culture of indigenous peoples, or something.

As long as Putin had nothing to do with it, of course. Then WW III is on the table.

The “indigenous peoples” of the Americas, weren’t indigenous to the region.

The Italian’s Holiday, they are racist brown people/s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBD61skoMk8

Lots of people don’t like Columbus and say stupid things, but they all like the day off with pay.

Whenever some says something about “Indigenous Peoples Day”, respond with “I prefer to call it Ending Human Sacrifice Day!”