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Home The End of Columbus Day is the End of America

The End of Columbus Day is the End of America

Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness. The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial.

There are counter-historical claims put forward by Muslim and Chinese scholars claiming that they discovered America first. And there are mobs of fake indigenous activists on every campus to whom the old Italian is as much of a villain as the bearded Uncle Sam.

Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated.

In Seattle, Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group's holiday.

The shift from celebrating Columbus' arrival in America to commemorating it as an American Nakba by focusing on the Indians, rather than the Americans, is a profound form of historical revisionism that hacks away at the origins of this country.

No American state has followed Venezuela's lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group's holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect.

Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too confused to rationally frame an objection to a protest by any minority group.

About the only thing sillier than a group of people emphasizing their collective identity as a Spanish speaking people, and denouncing Columbus as an imperialist exploiter is Ward Churchill, a fake Indian, who compared Columbus to Heinrich Himmler. Ward Churchill's scholarship consists of comparing Americans in past history and current events to random Nazis. If he hasn't yet compared Amerigo Vespucci or Daniel Boone to Ernst Röhm; it's only a matter of time.

The absurdity of these attacks is only deepened by the linguistic and cultural ties between the Italian Columbus Day marchers and the Latino Anti-Columbus Day protesters with the latter set cynically exploiting white guilt to pretend that being the descendants of Southern European colonists makes them a minority.

If being descended from Southern Europeans makes you a minority, then Columbus, the parade marchers, the Greek restaurant owner nearby and even Rush Limbaugh are all "people of color."

Italian-Americans are the only bulwark against political correctness still keeping Columbus on the calendar, and that has made mayors and governors in cities and states with large Italian-American communities wary of tossing the great explorer completely overboard. But while Ferdinand and Isabella may have brought Columbus back in chains, modern day political correctness has banished him to the darkened dungeon of non-personhood, erasing him from history and replacing him with a note reading, "I'm Sorry We Ever Landed Here."

But this is about more than one single 15th century Genoan with a complicated life who was neither a monster nor a saint. It is about whether America really has any right to exist at all. Is there any argument against celebrating Columbus Day, that cannot similarly be applied to the Fourth of July?

If Columbus is to be stricken from the history books in favor of ideological thugs like Malcolm X or Caesar Chavez, then America must soon follow. Columbus' crime is that he enabled European settlement of the continent.

If the settlement of non-Indians in North America is illegitimate, then any national state they created is also illegitimate.

It is easier to hack away at a nation's history by beginning with the lower branches.

Columbus is an easier target than America itself, though La Raza considers both colonialist vermin. Americans are less likely to protest over the banishment of Columbus to the politically correct Gulag  than over the banishing America itself, which was named after another one of those colonialist explorers, Amerigo Vespucci. First they came for Columbus Day and then for the Fourth of July.

The battles being fought over Columbus Day foreshadow the battles to be fought over the Fourth of July. As Columbus Day joins the list of banned holidays in more cities, one day there may not be a Fourth of July, just a day of Native Resistance to remember the atrocities of the colonists with PBS documentaries comparing George Washington to Hitler.

These documentaries already exist, they just haven't gone mainstream. Yet.

We celebrate Columbus Day and the Fourth of July because history is written by the winners. Had the Aztecs, the Mayans or the Iroquois Confederation developed the necessary technology and skills to cross the Atlantic and begin colonizing Europe, the fate of its native inhabitants would have been far uglier. The different perspectives on history often depend on which side you happen to be on.

To Americans, the Alamo is a shining moment of heroism. To the Mexicans who are the heirs of a colonialist empire far more ruthless than anything to be found north of the Rio Grande, the war was a plot to conquer Mexican territory. And neither side is altogether wrong, but choosing which version of history to go by is the difference between being an American or a Mexican.

A nation's mythology, its paragons and heroes, its founding legends and great deeds, are its soul. To replace them with another culture's perspective on its history is to kill that soul.

That is the ultimate goal of political correctness, to kill America's soul. To stick George Washington, Patrick Henry, Jefferson, James Bowie, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and all the rest on a shelf in a back room somewhere, and replace them with timelier liberal heroes. Move over Washington, Caesar Chavez needs this space. No more American heroes need apply.

Followed of course by no more America.

This is how it begins. And that is how it ends. Nations are not destroyed by atomic bombs or economic catastrophes; they are lost when they lose any reason to go on living. When they no longer have enough pride to go on fighting to survive.

The final note of politically correct lunacy comes from a headline in the Columbus Dispatch about the Columbus Day festival in the city of Columbus, Ohio. "Italian Festival honors controversial explorer with its own Columbus Day parade".

Once the great discover of America, Columbus is now dubbed "controversial" by a newspaper named after him, in a city named after him .And if he is controversial, how can naming a city after him and a newspaper after the city not be equally controversial?

Can the day when USA Today has a headline reading, "Some cities still plan controversial 4th of July celebration of American independence" be far behind?

Comments

  1. If anyone has a bone to pick with Columbus it's black people. Columbus brought with him old world diseases unknown in the new world. In short order about 90% of the indigenous population died from pandemics. Which made the importation of black slave labor courtesy of other blacks, and Arabs, an economic necessity in the new world. And since they West African blacks already had immunity to old world diseases AND malaria, they were the slaves of choice.

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  2. Anonymous12/10/15

    The celebration that is The Fourth of July will continue to be celebrated. However it will have been stripped of its meaning, its definition being having been broadened, like "marriage" and like "family", until it stands for any thing as it stands for nothing. For it will be that, as T.S. Elliot wrote:

    "We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!"...
    ..."This the the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but with a whimper."

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  3. Anonymous12/10/15

    I find it interesting that LaRaza is protesting since Mexican immigrants are invading the Us far further north than even their original land in the southern part of the US. When I lived and worked in Tuba City, AZ on the Navajo/Hopi land they had an American Indian day instead of Columbus Day and that was fine, but where do blacks etc get off protesting? How many of these idiots really want to live like the native American Indians lived at that time? I suggest they be allowed to do so on their own dime.

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  4. "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

    Declaration of Independence

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  5. Anonymous12/10/15

    Hey, Trude:
    1. Germs had not been discovered when we settled the New World. So all these rants about "germ warfare" you hear are -- unhinged.
    2. The Indians gifted the Europeans with, inter alia, syphilis: also a fatal malady, but you get to go insane first. In other words, they actually had indigenous diseases! fancy that.
    3. The slaves in British North America were only 15% of the African slaves imported to the New World: by far the majorities were brought by the Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

    So what's your point?

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  6. Anonymous12/10/15

    Obama just dropped 50 tons of supplies to ISIS, some schools are doing away with Halloween for those who don't want to participate, which means no one can participate, no pork products in federal prisons because they say prisoners don't like bacon (boy, not hard to see through that one,) and the media avoids Columbus Day. That stuff doesn't matter. They won't kill off America. We celebrate on our own, eat bacon, talk about Columbus, and kill terrorists when they come...and they will come because their dad is in charge in DC. He plans to wreck as much as he can before he leaves,

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  7. Anonymous12/10/15

    I was under the impression that he was killed off about 23 years ago by the barbarians with Phds and their students. dr

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  8. Just a common 'tater13/10/15

    Unfortunately, your analysis of the current political correctness is dead on. However, to be really accurate, the PC crowd needs to insist that the current remnants of the native populations of the Western Hemisphere should at the very least, insist that these groups show their disdain for Columbus's legacy by renouncing all of the decadent Western "advances." To wit: Need a tooth or appendix out, no anesthesia, no sterilized instrument. A rock or flint knife will do.
    No electricity, no woven materials. Animal skins and fires built without matches or flint and steel even. Let the Venezuelan leadership move to the forest, live in a hammock, and wear skins or leaves. Catch fish with a net or bow and arrow.

    As for the Phony Aztecs, their ancestors were probably butchered alive and eaten by the real ones. So, if they show up at my doorstep, I will assume they too are cannibals and will deal with them accordingly. In reality, the current remnants of the native groups from Patagonia to Nunavik should all voluntarily repatriate themselves back to Siberia. I would love to repatriate myself back to my ancestor's places in either Florence or Messina, but they are already crowded.

    I would have been more than happy to celebrate Columbus day today, but I do not work for the government and had to put in a full day at work.

    Oh, and I forgot. The PC nativist crowd should also renounce the bourgeois concepts of welfare and money. They can feel free to go to the mountains and smoke all of the dope they have been cultivating there. However, the rest of us need not feel obligated to make sure they have food and water nor firefighting support in case they light up the forest by flinging a hot doobie into the bushes.

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  9. Anonymous13/10/15

    "This is how it begins. And that is how it ends. Nations are not destroyed by atomic bombs or economic catastrophes; they are lost when they lose any reason to go on living. When they no longer have enough pride to go on fighting to survive."

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  10. Anonymous13/10/15

    "This is how it begins. And that is how it ends. Nations are not destroyed by atomic bombs or economic catastrophes; they are lost when they lose any reason to go on living. When they no longer have enough pride to go on fighting to survive."

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  11. Y. Ben-David13/10/15

    Regarding the Aztecs (also called "Mexica"), one of the main reasons that Hernan Cortes was able to overcome their empire with a population of millions with his 500 or so men and some horses and cannons was that the Indian nations surrounding the Aztecs hated them because the Aztecs would grab prisoners taken in the wars with them and use them as human sacrifices. These other Indian nations were glad (at the time) to make an alliance with Cortes to knock off the hated Aztecs. So much for the idyllic world that existed in the Americas before the Europeans arrived.
    By the way, regarding the claim that Columbus didn't "discover" America, it is true that others got there first from the Old World, apparently the Vikings did, and Portuguese fishermen might also have in the years before 1492, but the fact is that none of them really knew what they were looking at and didn't do anything with it. Although Columbus thought he was in southeast Asia, he did begin mapping the area, settling it and putting it in constant contact with Europe. This he is most definitely the true "discoverer" of America.

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  12. Anonymous13/10/15

    The Left destroyed Christmas and Easter as well. Sure, some of us still celebrates those dates, but most don't talk about it. I have seen professional memos were Christmas is written as "Xmas" and this is where no other words in the text are abbreviated. When I question it I'm told "it's just an abbreviation" (LIE) and then when I press it I'm told some BS about "Greek symbols". It's revolting.

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  13. This happens when a country becomes totally ignorant. In the name of PC (WTF?) we have to ignore the past. Are we saying our ancestors were a bunch of idiots? WOW! What a heritage!

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  14. I believe Danial did a piece on the fallacy for judging such past history by what passes for contempory standards. The first point to be made is that these leftist tools don't have any standards to speak of and if some new political tactic required rehabilitating Columbus they would do it without a second thought. The second is that the Spaniards that Columbus led to the new world had just emerged from a 700 year long struggle to rid their country of Moorish occupation. Their victory no doubt imbued them with a sense of rightious invincibility in their cause and religion. Thirdly, although some of the tribes they encountered were peaceful and welcoming most of them weren't and were brutal savages they enslaved their weeker neighbors and hauled their victims to the alters of human sacrifice. I for one have grown weary of all the PC bs about the "nobility" of the native cultures. Yes Cortez and his conquestadors were in awe when they they first look down at the size of the Axtec capital, but their awe soon turned to revulsion at the stench of death and rotted flesh, the fly infested pyramids of human heads and blood staind steps of the temples. There is a reason Cortez and his 500 soldiers were able to make short work of the Aztecs. The main reason was that all their subject peoples were ready for any means to free themselves from the Aztec's savagery. "The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico" by Bernal Diaz del Castillo is a great origional source and eye witness account of the events.

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  15. We Brits have a dog in this fight so...Happy Columbus day!

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  16. Anonymous13/10/15

    I know you take language seriously, so I suggest calling it Independence Day. The word carries the real meaning of the event.

    Sincerely,
    @yateslife

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  17. I imagine the leftist academics will say the descriptions of the Aztecs are European fabrications.

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  18. "Nations are not destroyed by atomic bombs or economic catastrophes; they are lost when they lose any reason to go on living. When they no longer have enough pride to go on fighting to survive."

    Today in America about half of the population fit in the category described above by Mr. Greenfield. We are quickly sliding down the slippery slope of Leftist lunacy.

    Pray for changed hearts and minds in America. God bless America.

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  19. First off, some of these commenters have some interesting ideas about history.

    Second: screw Columbus. His holiday was added as a pander to Catholics. Yes, he bravely sailed the ocean blue. He also started enslaving natives soon after arrival. So dump Columbus day in favor of Pilgrims Day. Or Plymouth Day. Much nicer people, much better role models.

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  20. Up until the early 1960s it was understood that John Cabot was the discoverer of the American continent and justly claimed it for England and France; Columbus only discovered some islands. By the 1960s, the invading hordes of Italians succeeded in getting John Cabot erased from history and replacing him with Columbus.

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  21. Anonymous18/10/15

    The biggest achievement of the commie infiltration was to turn liberals into coolness junkies. They will starve their own children to death, those they didn´t abort, before being portrayed as retrogrades. It is so much old-guy-like sounding for the forever-young-crew, the end-of-history generation...

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