You Either Celebrate Columbus Day or Hate Civilization. It’s That Simple.
From a lot of official and semi-official — meaning regime-controlled media — channels, we were treated to celebrations of something called “Indigenous People’s Day” on Monday.
Everything about this ought to be offensive to Americans of European, African, or Asian descent.
First of all, a celebration of the indigenous tribes who populated the Americas before European explorers — and, later, European settlers — came in and took the place over isn’t inherently a terrible idea. Every culture does deserve some recognition. And there were injustices perpetrated on those tribes by the people who moved onto this land.
Just as there were injustices perpetrated on the newcomers by the members of those indigenous tribes.
But that day should be another day. It shouldn’t be observed on Columbus Day, which is a celebration of Western civilization and the amazing advances and achievements of the Europeans who expanded it to create the hard-won world of comfort and decency, relatively speaking, that we live in.
It may seem absurd to characterize things in such a way, but we are incredibly fortunate. We take for granted as a society things that, were it not for the advance and spread of Western civilization, would never have been possible.
We have widespread access to electricity. Clean water. Telecommunications. A great amount — perhaps even a majority, in many cases — of our lives are spent in the pursuit of entertainment. We have access to virtually the whole of human knowledge and culture at our fingertips. We — generally, and we’re quite observant of the breaches — enjoy rights and freedoms most people throughout the entire history of human civilization could never have dreamed.
Are we good stewards of that bounty delivered to us by our ancestors? Not really. But we have it. And in America, we have it because history laid out exactly as it did.
Things could have gone another way, you know.
For all the constant bitching about Christopher Columbus, you’d have to be an imbecile to buy the proposition that it’s his fault the indigenous civilization in the Americas didn’t survive contact with the outside world.
If Columbus hadn’t come over, the Chinese would have.
Or the Japanese, eventually. Or the French, English, Russians, Germans, Dutch, Turks, or anyone else with an actual functioning civilization. All of those but the Turks actually did, and it was the Turks who had more to do with Columbus Day than perhaps even Columbus did.
Let’s not forget that the entire purpose of Columbus’ voyage was to attempt to find a passage to China and the Indies so as to escape the stranglehold the Turkish Empire held on Eurasian trade. And let’s also remember that the evil the Turks were guilty of at that time was far more prevalent and more purposeful than anything Westerners imposed on the indigenous population of the Americas.
At the time Columbus’ flotilla set sail westward, and very definitely in the years that followed as the Turkish Empire expanded along the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, it was common practice for Arab pirates sailing out of Turkish-held ports to land on European shores along a swath of territory from the Black Sea to the Irish Sea, sack towns and villages, kill all the men, and cart away the women and children as slaves.
In fact, the word “slave” derives from Slav, as the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe were harvested for captivity and forced labor with a regularity in the Turkish Empire that modern critics of Western civilization cannot even contemplate.
The American Spectator’s Paul Kengor noted yesterday that such cruelty was hardly unknown to the indigenous Americans, by the way:
"Among the sins that leftists try to peg on Columbus is slavery. And yet, many of their indigenous peoples, including the so-called “civilized” among them, in fact owned slaves. No, I’m not merely talking about their savage cruelty toward fellow tribes. I’m talking about their brute treatment of the black African slaves they owned, in some cases even after the Civil War….
Native American tribes in the continental United States engaged in slavery before and after 1776, far into the 19th century, and even owned black African slaves as well as enslaving one another. Many of these tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War in order to preserve slavery.
This is well known to historians who bother with the subject, though it would elicit a long, blank stare if not full meltdown from the typical product of our morally bankrupt universities. Our young people have been taught to place on a pedestal any and every Native American as living a pure and perfect life — until the cruel Columbus and fellow white Europeans marched along to subjugate them."
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Why would those indigenous tribesmen, so venerated by postmodern leftist cultural redeemers, be so enthusiastic about the “peculiar institution”?
That’s simple. It’s what every culture in world history was built on before Western civilization dragged humanity kicking and screaming out of slave-based economics.
It was Westerners, and particularly the British and those nations derived from the British Empire, who led the world out of slavery. And while it was military might more than moral suasion that finished off slavery in all parts of the world that Western civilization left significant marks on, more than anything else it was another achievement of Western civilization that is responsible for pushing slavery into the realm of crime.
Namely, the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism.
Those people insisting you celebrate Indigenous People’s Day rather than Columbus Day are extremely passionate about the evils of capitalism without recognizing that, but for private property and the profit motive it sets off, nobody would have invented and manufactured the machines that most effectively replaced the work slaves formerly did.
Until it was more efficient for a steam shovel to dig a ditch, that ditch was probably going to be dug by a gang of men treated little better than animals, men who probably weren’t free to leave. That was true in places like salt mines, cane fields, and lots of other venues where vital work had to be done and there was a shortage of people willing to do it at wages management could afford to pay.
Only technology solved that problem. And those wonderful indigenous Americans we’re supposed to celebrate rather than Christopher Columbus were awfully short on technology. Those highly interesting carvings in the desert of Peru notwithstanding.
In any event, as said above, Columbus came to America first, or, at least, he was the first documented explorer — perhaps the Vikings beat him to the continent, but they did a lousy job of documenting that fact — but he certainly wasn’t the only one who would have come. We celebrate him because he did come, and, when he did, he started a process that led to the founding of the greatest, most prosperous, most just and humane country that has ever existed on this earth.
And that’s worth celebrating.
But let’s say Columbus didn’t come. Maybe it would have been one of the French explorers, or the Dutch. Or a Spaniard or Portuguese. Or an Englishman. Or someone Chinese, or even an Arab.
It would have been someone from the Eastern Hemisphere. That you can count on. And when that someone reported back home what was here, more would come. As more did.
And when they did come, they would have found what Columbus did — a lightly populated continent with primitive, backward tribes busily killing each other with stone age weapons, committing human sacrifice, and perfecting slavery and paganism.
Because that’s what was here. That’s what the people demanding you celebrate Indigenous People’s Day are demanding that you pay tribute to. Barbarism, straight out of the stone age.
The most advanced, populous civilization in the Americas at the time of European contact was … the Aztecs. Not the lauded Iroquois or the Cherokee or the Sioux, all of whom held the land they held when the Europeans arrived through the same bloody conquest the West must wear a hair shirt for imposing on them.
Certainly not the cannibalistic Carib tribe Columbus encountered when he landed in the West Indies.
No. It was the Aztecs. Who turned human sacrifice, slavery, and satanic barbarism into an art form no other civilization before or since could match.
And, so, on Columbus Day I can only echo this…
by Scott McKay
October 9, 2023
Originally published on The American Spectator:
https://spectator.org/you-either-celebrate-columbus-day-or-hate-civilization-its-that-simple/