It’s become common to see students and Leftists in general attacking figures from American history as racists, thieves and murderers. This week on Columbus Day the mania intensified.
I think it is obvious and beyond question, that no one celebrates Columbus Day to honor atrocities or alleged atrocities he or his men committed. What Columbus Day celebrates is the discovery of North America by the West, and the consequence spread of Western Civilization, the ideas, to North America, which led to the founding of the greatest nation on earth, the United States of America.
Sure, others may have visited North America before Columbus, but so what? Nothing became of it. Historically it was a dead end.
Columbus Day made for an absurd and sickening spectacle.
Columbus, the greatest explorer of his time, ventured across an unknown world, in a fragile ship, at the mercy of the elements and the seemingly endless sea. This man is attacked by the generation who can’t navigate across town without their phones. Who, despite living in a free country and with every comfort known to man, felt the need to originate the absurd and disgraceful notion of “safe spaces” where they can cower and be assured that no one will question their ideas.
Columbus certainly had his faults and committed some heinous acts. But throughout thousands of years of history, brutal conquest and plunder were the norm. They were rampant on the North American continent before the Europeans arrived. With few exceptions, nations and tribes (including those in the Americas) have waged war, and raped, pillaged and plundered.
What ended it was the slow realization that man has inalienable rights. Glimmerings of that realization were evident in the Magna Carta. The realization crackled through England and Europe with the publication of John Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government” in 1689. It burst in flames in Virginia in 1776 in Jefferson’s magnificent and clear enunciation of those rights in the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed…” The Declaration, (Jefferson’s draft version)
Since then, many men and women have died defending that ideal of liberty, from the War of Independence, the Civil War and through two horrendous World Wars. They paved the way for a nation and an age where today we enjoy unprecedented well-being and wealth.
How many teachers and students today can actually grasp the meaning and the enormity of the intellectual feat of the Founders?
While taking the entire context of Western Civilization for granted, they retroactively (and selectively) apply these standards to men like Columbus, condemning them unconditionally.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they themselves upheld and lived up to these standards of respecting the rights of others, and espoused and defended these rights for all. But they are invariably aligned with the nihilistic Left, advocating collectivism and socialism. Freedom and individual rights are only convenient weapons to beat their enemy with.
They ignore the fact that their ideas led to barbarism and millions of deaths, not centuries ago, but only decades ago, and many people trapped in collectivist regimes like North Korea and Venezuela continue to die to this day.
They turn a blind eye to the millions in the Middle East today, who are being brutalized and murdered for their beliefs and sexual orientation.
Their indignation depends on accepting the objective truth of the natural rights of all, yet their own political philosophy of collectivism rejects those rights. Their indignation is hollow and hypocritical, their ideology, undoes civilization and returns us to a barbaric, pre-individual rights past, is evil.
