Columbus Day in the United States is upon us. In recent years, many have accused the holiday’s existence of being insensitive to indigenous people’s right and plight.
Some try to cite the brutality of Columbian rule to discredit the fact that Columbus DID effectively discover the Western Hemisphere. It’s been claimed the Vikings did or that the Chinese did, when in reality, the Vikings only discovered Greenland, not part of North America, and the veracity of them at Newfoundland is questioned. The Chinese discovered the Russian far East, not the New World.
But to make out Columbus as being the first example of “brutal, racist Western Imperialism” is a big oversimplification and a great example of self-hating political correctness.
Fact is that 524 years ago, all empires, be it Spanish, English, Chinese, Khanate, the Caliphate, the Mughals, various African empires, or even the Mayan, Incas, white or black, globally northern or southern, practiced racism, slavery, religious discrimination, and dictatorship/monarchy. Human rights were unheard of in any of those places, by either today’s standards those of 100 or 200 years ago. In fact, back in 1492, the Caliphate’s was by far the largest and most extensive. The Caliphate practiced slavery until the 20th century.
By advocating for the end of Columbus Day as a means to an end, progressives make progressivism look like a joke and drive out moderates and non-ideologues from the center-left. Without Columbus to establish the first permanent settlements in the New World, we would not be here. There would have been no major civilization to establish itself outside the orbit of Eurasian.
The Western Hemisphere has generally been more liberal and tolerant than the Eastern Hemisphere. Even for the two decades more it took for slavery to be formally abolished in the US, it was the European powers that imported the slaves here in the first place. Modern representative democratic ideals began here, as did various human rights movements. America had a grassroots abolitionist movement and fought a Civil War to abolish it; European monarchs crowed at them to do so, and instead, they moved their operations to colonizing whole continents. They had pogroms, genocides all over the place even before the Nazis; minorities like the Jews did not face the same fate in this corner of the globe.
Indigenous societies had it rough here, but how did they have it elsewhere? How about the native Siberians? Or Tibetans and non-Han groups of the Far East? The Mfecane vs. the Zulu Kingdom? The pre-Islamic Egyptians (the members of the group who look sub-Sarahan; Anwar Sadat, who looked black, got called racial slurs by his own people and other Arabs and Muslims, you know.)
Also, don’t ever compare what happened with the aboriginals with The Holocaust; a considerable portion of the aboriginals died from the diseases brought from far away lands, and the near total decline of them was not itself a goal, nor was there an industrial plan to make it happen. It did not happen in 4 years either. Plus, sad to say, the Native Americans WERE primitive.
The right has a tendency to deify, the left at times has a tendency to purify. Both are wrong.
Without Christopher Columbus, the advances made by civilization’s westward move to a land free of the orbit of constantly warring Eurasian would not have occurred. Yet the brutality that existed before it would still have existed, likely without a counter that was developed largely in this part of the world.
And quite frankly, that this debate has even extended past ultra-leftist campuses into the minds of more mainstream liberals is in part how I went from progressive as I was 8 years ago to now being slightly right-of-center, I guess.
