David McGrath, Christian Science Montior, October 12, 2009
Oct. 12 is the important anniversary of the opening of the Americas to settlers, and one that merits celebration, but by commemorating it as Columbus Day, Americans stand to ignore part of the past that deserves to be remembered.
While the holiday has been used to teach ideals of patriotism, and Christopher Columbus has been used as a symbol of an immigrant’s right to citizenship, the other side to the discovery of the new country is death and destruction. To many native Americans, Columbus symbolizes slavery.
In order to bridge this gap, perhaps the government should take a cue from Hawaii and call the day Discover’s Day?
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It was Columbus who opened the way for European colonizers, whose wars and infectious diseases wiped out massive numbers of native Americans. They set the standard by exiling the rest to rural, out-of-the-way reservations.
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Granted, Columbus was not the sole precipitator of the displacement and suffering imposed on native Americans for the next half millennium, and certainly his navigational, scientific, and sheer physical accomplishment, which rank him with or above such figures as Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, cannot be denied.
Yet Columbus was more than just an inevitable cog in history’s colonial machine. His own words survive in his letters as proof of his dehumanization of the indigenous people, whom he considered the property of Queen Isabella. He enslaved many of the Tiano Indians, while the rest he subjected to war and destruction.
Often, the first step to healing is recognition of a problem. By changing the name of this holiday we will draw attention to the plight of the native Americans, not so they can be pitied, but in order that their situation, which began with Columbus, can be addressed.
Perhaps replacing Columbus Day with “Discover’s Day” would stretch Americans to recognize where we have come from. It would also give a nod not only to what led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded, but to some abuses that the United States must remember to avoid. In so doing, we gain intellectual honesty.
Another solution would be to replace the adulation for Columbus with a native American hero. Crazy Horse’s monument is already in place near Mount Rushmore.
Chief Joseph might be more politically acceptable, though. The great savior of the Nez Perce tribe had the wisdom of President Lincoln and the inclination toward nonviolence of Martin Luther King. His recorded reflections are an inspiration for all patriots:
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The prospect of swapping Columbus for an Indian chief, in one fell swoop, may be a hard sell, especially in view of the paucity of political influence wielded by American Indians.
But the first step, and one everyone can embrace right now, is to honor the truth by terminating the celebration of Christopher Columbus, while commemorating the importance of this historic day in all its implications. It might just help with the healing of all America.
Original article
(Posted on October 12, 2009)
Comments
How about a St.Brendan The Navigator day?
I am sick and beyond tired of the vilification of everyone and everything white. I respect Columbus and plan to honor him every year. Reminder: we fought the Indians and won! We need to boot all the Marxists out of this country and let them crawl and apologize in some far away place. The one thing we should have done is banned immigration from Eastern Europe at the turn of the Twentieth Century! Too many of them came with Marx in their heads and hearts.
There is a well-accepted theory that it wasn’t Columbus and his crew that bought syphilis to the indigenous American population, it was the other way around. The Indians had built up resistance to the syphilis virus that was common among them; once Columbus took it back to Europe, Europeans didn’t have that immunity.
As a recent article in Newsweek said, “It’s horrifying to imagine (White) kids being proud.” (Newsweek, Oct. 4, 2009, page 60). Their stated goal is to not have a single White hero, except for those Whites who work for the good of Minorities, such as Mother Teresa. That is why on every TV show and Movie, most of the leading men and women are non-European, but the criminals are.
This attempt to remove Columbus and Washington’s Day, and replace them with Martin Luther King and Ceaser Chavez Days are examples of this.
Suggested viewing: Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006)
It captures the brutality of inter-tribal warfare, brutality and human sacrifice that abounded in the America’s prior to European colonization.
The Trail of Tears ended 200 years of Indian warfare. Posthumously award Andrew Jackson the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Often, the first step to healing is recognition of a problem.”
Indeed Comrade McGrath, indeed it is!
However, the problem is not Columbus Day, nor the fantasized “atrocities” fools like you place upon him; the problem is your unforgivably high treason to your own people in the name of multiculturalism. There is no gray areas with this as far as I am concerned. It is a black and white issue and if you are on the black side of things, calling you a traitor or a Red is simply being kind.
Far kinder, than you actually deserve!
Enough is enough, every year on October 12 we are subjected to this kind of prevaricating and insidious nonsense. There is no such thing as “Discover’s Day” or “Indigenous People’s Day.” However, on October 11 and October 13 of every year there should be two new holidays; these should be: Revile the Idiots’ Day and Punish the Traitors’ Day.
Enough said!!!
I remember when they no longer let kids have the day off from school because they felt the holiday was racist towards the Indians. I slightly agree with that, and Columbus certainly wasn’t the first person to discover America. However I always notice how many people love taking the day off just because they can.
Nice try. Columbus and the European explorers opened the door for Western Civilization to spread to North America. The stronger cultures have utilized the weaker ones for all of human history, it’s a part of human nature. I’ll always consider it Columbus Day and Western Civilization Day no matter what happens.
“It might just help with the healing of all America.”
Healing? Healing? Ha!
As long as the permanently aggrieved can extract money from stupid, guilt-ridden Europeans and Americans for events that tooks place generations or even centuries ago, the “healing” will never take place.
We should take a page from Obama’s political playbook and inform these aggrieved parties that “We won,” and then ignore them.
Writers like McGrath excoriate Columbus because he actually ACCOMPLISHED something, instead of just weepily emoting on various topics all day like the unintelligentsia of the Leftist elite.
Columbus was a great man. He did great things. He deserves to be honored by those of us who benefit every day from living in the New World. The flow of disease that altered lives went BOTH WAYS, and if the explorers of the New World had not brought it to the Indians then it would have been brought later by someone else. Inevitably.
Isolation does not convey immunity, and Europeans did not intentionally engineer the viruses that wiped out so many lives in the past. Vilifying Columbus for the immune deficiences of the Indians is the absolute height of idiocy.
Let’s just do away with anything and anyone that has to do with WHITE history to satisfy the enemy within. They are sure doing a number on us while we sit idly by. Where are our White warriors? How about some Christian warriors. Did we not use to have those?
By terminating the celebration of Columbus Day, “it might just help with the healing of all America.”
Gee! We didn’t know we were broken until the anti-Americans told us we were. Who’s next? Will the reputation of George Washington be shredded because he was a slave owner? In another 20 years, we won’t even recognize the history facts that today’s adults were taught. I’m sorry for the children of today’s world. It’s a far cry from the one that existed before the destruction began. But many voted for “change” did they not? And now they know what that change meant.
First thing we have to do is get past this “Native American” thing. There is no such thing as a “Native American”. The race of people known as “American Indians” are immigrants to this land too. Yeah, they may have gotten here before anyone else, but they are immigrants none the less. And to label them “American” considering their ancestors were here before this country was even known as “America” is the height of arrogance.
Technically, Vikings (more evil whites) stumbled upon America before Columbus. There’s strong evidence that the Chinese found it as well though they didn’t realize what they had stumbled upon. But Columbus alone was the beginning of European colonization of the Americas. We take for granted how easy it is to travel these days. For the right price, I can get from Washington D.C. to Hong Kong within the next 24 hours.
Discover’s day? It would be nice to honor John Cabot and others.
Am I looking at this the wrong way, or should the proposed name be “Discoverer’s Day”? I Googled it, and found entries under both, although they consistently seemed to indicate that in Hawaii there is a “Discover’s Day”. Maybe Europeans should have left the Americas (guess they wouldn’t have been called that if not “discovered” by Columbus so someone could apply Vespucci’s name to the continents) to the devices of the ingenious indigenous populations instead of introducing all our European backwardness and cruelty to this part of the world.
It goes without saying that the people who decry Columbus Day are waging the same type of colonialism against whites today, complete with rape, murder and diseases. Actually they’re worse because, unlike Columbus, the GOAL of their colonialism is genocide, the extermination forever of white people off the face of the earth. It’s not an economic policy, they’re not looking for riches, it’s a pure, hate-motivated policy of extermination at its roots.
It also goes without saying that they aren’t concerned with, for instance, the Indian tribes who chased the Apaches from the Northwest to the Arizona desert, or the victims of the Aztec empire. The left’s white-hating racism consists to a large degree of holding whites to standards they hold no other group to, and they should be called on it every time they do.
The Columbus demonizers seem to always forget that this man was around in the 15th Century (and not the 20th!).
An inferior culture meets a superior culture and crumbles. Same result all through history.
But the first step, and one everyone can embrace right now, is to honor the truth by terminating the celebration of Christopher Columbus, while commemorating the importance of this historic day in all its implications.
What a stupid man…celebrate the discovery but not the discoverer.
David McGrath go back to yur Latte and dreary existance and leave the thinking to more capable minds.
How multiculturalists forget. Look at the takeover of europe by muslims. Could this be viewed in the same light as the Columbus expeditions? I think not.
Columbus day IS racist… towards Norwegians! Lets give credit where credit is due people, from now on I celebrate Lief Erickson day!
It is easy for people to pass judgement on previous historical events. Slavery, although abhorrent by today’s standard was seen as a natural condition of the times. In parts of africa, slavery is still seen as a normal part of the “human condition”.
Why in the name of God are almost all of the leader’s of these anti Western movement’s White’s, such as this David Mc Grath character and the author of the preceeding article. That one is actually worse considering that it was written by someone who goes by the name Christine Armario. What is wrong with and what causes a race to become so filled with guilt and self haterd?
I like to check out David Yeagley’s site on these topics, he stirs up those leftist multicultists no end. The guy is a realist who doesn’t wallow in emotive recollections of 100 year old losses or demand recompense because his side lost. Yeagley loathes the victim status so many seek to impose upon him and his people. If only more were of his ilk.
http://www.badeagle.com/
Arc.
Anonymous #14-
Technically it was the white Clovis people who came to North America before anyone else. They walked across the Atlantic from southern France on the frozen icepack more than 60,000 years ago. They settled around the great lakes but were wiped out by a comet strike. There is archeological evidence to confirm this. So if my white ancestors were here first, then this IS my native soil, and that supercedes any claim that the so-called “native Americans” have to this land.
If these self-loathing leftists are so unhappy with America’s history, then why do they still live here? They should either face the facts, or go live somewhere else. We’d be a lot better off without them.
“Why in the name of God are almost all of the leader’s of these anti Western movement’s White’s, such as this David Mc Grath character and the author of the preceeding article.”
They get paid to do this. And mostly what they do is try and scare the rest of us enough so that we wont ever object any time in our lives.
“Why in the name of God are almost all of the leader’s of these anti Western movement’s White’s, such as this David Mc Grath character and the author of the preceeding article”.
They get paid to do this stuff. And mostly what they do is scare the rest of us enough so we wont object any time of our lives. It seems to be self-perpetuating now, even though most rank and file liberals don’t seem to really believe in it anymore themselves. There was an interesting quote of dubious intention, made by a rather bad person in history, that said, “The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it”. You can see this in trivial things today all the time.
So if Columbus is persona non grata now, what to do with the name of our capital’s district, the District of Columbia? They should have a contest for elementary school kids to rename the district.
http://www.clovisinthesoutheast.net/stanford.html
And of course there is still our old freind Kennewick Man.
Yes, those “racist white settlers” really ‘destroyed’ civilization right? I guess we should have let the indians keep cutting people’s scalps off. I guess we should get rid of hotels, restuarants, the constitution, cars, trains, airplanes, sanitary food and clean drinking water. Probably ought to get rid of the internet while we’re at it. I mean, that “ruined” the indians’ civilization…right?
“…Whites from the European continent walked or maybe followed the Southern ice pack in boats across the Atlantic, they originated in Southern France and Spain: Solutre…”
Posted by Arc:
The History Channel aired a wonderful show, Journey to 10,000 BC, positing this theory, . I watched it with my 15-year old thinking it was about saber-tooth cats and wooly mammoths. It was about that, but also about the theory of Caucasian migration from Europe by the Soluteran people of Spain and France who possibly followed their source of food (seals) across a sea that was much lower at the time—either from from ice berg to ice berg or island to island.
http://shop.history.com/detail.php?a=113450
I read the reviews from leading archeologists, paleontologists and other scientists who generally dismissed this theory outright—some even admitted that they hadn’t seen the documentary and ‘didn’t need to.’ A few called Dennis Sanford of the Smithsonian and his theory of European migration an outright nut. A few pre-10,000 BC Caucasian-looking skulls have been found—and have been suppressed or dismissed by academia.
I’m sure the prevailing wisdom in academia is that America was peopled solely by those who walked across the Asian land bridge and anyone who says otherwise is dead wrong. Interesting, isn’t it, that the Clovis-point resemble spear-heads used by the Soluteran and not those used in Siberian (this too is dismissed).
According to Dr. Göran Burenhult, professor of archeology at Gotland University in Sweden:
“…On ancient Caucasians in America, Kennewick man, has not been the only find. Others include the 13,000 year old Peñon skull found in Mexico, the 12,500 year old Monte Verde site in Chile, the 9,400 year old Spirit Cave Mummy…Pre-Clovis and Clovis stone tools found in America are similar to those in North Western Europe known as Solutrean. Such tools have never been found in Siberia…”
http://tinyurl.com/yl9h4yj
Wouldn’t want to give Caucasians credit for anything, would they? It might also punch a hole in the Native Americans’ claims as to who first peopled the Americas—and give a new look at the modern grievance industry.
Controversial to be sure—but does it not merit further study?
Europeans did not intentionally engineer the viruses that wiped out so many lives in the past.
Well said. Certainly, no one has vilified Asians for “intentionally” creating the Black Plague and bringing it to Europe, claiming 75 million lives and wiping out as much as 60% of the population. *
Nor should we blame them. It is thought to have come along the Silk Road from China. But no one had any idea of germs in those days. Any harm was unintentional.
I don’t think any schools are teaching impressionable young children about the death and suffering that came to us from out of Asia.
*[About 40,000 people died of plague in Paris — nearly half the population. Florence’s population was reduced from 120,000 to 50,000. At least 60% of Hamburg’s population perished, and more than 60% of Norway’s. It took 1/3 of Stockholm’s population and 2/3rds of Helsinki’s. Whole regions of Germany were depopulated, with an estimated loss of 6 million. It continued to return and ravage Europe periodically for the next 300 years.
On its return to London in 1603, the plague killed 38,000 Londoners. In 1625, 35,417 more Londoners died of the plague, and another 10,000 in 1636.
About 200,000 people around Moscow died of the disease from 1654 to 1656.
If celebrating the great explorer, symbol of Europe’s creation of the New World, is now optional, how about the same for Martin Luther King? As Jared Taylor observed, only King’s and Jesus Christ’s birthdays are national holidays. Yet no one makes anyone celebrate Christmas. Around “MLK Day,” two great Americans, Robert E. Lee and Benjamin Franklin, also have birthdays. Let Americans choose whom to celebrate, and quit jamming the affirmative action saint down our throats, if we’re deconstructing Columbus.
“It took four hundred years before Europe’s population recovered and again equaled the pre-Black Death figures.” http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/Europe.html
David McGrath is hardly neutral on this matter.and of Native American Literature at the College of DuPage http://www.geocities.com/profmcgrath2004/index.html
Bill Ayers is a native of Glen Ellyn and attended school there.
Apparently, the Native American Studies Program is rather big at DuPage. http://tinyurl.com/yhfkmja http://tinyurl.com/yl574jf
To ghw:
That was an excellent post, one of the best I have read in a long time. All here would do well to copy or memorize it for future battles with the “enlightened.” Another point also, is the fact that the Mongols had quite a booming slave trade!
Again, great job ghw,
John PM!!!
*KRONOS*
Thank you for the compliment. Unfortunately, for the sake of brevity there was a lot more that I left out. For instance, the fact that the countries around Baltic, such as Poland, lost a third of their population to the plague. The Indians of the Americas were by no means unique in suffering from imported diseases from which they had no immunity.
On some further research, I also find that smallpox was not a European “invention” after all. Nor was there any such thing as European immunity, contrary to what is taught! (see below) Like so many other diseases, right up to the very present, it too was an Asian import. And no one was immune. (Not that I’m blaming Asians, mind you. None of these scourges were engineered or intentional.)
“Smallpox, believed to have originated in India or Egypt, is one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity. In some ancient cultures, smallpox was such a major killer of infants that custom forbade the naming of a newborn until the infant had caught the disease and proved that it would survive.human beings appear to be universally susceptible to infection with the smallpox virus. [There was no such thing as European immunity.] … [Smallpox is now considered to have been completely eradicated.]http://tinyurl.com/yzt4nq3
http://tinyurl.com/dh7lz5 http://tinyurl.com/yf46a3y
Another interesting fact regarding Asia is that following the Mongol conquests, an unintended result of the ensuing peace which their empire established, the Pax Mongolica, enabled the opening of the Silk Road and the passage of diseases like the plague, which would have been far more difficult previously.
While fashionably lefty teachers such as Mr. Kolowitz in Florida may teach their impressionable young pupils about diseases that were spread by wicked European colonizers, what goes unmentioned is that it was also Europeans who developed vaccines and medical procedures for the prevention/treatment of such diseases, thus saving the lives of countless millions around the world, irrespective of race or nationality. It was Europeans who eventually eradicated the disease. Why is that never mentioned?
Although people in many countries (outside the New World) suffered the scourge of smallpox, it was European whites who finally did something about it. Where is the credit?
Incidentally, as is often mentioned here on Amren, whites didn’t have it that easy either — not even when they came to America. Indians weren’t the only ones who suffered from diseases and epidemics. My mother’s grandmother caught smallpox on the boat from Europe, at the age of three. She survived the disease, but it left her face scarred for the rest of her life, about which (I was told) she was always self-conscious. She wore veils and tried to hide her face. Even after arriving in America, life was no party. She grew up to have a large family of her own: seven or eight children. An epidemic (perhaps typhoid fever) came along and, within the space of several weeks, wiped out all her family, except my grandfather and 2 others. Her husband became blind and feeble, and could no longer work. Because of having no breadwinner, my grandfather, at eight years old, had to go to work in the coal mines to support his family. He got no schooling beyond third grade. Why don’t “educators” like Mr. K teach their young pupils about things like THAT?
No, whites weren’t all sitting on the verandah sipping juleps, or playing polo, while blacks toiled in the fields to support our idle lives of luxury. But that’s not according to the textbook.
