It shouldn't surprise anyone that Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Friday designating Monday, Oct. 13 as "Columbus Day." He promised back in April that he would bring the holiday "back from the ashes."
Trump referred to Christopher Columbus as "the original American hero," and accused critics of "slander."
The official proclamation says, "Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage."
“Columbus Day, we’re back, Italians. We love the Italians," Trump said.
Every story in history has two sides. Refusing to recognize that simple truth is a sign of small-mindedness and stupidity. If we were to begin listing the sins of every American hero without acknowledging his incredible contributions to the creation of the United States of America, there would be no faces on Mount Rushmore or statues gracing the green spaces in our towns and cities.
Nor would there be any monuments to civil rights leaders.
Christopher Columbus was an overly ambitious, greed-sotted man whose biases and prejudices were no different from those of any other man in 15th-century Europe. From humble beginnings, his path to improve his station in life took him down the only road that was open to him: gaining the favor of rich and powerful people.
His single-minded determination to make a success of himself overrode the teachings of his Catholic faith, leading him down dark paths that included extraordinary cruelty to the native people and a grasping for gold that led to his own destruction.
But Columbus dared to go where no European had gone before. In retrospect, he was one of the most skilled navigators of his age. He charted the seas around the Canary Islands, and recognized something that no other human had ever discovered: the Atlantic trade winds, which blew consistently from the East to the West. That discovery convinced him he could sail to Asia.
That alone should place him in the pantheon of great explorers.
We all know that Columbus didn't "discover" America. However, the journal he published when he returned to Spain in 1493 fired the imaginations of young European men about the "New World," and started a stampede to North and South America.
The argument of those who want to ditch "Columbus Day" and embrace "Indigenous Peoples' Day" is, to my mind, astonishingly idiotic. Once Columbus's discoveries were publicized, and the technology to cross the Atlantic was disseminated across Europe, Native Americans were essentially doomed. They could no more keep a lid on travel to the New World than the United States could keep a lid on the secret of the atomic bomb. Once it's out there, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
But Native Americans and their white liberal allies seek to maintain the fantasy that it's all Columbus's fault that white Europeans, trapped in societies that didn't allow for upward mobility, flocked to the New World to make their fortune. Simply, if not Columbus, it would have been someone else.
The silliest argument of all is that the whites "stole" native lands. Before we do that, perhaps we should ask Native Americans whom they stole those lands from in the first place?
I wrote this in 2021.
American history did not begin in 1492. There have been human beings residing in North America for at least 20,000 years and probably longer. But the people who crossed the Bering Sea land bridge from Asia to North America during the last Ice Age may not have been the first humans to arrive here. Recent DNA evidence shows that there have been several different migrations to North America with Native American tribes only being the most recent.
And that leads to the inescapable conclusion: the Native Americans who were present on the North American continent when Europeans arrived were not the same Native Americans who arrived 20,000 years ago. DNA evidence tracks the migration of one early American civilization — the Clovis people, so-called because the first tools and weapons were found in Clovis, New Mexico — and reveals that they thrived in both North and South America until about 8500 years ago.
Perhaps not coincidentally, tracing the DNA of modern Native Americans leads us to an inescapable conclusion that the Clovis civilization existed thousands of years before modern Native Americans arrived in North America. Contemporary Native Americans were part of the final wave of settlers who crossed the Bering Sea land bridge and spread out over North America about 8,500 years ago.
So what happened to the Clovis people? Were they conquered? Killed? Assimilated? We don't know. But given what we know about human beings, modern Native Americans probably had superior weapons and carried with them diseases that were deadly to the Clovis people.
But making the European conquest of the Americas just a continuation of the history of human beings on this planet isn't good enough. There's no political capital to be gained in telling that story. So Native Americans and their white liberal allies pass on the fantasy that if only Columbus had stayed the hell at home, Native Americans would all be living in their own private Eden.
People who tell that story know nothing of history and nothing of humanity.
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