A turquoise-colored sign on the door of my bank announcing closure on October 10 because of Indigenous Peoples’ Day inspired me to beat a path to a teller, even though I was not there for banking.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But I have a fun question for you…”
The question was far from fun but I didn’t want to appear strident. “Regarding the sign on the door…. What happened to the holiday called Columbus Day?” The teller rolled her eyes and said the wording on the sign was not the bank’s fault. She explained that the bank had made up a different sign that mentioned Columbus Day but the City of Philadelphia had forced them to scratch out Columbus and insert Indigenous Peoples Day (IPD).
“We didn’t do it,” she assured me.
I recalled how in February 2021 Mayor Jim Kenney signed an executive order effectively changing Columbus Day in the City of Philadelphia with the (Communist China-sounding) IPD-identifier. That executive order had come after a contentious period beginning in 2020 with the George Floyd riots when left activist mobs attempted to pull down the Frank Rizzo statue (after dousing it in paint and dressing it up in a woman’s bra) located on the steps of the city’s Municipal Services Building since 1998.
As it turned out, the leftists didn’t have to dismantle the statue because Mayor Kenny announced that the city was making plans to remove it and put it into storage.
With the Rizzo statue gone, the Columbus statue in South Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza became the city’s new Public Enemy No. 1.
Columbus statues were already being removed and beheaded around the country. Across the Delaware River, Camden, New Jersey had dismantled (and smashed to pieces) its Columbus statue in Farnham Park.
The self-righteous fury with which American Marxists destroyed Columbus statues in 2020 traces its origins to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, a book stocked with half-truths and historical distortions where Columbus is concerned. When demonstrators arrived at Marconi Plaza in South Philadelphia to protest the 20-foot-tall statue, or perhaps to topple it with ropes, neighborhood groups came out to defend it, some armed with bats and guns.
The legacy media in Philadelphia quickly jumped on the neighborhood groups and branded them as racists. It was a telling moment for the city.
Today, the Columbus statue in Marconi Plaza is boxed up in a wooden coffin until the city decides what to do with it. The Rizzo statue, by the way, is in storage.
The Marconi Plaza Columbus statue is the work of Italian sculptor Emanuele Caroni. It was originally made for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in the city’s Fairmont Park section, where it stood outside the U.S. Government Building. Dedicated on October 12, 1876, the statue was viewed by thousands of visitors to the Centennial, including poet Walt Whitman.
Although Columbus Day is technically a federal holiday, since 2020 130 cities in the United States have chucked the name for Indigenous Peoples Day (IPD). The trend was already in high gear in 2017 when TIME magazine reported that 55 cities had eliminated all references to Columbus Day, thanks mostly to Zinn, who died in 2010, and his devious “history.”
It was Zinn, after all, who said: “History is not about understanding the past but about changing the future.” His little book is now required reading in many high schools and colleges, despite numerous challenges to its credibility from (of all people) leftwing historians.
Sadly, academic attacks on Zinn have done nothing to curtail his influence. The most noteworthy of these attacks, Mary Grabar’s book, Debunking Howard Zinn, might as well have been published in a vacuum. Zinn’s popularity just keeps growing and growing.
The Zinn Education Project is a case in point.
This insidious online source is for schools and organizations that want to help in the abolition of Columbus Day. The site is also a marketplace for ‘Abolish Columbus Day’ stickers for your car and home. You can also download web banners and graphics for your local activist Unitarian Church or leftist community meeting.
The ‘How to rename Columbus Day’ website states:
If you still feel that a slaver, mass murderer, rapist, and simpleminded gold-seeker who never set foot on this continent should be one of only two people to have a U.S. holiday named after him, please explore more. If you’re ready for your city or university to join the over 100 others that have already renamed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, this page will point you in the right direction.
While Italian American groups have been notable in their opposition to eradicating Columbus Day, can these groups really battle the tide of woke anti-Columbus sentiment sweeping the nation?
Jody Della Barba, Secretary of the Philadelphia-based 1492 Society which organizes an annual (non city sponsored) Columbus Day parade, sees the abolition of Columbus Day as a double whammy, an attack on Italian Americans but an even greater attack on Catholicism.
Barba is right, of course.
Leftists, who tend to have no religion and who have a special contempt for Christianity, see Columbus as a murderer and a ruthless governor of the New World territories under his control. His savagery, they say, was rooted in a lust for gold, meaning gold for gold’s sake. What Zinn neglects in his “history” is that the explorer’s search for gold was to finance the Crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims.
In a December 1492 letter to King Fernando and Queen Isabel, Columbus wrote that it was his intention “to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem.”
But here we have an even greater reason to condemn Columbus because extricating Muslims from the Holy City, if viewed through a woke lens, can only be seen as Islamophobic.
Zinn, who charges the United States as being “a racist criminal enterprise built on murdering Indians, exploiting slaves, and opposing the working man,” left out of his “history” the fact that when Columbus first arrived in Hispaniola, he announced to the natives that, “The monarchs of Castile have sent us not to subjugate you but to teach you the true religion.”
Neither is there a mention of a 1502 letter Columbus wrote a letter to Pope Alexander VI in which he asked that missionaries be sent to the New World so they could accept Christ.
Zinn mentioning Christ is as impossibly “out there” as the prospect of President Biden mentioning (or quoting) an article by the Freedom Center’s Robert Spencer.
All of which means that Columbus’ real sin (from a woke point of view) is his promulgation of Christianity.
The thousands of students, mayors, legislative bodies and school boards across the nation that have been hoodwinked by Zinn’s historical acrobatics will go through life blissfully unaware that Columbus recorded in his diary that the natives he encountered “…love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest speech in the world and [they are] gentle and always laughing.”
They will also never know that Columbus had a rigorous policy that his crew exchange gifts with the natives they met and not just steal what they wanted.
They will be ignorant of the fact that Columbus’ policy was so unbending that on the explorer’s third voyage in 1500 he hanged men who disobeyed him by harming the native people.
They will also continue to denigrate Columbus with October hash tags like: “I’m celebrating Columbus Day by walking into a stranger’s home and claiming it as my own.” Or: “Columbus Day has become like that drunk uncle everyone is ashamed of.”
They will then go on to eradicate other historical names that challenge the notion that history is about changing the future.
Evidence of this can be seen in a city-sponsored advertisement announcing an Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebration on October 10, 2022 in historic Penn Treaty Park where William Penn signed a peace treaty with the Lenape in 1652. The ad, however, does not list Penn Treaty Park as the area’s rightful name (since 1893) but uses the native (and woke) Shackamaxon Park label with “Penn Treaty” added as an “aka.”
Only the naïve would dismiss this as a meaningless detail. Rather, this subtle change is the beginning of a process that I’m sure will lead to a total name change in time.
After all, William Penn was a wealthy, white slave owner.
Have no doubt. Efforts like “Indigenous People’s Day” have only one goal: Dismantle the entirety of white European/American history and replace it with all the myths and biases of the people that were supposedly oppressed by whitey.
I submit that the torment and vilification of those presently alive should continue until the historical record improves to my
liking.
Is this criticism or praise?
It is interesting that those who are in the process of vilifying Columbus, are doing the very same thing the KKK has also done in the past. It could be seen as evil evolving from the past to today with the KKK using a new name.
Happy Columbus Day, everyone!
Especially to Italian Americans who used to be able to feel especially good on this day but have been usurped by another group.
Celebrate anyway!
thom nickels should stick to what he knows – architecture. his fear of the whole truth is cowardly. folks who need mythology to prop up their patriotism are weaklings. i value more the people courageously facing reality and working to make our great country better.
And you are stupid enough to believe that Trump himself would have projected this onto one of the Trump towers in Miami ? The message that was projected by some jerk isn’t even signed by Trump. WTF are you talking about? It’s a farce.
Ok, thanks for the references, I’ll take a closer look.
“WORK FOR ONLY 8 HOURS PER DAYS ( 6 days a week)”
Who is the author of your content?
Luxury…We went down mine naked after walking 20 miles from home, working 8 days a week, 26 hours a day even on my birthday, had loaf of bread to share with my family…
Yeah that was your white privilege luxury mate.
Signed… Micheal Palin.
The USA is NOT a Christian country. It wasn’t founded as a Christian country for Christians. The USA was founded on rational principles derived from reason not faith. The USA was founded on the rational principle of Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Action, the freedom to think and take action according to the conclusions of your thinking, so long as your actions do not violate another individual’s life, limb, property, or freedom.
Those two rational principles can not logically be derived from the irrational and the illogical. They can not be derived from a religion that claims that man is fundamentally a depraved and evil creature by virtue of his birth, by virtue of Original Sin. If this claim were true such an evil and depraved creature could not be trusted with freedom and liberty. He would require an elite priesthood to control him at every moment of his life to curb his evil impulses. He would require a theocracy to rule over his evil nature.
If you want to destroy America destroy reason, the rest will take care of itself.
From our Rezidentura voice of the Left who always and desperately claims he is not a leftist.
“Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement. The values of Western civilization are values for all men; they cut across gender, ethnicity, and geography. We should honor Western civilization not for the ethnocentric reason that some of us happen to have European ancestors but because it is the objectively superior culture.”
— “The Christopher Columbus Controversy: Western Civilization vs. Primitivism” by Objectist philosopher Michael Berliner”
https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/1999/10/the-christopher-columbus-controversy-western-civilization-vs-primitivism/
You know T. (may I call you T.?), you would so much more convincing if you could actually write your own thoughts about western civ instead of always relying on the thoughts of others to get your silly irrelevant points across.
THE MOVEMENT AGAINST COLUMBUS was started here in Albuquerque when THEREDNATION.ORG protested against the UNM Seal, which they changed. WHO ARE THEY? THEY’RE COMMUNISTS! OPEN THE LINK! I’LL POST PART OF THEIR OWN MISSION STATEMENT!
WHY DO AMERICANS FOLLOW COMMUNIST AGENDAS AND NEVER SEEK TO FIND OUT WHO THEY’RE FOLLOWING??? FROM BLM, ADMITTED MARXISTS, to The Party for Socialism and Liberation/ANSWER, who organizes the protests including BLM and Women’s Marches. They’re hardcore members ARE ANTIFA. ALL are allowed to destroy our cities, to run our cities and universities, and promoted by The Democratic Party and the MSM. NONE will care about this link for now the changing of Columbus Day BY COMMUNISTS!
++++++++ THE RED NATION MISSION STATEMENT
This position paper of the Third General Assembly formally adopts revolutionary socialism and liberation as the primary political ideology of The Red Nation. While incomplete, the purpose of this proposal is to articulate the basic principles of revolutionary socialism and Marxism and its connection to Indigenous socialism and communism. By adopting this proposal, we commit ourselves to the study and practice of revolutionary socialism (also known as scientific socialism) by aligning ourselves with the long traditions of resistance that predate Marxism itself. Nonetheless, Marxism has become the weapon of the poor and colonized throughout the world and largely outside of Europe, a weapon we now take up as our own. Marxism is the five-fingered fist—the hand of the worker, the peasant, the colonized—and our traditions of resistance are the power behind that fist.
Marxism is a tool for making revolution, first and foremost. But it is a useless tool unless wielded properly by the oppressed. Our traditions of Indigenous resistance wield Marxism, not to uphold European traditions, but to emancipate ourselves from the colonizers by destroying that which destroys us, and building and rebuilding our nations according to our traditions and cultures so that our human and nonhuman relations and thus all people may live. And we cannot merely destroy capitalism, without the foresight and knowledge of replacing it with a more humane and just system without rulers and without colonizers. That system is called socialism, which seeks to destroy the class system and the ruling classes, redistribute land and wealth to its proper owners, and restore dignity to the humble people of the earth. Put simply, socialism is people power. Socialism puts people before profits. Socialism aligns with Indigenous traditions of relationality as we seek to be good relatives to other humans and other-than-humans. Socialism is the natural state of humanity, to live and work towards peace and justice.
Communism is the greatest expression of love for the people and our nonhuman relatives. And it is the only solution for a planet on the brink of destruction at the hands of the ruling bourgeoisie and their backwards ideologies and institutions.
+++++++
WAKE THE HELL UP! SPREAD AND SHARE THIS NOW!