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[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
“I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social back in April. “The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.”
He noted at the time that Democrats “tore down [Columbus’] Statues, and put up nothing but ‘WOKE,’ or even worse, nothing at all! Well, you’ll be happy to know, Christopher is going to make a major comeback,” Trump continued. “I am hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!”
True to his word, in a White House Cabinet Meeting last Thursday, Trump signed a proclamation honoring the Italian explorer who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, to paraphrase the poem. Trump announced to applause in the room, “We’re back, Italians!” referring to the Progressive push to tarnish Columbus’ legacy in reaching the New World, an achievement in which Italian-Americans take great pride.
Columbus Day was established as a federal holiday in 1934, but in October 2021, then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation for Indigenous Peoples Day to exist alongside it. You may recall that failed presidential candidate (and possible upcoming Democrat presidential nominee) Kamala Harris expressed her support for “efforts on the federal level to change the second Monday in October from Columbus Day to ‘Indigenous Peoples Day.’” She has consistently recognized Indigenous Peoples Day (but not Columbus Day) in official statements since 2021. In a speech to the National Congress of American Indians that year, she said,
Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story… Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations – perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today.
Blah blah blah. The unsubtle aim of this sort of neo-Marxist historical revisionism is the racist demonization of European explorers to the Americas, and the subversion of pride in our country. (Remember when Barack Obama dismissed American exceptionalism as no different from the British or Greeks believing in British or Greek exceptionalism?) The bitter, jealous Left has worked assiduously for half a century or more to perpetuate the hateful, corrosive narrative that the history of European colonialism throughout the New World is nothing but one long, atrocity-punctuated narrative of genocide, exploitation, theft and oppression, begun by Columbus.
For a rejuvenating antidote to that narrative, I highly recommend Jeff Fynn-Paul’s 2023 book Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, a must-have for anyone who wants to be prepared to defend the truth about our civilization against the ideologically charged distortions and smears that predominate in our culture. It is a deeply researched book by a scholar who explicitly states that his intention in writing it was not to be a cheerleader for Western civilization or to whitewash atrocities that actually happened in the New World, but to simply present the balanced, objective truth about very contentious historical issues. (For a deeper dive into that book, check out my interview with Professor Fynn-Paul at The Right Take podcast here and my review of his book here.)
The book includes a chapter titled “Intrepid Explorer or Genocidal Maniac? The Complex Case of Christopher Columbus.” In it, Fynn-Paul begins by noting what a boogeyman the Left has made of Columbus. According to their narrative,
Columbus embodies the European penchant for killing and enslaving nonwhite peoples wherever they are found. Throw in the notion that he was also the founder of modern capitalism, the first imperialist, the first colonizer, the bringer of patriarchy to the New World, and the instigator of mass environmental destruction, and Columbus becomes a nearly perfect embodiment of everything hated by the Left today.
He goes on to summarize the truth, both good and bad, of Columbus’ character, accomplishments, and failures in the New World, to set the record straight and humanize the monster which the Left have constructed. It’s worth quoting at length:
Columbus’s accomplishments as a navigator and explorer are irrefutable and justly catapult him into the first rank of historical figures. For hundreds of years after Columbus, the mapmaking and geography he spurred acted as anchors for countless scientific advancements. It is no exaggeration to say that the European voyages of discovery remain foundational to all modern science and technology. Columbus was the first to bring New World peoples back into contact with the major civilizations of the Old World, and he is rightly remembered as a brash, colorful architect of modern globalism. He was also very much a man of his time and of his culture. He marveled at the wonders of the New World and had some of the sensibilities of a Renaissance artist. He appreciated the physical form and intelligence of some of the Caribbean Indians he encountered. He had the capacity for religious fanaticism, but for most of his life he was a religious opportunist who counseled moderation. He was greedy, to be sure, but like all good businessmen, he understood the need to play fair.
[…]
In sum, Columbus was no saint. He was a self-aggrandizing entrepreneur and a bad administrator who allowed anarchy to break out where some other men might have kept order. This ended up causing thousands of deaths to set the stage for more. At the same time, Columbus was an extremely brave, skilled navigator and a visionary who set the stage for modernity by uniting the two halves of planet earth. The task of governing first contact between the Caribbean and European peoples was never going to be an easy one, and the fact that New World people proved so extremely susceptible to Old World disease could have been predicted by no one.
All of this is explored in detail in this chapter of Not Stolen. Again, I urge you to get and read it.
But Fynn-Paul notes that, just as multiculturalist Leftists demonize Columbus and other European explorers, they idealize the “indigenous peoples” in that condescending soft bigotry that characterizes the Left’s attitude toward the “people of color” they claim for their own. They believe that
if only indigenous institutions and mentalities had triumphed over European ones, rather than the other way around, the world today would be a veritable utopia, where all races and genders live in harmony with nature and one another. Because that, in their idealized view, is what New World society was like before Columbus arrived.
In this simplistic, utopian worldview, which requires the Left to omit the inconvenient truths and complexities that are always part of the human story,
the wellspring of Western civilization is the oppression of Natives. A more radical statement could hardly be made, and yet this is now what passes for mainstream historical opinion. Notice how this view of history is carefully crafted to lump together the hot button issues of the modern left… The resulting worldview is so rabidly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-European that it challenges the idea of human progress itself.
And that is the real reason Christopher Columbus is a lightning rod for Left-wing hatred: he represents the principal pillars of Western civilization they want to deconstruct and destroy: Christianity, capitalism, masculinity, and “whiteness.”
As for the truth of Indigenous Peoples Day, my colleague Daniel Greenfield wrote recently,
[R]emember that the notion of ‘indigenous’ is a Marxist myth used to browbeat civilized peoples into feeling like they have no right to exist because tribes of settlers and colonists who sacrificed children on pyramids and cut the noses off women are considered to be ‘indigenous’ because they did their settling and colonizing a thousand years earlier.
In the White House statement issued on October 9, President Trump concludes,
This Columbus Day, more than 500 years since Columbus arrived in the New World, we follow his example, we echo his resolve, and we offer our gratitude for his life of valor and grit. Above all, we commit to restoring a Nation that once again dares to tame the unknown, honors our rich cultural inheritance, and offers rightful praise to our Creator above.
Happy Columbus Day.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
My Callendar is calling it as Indigenous Peoples Day being all PC liberal Nonsense since they have been lying all about Columbus with this revionists History(Leftists Propaganda)to support their leftists Lies
Columbus was a champion of Indian welfare. Priests wrote praises of him.
Of course Columbus and his crew had plans to intentionally spread disease to wipe out the indigenous people though in the 1400’s there was zero knowledge about pathogens and transmission.
Are you really this stupid? How do you tie your shoes in the morning? Does mommy do it for you?
Wow! Do you really not recognize obvious sarcasm, J.B.?
I guess not. If that’s what it was.
cant quite work out why all the leftists who hate their country remain in it all the while telling all and sundry how bad it is . most have more than enough money to move elsewhere but then that would be because all the explorers and immigrants came from mostly europe . in europe there are even more statues to be torn down . colonialists galore , i am still waiting for the mass departure by all those who said they were leaving the first time trump was voted in . just shows you how shallow and vapid they all are . must be because they have made so much money out of the country they hate .
“the bitter jealous left”
This is the entire source and concept of the foot soldiers of the left in academia. They have never gotten over being on the wrong side the great schism in junior high school and never will.
They are easy pickings for the New World Order crowd that run the society.
It is so very simple. The Left hates white people.
The Cult of Jesus wasn’t Western.
It was an invading, poisonous, deadly, weed from the Middle East that sent Europe spinning into the approximately 1,000 years of the Dark and Middle Ages.
Note that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 not 992, during the Renaissance (the rebirth of reason), not during the Christian Dark Ages. By 1492, thanks be to God (so to speak) the Cult of Jesus had lost it’s complete stranglehold on the European mind and Europeans had begun to THINK again.
Although Columbus and most Europeans in 1492 were still steeped in the mysticism and irrationality of the Cult of Jesus, it was already a dying mysticism. The light of Aristotelian, pagan Greek, rationality was already eroding the stranglehold that Christian mysticism had had on Europe for almost 1,000 years.
The Renaissance man was a man that had one foot in the mysticism of the Cult of Jesus but the other foot firmly in the secular and rational philosophy of the Greek pagan Aristotle.
“Mysticism — as a cultural power — died at the time of the Renaissance.” – Ayn Rand
The laws of the G-d of Israel written in the Torah continue and long preceded your Aristotelian god!
Ah yes… you and your mythical Christian dark ages…
The MIDDLE AGES saw the construction of mighty cathedrals and the Magna Carta. Great days.
Unlike the unreasoned era we live in now. The greatest science man has ever known and we use it to proclaim global climate warming change and infest our countries with vile islam.
The so-called Dark Ages were a period of approximately 500 years following the collapse of Roman rule in Europe. Political chaos marked by competition to fill the void of power left by the Romans prevailed as Europe gradually reorganized. Religion played little if any part in the “darkness”.
So the Vatican had no influence over the Middle Ages? My ass.
“And the best way to remember the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is to remember that there’s no such thing. 9 times out of 1, indigenous or indigeneity is a myth. Any people who survived long enough probably did so by displacing multiple other peoples who came before them.” – Daniel Greenfield
Well, it’s good to know that the Jews (like the Muslims) are not indigenous to Israel either. Let’s get that myth over and done with too, Mr. Greenfield.
There’s plenty of evidence that the tribal people from whence the Jews evolved practiced human sacrifice too. The myth of Abraham willing to sacrifice his son for Yahweh is a myth that points to the primordial and universal human, primitive, practice of appeasing the mystical ghosts that primitive peoples all over the world believed controlled the world.
The existence of your brain is a myth.
Actually, Mizrahim Jews have lived in Israel for 3000 years. The Philistines, Amelikites and all the rest are extinct. Psuedostinians are Eastern invaders who despoil the land they squat on.
It’s time for us to be the bigger people. Let’s throw the multiculturists a bone and be done with it. From here on out, let’s give the Indians some credit for having discovered the first Europeans on their beach. Would that be so hard to live with?
And they said, “Well, there goes the neighborhood!”
The Salutrians likely discovered the first Indians.
The Greenlanders & Icelanders of Norwegian heritage discovered the continent North America, they just didn’t blab about it when they came back home; it was their secret, which allowed them to trade with the natives for years. Recent archaeology has borne this out. They traded with the Dorset people in Canada, and they were apparently settled for some time in Newfoundland, since they had time to do iron smelting there. You don’t do that over the weekend.
That nonsense in another post that said Columbus had a plan to wipe out the natives by infecting them was refuted in his own statement that no one knew about pathogens back then. It was a stupid and ill-informed comment intended to make Europeans explorers look premeditatively murderous.
If you’re referring to the comment about pathogens on this thread, I believe he was being sarcastic mocking the idea.
And yes the Norse were in North American long before Columbus around the year 1000 at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland where the ruins of their settlements are now a museum. The 2009 movie Valhalla Rising depicts Norsemen coming to NA at that time. So Norsemen were the Europeans who discovered the New World long before the Spanish although other primitive people from Europe whose remains have yet to be discovered may have been in NA much earlier before the East Asian and South Pacific colonizing settler forebears of today’s North and South American Indians. If anyone is owed “land acknowledgements” it may end up being Austrolopithicus.
Excellent article. Thank you for spreading the word about Jeff Fynn-Paul’s “Not Stolen” that should be mandatory in all school history courses and for anyone who refuses to pander to the “indigenous land back” lies. I own a copy which makes me a criminal if the Canadian government passes its pending law making “denial of indigenous truths” a “far right” hate crime. A few years ago on another blog exposing the Indigenous Industrial Complex, I posted my own personal “land acknowledgement”:
I am acknowledging that I have dared to squat upon the tectonic plates once stewarded by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble and beg to be allowed to grovel to their descendants as punishment for my settler colonization of their Neolithic tar pits. Bam-Bam Rubble! Say his name!
Tobacco being the main contribution to the world coming from native Americans, I always purchase a pouch of Red Man Chewing Tobacco at the convenience store.(once a year).
What a great way to celebrate native peoples day..
North American indigenous tribes were continuously engaged in territorial tribal warfare disputes over agricultural, hunting and fishing lands in addition to raiding parties which ruthlessly killed competitors and took their women and children captives as slaves. Luckily the noble indigenous tribal leaders didn’t have nuclear weapons or parts of North America would still be glowing in the dark.
Food for thought: The skin color of many ethnic Italians isn’t exactly snow white!
Part camel jockey, like the Sicilians.
Teleport all those Anti-Columbus screwballs back to 1491 so they can geta good look at those so called Peaceful Indigenous People
The Salutrians were the first known Americans, not the Amerindians. Sorry Charlie, us whiteys beat you to it. And we eventually turned America into the greatest nation on Earth rather than a savage shithole of warriing tribes. Not nations, savages who didn’t even have farming in most areas. Corn? No real nutritional value and bad on the teeth.
You Indians suck.
“Colonization” is the best thing that ever happened to the colonized. Thank you very much.
important to know the lie when they say native americans mostly died from “diseases.” here a chumash (california)elder relates that via the mission system they were enslaved, forced to work 12-14 hour days, with very little, very bad food so their immune systems were weakened.i.e. they were worked to death! the first governor of calif. from 1851 said he wanted to exterminate all of them! there were 300 massacres of villages. (see 21:00) the video deals also with culture, storytelling etc from 1851 (1st calif. governor) for 25 yrs population of chumasch etc went from 140-150 thousand to 10-15 thousand. i call that genocide.