On Columbus Day
Let me voice my vexed conclusions regarding the ongoing denigration by the self-anointed Elite of Columbus Day.
In the same way gratitude is the only attitude toward creation which makes the existence of any mortal in creation endurable, if not joyful, so ingratitude is the only attitude certain to despoil what joy one has. Even Eve was ungrateful for the blessings of Eden, or else she would not have been tempted to know more.
The ingratitude toward Columbus, however, is pitch-perfect in its archetypal self-destructiveness.
Those who hate Columbus hate themselves.
Even a matricide like Nero only kills his mother or burns his capital city; he does not slander the memory of all Roman history, nor wish the known world void of any memory of human life.
In 1892 President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed October 12 a holiday to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus. This was done in an atmosphere of rising hostility to Italian immigrants and Catholics, as an amelioration to world opinion in general, and the Italian nation in particular.
Ironically, it was the progressives of the day, the cosmopolitans, who thought the American dream should embrace more than Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Columbus was celebrated in statewide holidays by the notorious Democrat machine of Tammany Hall. The Catholics vote in those days, as in these, was overwhelmingly Democrat: Columbus was an emblem so beloved that the Catholic charity Knights of Columbus named themselves in his honor.
But Columbus was rightly regarded in those days as a symbol of the American ideal for all Americans: bold, adventurous, innovative, willing to defy the wisdom of the world for his daring dream. Ronald Reagan remarked in his 1988 speech, Columbus Day is “to celebrate not only an intrepid searcher but the dreams and opportunities that brought so many here after him.”
There are others who can sum the matter more eloquently than I.
Let us turn to a fictional scofflaw and felon, Tony Soprano. Please note the name of the book his son is reading: this is the real title of a real book! It is not a parody meant to mock self-important pinkos, albeit, let us hasten to add, not so intended by its author. The self-parody is unintentional: for PRAVDA was taken.
From THE SOPRANOS
Note: no literate man in the generation of Columbus thought the world flat. Indeed, the shape of the globe, and its diameter, had been correctly estimated since the time of Aristarchus of Samos circa 300 BC. Columbus was mocked, and rightly so, by the courtiers of Europe because his estimation of the size was off by fifty percent. Sailing by his calculations would not land a ship in India, as Columbus thought, but only get her halfway there. Which is in fact what happened: Had there not been an undiscovered continent for Columbus to find, all would have been lost. A more unlikely serendipity history does not record.
Moreover, he was not a product of his time. His treatment of the Indians (and he and we still call them) was exemplary, far more humane than the norm of his day and age.
Is Columbus to blame for the evils that befell following European colonization of the New World? If so, he is to be credited also with the benefits that likewise followed, including the foundations of the greatest nation ever to exist, the preservation of liberty in the world, and the promulgation of that theory of natural and universal rights which forms the sole basis for any criticism of Columbus, or any other explorer, pioneer, colonist.
Those who wish to recite the wickedness and depredations of Christendom against pagan lands and races, are welcome to do so, provided equal time is liven to reciting the wickedness and depredations visited on Christendom, or by one tribe or race against another, long before.
One example must stand for a plethora: Mohammedan conquests of North Africa and the Near East broke the aqueducts, toppled cities, and returned endless acres of irrigated farmland to arid wilderness, replacing Christianity with a savage and inhuman theocracy. The number of white slaves held in bondage in these lands far exceeds the number of black slaves held in North America at any time, whose original numbers, by the way, were sold by Mohammedan slavers.
Compared to Utopia, any society must seem a hell, and merit scorn, if not violent revolution. This includes the fictional Utopias imagined by socialists in the future, and equally fictional Golden Age of Hesiod in the past, or its dull and silly copy penned by Rousseau, who imagined tribal life before the invention of private property to be peopled by noble savages.
Hobbes is more clear eyed than Rousseau, for he correctly sees life in the state of nature to the war of all against all:
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Again, the myth of the noble savage, who lived peaceably with his neighbors before the coming of the White Man to North America is an absurd fiction. It is an insult to history, and an insult to one’s intelligence.
But, again, there is another who can wax eloquent on the point moreso than can I.
From BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE (2007)
So why the endless defamation of Christopher Columbus? Why pull down his statues, and rename his holiday to celebrate the cannibal savages he found in the Carib islands, or the human butchers of the Aztec Empire in Mexico?
This is not because the Left loves Indians. Indeed, they hate them, and seek to remove their name and image from public life. The Indian in sponged away from football teams, Boy Scout meetings, even butter packages. The Left insists they be called Natives, even though that word, if used in India, is likewise an insult.
Leftism is a deathcult. It is an unacknowledged bastard child of Christian theology, a heresy, in fact, taking certain Christian principles concerning love for one’s enemies and pity for the downtrodden, and applying them backwardly. These principles simply make no sense outside the Christian context: there is no Darwinian reason to affirm the existence of natural rights, and no material reason to affirm the equality of all men.
Equality is a spiritual property, based on the insight that all men, even the weakest and wickedest, is made in the image and likeness of God. From a material point of view, equality is an absurdity, neither achievable nor desirable: for, absent God, equally means punishing the successful, hating the fortunate, and beheading the tall. Material equality means robbing a man’s material wealth, and handicapping his inborn advantages.
Cult is a cult because it severs all other human relationships to family, friends, town and nation, rather than affirming and enriching them. A Christian can pray for the non-Christian leaders of his nation to prosper, and, indeed, we are obligated to do so. A Cultist can only hate his nation, because a cult demands undivided loyalty.
Christians, and any men of sober religion, see all men as sinners, and see the sorrows and evils of life on every side, within himself and his nation as well as within others. Sin is the natural of man, original to his mortal life: Original Sin.
Cultists sees only the cult as good, and all others as evil. There is no original sin: all evil springs from lack of loyalty to the Cult. The outsider, the enemy, the unenlightened causes all the world’s woes, and all will be cured once the cult is universal and absolute.
A deathcult is a deathcult because it sees life itself as the enemy, the world as irredeemable and deplorable. For a deathcult, the world deserves to perish merely for the sin of coming into existence at all. Merely by existing, existence causes pain and misery, and no joy can amend this.
Remember, as we said to being, joy is produced by gratitude. This is the one emotion the deathcultist cannot know.
If all existence is condemned to death, then one’s self, one’s family, one’s race, one’s nation, one’s history, one’s culture, one’s faith all must be destroyed, preferably after sadistic pains and humiliations.
Why such hate for Columbus? His discovery was a credit to the genius of the white race. The Christian names adorning the maps of Spanish explorers, from Sacramento to San Francisco to San Salvador glorify sacrament, saint or savior. He is a founder, not merely of our nation, but of this hemisphere, and one of the exemplars of history, an inspiration of hope.
So those who hate hope, hate history, hate saint and savior alike, hate the White race, hate their own culture, people, clan and family, and want to see their friends conquered, looted, raped and murdered, are indeed suicidal.
Columbus is a perfect example of everything the deathcult wants dead.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
