Stop celebrating Christopher Columbus

Every year, we’re treated to the same routine. Those on the left bash Columbus and white people. Those on the right defend Columbus and white people.

Today’s Amren homepage features 4 headlines related to Columbus day:

UMaine Group Faces Backlash Amidst ‘Indigenous People’s Day’ Controversy

When Talking About Indigenous Peoples Day, Tucker Carlson Sounds Just Like a White Supremacist

To the extent that bashing Columbus (day) is largely the equivalent of bashing whites, and their historical achievement, I agree that we should not take such attacks passively. We should definitely defend Western civilization.

But, with all due respect, I must disagree with my friends at American Renaissance. If we are to reject Martin Luther King, and his associated “day,” due to his moral failings, then we should definitely reject Christopher Columbus, and his associated “day” due to his moral failings. If we are to condemn Mohammad for marrying a six-year-old girl, and keeping sex-slaves, then we must also condemn Columbus for similar crimes.

King was guilty of plagiary, disrespecting women (possibly including rape), associating with Communists and promoting racial favoritism.

According to the accounts we have at our disposal, Columbus committed the following crimes:

1.He cut off the hands of roughly 10,000 Natives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Columbus mandated every indigenous Taino over the age of 14 provide him with a “hawk’s bell” of gold every three months. Those who failed to meet orders were “punished by having their hands cut off” and were “left to bleed to death,” Columbus’s son Fernando reported.

2.Columbus punished minor offenses by cutting off Natives’ noses and ears.

 

3.Columbus combatted resistance by releasing hunting dogs to rip Indians apart. People were “eaten (alive)” and “20 hunting dogs … were turned loose and immediately tore the Indians apart,” wrote Spanish historian and Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas, who witnessed much of the carnage.

 

4.Columbus and his crew hunted Natives for sport and used their bodies for dog food. If their dogs grew hungry, “Arawak babies were killed for dog food,” Bartolome de las Casas reported.

 

5.Columbus spearheaded the transatlantic slave trade. When he essentially massacred a whole race in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he began enlisting Natives from other islands. He would also ship these people to Europe as slaves. When so many of these people died on the journey, the Spanish turned to Africa for slaves. Columbus’ son carried out the first Africa-to-Caribbean slave trade in 1505.

6.Columbus encouraged his men to rape Native women as young as 9 or 10.

In one particular documented example, Columbus shipmate Miguel Cuneo took a teenage “Caribbean girl as a gift from Columbus” when they embarked back to Spain. She “resisted with all her strength” his attempts to have sex with her, so he “thrashed her mercilessly and raped her.”

7.Columbus ordered his men “to cut off the legs of children who ran from them (in order) to test the sharpness of their blades,” according to Bartolome de las Casas. The invaders also reportedly “roasted” children “on spits,” and “hack(ed) the … children into pieces.”

Some of these accusations may be exaggerated. I hope so; it’s the stuff of nightmares. I have yet to see any contemporary accounts that describe Columbus as being benevolent.

We can do nothing to change the past, and I am not advocating for the destruction of monuments honoring Columbus, or the renaming of places that bear his name. But if anybody should honor Christopher Columbus, it would be the Pakistani rape gangs of Britain; they are his spiritual descendants.

The fact that Columbus was condemned, even in his own day, reflects well on Western civilization. Though he was never punished adequately for his crimes, at least he was held accountable to some extent:

Eventually, his methods and actions caught up with Columbus. A number of settlers lobbied against him at the Spanish court, accusing Columbus of mismanagement. In 1500, the king and queen sent in a royal administrator, who detained Columbus and his brothers and had them shipped home. Although Columbus regained his freedom and made a fourth and final voyage to the New World, he had lost his governorship and much of his prestige.

The fact that his excesses, against the natives, were recorded is testimony to the fact that some of his compatriots had a conscience.

At the same time, and up until recently, such savagery was commonplace in the non-Western world. Do we have any accounts of Mongols condemning the atrocities of Genghis Khan? Were there Zulu scholars who tried to reign in the barbaric practices of Chief Shaka? Do we have records of Aztec priests protesting the massive numbers of human sacrifices, whose hearts were torn out on the pyramids?

The fact that Columbus was condemned, and even punished, by his superiors – even though he was a national hero at the height of Spain’s glory – is something to be proud of. It shows that Europeans, flaws and all, at least strive toward a higher standard of morality.

This is what we should be proud of, and it’s necessary to make the distinction that so many of our leftist enemies refuse to make: Christopher Columbus does not equal white people or Western Civilization. We can condemn one, and defend the other.

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13 Responses to Stop celebrating Christopher Columbus

  1. Looking to your linked article, this is the only reference I found
    https://www.phillymag.com/news/2012/10/08/speaking-cutting-peoples-hands-happy-columbus-day/
    Not sure how credible. None of our leftists never found out about these stories?
    On the other hand, perusing Steven Pinker’s book about the historic crime reduction, I found: the middle ages were full of cruelties as described (disemboweling, impaling, burning alive) but against European enemy cities, apostates, common criminals. Even the own soldiers and seamen were pulled under the ship or flogged to the bones. Cruelty was fairly common in the middle ages.

    • jewamongyou says:

      We don’t have much in the way of solid evidence from those early encounters. What we do have does not paint a pretty picture. Brutal as the Middle Ages were, it’s not as if they knew no limits to cruelty. There were still standards of decency.

  2. oogenhand says:

    http://shoebat.com/2019/10/17/paganism-has-taken-over-the-vatican/
    There is racial identitarian, hence why he speaks of “self-determination” and a priority for “languages” and “cultures”. Secondly, we see paganism. Hence a praise for “shamans.” If this sort of language could be officiated as acceptable by the Catholic Church, then easily European identitarians who claim Catholicism could use Church synod doctrine to elevate their own self-determination and their cultures and languages all for an ethno-nationalist cause. From indigenous identitarianism, racialists in a traditionally Catholic country like Austria could as easily then promote a White Euro focused identitarianism. Martin Sellner, a leader of the Identitarian movement in Austria who claims traditional Catholicism, believes that he is taking part in a struggle for the continuation of European culture, and in this he is completely in favor for elevating European pagan images like Thor’s Hammer:

    • jewamongyou says:

      That’s an interesting story. I can see the current pope honoring paganism, but I can’t see him trying to protect the indigenous peoples of Europe. As for actual Catholics, there may be some hope of this.

  3. Mike says:

    “The invaders also reportedly “roasted” children “on spits,” and “hack(ed) the … children into pieces.”

    False wartime / victor’s propaganda has a certain smell and this is it. I wouldn’t take a single claim in that list at face value as a result. Most if not all are very likely invented out of nothing.

  4. Mike says:

    Sorry to have not written with more clarity. I was attempting to imply that the long-time-horizon victors are those who prop up the authors that now write such extreme accusations and write most of the modern textbooks. Even if those victors paradoxically benefit from the exploits of those Spaniards.

    Whatever the colonial idealism and actual actions of the Spaniards, both are now ideologically defeated: at least in the public record in academia and according to the modern propaganda outlets.

    The wider condemnation by these institutions, of the modern version of the general Spanish colonial agenda, serves to imply that the Spanish are not to be judged on their own history and merit but instead prejudged and condemned perhaps even in spite of it.

    I would guess that all such accusatory pieces (to be polite) exclude detailing “indigenous” (migrated Asian) Indian cannibalism and human sacrifice found by the Spaniards. Which wouldn’t excuse hypothetical Spanish atrocities, necessarily, but it would lend an air of agenda-free objectivity.

    These entities are bent on defeating the Spaniards even if it takes a straw man to defeat them. If Spaniard atrocities did not exist, they would be invented. It is to be expected that the Spaniards are now cast as demons in the public record.

    In my opinion, the modern zeitgeist assures a measure of victor’s propaganda about the Spaniards. Whether these accusations are a case of that or not, and I argue that they have the tell-tale red-flag of fantastical inhuman extremism (that happens to target the most sympathetic members of the victim group), they cannot be trusted at face value.

    • jewamongyou says:

      Yes, I see where you’re coming from. I didn’t examine many of the original sources, but it would be interesting if somebody who did would weigh in on this. The defense you offer can be used to absolve any white person who lived a long time ago – because the current zeitgeist is against ALL white people. Yet we can be certain that some of them really were bad people.

      • Mike says:

        “The defense you offer can be used to absolve any white person who lived a long time ago – because the current zeitgeist is against ALL white people. Yet we can be certain that some of them really were bad people”.

        That’s theoretically true. I offer three points in response to your comment and other perspectives that would leave the door open to the narrative in question:

        1. A circular “it is worthwhile to consider the possibility that the Spaniards are evil because the current rage against White people might cause an (incorrect) reactionary prejudice that would assume that accusations of evil are wrong” seems to likely to result in a never ending rationalization loop. I took it around to a place of reactionary prejudice in favor of the accused group (which is the generally accepted method once a clearly prejudicial environment has been discovered), you looped it back around, and then I can simply take it around again.

        The problem with that is that’s not how we generally adjust the gimlet eye when obviously prejudicial environment is in place. The Spaniards may or may not have taken part in some evil things that the above narrative accuses them of, but the current narrative against them has been tainted by the current zeitgeist. Full stop.

        With absolute proof of accusations, I am fine with the narrative that results. Without it and until it comes, the broader prejudicial environment causes the conclusion to necessarily point to the modern bias. In that case, we can re-discuss this specific topic as a society when the broad brush against White people and their history is no longer in use.

        2. The aforementioned red flags in their narrative, to the point of complete lack of credibility of some of the accusations in my opinion. This is not insignificant to the argument as to whether any of this narrative is true or not.

        3. The lack of historical contextual detail including both what I mentioned in regard to the barbarism of the “natives” and the thousands of historical details that I didn’t, which are always left out, but which tend to define our hidden true histories. In short, I personally find it impossible to pass judgement, in general and across history, without most of the fine history detail.

  5. Robert Sykes says:

    I reject MLK Day because MLK is black. I celebrate Columbus Day, because Columbus is White.

  6. jewamongyou says:

    Re: Mike,
    Thanks for your thoughtful comments Mike. I’m in the process (slowly) of examining what sparse original documents we have of those long-ago days. You definitely have valid points. There is an underlying point, however, that I didn’t bring up: There’s a difference between the actual, historic, human being and the cult persona that he may become centuries after his death. For example, Jesus Christ might have been a militant of some kind, or never have existed at all; we don’t know. But if you say you’re “against Jesus Christ” today, what you’re actually saying is that you oppose what he now stands for for most people. That’s an extreme example, granted, but Christopher Columbus also falls in that continuum.

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