Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion:
Of all their sins, progressive insistence on revisionism and transposing modern day mores onto history is one of the worst. The anti-history movement is a scourge on our culture and intellectual heritage.
When I was a kid we spent this time of year learning about the great explorers, sitting on the graveled blacktop squashed against one another inside chalked drawings of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. They were much smaller ships than I’d imagined.
Mere years later and Columbus Day is an annual mini-culture war. Leftists insist Columbus is heroes greatest villain. As is their standard policy, everyone must be remembered not for their greatest achievements, but for their biggest flaw.
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles dedicated his entire show today to Christopher Columbus and rightly argues that Columbus has the ability to extract so much vitriol from progressive anti-history types because he embodies western civilization. Once championed by progressive intellectuals, western culture is now responsible for everything wrong with humanity, so we’re told.
So obsessed are these anti-historians that they’ve started a nationwide attempt to renameColumbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day, which as The Federalist points out, is far worse:
When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.
For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to “Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865,” by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”
“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”
Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”
That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”
Facts and things though.
Columbus’ motivations have been largely mischaracterized and lost in the discussion is his dedication to spreading Christianity to newly found lands. The Daily Signal writes:
