The left’s most hated holiday
By Greg Strange
web posted October 9, 2017
“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
Americans of a fairly advanced age may remember fondly from their childhood this first line of a poem about the man who is usually given credit for discovering the New World. It’s not recited much anymore because to do so would get you called out as a white supremacist so fast it would make your head spin. And then you’d be force-fed an angry litany of alleged crimes against humanity from some leftist malcontent who doesn’t understand history and is congenitally incapable of gratitude or happiness.
Well, get ready to hear that litany anyway, ad nauseam, because once again, Columbus Day is upon us. What that means is the usual insufferable rant from the left about genocide, racism, slavery, theft of land, white supremacy, hate, and maybe a few chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”
On the flip side we will also hear gratuitous romanticizing of indigenous peoples, most of who were living in something not much beyond the Stone Age when Columbus arrived. Who else but the left could find a way to romanticize primitive squalor while simultaneously denigrating the world’s greatest civilization?
So, the left’s narrative goes something like this: The Americas would have been infinitely better off if Europeans had never set foot there. That’s because five minutes after landing at San Salvador, Columbus and his band of white supremacists began the despoliation and theft of an Edenic paradise that was populated by gentle natives who were living in perfect harmony with nature, not altering the global climate and generally being a model of sustainable living. It was like one big beautiful, really cool hippie commune, only without the psychedelic soundtrack.
That’s one viewpoint. But here’s a more realistic one: From the Arctic wastes of North America all the way down to Tierra Del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, savagery ruled. In the entire 16,000,000 square miles that constitute the two massive continents, no one knew what a wheel was. Life was nasty, brutish and short. Indigenous tribes waged endless war against each other, enslaved each other and gave nary a thought to human progress. No one was down with women’s rights, gay marriage, social justice, transgenderism, multiculturalism or anything else in the pantheon of left-leaning priorities. But the propagandistic purpose those indigenous peoples now serve is to help fill up the left’s stable of diversity mascots designed to signal the left’s supposed virtue.
Native American activist Russell Means once remarked that “Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.” Whatever. The mass-murdering, human-sacrificing Aztecs who yanked out the still-beating hearts of their victims make the Europeans look like Boy Scouts. So what?
Judging people from centuries ago by today’s standards is nothing more than sanctimonious moral preening, besides being moronic. The people of the fifteenth century simply weren’t as enlightened as we are today and were only capable of operating by the standards of their own time – which is exactly what they did. What happened to the Native Americans was certainly unfortunate, but that was how the world – all of it – was at that time.
So, when a far more advanced people arrived in a new world sparsely populated by primitives, there was no way, at that time in human history and at that stage of human development, that it was going to go down like some kind of groovy, multi-culti encounter session with “diversity officers” guiding the proceedings. Instead, there was conflict and the Native Americans eventually, and unavoidably, lost. It was literally impossible, at that time, that it could have gone down any other way.
This is what all the Columbus and Western Civ haters need to grow up and accept. In 1492, and for several subsequent centuries, there was no race, nationality or civilization on planet earth that possessed the degree of enlightenment that would have brought about a different result in those circumstances.
By the way – ninety percent of Native American deaths were because of diseases for which they had no immunity. That’s not genocide, that’s biology. That happens to be a science, which is something the left claims strict adherence to, except, of course, when it interferes with their ideological goals, in which case it gets ignored or ripped to shreds.
None of this matters to leftists. The only thing that matters to them is finding justification for their perplexing hatred of America and Western Civilization. Then, they go out and do things like the militant Antifa group which recently announced its grand plan for a “Deface Columbus Day,” designed as a coordinated plan to deface and destroy historical monuments. Brilliant! A righteous war against stone statues!
Of course, some other malcontents beat them to it weeks ago and at the sight of one particular act of brain-dead vandalism, they left the messages “Racism: Tear it down” and “The future is racial and economic justice.” All of which is thinly disguised code for “We want communism.”
Here’s a reality check for these angst-ridden, Antifa hipster revolutionaries. There has never been a time in human history when there was less racism, less injustice, less white supremacy than there is right now in the United States and throughout the West. Diversity, tolerance and multiculturalism are everywhere preached like the holy gospel. Universities, corporations and government agencies bend over backwards to bring in “people of color,” whether they’re qualified or not. The slightest whiff of racism is sought out and exposed by an eager media. The tiny handful of white supremacists who still exist are universally condemned and utterly without power or influence.
In other words, institutional racism is fundamentally dead. Given the fallen nature of humankind, it really couldn’t get much better.
It’s fun to daydream about sending some of these Antifa types back to pre-Columbian America to see how they would like it. As already mentioned, life in pre-Columbian America was nasty, brutish, short and violent. There was zero opportunity for human advancement, no tolerance for diversity and nobody gave a damn about “social justice.” The most advanced cultures in pre-Columbian America, the Aztecs and the Mayans, practiced human sacrifice on a grand scale and, again, did not know what a wheel was.
Care to comment, Antifa? Or are you fine with all that?
Honestly, the stupidity and ingratitude of these leftists may be unequaled in all of human history. Winning the lottery of human existence, they were born into a civilization that, by leaps and bounds, affords more opportunity for material well-being, good health, education, prosperity and justice than any other in history. And yet, all they want to do is tear it down and replace it with . . . what? Some half-baked utopia based on an imbecilic mishmash of Marxism and social justice gibberish that, within about half a day of implementation, would collapse into a stew of irreconcilable identity politics.
So the left will wage its idiotic war against Columbus and Western Civilization while childishly refusing to accept the obvious: some cultures are clearly better than others. For instance, a culture that can put a man on the moon is clearly better than one that doesn’t know what a wheel is. A culture that can finally banish slavery once and for all is clearly better than one that sacrifices countless human beings to an angry god. A culture that seeks to improve the living conditions and lifespan of its people through scientific and economic progress is clearly better than one whose people are content to squat in the dirt around a campfire till the end of time.
Pointing all of this out is not meant to denigrate indigenous peoples. At one time, all peoples lived in a state of savagery. It was only over millennia that various groups emerged from that state at various times for various reasons, perhaps more from serendipity than anything else. Pre-Columbian indigenous peoples were human beings just like everyone else, and as such, were inherently imbued with the same potential for excellence, achievement and improvement. But human beings can only thrive and advance in the context of a culture that allows and encourages them to. At the time Europeans arrived, no such culture yet existed in pre-Columbian America.
But there was one extraordinarily good thing about pre-Columbian America: no leftism! That’s because leftism can’t thrive, or even sprout to begin with, in any environment where facing reality is of paramount importance, as it is in any primitive living circumstance where survival is tenuous.
Unfortunately, though, Western Civilization, with its prosperity and advancements, also brought about the conditions where great masses of pampered people have the luxury of being clueless, complaining about everything and indulging themselves in destructive social experimentation. And thus, we have leftism, modernity’s most virulent cancer.
If you celebrate Columbus Day, you’re not a white supremacist or a hater or any of the other leftist slanders on good people. You’re just a normal person who feels gratitude and is capable of putting things in proper perspective. You understand that history is the story of mankind’s long, torturous, indelicate slog out of a state of savagery into civilization that, while fraught with imperfection, still affords more people more opportunity for betterment than has ever before existed. 
Greg Strange can be reached at gpstrange30341@yahoo.com. (c) 2017 Greg Strange.