Columbus Day should be a time for Americans to come together and celebrate a shared heritage. Instead, it has become a cultural battleground, and the latest salvo against it is a vow by Antifa to deface Columbus statues nationwide.
The move is the latest proving that Antifa’s name, Anti-fascist Action, reflects pure projection. PJ Media provides some details:
Five Christopher Columbus statues have already been vandalized in New York City in recent weeks, according to Far Left Watch. In one case last month, vandals defaced a “larger-than-life” statue of Columbus in Central Park, leaving blood-red paint on his hands, and scrawled, “Hate will not be tolerated” and “#SomethingsComing” on its pedestal.
What is coming appears to be a coordinated campaign to destroy monuments all across the country on Columbus Day.
The NYC-based antifa group Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) made the announcement on Thursday, September 21, calling on antifa groups nationwide to “decorate” their neighborhoods.
According to Far Left Watch, RAM is “an extremely militant group that advocates for the violent redistribution of property” and for “the abolition of gender.”
This threat is so serious that the NYC police have been providing the marble Columbus statue in Columbus Circle around-the-clock protection. The carving has been in the spot since 1892 and never before needed “bodyguards.”
Until now. In fact, RAM has even made a promotional Columbus Day video (found here), showing black-clad anarchists defacing and destroying monuments.
The group has also issued a press release on radical leftist website “It’s Going Down.” It states:
The battles lines have been drawn and white supremacists are on notice. White nationalist statues are crumbling all over the US as our collective revolutionary power is growing. As the monuments of white supremacist society fall we must continue to make it clear that their reign of terror is coming to an end.
For the occasion of Columbus Day, October 9th, one of the most vile ‘holidays’ of the year, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement is calling for collectives all over the country to take action against this day and in support of indigenous people in the US and abroad who have been victims of colonialism and genocide.
We are calling for groups to “decorate” their neighborhoods as they see fit: put up murals, wheatpaste posters, drop a banner, etc. On October 9th put a picture of your action on social media and use the hashtags below. With these actions multiplied around the country, we will make it unequivocally clear that revolutionaries will always stand with the indigenous!
As bad as such groups are, they mainly comprise useful idiots and did not emerge in a vacuum. They reflect how for years youth have been assailed with shoddy, anti-American “scholarship” and vile propaganda. In fact, some may ask, where are the adults? Well, the answer is, setting a bad example.
Just consider the state and local governments facilitating the anti-Columbus crusade. As Aol.com informs, “Minnesota, Alaska and Vermont all celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day.”
“South Dakota celebrates Native American Day.”
“Some of the big cities that made the switch include Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Denver, Phoenix, and Austin, Texas.”
Of course, these are the fruits of miseducation, of pseudo-intellectuals in academia portraying Columbus as a genocidal, slave-owning colonizer who brought new misery to the New World.
Yet as I explained in “Killing Columbus: Seeking the ‘Undiscovery’ of America” (The New American, October 9, 2017), these assertions are largely false. For instance, the “genocide” claim is nonsense. Most post-Columbian American Indian deaths were caused by diseases that inevitably are spread when new populations mix (even today; just consider all the disease outbreaks resulting from illegal migration). Europeans themselves once died in massive numbers due to this phenomenon.
As for slavery, some dispute the reports about Columbus’ involvement in the practice. Regardless, slavery was once ubiquitous throughout the world, and it’s hard to find prominent pre-Enlightenment figures who didn’t practice, facilitate, or at least justify it. Moreover, New World Indians often enslaved other Indians — not to mention sometimes engaging in human sacrifice and cannibalism. And Western civilization would eventually put an end to all these evils.
This brings us to why we celebrate Columbus: America became America and part of Western civilization — the greatest civilization to ever grace the planet — partially because of the Italian explorer. As Live Science put it in 2011 (the following is excerpted from my Columbus essay), “News of the success of his first voyage spread like wildfire through Europe, setting the stage for an era of European conquest. One can argue whether the conquest was good or bad for humanity [note: One could, but shouldn’t]…. But it is difficult to deny Columbus’ direct role in quickly and radically changing the world.” Biography.com elaborated on this radical change:
In what is known as the Columbian Exchange, Columbus’ expeditions set in motion the widespread transfer of people, plants, animals, diseases, and cultures that greatly affected nearly every society on the planet. The horse from Europe allowed Native American tribes in the Great Plains of North America to shift from a nomadic to a hunting lifestyle. Wheat from the Old World fast became a main food source for people in the Americas. Coffee from Africa and sugar cane from Asia became major cash crops for Latin American countries. And foods from the Americas, such as potatoes, tomatoes and corn, became staples for Europeans and helped increase their populations.
The Columbian Exchange also brought the light of Christianity to the New World; in fact, The New American’s Steve Byas, a history professor, points out that Columbus was actually quite passionate about evangelization.
Of course, none of this sits well with those who hate Western Civilization and its formative faith. This is the real reason the Left hates Columbus. The claims of “slavery,” “genocide,” and “colonization” are mere pretexts justifying Western culture’s destruction. Note that these great new abolitionists never propose purging Mohammed’s name and teachings from the world, despite his having been a slave owner and trader (and mass murderer). Nor does socialist governments’ 20th-century body count of 100 million slaughtered souls preclude them from trumpeting Marxism.
As an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) extremist once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” Columbus isn’t the issue. He’s just the latest victim of cultural revolutionaries who won’t stop until Western Civilization isn’t even found in history books.
Photo of statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle in New York: Daderot via Wikipedia
