The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Columbus and the Meaning of America

Posted on | October 10, 2022 | Comments Off on Columbus and the Meaning of America

“Twelve protesters were arrested and 18 police officers injured during an altercation Friday in Chicago’s Grant Park over a statue of Christopher Columbus. ‘Hundreds of protesters rallied, crowding around the Columbus statue while trying to tear it down. The statue was still vandalized and tagged with spray paint,’ according to Fox 32.”
— June 19, 2020

Sometime during the mob madness of 2020, I lost count of how many statues had been vandalized, but at least three statues of Christopher Columbus were among the targets of the “social justice” hooligans.

One may observe that this destructive impulse was not coincidental. Everything the Left ever does is destructive. The greatest “achievements” of the Left have historically been genocidal in nature, whether we are speaking of Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia or Mengistu in Ethiopia. Every left-wing radical leader as far back as the French Revolution has turned out to be a mass murderer, but we aren’t supposed to notice this trademark telos of radicalism. We are expected to think of these blood-soaked fanatics as idealists who, perhaps, got a little carried away with their idealism and thus killed millions of their countrymen. The fact that such “idealists” seizing power is always swiftly followed by the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — just a coincidence. “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

What did the mobs think they were accomplishing by toppling or defacing those statues of Christopher Columbus? What, if anything, did they actually know about the man and his achievements?

“Very little or nothing,” would answer both questions.

Ignorance and futile rage go hand-in-hand, and I doubt many of them could be inspired to actually research the life of Columbus.

“Read a book? Learn something? Are you kidding me, dude?”

Nevertheless we must recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s masterful 1942 biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, despite our knowledge that leftists don’t actually care about history, except insofar as they can hijack it and distort it to serve their own destructive agenda. They want to destroy Columbus because they want to destroy America. What is it about America that they hate so much?

Liberty, per se. By which I mean that the Left despises the sort of independent self-sufficiency — what we used to call “the pioneer spirit” — because independent people are not useful to the Left as prospective clients for their lunatic “share the wealth” schemes of economic redistribution. As I have sometimes felt the need to point out, Americans in 1776 did not issue a “Declaration of Equality,” but rather a “Declaration of Independence.” Our colonial forebears had, by necessity, learned to manage their own affairs without the assistance or supervisory instruction of the Crown. So when, after the end of the French and Indian Wars, the Crown sought to exert its authority over the colonies, this was viewed by Americans as an infringement of their liberty, or as they declared, “invasions on the rights of the people.”

The right to be left alone — to be spared the meddlesome interference of government in the day-to-day business of life — is what America is really all about, and the Left simply can’t stand this. It is wrong for you to be free from government interference, the Left believes. They crave the power to boss you around, to deprive you of your basic liberty, and this is why the Left in America, rather than desiring to overthrow the government, instead seeks to expand the authority of government, which they aim to control as an instrument of destroying liberty. And without liberty, it isn’t really America anymore, is it?

Columbus discovered America, and they can’t forgive him for that.




 

Category: History

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