Last week there was a historic day in New York City with the inaugural celebration of Indigenous Peoples/Italian Heritage Day, a hybrid creation by craven politicians to placate the “Progressive” forces in our society demanding the end of any tribute to Christopher Columbus as a symbol of white racial dominance and brutality toward other ethnicities.
That it is an aspersion on his character and accomplishments was of secondary importance; he is the symbol, the symbol must be destroyed.
The effort to disparage the contribution of Columbus to world history began in the 1960s following the discovery of the remnants of Viking settlements in Canada, thus leading to the theory that America was discovered by Norsemen 500 years before he sailed on his epic voyage. This contention was dismissed by the vaudevillian entertainer Jimmy Durante, who famously observed, “I don’t see any blond-haired blue-eyed Indians running around.” Historians agreed, noting that the Norse, though hunting and fishing in Labrador over a period of perhaps 400 years, never remained for long periods of time and their small settlements were completely abandoned by the 15th century. So, Christopher Columbus discovered America, case closed. Children in schools across the United States could now safely go back to drawing three little ships with crayons on construction paper in the first week of October.
Oh, but no; an attack on his reputation was to come from another quarter.
A “Native American” activist in the 1990s stated, “We didn’t need to be discovered, we knew where we were.” Of course, this is ludicrous. It is analogous to a blind man riding in an automobile; he may know that he’s in a car, but he doesn’t know where the car is located.
