Why should we celebrate Columbus Day?
What did Christopher Columbus do? It was not “discover” the New World as many people mistakenly believe.
Christopher Columbus had both the courage to launch such a daunting voyage and the smarts to monetize the New World once he landed upon it.
Many of us have the same opportunities and experiences that billionaires and other mega successful people do, but only a very few are smart enough to recognize them when they come along. It is in this that Columbus stands alone and unique among the early explorers. Most of the early explorers simply came to the New World, dropped a flag or made some markings, and left.
However, Columbus recognized the opportunity and seized upon it.
Yes, Columbus exposed the native peoples of the Americas to many atrocities, but you cannot apply the ethics of 2012 to the ethics held by people who lived in 1492. Our morals and standards will be very different from what the people of 2512 will think, as well.
Perhaps, in 2512, they will be more aggressive. Or, perhaps they may well be a compassionate people. Either way, it would be impossible for a man of today to have the moral outlook or education of someone from 500 years of distance separates, either forward or back.
Let’s also not forget that the indigenous peoples of North America at that time cannibalized and committed atrocities in blood rituals on their own peoples, as well as the Europeans.
This was common to both cultures.
Nevertheless, it was Columbus that was the herald of a changing world – one that brought capitalism and civilization to a nomadic continent.
Happy Columbus Day, for without his foresight, in all likelihood America as we know it would not exist, and might never have been given birth to the enlightened people who inhabit it today.
It is in this we celebrate, not the exploits or crimes of a single man, but of the day when our identity as Americans began to take root; the day that the future took root in the past, and from which, the blossom of America bore its first fruit.
Without Columbus, there would have been no Jamestown. Without Jamestown, there would have been no Plymouth. Without Plymouth, there would have been no Boston, Philadelphia or New York.
There would have been no expansion of the world economies with capitalism if we had all still been living in monarchies. There would have been no bulwark against the German menace of WWI. There would have been no defense against communism after that.
And what of the indigenous peoples of North America?
They most certainly would have been wiped out of existence by the genocidal madness of Nazism. Ironically, without Columbus there would have been no enlightened Americans who have the freedom of speech and thought to pass judgment upon him today.
Thomas Purcell is the host of the show Liberty Never Sleeps.
Cheerful Clips / October 13, 2014
October 13. Author: Thomas Purcell. Your right wing conservative republican New Wiorld Order Rothchild Zionist underpants are showing. I am an Inca, Aztec, Maya, Cherokee, Chumash, Native American fanboy. So, you are not invited over for dinner cuz our dinner talk would be testy.
/
Thomas Purcell / October 13, 2014
Well your latte drinking sushi eating muslim loving liberal blouse is showing. I wouldn’t go over to dinner because I don’t eat quiche and I’m not vegetarian.
/
Elaine Kain / October 13, 2014
Agree. Whatever brutalities natives were engaging in historically, the European history is full of its own atrocities – domination of women, religion, sex, economy, science, medicine. The Crusades, witch hunts, child sacrifices, genocides, stoning people, and so on is hard to brag about. It was justified under the cloak of religion or superiority by those engaging in these activities.
/
Elaine Kain / October 13, 2014
This is rather a narrow view, assumes no one else would have eventually floated across the ocean and started westward expansion by Europeans – and that this is necessarily a good thing. Possibly neither good nor bad, ‘just is’ as history wrote it. The next wave could have been Swedish, and we might all be less hung up on nudity (vs. Puritans) or it could have been Nazis. Or it could have come from the east, from the Orient. Thinking it must be a good thing because we are here has the same limitations any species could claim on self-preservation level, be it human or rat. No rat sees itself as evil, ‘just making a living’ like the rest of us. Capitalism and monetization of humanity isn’t necessarily a good thing, either; money was supposed to facilitate trade, not control lives. “Until the 7th generation” would have been an excellent adaptation for any entrepreneur, culture, government, or corporation. Selfishness, greed and profit at any cost isn’t terribly honorable.
/
Thomas Purcell / October 13, 2014
So we are no different than Nazis…..oooooh kk
/
Elaine Kain / October 13, 2014
No idea what you’re referring to, appears to be an absolutely illogical statement that reflects on the speaker. However, you claimed that, without Columbus, Nazis and communists “would have wiped out the indigenous peoples by genocidal madness”… historically, how did all the US treaties with the natives turn out, anyhow?
/
Thomas Purcell / October 13, 2014
Certainly not genocidal. Ask the Washington Redskins. Plenty in the US bitching and moaning at them.
/
Cheerful Clips / October 13, 2014
Elaine Kaine. You are invited over for dinner. If you need some financial support for any your projects, just ask.
/
Elaine Kain / October 13, 2014
Thanks, appreciate it! Possibly long walk, I’m in Minnesota.
/
sharon wood / October 14, 2014
i think we should celebrate Columbus day because he gave us somethings that we would not have.
/
Thomas Purcell / September 1, 2015
Essentially my point. Unfortunate so many go so personal with their remarks.
/
darknessdescendsuponsome / October 14, 2014
Twaddle. This reads like a high school term paper written at the last minute.
Perhaps you have heard about the Age of Exploration? It was advances in cartography and new navigational tools–the astrolabe in particular–that made it possible for adventurous and fortune seeking people like Columbus to even get close to North America. Of course, he really had no idea where he was when he first on an island in the Caribbean. He thought he had landed in India.
He was interested in bringing spices and gold back to the Spanish Crown, and for being rewarded handsomely for it. Sure, he brought Christianity to the New World. And that was such a great thing? Most Europeans considered themselves Christians and yet they were in a nearly constant state of war with each other; sometimes it was differences in their interpretation of what it meant to be a Christian (Protestants vs. Catholics vs. Greek Orthodox, etc.) but mostly it was wars of conquest. If a larger country or city/state wanted to confiscate the property and territory of people who were weaker militarily, they usually did so. Go back and look at a map of Europe circa 1000. How many nations/tribes that existed then still exist? So the culture from which Americans sprang was superior in what way?
As the anthropologist J. Diamond has pointed out, Europeans didn’t conquer much of the world because they were superior in any sense other than that they had superior weapons to the people they seized land from, and they had developed immunity to diseases–in particular smallpox–to which the native peoples of the New World had no ability to mount an immunological defense. In other words, luck and military might had a lot to do with it, not superior ideas. Trickery in the form of broken treaties in the U.S. helped too. (Sounds more like Darwin’s world, eh?)
Americans saved the day against both Nazism (not stated but implied, otherwise the Nazis would’ve never made it to the New World) and communism? Actually these two historically doomed memes knocked heads with one another months before the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor and forced the Americans to nobly enter the world wide conflict–a war most Americans wanted no part of. Yes, we were so heroic. So heroic in fact that we turned ships full of desperate Jews away from America and sent them back to Europe where they faced certain extinction.
As for communism, all I can say is thankfully Stalin was tyrannical and shrewd enough, aided by some of the worst winters of the 20th century, to turn back the invading Germans by 1943 and start their inexorable march on Berlin from the East long before any Anglo/American force had landed in France. Indeed this ill-conceived state’s ability to tie up German resources on the Eastern front made the invasion of Normandy possible.
By the way, let me tell you a little anecdote that may astonish (probably not, but why not give it a try?) you as to why communism ultimately failed as a social experiment.
The conservative narrative is that Ronald Reagan stared them down.
Here’s what my political science teacher, a fairly conservative guy, predicted in 1975: Communism in the Soviet Union had maybe 25 years to go before it imploded. I asked him: “How can you be so confident about your prediction, given that a communist state has existed in Russia since 1917?”
He replied that no economic system which did such a poor job of providing the bare necessities of life could long endure. He cited reports from friends in academia; workers in factories and government buildings left their places of work–in the middle of the day–to get in long lines at the first mention that winter boots or meat might, just might, be available at one of the local state run stores.
Gorbachev recognized this; fortunately he was too ideologically indoctrinated to understand that once you pursue a policy of glasnost, communism is doomed. For as Lenin (and Mao later) understood: communism cannot survive without centralization of authority. Which means simply, communism tolerates no dissent.
Sorry to make things look more complicated than you’d like to believe, but they are indeed much more complicated than you can apparently imagine.
/
Thomas Purcell / September 1, 2015
A flat bit of nonsense.
/
your bad / August 24, 2022
Bruv can’t even defend his own argument lmao
/