10/08/2023
See, earlier: Columbus Day 2020: “The Columbian Exchange” — Columbus Did Nothing Wrong, The Geneva Convention Says So
Christopher Columbus discovered America, more or less, in 1492, and died in Spain 1506, but because he’s a symbol of white “settlement” in America, he’s still in the news.
Here are some recent examples.
From the NY Post, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni pops up to honor NYC’s Christopher Columbus statue as ‘woke’ pols mull taking it down (by Carl Campanile and Jared Downing, October 8, 2023):
Christopher Columbus received some powerful Old World backing in Manhattan on Tuesday as New York City pols weigh whether to yank statues of him and other now-controversial historical figures.
Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni pointedly visited the borough’s famed Columbus Circle to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony honoring Columbus — just hours after the City Council held a hearing on proposed legislation targeting monuments and other artwork featuring the explorer, as well people such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
“Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, placed a wreath of flowers on the statue located at the center of Columbus Circle, one of the most famous in the US depicting Christopher Columbus,” said a statement from the office of Meloni, who is in the city for the United Nations’ annual General Assembly.
Here’s the statue, which dates back to 1892, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage:
“Through this important reaffirmation of identity, the President celebrated a symbol of the cultural and moral history of the American people.”
The Italian leader stood by the statue for a moment of silence — to honor Columbus ahead of the US’s Oct. 12 holiday in honor of him — before being swarmed by Italian media.
Italian PM Giorgia Meloni pops up to honor NYC’s Christopher Columbus statue as ’woke’ pols mull taking it down https://t.co/cn2VszLNCC via @nypmetro
— Maria Fosco (@MariaFosco) September 23, 2023
In contrast, Neoconservative Jeff Jacoby (Of course! He wimped on the Confederate Battle flag too!) has a column saying
I used to defend Columbus as ‘magnificent.’ I don’t anymore.
Reading what his contemporaries wrote about him opened my eyes.
Boston Globe, October 8, 2023
In 1997 I wrote a column for Columbus Day weekend that opened on a smart-alecky note: “Say,” I asked, “is it OK to admire Christopher Columbus again?”
You can actually read this online at Jacoby’s own site [Christopher Columbus, hero, Boston Globe, October 9, 1997] but Jacoby [Tweet him] doesn’t link to it in his Current Year column.
Ever since the quincentennial of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World in 1492, denunciations of the Italian navigator as a brutal conqueror and bloody enslaver had been growing louder and more vehement. I didn’t think much of the denouncers — “commissars of political correctness,” I called them — and wanted to remind readers that there were good reasons why Columbus had been regarded by generations of Americans as a great man. To be sure, by present-day standards he was no sensitive, enlightened role model. Columbus was “a zealot, greedy and ambitious,” I acknowledged, “capable of cruelty and deception.” He and the Spaniards he led to the New World were vicious in their treatment of the indigenous people they encountered. But there was no denying his astonishing feats of seamanship or the world-changing impact of his discoveries. “For all his flaws,” I concluded, “he was magnificent.”
I wouldn’t write that today. My view has changed. [More]
Jacoby’s complaint: contemporaries of Columbus said he was nasty to Indians. But this charge was definitively debunked in Carol Delaney’s book Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. We crossposted Jared Taylor’s review of it here. Columbus was actually an evangelizing Catholic who opposed nastiness to Indians.
Of course, Jacoby doesn’t read Dissident Right sites like VDARE.com or American Renaissance. But why is he changing sides now?
And finally, Puerto Rican podcaster Alana Casanova-Burgess has a New York Times op-ed What Is a Statue of Columbus Doing in Puerto Rico? [October 8, 2023].
I’ve got a guest essay in the @nytimes opinion section today about something that’s been on my mind: why are there HUGE monuments to Columbus in the Caribbean?
— Alana Casanova-Burgess (@AlanaLlama) October 8, 2023
Big thanks to editor @isvettverde. It was hard to write this week but I’m glad I did.https://t.co/ajZcEn63pO
I can answer that! Columbus discovered Puerto Rico. And if it weren’t for Columbus, there would be nothing on Puerto Rico but cannibal savages.
Everyone used to know that, but they’ve forgotten it.
Ms. Casanova-Burgess says the 350-foot statue — “tallest in the Western Hemisphere” — is “devoid of context about the violence of Columbus’s time in the Caribbean.” Well, yes, there’s nothing about the cannibals, and the Indians who tried to kill Columbus’s men.
That’s the kind of “context” that’s not allowed any more.
In 2019, the New York Times and black academic Nikole Hannah-Jones launched something they called the 1619 Project to date America’s Founding from the arrival of the first Africans in America.
VDARE.com has responded with the suggestion of a 1620 Project (and the 1620 Society — join here) that harks back to the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers.
But we should remember that, as Richard Armour’s humorous book about American History said in 1953: It All Started with Columbus.
Perhaps what we need is a 1492 Project. If so, the links below should make a start.
Happy Columbus Day!
James Fulford is writer and editor for VDARE.com.
Previous Columbus Day Coverage
Five Columbus Day stories by the late Comanche writer, patriot, and friend of VDARE.com, David Yeagley:
Stories by American non-Indians — or “white people,” as we’re known:
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.