[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
“I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social back in April. “The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.”
He noted at the time that Democrats “tore down [Columbus’] Statues, and put up nothing but ‘WOKE,’ or even worse, nothing at all! Well, you’ll be happy to know, Christopher is going to make a major comeback,” Trump continued. “I am hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!”
True to his word, in a White House Cabinet Meeting last Thursday, Trump signed a proclamation honoring the Italian explorer who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, to paraphrase the poem. Trump announced to applause in the room, “We’re back, Italians!” referring to the Progressive push to tarnish Columbus’ legacy in reaching the New World, an achievement in which Italian-Americans take great pride.
Columbus Day was established as a federal holiday in 1934, but in October 2021, then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation for Indigenous Peoples Day to exist alongside it. You may recall that failed presidential candidate (and possible upcoming Democrat presidential nominee) Kamala Harris expressed her support for “efforts on the federal level to change the second Monday in October from Columbus Day to ‘Indigenous Peoples Day.’” She has consistently recognized Indigenous Peoples Day (but not Columbus Day) in official statements since 2021. In a speech to the National Congress of American Indians that year, she said,
Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story… Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations – perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today.
Blah blah blah. The unsubtle aim of this sort of neo-Marxist historical revisionism is the racist demonization of European explorers to the Americas, and the subversion of pride in our country. (Remember when Barack Obama dismissed American exceptionalism as no different from the British or Greeks believing in British or Greek exceptionalism?) The bitter, jealous Left has worked assiduously for half a century or more to perpetuate the hateful, corrosive narrative that the history of European colonialism throughout the New World is nothing but one long, atrocity-punctuated narrative of genocide, exploitation, theft and oppression, begun by Columbus.
For a rejuvenating antidote to that narrative, I highly recommend Jeff Fynn-Paul’s 2023 book Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, a must-have for anyone who wants to be prepared to defend the truth about our civilization against the ideologically charged distortions and smears that predominate in our culture. It is a deeply researched book by a scholar who explicitly states that his intention in writing it was not to be a cheerleader for Western civilization or to whitewash atrocities that actually happened in the New World, but to simply present the balanced, objective truth about very contentious historical issues. (For a deeper dive into that book, check out my interview with Professor Fynn-Paul at The Right Take podcast here and my review of his book here.)
The book includes a chapter titled “Intrepid Explorer or Genocidal Maniac? The Complex Case of Christopher Columbus.” In it, Fynn-Paul begins by noting what a boogeyman the Left has made of Columbus. According to their narrative,
Columbus embodies the European penchant for killing and enslaving nonwhite peoples wherever they are found. Throw in the notion that he was also the founder of modern capitalism, the first imperialist, the first colonizer, the bringer of patriarchy to the New World, and the instigator of mass environmental destruction, and Columbus becomes a nearly perfect embodiment of everything hated by the Left today.
He goes on to summarize the truth, both good and bad, of Columbus’ character, accomplishments, and failures in the New World, to set the record straight and humanize the monster which the Left have constructed. It’s worth quoting at length:
Columbus’s accomplishments as a navigator and explorer are irrefutable and justly catapult him into the first rank of historical figures. For hundreds of years after Columbus, the mapmaking and geography he spurred acted as anchors for countless scientific advancements. It is no exaggeration to say that the European voyages of discovery remain foundational to all modern science and technology. Columbus was the first to bring New World peoples back into contact with the major civilizations of the Old World, and he is rightly remembered as a brash, colorful architect of modern globalism. He was also very much a man of his time and of his culture. He marveled at the wonders of the New World and had some of the sensibilities of a Renaissance artist. He appreciated the physical form and intelligence of some of the Caribbean Indians he encountered. He had the capacity for religious fanaticism, but for most of his life he was a religious opportunist who counseled moderation. He was greedy, to be sure, but like all good businessmen, he understood the need to play fair.
[…]
In sum, Columbus was no saint. He was a self-aggrandizing entrepreneur and a bad administrator who allowed anarchy to break out where some other men might have kept order. This ended up causing thousands of deaths to set the stage for more. At the same time, Columbus was an extremely brave, skilled navigator and a visionary who set the stage for modernity by uniting the two halves of planet earth. The task of governing first contact between the Caribbean and European peoples was never going to be an easy one, and the fact that New World people proved so extremely susceptible to Old World disease could have been predicted by no one.
All of this is explored in detail in this chapter of Not Stolen. Again, I urge you to get and read it.
But Fynn-Paul notes that, just as multiculturalist Leftists demonize Columbus and other European explorers, they idealize the “indigenous peoples” in that condescending soft bigotry that characterizes the Left’s attitude toward the “people of color” they claim for their own. They believe that
if only indigenous institutions and mentalities had triumphed over European ones, rather than the other way around, the world today would be a veritable utopia, where all races and genders live in harmony with nature and one another. Because that, in their idealized view, is what New World society was like before Columbus arrived.
In this simplistic, utopian worldview, which requires the Left to omit the inconvenient truths and complexities that are always part of the human story,
the wellspring of Western civilization is the oppression of Natives. A more radical statement could hardly be made, and yet this is now what passes for mainstream historical opinion. Notice how this view of history is carefully crafted to lump together the hot button issues of the modern left… The resulting worldview is so rabidly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-European that it challenges the idea of human progress itself.
And that is the real reason Christopher Columbus is a lightning rod for Left-wing hatred: he represents the principal pillars of Western civilization they want to deconstruct and destroy: Christianity, capitalism, masculinity, and “whiteness.”
As for the truth of Indigenous Peoples Day, my colleague Daniel Greenfield wrote recently,
[R]emember that the notion of ‘indigenous’ is a Marxist myth used to browbeat civilized peoples into feeling like they have no right to exist because tribes of settlers and colonists who sacrificed children on pyramids and cut the noses off women are considered to be ‘indigenous’ because they did their settling and colonizing a thousand years earlier.
In the White House statement issued on October 9, President Trump concludes,
This Columbus Day, more than 500 years since Columbus arrived in the New World, we follow his example, we echo his resolve, and we offer our gratitude for his life of valor and grit. Above all, we commit to restoring a Nation that once again dares to tame the unknown, honors our rich cultural inheritance, and offers rightful praise to our Creator above.
Happy Columbus Day.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior