Columbus and the Crisis of the West

From Eighth Day Institute:

During the riots that took place in America in mid-2020, several statues of Columbus were toppled. After a statue in Milwaukee fell, video circulated of people—mostly young white women—taking turns stomping on it. This was presumably because they regarded Columbus as the source of the displacement and killing of native peoples and subsequent slavery and racism in the Americas. Whatever the reason, however, it’s quite certain that, unlike Las Casas, the mobs knew little or nothing about the person against whom they raged—or about other figures, including abolitionists, even the black activist Frederick Douglass, whose statues they toppled. And probably did not much care to know, because it has become self-evident to many people, insofar as there is any conceptual basis for such notions, that the whole history of. Western exploration and expansion is nothing but a tale of exploitation, imperialism, and “white” supremacy. If you believe that, prior to any look at the facts—or any sense of the complexity of history—then it also appears wrong to try to sort out the good and the bad present in this process, as in all things human. That amounts, on the radically critical view, to making excuses for genocide and racism.

It used to be possible to assume that any person who had graduated from high school (even grade school) would be familiar with at least a few facts about what happened in 1492. That this is no longer the case reflects failing educational institutions, to be sure, but also—it needs to be said—an anti-American, even an anti-Western and often anti-Christian, ideology that has arisen within the West itself: all the West, because, in 2020, mobs tore down statues in England, France, Belgium, Canada, Australia, and beyond. This widespread unrest calls for careful attention. You don’t need to believe that the French or communist revolutions, for example, were of unmixed benefit to the human race to take the trouble to know dates such as 1789 or 1917 and something about what they mean. Yet the year in which a far greater change came into the world—indeed, began the colossal process by which the various nations and continents truly became one global, interconnected world—has been taught for many years now as something to be ashamed of, even to denounce. In a saner mood, we might regard it as owing to the boldness and tenacity of Columbus, however little gratitude he now gets, that we today inhabit that world. (Read more.)

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