Thoughts out of season: Celebrating Columbus Day

Well, after all, you can’t celebrate this holiday without celebrating the European discovery and settlement of the Americas, can you?

And, yes, much the same can be said of the US holiday of Thanksgiving, no?

And isn’t that history exactly what the followers of Howard Zinn refer to, with the gravest and most unreserved moral condemnation, as 500 years of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and theft of an entire hemisphere from its rightful owners and inhabitants?

If you accept the requisitoire and verdict integral to Zinn’s history - and this, after all, is why his history is valued - how can you not view the celebration of Columbus Day as an annual celebration of, as these people sometimes put it with that same unreserved moral condemnation, the greatest crime against humanity in all of history?

Genocide?

Counting mestizos as half, today’s Indian population of the Americas is some 100 times what it was when Columbus arrived.

Ethnic cleansing?

Well, there were certainly intentional displacements, but Mexico, Central America, much of the Andean region, and Amazonia are still overwhelmingly Indian, as they were 500 years ago.

The theft of a hemisphere?

But, amoralism apart, why accept the grossly unhistorical and even anti-historical, racist moral dogma that those who arrived in the New World before Columbus and all their descendants form a homogenous mass who, collectively and in all innocence, were and even remain the just owners of every inch of the New World, regardless of the actual, often violent history of their settlement and lives here?

And that whites arriving from Columbus onward are fully and irremediably excluded from that racially defined mass of rightful owners of half the planet, also regardless of the actual, and often peaceful, history of white settlement here?

But there are broader implications.

It isn’t just the colonization of the Americas that’s at issue.

It’s the history of successful European, white colonization of not only the Americas but Oceania.

And then there was the relatively unsuccessful colonization of Africa.

What is at issue is not so much the facts of the case – though to some extent those are at issue, too – as the moral assessment of the facts, as well as the politics to be based on that assessment.

The wholesale condemnation of this vast swath of white history is now an essential feature of the racism of the United Nations and of the liberal view of the world, as defined and certified by the PC commissars of the professional left.

That I do not exaggerate is abundantly clear, and you know it as well as I do.

And American conservatives rarely contest it.

Not even the handful of "neo-confederates" among them.

Imagine that.

And what's this all for, anyway, politically speaking?

Who benefits, and how?

Think about it.