Columbus And The Racists

The other day, I amused myself by calling a couple of my Italian friend and wishing them a "happy Indigenous Peoples Day." The gag, of course, is that Christopher Columbus's discovery of the Americas in 1492 has recently been decreed an atrocity by our Best-and-Brightest. No matter that it has long been a day of cultural pride for Italian Americans. Since they are white - or more accurately finally got assigned to the "white" team after decades of racism aimed at them by earlier waves of immigrants - they don't get or deserve consideration any more.

Indigenous Peoples Day (you can read about it here), was first ideated back in the 1970s, and formally proclaimed for the first time by President Biden in 2021. It has been intended from the get-go as a counterpoint to the celebration of Columbus's first transatlantic journey, and a denouncement of the subsequent warfare, colonization, and displacement of "people who were here first."

Funny thing about that "here first" bit. It only applies when it produces the desired result. Those who apply it engage in what Jonah Goldberg dubbed snapshot geography, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Ditto for the word "colonization." If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who uses the word "colonizer," you might as well drink a jug of Jonestown Kool-Aid - the result will be the same.

For today's purposes, let's call the folks who denounce Columbus and colonization “The IP Crowd” (IP = Indigenous Peoples).

The IP Crowd engages in a whole lot of deliberate ignorance on this matter. Since all their history is filtered through their present-day metrics and dogmas, it comes as no surprise that, despite the plural nature of the word "Peoples," they lump the hundreds of tribes and cultures of the pre-Columbian Americas into one identity group. There's power in numbers, after all, and it matters not that those hundreds of tribes and cultures warred with each other, slaughtered each other, conquered each others' lands, and enslaved each other across centuries.

In other words, they engaged in the very same behaviors as the evil European colonizers did, both pre- and post-Columbus. As did just about every culture in the world at the time, and across the previous five millennia.

In other other words, I don't see any moral difference between the indigenous peoples and the Europeans. Both fail any 21st century moral test, and fail it miserably. As does every culture that existed before the Enlightenment put humans on a path to actually respecting their fellow humans.

Why, then, does The IP Crowd choose to selectively protest and denounce Columbus and the wave of immigration that his journey sparked?

Let's connect a few dots.

Modern progressivism simplifies all interactions down to zero-sum power dynamics, and it grants moral superiority to whichever side is perceived as weaker.

Thus, modern progressivism favors natives over immigrants if the natives are weaker and favors immigrants over natives if the immigrants are weaker.

Modern progressivism also favors those with darker skin in all such comparisons. Europeans coming to the Americas were the bad guys, but Latin Americans coming to the USA are not. Ditto for Middle Easterners and North Africans going to Europe, where the "colonizer" trope goes out the window and the natives are scolded for wanting to keep their cultures. On this side of The Pond, the message is literally the opposite - “native” culture should be glorified.

Power-dynamic justifications and redefinitions aside, this is literally racism. Columbus and the Europeans were white, and whiteness is today a form of original sin. No matter that "white" is as much a modern construct and amalgamation as AAPI or any of the other identity groups the woke have ginned up are. Even the most cursory look shows that "whites" warred and murdered each other in much the same way as the pre-Columbian IP of the Americas did, or Arab tribes did, or African tribes did, or Asian tribes did, et cetera and so forth. None of these groups identified with each other. It's just our 21st century Best-and-Brightest that decided, well after the fact, that they should be deemed one rather than many.

Ponder this scene from David Lean's masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, where T.E. Lawrence seeks to convince Auda Abu Tayi, leader of the Howeitat, to make common cause with other tribes under the "Arab" banner and against the Turks.

The Arabs? ... The Howeitat, Ageyli, Rualla, Beni Sahkr, these I know - I have even heard of the Harith - but the "Arabs," what tribe is that?

While Lawrence corners Auda with skillful rhetoric, and the "Arabs" united to fight alongside the English against the Turks, old tribal rivalries re-emerged in the governance of Damascus late in the movie. Lawrence's grand plans for Arab self-determination were thwarted.

There is a profound arrogance in believing one has the moral authority to reorder the world to match one's opinions of "how things should be." That arrogance has led to the rewriting of history and to "feelings" based determinations of who should be vilified and who should be beatified.

Did the arrival of Spaniards and other Europeans in the New World bring about the subjugation and demise of indigenous tribes?

Certainly - no rational person denies that.

Were those indigenous tribes somehow 'better' than the Europeans? Were their behaviors more moral, or their cultures to be held in greater esteem?

I don't see evidence of that.

If I grossly oversimplify New World history - as the The IP Crowd does - into two sides, I see no reason to grant either side favoritism, from what I see. Both sides behaved as people and cultures of their era typically did. From our modern perspective and morality, they were all barbaric. Were some cultures more barbaric than others? Oh, certainly. But our modern-day arbiters of all things moral don't bother assessing those disparities. Their favoritism has nothing to do with actual history, and everything to do with romanticized heroes and villains.

They choose those heroes and villains by looking at them. By noticing the color of their skin.

There's a word for that.