Abolishing the West: Dismantling Traditional Western Culture By Chris Knight (Florida)
Columbus Day here in the US is roughly equivalent to Australia Day back in OZ, and in both pioneer countries there is the same black arm band response from the Left and multicults. These days are said to be white racist, need to be abandoned, whites replaced by their elites, and new guilt days installed. What a pity the good people do not engage in legal mass strikes to end all of this, since ultimately this revolt is dependent upon stable food, water and energy supplies. But, today there is no longer the pioneer spirit, and no mass resistance, the central problem of our political paradigm.
“President Biden is trying to Replace [Columbus Day] with the first Hate-America Holiday. Invented by resentful Indians with the help of Leftist activists, Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebrates the wonderfulness of indigenous people generally, and how sorry the Federal government is or should be for interfering with them in the past.
The Federal Government has a solemn obligation to lift up and invest in the future of Indigenous people and empower Tribal Nations to govern their own communities and make their own decisions. We must never forget the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country. Today, we acknowledge the significant sacrifices made by Native peoples to this country—and recognize their many ongoing contributions to our Nation.
A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2021 October 8, 2021
Note that this right of Tribal Nations “to govern their own communities and make their own decisions” is something American white people haven’t had for years.
Biden also took the occasion of proclaiming the legal holiday of Columbus Day to attack Christopher Columbus. After some weasel words about Italian-Americans, still frequently part of what’s left of the Democratic Party’s white base (especially in Biden’s home state of Delaware) he goes on about how evil Columbus was, and how evil America is for existing:
Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past—that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them. For Native Americans, western exploration ushered in a wave of devastation: violence perpetrated against Native communities, displacement and theft of Tribal homelands, the introduction and spread of disease, and more. On this day, we recognize this painful past and recommit ourselves to investing in Native communities, upholding our solemn and sacred commitments to Tribal sovereignty, and pursuing a brighter future centered on dignity, respect, justice, and opportunity for all people.
A Proclamation on Columbus Day, 2021, October 8, 2021
In contrast, see President Trump’s 2020 Columbus Day Proclamation, which says in part:
More than 500 years ago, Christopher Columbus's intrepid voyage to the New World ushered in a new era of exploration and discovery. His travels led to European contact with the Americas and, a century later, the first settlements on the shores of the modern day United States. Today, we celebrate Columbus Day to commemorate the great Italian who opened a new chapter in world history and to appreciate his enduring significance to the Western Hemisphere. …
Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus's legacy. These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions. Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister. They seek to squash any dissent from their orthodoxy. We must not give in to these tactics or consent to such a bleak view of our history. We must teach future generations about our storied heritage, starting with the protection of monuments to our intrepid heroes like Columbus. This June, I signed an Executive Order to ensure that any person or group destroying or vandalizing a Federal monument, memorial, or statue is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. …
On this Columbus Day, we embrace the same optimism that led Christopher Columbus to discover the New World. We inherit that optimism, along with the legacy of American heroes who blazed the trails, settled a continent, tamed the wilderness, and built the single-greatest nation the world has ever seen.
Proclamation 10100—Columbus Day, 2020, by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States, October 9, 2020
Of course Biden, above, is wrong about not seeking “to bury these shameful episodes of our past”—the Left enthusiastically trumpets anything done by whites that can be interpreted as shameful, while burying any shameful episodes committed by people of color.
Examples of the latter: Indian massacres (violence perpetrated by “Native communities”), black uprisings and mass murders committed during slavery, black race riots of the Sixties, the whole history of Reconstruction, and the huge crime spree committed by blacks from the Civil Rights Era until today.
As for the atrocities Biden is blaming whites for, they’re mostly bogus: the “introduction and spread of disease” was mutual (syphilis spread to Europe as part of the "Columbian Exchange", and so did the potato blight that caused the Famine in Ireland).
And as for the “theft of Tribal homelands”, I’ve explained before that they weren’t stolen. To quote Felix S. Cohen, a leading 20th Century scholar of Indian law:
Fortunately for the security of American real estate titles, the business of securing cessions of Indian titles has been, on the whole, conscientiously pursued by the Federal Government, as long as there has been a Federal Government. The notion that America was stolen from the Indians is one of the myths by which we Americans are prone to hide our real virtues and make our idealism look as hard-boiled as possible. We are probably the one great nation in the world that has consistently sought to deal with an aboriginal population on fair and equitable terms. We have not always succeeded in this effort but our deviations have not been typical.
The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers Of Felix S Cohen,1960, p 280. Emphases added.
Thomas Jefferson said much the same thing in 1785 about land titles in Virginia:
That the lands of this country were taken from them by conquest, is not so general a truth as is supposed. I find in our historians and records, repeated proofs of purchase, which cover a considerable part of the lower country; and many more would doubtless be found on further search. The upper country we know has been acquired altogether by purchases made in the most unexceptionable form [Notes on the State of Virginia ch. 11].
At VDARE.com, we’ve been talking about “Abolishing America” in our headlines for years.
This Biden balderdash is more of the same—saying it was wrong for the Genoese navigator to cross the seas 1492, Virginia Dare’s parents to cross the seas in 1587, the Pilgrim Fathers to do the same thing in 1620, and the California pioneers to cross the plains in 1849 and afterward.
Biden’s anti-Americanism part of a Blood Libel against white America and the Historic American Nation, which only exists today because white people steadfastly refused to be scalped, burned alive, or massacred.
They survived and made America—and the modern world.”
“The Catholic League reported it is taking the day off for Columbus Day Monday, in honor of Christopher Columbus and not Indigenous Peoples, observing the attacks on the great explorer and the day set aside to honor his memory were inspired by leftist historian Howard Zinn.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, the watchdog agency and defender of the civil rights of all Catholics, wrote a three-part series on Columbus and the origins of the attacks on the man and the day intended to honor his achievements.
Donohue noted that in the 1990s, Yale University decided not to accept a $20 million contribution from Lee M. Bass to expand the Western civilization program at the school.
“Highly politicized members of the faculty wanted to replace it with a multicultural program,” Donohue wrote. “The faculty won and Bass got his money back.”
Elaborating, he observed:
The fact is that many professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, hate Western civilization; they have a particular animus against the United States. That this is happening at a time when many poor people from Latin America are crashing our borders is perverse. Yet the pampered professors still keep railing against the U.S. They just don’t get it.
“The attack on Columbus, and on Columbus Day, is traceable to the ideology of multiculturalism,” Donohue continued, adding that Pope Benedict XVI “rightly observed that multiculturalism has bred not only a contempt for the moral truths that adhere to the Judeo-Christian ethos, it has led to ‘a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological.’”
Donohue credited the efforts of Howard Zinn and his A People’s History of the United States with providing the “inspiration behind the attacks on Columbus Day and the one most responsible for replacing it with Indigenous People’s Day.”
Zinn’s book has sold two million copies since its publication in 1980, and the Zinn Education Project continues his work to this day, not only attacking historical icons like Columbus but also promoting critical race theory (CRT) in K-12 schools.
The Catholic League president observed the irony of the characterization of Zinn as “a man who hated oppression”:
He found it almost impossible to condemn atrocities committed by the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao, owing, no doubt to his membership in the Communist Party. According to Ronald Radosh, one of the most prominent students of Communism, “Zinn was an active member of the Communist party (CPUSA)—a membership which he never acknowledged and when asked, denied.”
Donohue noted the work of Alexander Hamilton Institute scholar Mary Grabar, author of Debunking Howard Zinn, who asserted Zinn lied profusely about Columbus, contributing to campus outrage against the October 11 day set aside to honor his memory.
As Breitbart News reported in 2019, Grabar made the case that Zinn “intentionally misleads his readers” by “omitting relevant portions of Columbus’ writing.”
For example, Zinn wrote in A People’s History:
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log: ‘They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton, and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned …
According to Grabar, Zinn purposefully placed the ellipses to deceive his readers in order to omit text from the explorer’s journal that would not contribute to his narrative.
Grabar wrote:
But Zinn’s most crucial omissions are in the passage from Columbus’s log that he quotes in the very first paragraph of his People’s History. There he uses ellipses to cover up the fact that he has left out enough of Columbus’s words to deceive his readers about what the discoverer of America actually meant. The omission right before “They would make fine servants” is particularly dishonest. Here’s the nub of what Zinn left out: “I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they come here from the mainland to take them for slaves.”
Donohue added that Zinn also “would never acknowledge what Carol Delaney, a Stanford University anthropologist, had to say about Columbus. She maintained that Columbus acted on his Christian faith and told his crew to be kind to the Indians.”
In October 2019, Professor Emeritus Delaney wrote in a letter to the editor at the Providence Journal that she was “appalled” following an attack on a statue of Columbus.
The author of Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, called “one of the 100 best books of the year” by The Times Literary Supplement, Delaney asserted, “Most people know little about the man and it is about time they learned.”
She continued about Columbus:
His project was to meet the Grand Khan of China to set up a trading post. There was absolutely no intention of enslaving the people in the greatest empire in the world. The gold obtained was to be used to finance a crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims before the end of the world, which people thought was fast approaching because of a number of seemingly apocalyptic events. Columbus continually begged Queen Isabella to send priests to instruct and baptize the natives. Baptized people could not be enslaved.
He remained friends with the Indians throughout; the horrible deeds were committed, against his orders, by the men he left behind while he was trying to find the Khan. This is all in Columbus’s writings. He was a very religious man and became a Franciscan monk after the first voyage. No doubt, this was partly in penance for the deeds of some of his men.
Donohue said about Zinn’s omissions of “this side of Columbus,” it is not that the leftwing historian was “unaware … he just glossed over evidence that contradicted his thesis.”
“Just as bad,” Donohue added, is that “some promote the idea that virtually all the Indians were kindly souls who respected the land and treated each other with dignity.”
“This is a romantic fairy tale having no basis in history,” he asserted. “The truth is that some were gentle while others were brutal.”
Donohue warned that “a country that cannot agree on who to honor is in trouble.”
“Worse, a country whose public officials take no action against those who destroy statues on public land of those who have made significant contributions to American society are sending the wrong message,” he wrote. “When a nation’s historically renowned figures become part of our throw-away culture, it does not bode well for instilling patriotism in young people.”
The same romantic primitivism, the “myth of the noble savage,” is present in the Australian debate, and the parallels are remarkable when one takes a step back to look. Remember, once the Australian Liberal Party are defeated, the Labor Party will be just like our Democrats, hence the need for Australians to pay attention to what is being done to us, because you are next.
https://www.catholicleague.org/origins-of-the-assault-on-columbus/
https://www.catholicleague.org/columbus-day-or-indigenous-peoples-day/
https://www.catholicleague.org/the-dark-side-of-indigenous-peoples/
https://www.amazon.com/Scalp-Dance-Indian-Warfare-1865-1879/dp/0811729079
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