Goodbye, Columbus

Happy Indigenous Peoples' AND Italian-American Heritage and Culture Day! I thought I'd reposted my own favorite Columbus Day post, from 2017, but I never have, so here it is:

No rapist, Amerigo Vespucci, in yellow tights, chastely declines a proffer of women in Honduras, 1497. Illustration by Theodor de Bry, ca. 1592, via Wikipedia.

An interesting wrinkle in this year's pro–Columbus Day noise is the suggestion that if you don't like Columbus Day you must be allied with the Ku Klux Klan. Why? Is the Klan supporting a national holiday honoring our indigenous peoples?

Sadly, no. It's all about identity politics, and the Klan's denial of the Italians' ethnic pride. As we read from Jarrett Stepman at Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal:

Much of the modern rhetoric about Columbus mirrors attacks lobbed at him in the 19th century by anti-Catholic and anti-Italian groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

In fact, Columbus Day became a nationally celebrated holiday following a mass lynching of Italians in New Orleans—the largest incident of lynching in American history....

As the pro-Columbus website The Truth About Columbus points out, the Ku Klux Klan worked to stop Columbus Day celebrations, smash statues, and reverse his growing influence on American culture.

According to The Truth About Columbus, in the 1920s, the Klan “attempted to remove Columbus Day as a state holiday in Oregon,” burned a cross “to disturb a Columbus Day celebration in Pennsylvania,” and successfully “opposed the erection of a statue of Columbus in Richmond, Virginia, only to see the decision to reject the statue reversed.”

Attempts to quash Columbus failed, but they have re-emerged in our own time through the actions of far-left groups who want to see his legacy buried and diminished forever.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891 was the worst lynching in American history?

A (Truly) Modest Proposal: Goodbye Columbus

No rapist, Amerigo Vespucci, in yellow tights, chastely declines a proffer of women in Honduras, 1497. Illustration by Theodor de Bry, ca. 1592, via Wikipedia.

An interesting wrinkle in this year's pro–Columbus Day noise is the suggestion that if you don't like Columbus Day you must be allied with the Ku Klux Klan. Why? Is the Klan supporting a national holiday honoring our indigenous peoples?

Sadly, no. It's all about identity politics, and the Klan's denial of the Italians' ethnic pride. As we read from Jarrett Stepman at Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal:

Much of the modern rhetoric about Columbus mirrors attacks lobbed at him in the 19th century by anti-Catholic and anti-Italian groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

In fact, Columbus Day became a nationally celebrated holiday following a mass lynching of Italians in New Orleans—the largest incident of lynching in American history....

As the pro-Columbus website The Truth About Columbus points out, the Ku Klux Klan worked to stop Columbus Day celebrations, smash statues, and reverse his growing influence on American culture.

According to The Truth About Columbus, in the 1920s, the Klan “attempted to remove Columbus Day as a state holiday in Oregon,” burned a cross “to disturb a Columbus Day celebration in Pennsylvania,” and successfully “opposed the erection of a statue of Columbus in Richmond, Virginia, only to see the decision to reject the statue reversed.”

Attempts to quash Columbus failed, but they have re-emerged in our own time through the actions of far-left groups who want to see his legacy buried and diminished forever.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891 was the worst lynching in American history?

For the Record: Leif 'Em Laughing

Columbus Day to become Indigenous Peoples' Day in Los Angeles
https://t.co/iGKuM4WmRG

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 30, 2017

I wonder how Columbus made it here while indigenous people couldn't make it to Europe https://t.co/MXDVPLufyV

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 31, 2017

Why does he assume they didn't make a decision to stay on the west side of the Atlantic? Things seemed pretty good in North America back in the day, when there weren't any Europeans mucking it up.

More interesting question: how did Vikings make it to North America 500 years earlier without killing or enslaving any indigens? https://t.co/Sd1Th68fLS

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 31, 2017

Update: Smut points out in the comments that this is not quite true, and I can't believe I didn't even look it up. No enslavement, but the Norsemen and the native inhabitants of Vinland did not in fact get along perfectly. It's not possible to quantify from the sagas (written down from oral tradition 250 years after the events), but it seems clear that at least six natives and one Greenlander (Leif's brother Thorvald) were killed over the four or five years of the colony in a series of fights. It is likely that they killed more of each other, when Leif's sister Freydis led the Greenlanders in the party to slaughter all the Icelanders, including five women, in their sleep, for unexplained reasons—were the Greenlanders Odin-worshipers like Eirik the Red and the Icelanders all Christians like Mrs. Eirik? Eirik's Saga, in any case, says that "after several years away from Greenland, they chose to turn back to their homes when they realized that they would otherwise face an indefinite conflict with the natives," which proves my main point that they were morally superior to their Spanish, Portuguese, and English successors who chose genocide instead of retreat.

Leif Eiríksson, in Boston by Anne Whitney, 1887 (Amateur archaeologists were looking for Norse sites in Massachusetts at the time, in vain). Photo via Medieval Karl. It does not carry the motto, "Just because you're white doesn't mean you have to kill everybody," but it could. Nice work, Leif.