If Columbus Day was a Bill O’Reilly book:
(Apologies to Michael Ramirez. And, I guess, Bill O’Reilly.)
Gary Kasparov, former chess slave under the former Soviet Union regime, has this to say about woke America’s commitment to cancelling Christopher Columbus:
(Columbus) achieved great things and is worthy of being honored for them with a national holiday. His incredible feats of exploration were due to individual qualities that Americans should find admirable, and once did in near unanimity. Holding historical figures to modern standards of morality is a method of antihistorical political control—much like the pseudohistory I grew up being taught in the Soviet Union.
… Soviet history books portrayed these men as callow imperialists who exploited the natives the way their capitalist descendants exploited the proletariat. This also prepared me to hear the same tropes repeated by Western leftists today…
Their accomplishments should not blind us to their flaws, but neither should their flaws blind us to their achievements…
History is not a zero-sum game. We can honor indigenous people and all they represent—and all they lost—without erasing the greatest achievements of the Age of Discovery. I will be celebrating Columbus Day, and I hope you’ll join me. - WSJ
I will happily join Mr. Kasparov, but Columbus fans in Philadelphia will no doubt be in mourning again this year as the Columbus statue in Marconi square remains in a plywood box where it’s been since June of 2020, ostensibly for safekeeping against the marauding hordes.
Columbus’ light getting put under a bushel in June, 2020 where it remains today due to yet another court overruling a lower court order
It is truly a mark of our lawless times that a statue of a great historical explorer needs to be shut away to prevent it from being destroyed. Shameful and ultimately suicidal.
*The first post I wrote titled “Goodbye Columbus” was written in 2009. I was so much younger then and actually thought we could and would turn this nonsense around. I didn’t think I could grow more cynical then I was at that point but history has proven me wrong, again.
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