Christopher Columbus Should Be Celebrated

Please allow me to be the first, and perhaps at this point, the only person to wish you a happy Columbus Day. Well, I'm not the only one. We have some other Columbus fans here at The Daily Wire, and there are more scattered throughout the country. But the number of people who will acknowledge and show proper appreciation for Columbus, or any other of the heroes of Western civilization, is dwindling rapidly. More and more, our country is overrun by historically illiterate halfwits who insist that we cannot celebrate the great men of our history because those great historical men made the mistake of being historical rather than modern. What's more, they committed the crime of being mere men and not angels. They had flaws. They were not perfect. And if they weren't perfect, then they were scum, and all of their achievements were dirt and ash amounting to nothing. That's the popular modern attitude anyway. And it's an attitude especially prevalent in people who themselves have never achieved a single thing of note at all in their lives. They've never done anything of value in their entire lives. They've contributed absolutely nothing to the world whatsoever, and yet they feel qualified to scoff at the achievements of the people who made their luxurious lives possible. They don't even see the irony in mocking Columbus for his alleged navigational deficiencies, even as these same people can't make it a half a mile to the Walgreens down the street without the assistance of a satellite. I mean, they need a satellite, a phone, a car, just to make it a half mile. All of the technology that the world can offer them, they need just for that trip. Christopher Columbus, navigating completely uncharted waters half a millennium ago, did not have those technological advantages. He had to make his way through the mostly unknown sea, across thousands of treacherous miles, using the stars and dead reckoning and other techniques that would flummox his modern critics, all of whom would be shipwrecked in about 45 minutes if they were in the same situation. But Columbus survived the first voyage and discovered a whole part of the globe that was unknown to his civilization at the time. And this is when the modern losers again chime in with one of the two or three bits of information that they know about this subject, all of which they acquired from Twitter memes. And they announced that Columbus, he didn't even mean to discover the Americas. He was trying to find Asia. Ha! What a dope. Yes, of course Columbus didn't mean to discover the Americas, you idiots. Nobody knew that it existed. How does that undermine the significance of the discovery? If some future team of astronauts accidentally discover a life-bearing moon of Jupiter on their way to, I don't know, explore Pluto, should we dismiss their groundbreaking history-shaping discovery on the basis that they originally intended to make a different groundbreaking history-shaping discovery? Would you sit back here on Earth on your couch and say, what a bunch of dorks, they were trying to find Pluto and accidentally discovered extraterrestrial life instead? Perhaps you would. But that says more about you than any of the explorers who are out changing the world while you sit on your fat ass injecting cheese whiz straight into your veins. Over the course of Columbus' voyages, he discovered many Caribbean islands and explored the coasts of South and Central America. He didn't make it to what is now the continental United States, but he made it possible for future explorers to soon find it. And that's quite an achievement, I would say. Or must he be blamed for only discovering half of the Western Hemisphere while neglecting to discover the other half? The point with Columbus is that he was one of the men, one of the primary men, to bring civilization to this side of the globe. He planted the seeds for the society that we all live in today. If Columbus never existed, your life would be very different. In fact, your life, you might not exist at all yourself. And it would be different in a much worse way. He was a great explorer. He was not a great governor or administrator. Yes, he also took slaves. He executed both Spaniards and Indians under his rule. He took gold. He was not nearly as good as leading men on dry land as he was at leading men while they were on the sea. This was a common flaw of explorers of that era. Many of them were brilliant on their ships, but incompetent to even horrible on solid ground. Magellan made it three-quarters of the way around the globe before getting himself killed in a needless conflict with a tribe in the Philippines. See, a certain type of man was needed to navigate a fleet of ships across uncharted waters. A different kind of man was needed to manage settlements. These are different skills. But the thing is, back in those days, if you were a captain of one of these ships, you had to be everything. You had to play all of these roles. You had to be an expert in every conceivable area. Unfortunately, the latter type, the ones that were actually good at managing settlements, they had no way of getting to the settlement except by hitching a ride with the former type. And the former, they weren't often willing to cede control of the land they had just gone through all the trouble of discovering. That was the issue. Now, we can acknowledge these realities while still honoring the achievements of the people who shaped the world we all currently, and most of us passively, occupy. Here's the problem. If we're saying that the brutality and violence of historical figures entirely negates the good they did and the things they achieved, then we've painted with a brush so broad that it erases everyone, and I mean everyone. That's one of the things that makes the push to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day so incredibly ridiculous. And that's a push that's almost succeeded. In fact, Joe Biden on Friday became the first president in history to issue an Indigenous People's Day proclamation officially acknowledging the holiday that is meant to replace, not only replace, but be an apology for Columbus Day. But the problem should be obvious to anybody with an above room temperature IQ, which means that it's not obvious to very many people these days. If we cannot celebrate Columbus Day because the European explorers and settlers practiced conquest and slavery, how can we celebrate Indigenous People's Day seeing how Indigenous people practice an even more ruthless form of conquest and slavery? Despite what you may have heard, Europeans did not introduce these forms of brutality to these shores. The Indian tribes had already discovered them for themselves and often took it several steps farther. For example, the most powerful tribes in Mesoamerica would take slaves and then add the extra step of cutting their beating hearts out of their chests and sometimes consuming their carcasses. Not all tribes had human sacrifice, but they all lived by the law of conquest. If you wanted land, you took it. If you wanted to keep it, you had to defend it. If you couldn't defend it, your land would be conquered. And among Indians, it also meant that part of conquering land, if your land was conquered, it meant that all of your men would be tortured and killed and your daughters would be taken as sex slaves. That's just the way it worked. That's the way it worked everywhere among nearly all Indigenous people. If the Europeans were land thieves, they were stealing from thieves. If they were conquerors, they were conquering conquerors. If they were killers, they were killing killers. Does that make it all okay? Not necessarily, but it does complicate the black and white. It does complicate sort of the black and white victim versus oppressor model that we've come up with in modern times. And it does also raise the question as to why we should celebrate one group of oppressive conquerors, the Indians, and not the other. See, once we understand historical context and we see that history was a brutal time filled with violent people and that every inhabited inch of the globe has been settled through war and every line has been drawn in blood. And once we see all of that, the only sensible thing is to accept that reality and thank God that our reality is a little bit less bleak than that, a little bit less, and then decide who to honor and celebrate based on their achievements. See, if we focus on sin, if that's the only thing we're thinking about, there are no winners. No one is worthy if that's all we're focusing on. And that's the case even today. But if we focus on achievement, if that's what we're looking, how does it all shake out? I mean, are we celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day because of their achievements? Is that holiday supplanting Columbus Day because the achievements of indigenous people were greater than Columbus's achievements? Well, if that's the case, what were their achievements exactly? And that's a sincere question. I'm not asking it rhetorically. What were their achievements? If you're asking me to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, what were the achievements of these indigenous people? What am I celebrating exactly? Am I just celebrating them for existing? Is that the achievement? Now, we know that the native tribes were about three or four thousand years behind European civilization in terms of technology, art, philosophy, government, and in pretty much every other way. I mean, the most advanced civilizations in this part of the world were building pyramids, the most advanced ones. Many other tribes hadn't even discovered agriculture. So so what are we celebrating on Indigenous Peoples Day? I think the proclamation from Joe Biden clears things up. He writes in general terms about the contributions of native tribes, but he doesn't list any specific ones. And then he has this. He says, quote, 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, terror wrought upon native communities and tribal nations throughout our country. Today, we acknowledge the significant sacrifices made by native people to this country and recognize their many ongoing contributions to our nation. OK, so it's not really about contributions. It's about victim status, because we don't honor achievements anymore. If we did, Columbus would still have his holiday all to himself. Instead, we honor victimhood, even if the victims were victimizers themselves. Even so, all that matters is who can plant their flag the highest up on Victim Mountain. That's what we're supposed to celebrate today. And it's it's twisted and backwards and perverse. It breeds a society of passive weaklings seeking always to become victims themselves, because that's where the power lies. That's where affirmation and celebration lies, that that's that's where you gain it. And that's the society that we're building rather than building a society of bold and courageous people who admire men for their accomplishments and seek to achieve greatness themselves. See, personally, I prefer the latter approach, and that is reason enough, among many other reasons. To say again, happy Columbus Day. Well, I hope you enjoyed that clip from The Matt Wall Show. If you did, go ahead and hit that subscribe button right down there so you can stay up to date on all of our future content.