Subj: Christopher Columbus: My Hero
Date: 10/11/99
To: LABRI-L@LISTSERV.OKSTATE.EDU
These days it's hard to find any good stuff on the Web about Christopher
["Christ-bearer'] Columbus. Since the 500th anniversary of his discovery of the
Western Hemisphere (1992), Columbus has been thoroughly trashed by the PC police.
Why do I like Columbus?
Columbus was brave.
I lived and worked for a few years in a shelter for the homeless in a less-than-desirable
part of town. I knew people who would not bring donations to the house because they were
afraid to walk from the curb to our door.
"America: Land of the Slaves, Home of the Wimps."
http://members.aol.com/kevin4vft/cw/them.htm
Columbus was a Christian.
Impossible to doubt this having read his diaries. But easy to ignore.
Columbus Contra Mundum
Columbus Contra Mundum (Part II)
Columbus
Contra Mundum (III)
Columbus was after Gold.
A good reason to like anyone.
Some Secularist historians have used this fact to cast doubt on the claim that Columbus
was a Christian. Neo-platonist "christians" are easily confused at this point.
They don't see how someone could be a Christian if he's in pursuit of something so
terribly "unspiritual" as gold.
But the Bible says gold is good:
http://freebooks.entrewave.com/freebooks/docs/292a_43e.htm
Even the U.S. Constitution says gold is good: that "no state shall
make anything but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts." The triumph of
Secular Humanism's preference for unbacked paper money has empowered the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank to crush more poor Latin Americans than Columbus could
ever dream of.
http://members.aol.com/vftinc/frn/unabomb3.htm
Columbus Attempted to Civilize the Indians.
How many Indians were there? Less than a million? Ten million? Russell Means says 100
million
http://www.indians.org/welker/russmean.htm
This is nonsense. The Indians were unable to sustain a population in North
America which is one-hundredth that of today. To quote Hobbes, their lives were
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The Ignoble Savage
The Indian as
Environmentalist
The Indian as Egalitarian
Was Columbus an instrument of God's judgment upon a people dominated by
idolatry, slavery, immorality, brutality, and tribal racism?
Columbus and the Puritans came to this nation to bring the Gospel to the
natives, and this is their chief offense in the eyes of modern man.
http://members.aol.com/TestOath/08theocracy.htm#t12
Columbus Defended Western Civilization
What follows is an article that ran in UC Berkeley's Daily Californian, September 13,
1997. It was published on their Opinion Page.
Columbus Day Banned by PC
by Michael Berliner, Ph.D.
Columbus Day approaches, but to the
"politically correct" this is no cause for celebration. On the contrary, they
view the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 as an occasion to be mourned. They have
mourned, they have attacked, and they have intimidated schools across the country into
replacing Columbus Day celebrations with "ethnic diversity" days.
The politically correct view is that Columbus did not
discover America, because people had lived here for thousands of years. Worse yet, it's
claimed, the main legacy of Columbus is death and destruction. Columbus is routinely
vilified as a symbol of slavery and genocide, and the celebration of his arrival likened
to a celebration of Hitler and the Holocaust. The attacks on Columbus are ominous, because
the actual target is Western civilization.
Did Columbus "discover" America? Yes in
every important respect. This does not mean that no human eye had been cast on America
before Columbus arrived. It does mean that Columbus brought America to the attention of
the civilized world, i.e., to the growing, scientific civilizations of Western Europe. The
result, ultimately, was the United States of America. It was Columbus' discovery for
Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded
and on which it still rests. The opening of America brought the ideas and
achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and the thousands of thinkers, writers, and
inventors who followed.
Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely
inhabited, unused, and undeveloped. The inhabitants were primarily hunter-gatherers,
wandering across the land, living from hand-to-mouth and from day-to-day. There was
virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life was
nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no division of labor,
little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there were endless, bloody wars.
Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous,
undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer or
not even alive.
Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor
Western civilization. But the critics do not want to bestow such honor, because their real
goal is to denigrate the values of Western civilization and to glorify the primitivism,
mysticism, and collectivism embodied in the tribal cultures of American Indians. They
decry the glorification of the West as "Eurocentrism." We should, they claim,
replace our reverence for Western civilization with multi-culturalism, which regards all
cultures as morally equal. In fact, they aren't. Some cultures are better than others: a
free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal
with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization
stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible:
reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement. The
values of Western civilization are values for all men; they cut across gender, ethnicity,
and geography. We should honor Western civilization not for the ethnocentric reason that
some of us happen to have European ancestors but because it is the objectively superior
culture.
Underlying the political collectivism of the anti-Columbus
crowd is a racist view of human nature. They claim that one's identity is primarily
ethnic: if one thinks his ancestors were good, he will supposedly feel good about himself;
if he thinks his ancestors were bad, he will supposedly feel self-loathing. But it doesn't
work; the achievements or failures of one's ancestors are monumentally irrelevant to one's
actual worth as a person. Only the lack of a sense of self leads one to look to others to
provide what passes for a sense of identity. Neither the deeds nor misdeeds of others are
his own; he can take neither credit nor blame for what someone else chose to do. There are
no racial achievements or racial failures, only individual achievements and individual
failures. One cannot inherit moral worth or moral vice. "Self-esteem through
others" is a self-contradiction.
Thus the sham of "preserving one's heritage" as a
rational life goal. Thus the cruel hoax of "multicultural education" as an
antidote to racism: it will continue to create more racism.
Individualism is the only alternative to the racism of
political correctness. We must recognize that everyone is a sovereign entity, with the
power of choice and independent judgment. That is the ultimate value of Western
civilization, and it should be proudly proclaimed.
Michael S. Berliner, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Ayn Rand
Institute in Marina del Rey, California.
http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/columbus.html
What About Other Infamous Conquerors?
Cortez the Infamous
Christianity & Conquest
Columbus realized his errors.
Which is more than I can say for Secular Humanists.
At the end of his life, Columbus regretted his use of the sword against
defenseless natives. He had bought into the myths prevalent in his day that justified the
State and its use of the sword, and especially the view that certain people could be
thought of as non-human and the State could choose to take their lives in order to advance our own material
prosperity. Columbus repudiated his earlier championing of this "pro-choice"
mentality, and became pro-life. Convicted of his sins in his later years, Columbus
purposed never again to wear the costly garments of "the Admiral of the Ocean
Sea" and assumed the brown habit of a Minorite friar as a symbol of his penitence.
This remained his costume when in Spain for the rest of his life.
The modern world of Political Correctness has learned nothing from
Columbus. Even the hysterically overstated estimates of "historians" like
Russell Means pale in comparison to the genocide committed by 20th century Secular
Humanists: an average of 10,000 people per day, every day of the week for 100 years;
nearly half a billion people murdered in this century.
http://members.aol.com/XianAnarch/pacifism/Rummel.htm
Columbus was an admirable man, as well as a product of his times. His
times were Christian, crippled by the myth of the State. Our times are non-Christian,
empowered by the myth of the State, and therefore more enslaved and more violent by
several orders of magnitude.
We can learn much in every way from Columbus.
Happy Columbus Day!
Kevin C.
http://members.aol.com/TestOath/HolyTrinity.htm
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And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and sit under their Vine & Fig Tree.
Micah 4:1-7
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