Columbus Day

Happy Settler-Colonist Day!

Mark Noonan23 Comments

As we head towards Columbus Day and the annual whines from the Left about what a meanie he was I am inspired to point and laugh at how stupid they are.

Settler-Colonialism is the best purely human thing to ever happen. It is what made us – all of us. Most importantly, the Natives who were Colonized. That is, it is what gave them the ability to pathetically whine about being Colonized. Their ancestors were too busy trying to scratch out a bare, hand-to-mouth existence to be pathetic. Yesterday, the aurora borealis came down pretty far south and there’s this one Native activist account on X who said we’re not supposed to take pictures of it because the gods would get offended or some such drivel. Just tried to picture that:

Pagan god: “Just remember, when the crackers show up, don’t let them take photos of the aurora borealis.”

Savage: “uh, sure…but, what’s a photo?”

PG: “you want a fork of lightning up your bung?”

S: “got it: crackers, photos, no go.”

Its all just so ridiculous – and I mean pretty much the whole Native ethos they try to sell us these days. As if getting here earlier endows a person with some special connection to the land. It doesn’t. It is dirt. It is for anyone who is on it and they’ll do a good or bad job at stewardship based upon their moral character…not because of some legend, probably only half remembered because it was passed down orally, said a certain mountain was sacred to the gods (or, more likely, had the really good hunting ground so make sure you keep the other tribes away from it).

Also ridiculous is the notion that, somehow, Natives are more in touch with Nature. Nothing like that at all. All of humanity once used stone – from paleolithic beginnings to some pretty advanced things in the neolithic. But here’s the thing: as soon as anyone came across usable metal, they dropped stone like a bad habit. Nobody knows when the first person made bronze. It might have been made in several different areas but the main thing to keep in mind that as soon as bronze comes in, stone goes. There is just no comparison in quality and durability between even the very best stone tool and bronze.

The Natives in the Americas were still stone age when the Europeans showed up. Some pretty sophisticated stone age societies, but all still using stone. They had gold and silver but nobody in the America’s ever got around to combining tin and copper to make bronze – so, gold jewelry, stone knives. This also indicates that the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world some time before bronze was made – because wherever it arose outside the Americas (there’s some dispute about this) it spread everywhere…but not to the America which were lands pretty much unreachable from the end of the last Ice Age until ships as good as the Nina were built. This doesn’t mean that the Native of America were dumb – they just never put copper and tin together. Whoever did was some sort of genius or just very lucky (think about it: why would you try to combine metals? Who would think of that? But someone did…but not in the Americas). Without that stroke of luck or genius, the Americas just went on and on in the Neolithic and would have continued to do so unless that bronze stroke of luck happened…but what did happen is Europeans showed up. And not with the bronze the Americas missed out 5,000 years earlier, but the iron they missed out on 3,000 years earlier. But like everyone who first came across bronze – and then later came across iron – the Natives of the Americas dropped stone like bad habit as soon as they did so. In other words, they were just like everyone else. They weren’t living in harmony with Nature – they just lacked the technology to alter it like Europeans, Asians and Africans had.

The main thing to keep in mind here is that Cortez showed up in Tenochtitlan, not Moteuczoma in Madrid. Why? Not for lack of desire for conquest and glory. Both men engaged in that quite a lot; as much as they could, in fact. Not based on inherent intelligence: there’s nothing in the history books which indicates that either men – or their people – were intellectually inferior to the other. So, what happened?

Well, Cortez had a compass on his ships. That originated in China. He also had arquebuses, which used gunpowder which also originated in China. For calculation he used the efficient numbers developed by the Hindus. He wrote with pen and ink. On paper. He had steel swords and lances. He had horses; the use of none of these things originated in Spain. But they were all in Spain, along with a lot of other things. And this Spain wasn’t inhabited by the first human beings to show up. Heck no! Whatever indigenous stock had been there had been overlayed by Celts, Phoenicians, Gauls, Romans, Germans, Berbers and just about everything else outside of East Asians. All of that Spanish history – which included multiple periods of being Settler-Colonized – worked to produce Hernan Cortez meeting Moteuczoma. And then looking around at a nation of proud conquerors and going, “I can take this”. And take it he did – because he was better than the Aztecs. Not inherently braver. Not inherently smarter. But better. The total sum of knowledge Cortez had was the total human inheritance…Moteuczoma just had his own culture to fall back on, and it wasn’t sufficient when the whole world, as it were, pressed against it. What Moteuczoma needed more than anything else when Cortez showed up as all the history, trade, war and development behind Cortez.

And it must be kept in mind that Cortez was helped by other Natives. These people didn’t like their Aztec tyrants. They were also quite impressed with what the Europeans had and wished very much to take advantage of it. No, they couldn’t see the future – nor the very crucial immediate thing of the European arrival: that Cortez and his men brought with them the collected disease environments of Europe, Africa and Asia – diseases the Natives simply hadn’t encountered before and initially had little resistance to. It is very important to remember that when we talk of the Native death toll following the European arrival, most of the dead died of diseases before they even saw an European. The activists call it deliberate genocide – which is ridiculous because (a) it wasn’t intentional and (b) it didn’t kill them all. It was something that was going to happen some day – and it was going to be tragic when it did. But it was never a crime.

But that also needed to happen. It is part of human development. The world has certain diseases and until modern medicine came along the best way to make sure they didn’t destroy you was, counterintuitively, to be exposed to them. It built up resistance – both in the infected individuals and in the fact that those who survived the new disease environment were biologically stronger and would pass that along to their children. And, once again, it highlights the crucial importance of getting around out there. To not be isolated in your own, little world. To meet with others. In other words, having a Settler-Colonialist show up is, long term, the best thing that’s ever going to happen to you. A better world is going to rise out of it.

Now, this is not to excuse any crimes. Wrong is wrong – and as the Spanish moved into the New World there were crimes committed as the Spanish found that they could just lord it over Natives who had no chance against them. But it wasn’t all Spaniards. And the law did try to protect the Natives. Spanish voices were raised in protest against ill treatment. And this was also something new brought to the Natives – the concept of a human right. That certain things can’t be done to you simply because you are human. This is something the Natives had never had as a concept before – which is why in 1500 they were still engaging in human sacrifice which had been extirpated in almost all of Europe, Asia and Africa ages before. Long term, this was a huge benefit to the Natives…it eventually gave them the freedom to speak a lot of nonsense about Columbus, for instance.

So, what I do is bless the Settler-Colonists. Heck, if my ancestors in Ireland hadn’t been Settler-Colonized I’d be living in a mud hut by an Irish bog rather than typing on a computer in my air conditioned home. Three cheers for the Limeys that came to Ireland – even if they did hang great-great-great-great-Grandpa for stealing a sheep. On Monday, take a moment to remember Christopher Columbus and the incredibly brave men who set out with him to discover the New World. It changed everything, and for the better.

Defending Columbus

Mark Noonan12 Comments

A lot of people just don’t like the guy – including a family member of mine who has a significant amount of Native American blood. But I do think that he’s gotten a bit of a bad rap and someone should stand up to defend him.

First off, the modern picture being built up of Columbus as some sort of racist-sexist-imperialistic pig deliberately trying to destroy and conquer is nonsense. Columbus was, first and foremost, a seaman and explorer. That was his main thing in life – he liked to go to sea, he liked to explore. And he was very good at both.

There is some ridiculous bit of Columbus revisionist humor out here which holds that he didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing – but he knew precisely where he wanted to go and, actually, he hit land in the New World pretty much exactly at the time and place he calculated – it just wasn’t the land he was looking for, because the earth was larger than he thought. And think about what he did the job with: his flagship – the Santa Maria – was 62 feet long. To give you a bit of contrast, the 19th century U.S. frigate Constitution is 175 feet long, and a modern, Burke class destroyer is 509 feet. Columbus was at sea in tiny boats. Not only were the ships tiny, but navigation was still primitive. Tell a ship’s captain today that he’s to go from Spain to Cuba with merely a compass to help navigate and he’d turn you down – and he at least knows where Spain and Cuba are in relation to each other! Columbus didn’t. He set off into the blue thinking that just maybe there was land at such a such a place and he would find it by using dead reckoning navigation…and he did it. This is an astounding achievement of seamanship regardless of what else one wishes to think about Columbus or the arrival of European in the New World.

In addition to denigrating Columbus’ achievement as a ship’s captain, the more important condemnation of Columbus is that he did morally wrong by arriving in the New World. Columbus was the deliberate and malicious bringer of slavery and genocide to the New World. This assertion stands in the public mind firmly atop the very large number of Natives who died – but to me, it is absurd to condemn Columbus for things he never intended and especially for things which happened after he was absent from the New World. Columbus’ intention was to find a trade route to Asia – he wasn’t intending on finding a New World, still less one which, in the event, turned out to have no immunity to non-American diseases. He wasn’t out to massacre. He did enslave – but so did every other sort of person on earth when they came across strangers who could not resist them…including, it must be said, the peoples of the Americas who also engaged in slavery.

The thing about the peoples of the New World is that they were, well, people. In other words, just like everyone else – with their portions of good and bad. Just as we can find noble people in every community, so can we find base people. No one lives in harmony with the environment because no one can – we all must change the environment to suit our needs or we’ll die. There was only one Eden, and God kicked us out of it because we sinned – and we go on sinning. In the fullness of time, we’ll be back in Eden; but if you’re looking for an Eden after the Fall, you won’t find it in this life. Columbus did not stumble upon Paradise and destroy it – he found people. Had no one ever taken it into their heads to sail Columbus’ course and the New World had been left to its own devices, then the history which would have been written in 2014 by the people living here would be as much a chronicle of crime and chicanery as anywhere else – but also a chronicle of people who rose above and did right in spite of everything, just as everywhere else.

I do understand that for the Native peoples of the Americas, the coming of Europeans was a catastrophe. A much more technologically advanced civilization came upon a less technologically advanced people and the result was bound to be bad for the peoples of America. It was going to massively disrupt the social, political and economic lives of the people living here. Adding to the that was the fact that no one – anywhere – knew how diseases were spread and the peoples of the Americas, isolated for many thousands of years from the main stream of human interaction, had no defense against the diseases of Europe, Africa and Asia. It was the onslaught of disease that caused most of the destruction – and no one intended that it should be so. Given the nature of things, eventually someone – from Asia or from Europe – was going to arrive on the coasts of the Americas. At some point in human history, the foreign disease environment was going to arrive and cut a bloody swath through the population. To blame Columbus – or anyone – for this is to arrive at the level of absurd.

It is also very true that the Europeans still should have treated the populations of the New World with justice and mercy. This didn’t happen. Plenty of crimes were committed. But this is now more than 500 years since Columbus sailed and we can’t undo what happened – neither the mere appearance of a different civilization, nor the un-intentional transmission of disease, nor the criminal failures of many who arrived in Columbus’ wake. The world we have today is the result of everything that went before and our job, as rational human beings, is to learn from what happened and seek to better the example of the past.

Some are calling for changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day – I disagree with the change, but not with the creation of an Indigenous Peoples Day. Let us have both – let us have a day set aside to honor a brave man – and his crews – who set out into the unknown to widen the horizon of human knowledge. Let us also set aside a day to remember the peoples of the Americas who were here when Columbus arrived. It has been the mingling of all the peoples of the world in the New World which created the dynamic civilization which has more than once been able to right the wrongs of the Old World – both in Europe and Asia, as well as Africa. In the long chain of events, because Columbus sailed the ocean blue, an American Army arrived on the coasts of France to bring liberty, and American food and medicine has arrived all over the world to end suffering. The net balance of all that has comes to pass in the Americas has been good, not bad – and Columbus deserves remembrance as the man who set the events in train.