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"I don't care what they say: Happy Colombo Day, Peter."
"Thank you, Patrick." |
"Your Highnesses, as good Christian and Catholic princes, devout and propagators of the Christian faith, as well as enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, conceived the plan of sending me, Christopher Columbus, to this country of the Indies, there to see the princes, the peoples, the territory, their disposition and all things else, and the way in which one might proceed to convert these regions to our holy faith. And Your Highnesses have ordered that I should go, not by land, towards the East, which is the accustomed route, but by the way of the West, whereby hitherto nobody to our knowledge has ever been."--Christopher Columbus versus Islamic tyranny, 1492
"There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past."-G.K. Chesterton
"...And so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren't understood; they're not appreciated. And if you don't have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don't mean very much to you. You just think, well, that's the way it is. That's our birthright. That just happened. [But] it didn't just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I mean this. I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn't just to be uneducated or stupid. It's to be rude, ungrateful. And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings."--David McCullough
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."--L.P. Hartley
“I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future."--Ronald Reagan, an Actual President of the United States
"Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. ...I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside."--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Mark Steyn: From Barbarous to Evil (2017):
"I woke up to the news that, during the night, in Baltimore, Maryland, the oldest monument to Christopher Columbus in the United States had been destroyed by someone called "Ty" and his chum:
A 225-year-old monument commemorating Christopher Columbus was vandalized early Monday amid the nationwide debate on removing Confederate statues and monuments.
A video posted on Monday shows the monument being smashed. It shows two unidentified people taping a sign reading "The future is racial and economic justice" on the monument. One of them then hits the monument with what appears to be a sledgehammer while the other stands next to the monument holding a sign that reads "Racism: Tear it down."
"Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere. Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas," the video's narrator, who identifies himself as "Ty," says.
As you can see at right, almost every word painstakingly engraved on that obelisk has been obliterated. It stood for 225 years, and it was destroyed in the blink of an eye. Julia Manchester, The Hill's reporter, continues:
This comes amid a heated debate across the country over removing Confederate monuments...
That's one way of putting it, but not an honest one. Mark Steyn Club member David Elstrom left a comment here that deserves to be more widely distributed:
Mark,
I notice that the left media and even Fox News talk about the "discussion" on statues, or opine on the "conversation" concerning public monuments.
This Newspeak is apparently supposed to con the plebes into thinking something civil or democratic is happening. All I've seen is politicians or other apparatchiks rushing to remove statues (fearing the wrath of the mob) or actual mobs tearing things down.
If this is discussion, or conversation, then rape must be a "social event," and sticking up the local convenience store a "financial transaction."
Indeed. It's hard to have a "conversation" with a guy wielding a sledgehammer.".......
Real President was wrong. There are not good people on both sides of the Monuments Debate--because there is no debate. Just a Democrat mob with a rope. As usual.
The appeal of "old" stories used to be that their truths were so enduring you didn't mind the crinolines and powdered wigs: When I read bedtime stories to my little girl - Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Black Beauty - she did not have an adult's conception of time and so was too young to know or to care that all these people lived years before she was born and were all now dead. She was simply engaged by their quandaries. The endurance of Shakespeare is, as the cliché has it, that he "understands human nature" and so you cut him some slack on the doublet and hose.
But the hyper-present-tense of our own culture has more or less inverted that: We don't mind the doublet and hose, it's the "human nature" that's the problem. So, when today's movies do the period stuff, we impose our values on their times - hence, all the "f*cks" and lesbo sub-plots in recent Miss Marples, or the ghastly boorishness of Robert Downey Jr's outings as Sherlock Holmes. Their times, our values. And because we are, in fact, engaged in overthrowing and remaking "human nature", the past's eternal verities are a particular affront.
It would be foolish to think that contempt can be contained merely to electronic entertainments. Today we insist "empathy" is a virtue, and trumpet our own incessantly.
The more we boast of our "empathy", the less we have - not in the sense of the definition offered by David Berger in his book Clinical Empathy:
The capacity to know emotionally what another is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other person.
My emphasis. Not a lot of that in the bright new dawn of our statue-free land. In an empathy-flaunting age we demand the entirety of human history think just like us - "because it's 2017". Robert E Lee must be toppled because he was racist. Thomas Jefferson must come down because he owned slaves. Christopher Columbus has to go because he had no transgender-bathroom policy on the Niña, Pinta and Santa María. The mobs in the street have no idea who these guys are - except that they are not like them, and so cannot be permitted to stand.
I've said many times that, when a people lose their future, they also lose their past: There will be no West End theatre in an Islamized London - no Oscar Wilde, no Bernard Shaw, no Noël Coward, and eventually no Shakespeare. There will be no Berlin Philharmonic in an Islamized Germany - no Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner. There will be no classic rock on the radio dial in an Hispanic Florida - so no Motorhead, no Def Leppard, no Blue Oyster Cult. Such are the vicissitudes of demographic transformation.
But perhaps it won't matter anyway. Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.".......
The Federalist: "Australian Prime Minister John Howard once said that “a conservative is someone who doesn’t think he is morally superior to his grandfather.” But progressives hold the opinion that they are morally superior to their grandparents, while believing that their own grandchildren will somehow not feel the same way about them. That lack of humility makes it easier for them to be certain; it also makes them certain to be wrong.".......
Moonbattery: The Unpersoning of Christopher Columbus Continues: "The ultimate villain is not Robert E. Lee, who merely defended his Virginia homeland, but Christopher Columbus, whose crime was to allow Western Civilization to expand into the New World. If no one had achieved what Columbus did, North America would still be populated by half-starved Stone Age savages and the hated United States would not exist. Consequently, La-La Land is the latest city to proclaim that Columbus Day will henceforth be fundamentally transformed into Indigenous Peoples Day... Although Italian Americans seem to be the only ones who put up a fight against the campaign to unperson Christopher Columbus, he represents all Americans of European heritage, or who appreciate living in a civilized country where life isn’t as nasty, brutish, and short as it was for pre-Columbian Indians. ... There is no aspect of American or Western Culture that these malefactors will not desecrate, demonized, and destroy. Progressives are doing to America what Muslims did to the rich and varied, mainly Christian cultures that once flourished across the Middle East. Everything that we fail to defend will be lost, starting with our pride.".......
Christopher Columbus was likely Spanish and Jewish, study suggests (bbc.com)
The Secret of the Hundredfold and How to Live In It! | Mike Thompson LIVE (Sunday 10-13-24) - YouTube
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| Arriving at Watling Island, Bahamas, Oct. 12, 1492 |
The Left has always been fond of the Soviet Airbrush, and the Reading of History as one long indictment of the West is generations old now. But it seems like they're now declaring war on the very concept of history itself.
Statue-smashers consider themselves to be the very pinnacle of enlightenment, yet they are more brutish and superstitious than Og the Caveman. At least Og knew that he didn't fall out of his father's uterus a fully-formed, sui generis moral god. They live in a world built on the shoulders of Christopher Columbus, flaws and all, yet are too stupid and arrogant to know it.
And for the record, slavery was practiced by the American Indians and Aztecs long before Columbus came. Indeed, slavery was practiced almost everywhere, by almost everybody, almost always. It's in all the history books these idiots don't read.
At one point, Columbus was imprisoned by Queen Isabella, and remarkably, he's still in trouble with the authorities today. Comrade di Blasio wants to shutter or rename his landmarks--which is understandable for a guy who renamed himself from "Wilhelm" to sound less Germanic.
Columbus made four trips to the New World, the last one probably the most dangerous. He arrived just ahead of a hurricane, but was refused dockage. The experienced Admiral tried to warn the local Governor, but was ignored. The Governor dispatched a fleet of treasure ships to Spain and they were promptly sunk.
Columbus went on to Panama and faced marooning and mutinies. He was the first Westerner to sight the South American coast, but mistook it for an island.
He named the Virgin Islands after St. Ursula and her legendary 11,000 Virgins, who gave their lives for the Faith. Columbus thought the islands resembled the virgins' breasts/ "I found it (the world) was not round...but pear shaped, round where it has a nipple, for there it is taller, or as if one had a round ball and, on one side, it should be like a woman's breast, and this nipple part is the highest and closest to Heaven."--Christopher Columbus, Log of his Third Voyage (1498)
I take your point, sir.
Sail on, Admiral. Sail on through all of history.
