Right on cue for Columbus Day, the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle in Manhattan is getting round-the-clock guards to ward off vandals, and USA Today’s Josh Hafner wants to know “As Confederate statues come down, what about Columbus?”
It’s a logical question. There was, of course, never any chance the left’s Cultural Revolution was going to stop at the Confederate memorials. Soon the Founding Fathers will be in the dock. In the meantime, there’s the discoverer of America.
And given the Hafner’s picture of Columbus, readers could be forgiven for thinking there was little reason to honor the man in the first place. Hafner called Columbus a “15th Century figure tied to genocide and slavery,” and dismissed him as a “deluded navigator who stumbled upon the Americas and carried out colonization as usual – no more or less interested in slavery than others of his time.”
Ho-hum, the banality of evil and all that. Columbus’s reputed crimes almost go without saying on the left these days, the result of agenda-driven scholarship and the cult of victimhood.
Hafner’s article is noteworthy for showcasing the incredible pummeling UVA’s Douglas Blackmon gives to one unfortunate straw man:
“The one argument that has absolutely no validity is that simply because a monument has been standing for a long time, it is ‘a part of history’ and therefore can never be changed,” he said.
“By that logic, it was wrong to have taken down the ‘White Only’ signs over water fountains and restrooms all over the South.”
Umm, no. Shorn of the odious reasoning behind segregation laws, “White Only” signs were simply legal notices, proscribing behavior. The laws changed, the signs came down.
A Columbus statue conveys no legal authority or practical information. It commemorates a milestone toward the establishment of the United States and celebrates the audacity, courage and skill of the man who drove it. To associate it with artifacts of Jim Crow is a low rhetorical tactic.
But for all that, Hafner’s article reaches a reasonable conclusion, quoting university of Alabama professor Alfred Brophy. “‘Burying history is the worst way,’ Brophy said. ‘We’re having this conversation now because the monuments still exist.’”
But conversation is the last thing left-wingers want – just look at college campuses these days. That’s why the statues have to go.
