Today, October 12, is the actual Columbus Day anniversary even though the federal holiday was Monday.
Below is a re-post of an article I wrote last year for Columbus Day.
First, though, I want to comment on a recent post from the ‘Jasmine Taylor For Montana’ Facebook page.
Taylor is an official with the Cascade County Democratic Central Committee, a precinct captain and former failed Democrat candidate for state legislature and Great Falls city commission.
She is also a divisive, racist, extremist who is largely responsible for turning the local Democrat party into the laughingstock it has become. Why local Democrats would allow a loser like Taylor to represent their ideas and values is a baffling question indeed.
What is the purpose of a public Facebook post like this from a Democrat official (“…for Montana”, really?) other than to demonstrate to a tiny minority of kooky extremists how ‘woke’ she is?
One might as well insert “Great Falls voters” in place of “Christopher Columbus” on the picture below because that seems to be Taylor’s attitude towards this community.
Taylor and others like her think they’re edgy and oh so hip by posting garbage like this, but really they’re just dumb and totally out of touch with this community.
Here’s the article from last year.
“Like many Italian Americans I recognize Columbus Day as a way to take pride in my Italian heritage.
Unfortunately, once again this year there are those would like to take Montana in the direction of other states like Hawaii, Oregon and South Dakota, in the elimination of Columbus Day.
Those voices, including the usual state legislators and apparently everyone who works for the Great Falls Tribune, seem willfully ignorant of a couple of important facts.
First, Columbus never set one foot in what we now call America.
Secondly, history is replete with examples of indigenous peoples in America conquering and taking neighboring tribes as slaves, stealing their land, brutalizing and raping women, engaging in human sacrifice and torture as well as committing atrocities including acts of cannibalism.
All of this before any Europeans even knew the New World existed. So, as Zachary Mettler points out is his excellent article, “The Left Hates Christopher Columbus. Here are Five Reasons Why We Should Still Celebrate Columbus Day”, if Columbus is off limits to celebrate, so are indigenous peoples.
No racial or ethnic group is pure and innocent when it comes to treating fellow human beings badly. Those who constantly single out white Europeans as monsters while ignoring the atrocities committed by other groups and individuals do so mostly for selfish political reasons.
Their hypocrisy is clear to anyone interested in the facts.
So I would ask the local Great Falls finger pointers and virtue signalers, like those at the Great Falls Tribune who make money on the Lewis and Clark advertising brand, how they feel about the fact that Clark himself held slaves and the Corps of Discovery helped open up the West to American expansion and the “exploitation” of indigenous peoples?
Where are the calls to eliminate the statues of Lewis and Clark in and around Great Falls?
Where are the demands to get rid of any mention of Lewis and Clark in our local celebrations or in the naming of local restaurants and other businesses and tourist sites?
Please, be consistent or be quiet.
Philip Faccenda – Proud First Generation Italian American“
POSTSCRIPT
Christopher Columbus wrote in his Lettera Rarissima, “Let those who are fond of blaming and finding fault, while they sit safely at home, ask, ‘Why did you not do thus and so?” “I wish they were on this voyage; I well believe that another voyage of a different kind awaits them, or our faith is naught.”
To quote a piece by John Hirschauer, Contrary to the simplistic picture painted by academics, the indigenous cultures Columbus encountered were as assorted as those of any other peoples in history. While it might be true that some such cultures fit the nomadic, tranquil image pushed by the revisionists, not even close to all of them did. Which leads to an inevitable follow-up to those who would eliminate Columbus Day in favor of “Indigenous People’s Day. Which “indigenous people” do you have in mind? Is it the Kalinago people, who ate roasted human flesh, with a particular affinity for the remains of babies and fetuses? Is it the Aztecs, who killed an estimated 84,000 people in four days in their consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan?
As historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in his book The Great Explorers noted, Columbus “had his flaws and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great – his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission. That will and faith make him a man worthy of this, the day on which we honor him.
[…] Taylor and others like her think they’re edgy and oh so hip by posting garbage like this, but really they’re just dumb and totally out of touch with this community.’ – ECB 2022 […]