As we approach Columbus Day, fewer and fewer governments are honoring the great explorer, though President Trump has just retained the holiday after the explorer.
Closer to home, the town of Huntington, which usually has one of the grandest Columbus Day parades in New York, has decided to keep the parade but focus only on Italian heritage and ditch any association with Columbus. It’s too bad they folded to the Woke mob.
There’s a reason to celebrate Columbus’s voyage.
His venture opened up various parts of the world to each other and ushered in a new era of trade and communication. One could say it played a role in helping expand the Renaissance.
But it was the opening of the trade routes that really made a difference in human development. Trade opened markets, which, as Adam Smith wisely noted in The Wealth of Nations, ushered in the age of capitalism. Trade and capital investment built wealth around the world. As nations became richer, disease was tempered to a certain extent, and people had the ability, for the first time in history, to break their serfdom roots and possibly move up the social ladder. This advancement was slow in most of the world, but not in America, which soon developed, thanks to Columbus’s three journeys.
Certainly, the story of Columbus is not all pristine. The Europeans, who met up with the indigenous people of the Americas at the time, forged working relationships with the natives, but also at times engaged in exploitation and deceit.
However, it’s totally incorrect to say that Columbus and the Europeans introduced slavery to the world. Slavery existed all over the globe, including in the Aztec and other tribes throughout North and South America. In fact, the Aztecs were known for killing their own via human sacrifices.
We shouldn’t sugarcoat Columbus’s actions during his lifetime. There were certainly dark sides to discuss. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the fact that there was a great deal of good that occurred with the opening of this new world to the Europeans and the beginning of capitalism and trade.
New-age educators want to make sure that the negative parts of our history are not erased. They’re on solid ground there, but they go too far when they themselves want to erase the good things that came about from Columbus, and then our founding fathers who followed him in the centuries to come.
So enjoy our celebration of Italian heritage — and Columbus — this Monday.