The leftist iconoclast trying to destroy history
Victor Davis Hanson:
The Columbus thing also demonstrates an ignorance of history. Colombus of not a Conquistador. He discovered America while looking for a new trade route to India because Muslim had blocked the old one. While the Spanish did exploit the discovery, it should be noted that in the history of ancient Europe Spain first enters the books as a colony of the Carthaginians. After the Romans defeated Carthage in its North African base Spain became a colony of the Roman Empire.
There is also the bogus claims that the Europeans displaced "indigenous" people. The fact is that there were never any indigenous people in America. The people who were in America when it was discovered by the Europeans were early migrants from Asia. While some have tried to romanticize these early migrants, many of them were not just primitive but were people who engaged in human sacrifice and in infanticide.
I think it is wrong to try to destroy history and make war against people from a different era.
The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.The Romans did not destroy statues of Julius Ceasar even after he was killed in a power struggle.
In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.
In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad.
The West prides itself in the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.
In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descendants of Southern slaves --154 years after the extinction of the Confederate states.
There is also a renewed crusade to erase the memory of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Los Angeles removed a Columbus statue in November based on the premise that his 1492 discovery of the Americas began a disastrous genocide in the Western Hemisphere.
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The Columbus thing also demonstrates an ignorance of history. Colombus of not a Conquistador. He discovered America while looking for a new trade route to India because Muslim had blocked the old one. While the Spanish did exploit the discovery, it should be noted that in the history of ancient Europe Spain first enters the books as a colony of the Carthaginians. After the Romans defeated Carthage in its North African base Spain became a colony of the Roman Empire.
There is also the bogus claims that the Europeans displaced "indigenous" people. The fact is that there were never any indigenous people in America. The people who were in America when it was discovered by the Europeans were early migrants from Asia. While some have tried to romanticize these early migrants, many of them were not just primitive but were people who engaged in human sacrifice and in infanticide.
I think it is wrong to try to destroy history and make war against people from a different era.
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