The Incredible Irony Of MAGA's Columbus Day Obsession

[erronis]

https://www.wonkette.com/p/the-incredible-irony-of-magas-columbus
Robyn Pennacchia

It literally only exists because people were horrible to immigrants.

Another bit of news I wasn't taught in schools (public and private - so there!)

If you are reading this, odds are you know that Christopher Columbus was a pretty horrid person. We’ve all been over it 10,000 times, and if somehow you do not know, that information is pretty widely available.

Now, he was a real person who existed, but he’s also a very convenient myth that has long been used to symbolize whatever it is people need him to symbolize at that time. During the Enlightenment, despite his being at least a publicly practicing Catholic (there’s some evidence to suggest he was actually at least ethnically Jewish), the barbarous Columbus was recast a symbol of intellectualism, reason and scientific progress. This myth was solidified in the minds of most people after Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus included the apocryphal story that the purpose of his big trip was to prove to all of the backwards religious people that the earth was not flat, when no one at that time believed the earth was flat. Hell, there are probably more people who believe that now than there were then.

A large part of the reason we celebrate Columbus Day is because Italian immigrants were horribly mistreated, frequently with the excuse of protecting a WASPy American identity or crime prevention. Sound a little bit familiar? They started promoting the idea of celebrating Columbus as a way to assert their right to be here and their history in this country. They created, in a way, their own mythology of the man.

It didn’t become a national holiday, however, until a bunch of Real Americans went a little too far in New Orleans in 1891 and went and lynched 11 Sicilians in the largest recorded mass lynching in American history. The people of New Orleans believed that “the mafia” had killed police chief David Hennessy (who, oddly enough, actually did kill the New Orleans Chief of Detectives — his rival Thomas Devereaux — and was found not guilty by reason of self defense a decade prior). They were outraged when nine of the 19 Sicilians indicted for his murder were found innocent, due to the fact that they had alibis and there was no evidence beyond the fact that before he died, Chief Hennessy said “It was the dagoes,” although when asked if he knew which “dagoes,” he said he didn’t recognize them.

. . .

Lots more ugly American history in this article.

[Ocelot II]

1. Columbus Day became a celebration of the "discovery" of America

by white Europeans who declared the people they found there to be inferior creatures who could be eliminated or enslaved or driven off their land. Accordingly, Columbus Day has come to be represented as a great event in history even though Columbus was lost, had no idea where he was and never got anywhere near what is now the continental US, but he claimed wherever the hell he was (somewhere in the Bahamas, as it turned out) for Spain, despite the fact that people were already living there. He was a nasty piece of work for all that - he treated the indigenous people abominably. Nevertheless, what we learned in school decades ago was that the great mariner Columbus did this awesome thing for civilization by opening up this whole new continent for settlement and exploitation (though apparently he never figured out where he really was even though he went back a couple of times, to kidnap some native people and steal their stuff). But Trump doesn't want, and has in fact cancelled at the federal level, the corresponding Indigenous People's Day, because fuck indigenous people, right? It's hugely ironic that a day that was meant to lessen discrimination against Italian immigrants has turned into a celebration of white European colonialism.

[Iggo]

2. Brown people don't want it. So white folks gotta have it.

What else is new?

[UTUSN]

3. "more believe (flat earth) now than then" - Hah!

[erronis]

4. Yes - I liked that line also. Sad comment on our society.