Columbus Day Special
The Memory of Columbus in the Western Diaspora

2,766 words

Commemoration of the 15th-century European discovery of the Americas has seen better days. From Seattle to Caracas to Buenos Aires, the Spanish-Italian explorer Christopher Columbus is increasingly considered a villainous embodiment of pure evil. While the American government still observes October 9th as Columbus Day, that hasn’t stopped a number of city governments from changing the holiday to ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ and re-purposing European colonial heritage as an original sin against the childlike innocent aboriginals—who surely knew neither war nor violence in their non-white utopian societies. Over the years, emboldened iconoclasts have also vandalized Columbus statues and called for their removal, as such monuments represent the destruction of a mythical paradise of color by a rogues’ gallery of European racists, rapists, and slavers.

The increasingly anti-European ideology of liberalism, which once birthed nationalism, has slowly grown and mutated from the French Revolution, through the ‘democratic’ crusading of the World Wars, through the Cold War’s game of postcolonial speed chess between the communist and capitalist heads of modernity’s hydra, and now into the present struggle between universal demo-bureaucracy and its discontents. Whether we wish to blame Guelfism, Calvinism, Judaism, Masonry, or Modernity, the resultant hegemonic worldview has fused the ecstasy of destructive class revolution with the principle of elite, oligarchic direction and set the stage for a global, mostly non-European ‘proletariat’ to be smashed against European and Eurocolonial peoples as the global ‘bourgeoisie.’ This same attitude which inspired Europe to evacuate from Africa and Asia, allowing non-European nation-states to fill the vacuum of European imperialism, now inspires Europe, North America, and British Oceania to abolish their own nationalities so that they may belong to the world instead of ruling it.

For the left, whatever may be subsumed under the banner of former Western civilization lingers as a black residue of the before-time, when evil ‘racist white supremacists’ ruled the world and oppressed everyone. This worldview informs the campaign against Columbus, who is the ultimate symbol of extra-European white populations, which themselves are a product of ‘white supremacy,’ that which must be smashed.

Columbus, the Confederacy, and the Founding Fathers

Many elected officials, chiefly those who identify as liberal or progressive, voice support for anti-Columbus campaigns, just as they have for the removal of Confederate statues across the American South. (Those on the so-called right come around in due time as well, as their conservatism amounts to defending outdated forms of liberalism against further upgraded degenerations of it). In both cases, public resistance comes from the proles more than the politicians.

Columbus is a Northern (or national) analogy for the South’s infamous controversy over its historical-political symbols, with the anti-Columbus movement being another development in the ideological trend of European de-nationalization.

The same destructive-revolutionary animus which motivates neo-Reconstruction (or de-Confederatization), a campaign to cleanse the South of ‘problematic’ flags and public monuments to historical ‘racism,’ motivates the erasure of Columbus from the American pantheon of heroes. In the latter case, rather than merely targeting a ‘wrong side of history’ character or polity as unfit for commemoration due to its unacceptable views and symbolic meaning relative to those of the present, the campaign strikes at the very root of that ‘racism,’ because without Columbus there would be no modern European populations in the Americas. Virginia Dare is never born if England never seeks to establish colonies in the New World; England never seeks to establish colonies in the New World if Spain doesn’t first; Spain doesn’t establish colonies if Columbus never discovers new lands. Tearing down Columbus serves as a symbolic rejection of the expansion of Europe.

Thus, in Columbus we find a far more existential symbol of European civilization than any Confederate general. What is meant by charges of ‘racism’ or ‘white supremacy’ in this context is ultimately the presence of Europeans. By destroying symbols of that past and re-configuring its meaning into one of evil and negativity, its future is also destroyed — the future of Eurocolonial peoples. No people without a treasured past have any real conception of the future, or possibility of having a future.

A less popular target for removal than either Columbus or Robert E. Lee — as readers may be aware — is that of the Founding Fathers, who played a major role in the expansion and perpetuation of Europe in the Americas. They were incontrovertibly ‘white supremacists’ and ‘racists,’ and yet remain part of the collective past as envisioned by American nationalism in most forms, as well as by the liberal democracy which pays lip service to them as troubled forebears (yet, still forebears). President Donald Trump drew attention to this logical conclusion when responding to the controversy in Charlottesville, Virginia over a demonstration-gone-bad in defense of its equestrian statue of General Lee. Regarding the monument, which the city government wants to remove, Trump said:

“So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

The media has played dumb with regard to this equivalency, but academia and further left outlets could have easily furnished agreement for it to agree and amplify in any other climate. The men who founded the United States were of the same substance as any other demonic avatar of Hitler-Voldemort so reviled by the left. Consider George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — both owned slaves and regarded blacks and Indians as racially inferior to whites. They also set political events in motion which advanced global ‘white supremacy.’ Washington led the military campaign to divorce the United States from Britain, which also ended the peace Britain had secured between European and Indian in North America a decade earlier in the Seven Years War, as restrictions on their former colonists moving past the Appalachian Mountains into the ever-shrinking Indian country were now null and void. As president, Jefferson authorized the Louisiana Purchase, which similarly expanded both African slavery and Indian dispossession in North America by doubling the size of the country.

Even more than Washington, Jefferson was a Columbian figure, though in the service of the USG and not the crowns of Castile and Aragon. Thus, all arguments against one are transitive to the others.

Robert E. Lee, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus all stood for European dominion over lands and peoples outside of Europe, and the settlement of Europeans beyond Europe. As such, they are by definition avatars of ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy,’ and their statues stand as testament to the conquests of continents.

However, for reasons of filial piety towards the state and classical liberal ethics, the Founding Fathers of the United States are a much harder target to popularly deconstruct than Columbus. While they were ‘white supremacists,’ they are also the reason that the country exists. It was men like Washington and Jefferson who did found the United States of America, and are widely respected as such, at least for now. That is far more proximate than discovery of the New World. On a purely civic level, the Founders are generative. As such, the public feels a great deal more patriotism towards their nation-builders than the more remote first-mover of their race to this continent. Zeus is the chief Olympian after all, not Kronos.

The racial or ethnic dimension to the Founders largely remains buried, only drudged forth for the purposes of guilt and manipulation. Generations of Americans have been raised with a strong (and natural) affinity for the Founders, as one has for their parents, and by and large reject the idea that these men should be torn down from the halls of fame and sandblasted off Mount Rushmore because angry leftists are calling them ‘racist.’

The demos overlooks the racial context, owing to the modernist grade-schooler interpretation it was taught—the Founders were on the side of equality even if they had not perfected it. None learned as a positive value that colonization brought our racial forebears to the Americas and led to the founding of the Union, only that the Founders spread liberty while unfortunately practicing race-war and slavery. This narrative prohibits rehabilitation of Columbus while affording it to the Founders, but it implicitly leaves their spiritual successors open to challenge.

Incrementally, they will be challenged, until the debate is over and the new consensus becomes stabilized. The liberal cosmopolitan completely understands that Columbus, Washington, Jefferson, and Lee were racial compatriots in the European colonization of the New World, and frames them accordingly in her concept of the political. And she is patient, because she believes she has demography and the long arc of moralized history on her side; she believes that one day all (white) racist patriarchs and their memory will be abolished. It will take time to digest and expel the Confederates and the conquistadors, but time is in good supply.

Columbus and the Autochthonous

As the man who followed the ancient way of the White Gods across the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus is effectively the founding father and first-mover of the various Eurocolonial ethnoi we have today all around the world. Everyone from Americans to Argentinians to Australians is a product of history’s largest and longest völkerwanderung.

As such, the Fifth Political Theory (5PT) looks to Columbus as the founder of the Western diaspora. The voyages of Columbus to the New World, like the Trojan exiles settling in ancient Italy, lay the foundations for the next expression of Western civilization. And even as that expression crumbles, we can find in its foundation a framework for conceptualizing our sub-national and trans-national diaspora. While Eurocolonial peoples may differ on any number of local issues, at the higher levels of geopolitical identity and supra-ethnic kinship we face similar challenges and opposition in addition to sharing the same civilizational and racial legacy of Europe. The world-historical event which forever ties us together is 1492.

Naturally in a society as involuted and degenerated as ours, there is a strong movement to purge Columbus from public memory as anything other than a villain. He can have no generative role nor commemoration. Eurocolonials are an immoral ‘racist’ product of immoral ‘racist’ actors. And so, we arrive at the problem of the evil ancestor which is unique to Eurocolonial countries and no others.

Mongolia, for instance, does not have this problem with Genghis Khan. All the war, death, slavery, and banditry his horde was responsible for — to the Mongolians, does not outweigh his value to them as their political ancestor. On the flip-side of the Old World, the Russians do not condemn their expansion across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean or those forebears who enabled it by subjugating Mongols and Turkic peoples.

The Islamic world does not hate Mohammad for persecuting the Arab Jews who refused to acknowledge his brand of Abrahamism, nor does it hate him for setting in motion the destruction of the Christian Levant, Egypt and North Africa; the destruction of Zoroastrian Iran; and the persecution of the Hindus and Buddhists in India; nor is he hated for giving a unifying set of memetics to the Arab, Turkish, and Mongol nations who would enslave untold millions of Africans, Caucasians, Greeks, Slavs, and other proximate non-Muslim peoples.

In the Western world, however, we are asked to hate our first-mover and denounce the reasons for our existence — if not our existence itself — as products of great and irredeemable evil. For what redemption can there truly be for a great mass of sinners but their material and post-historical demise? When the grievance-mongers charge us with grand theft terra they are implying our forebears should not have occupied this land, that the Eurocolonial past should not have existed, that we currently exist as the result of a genocidal transgression which we can never atone for. In a world created by war who else is held to this standard but we few?

The notion that countries mostly populated by Eurocolonials such as the United States or Canada really belong to their residual Indian minorities (or in the case of Ibero-American countries those who are the least racially European) is what white nationalist Greg Johnson calls the “autochthony argument.” In short, these countries and their majorities are “morally illegitimate because other people were there first.” Johnson raises a number of objections to this in working through the many contradictions of this argument. The most important takeaway, as I see it, is that the deconstruction this entails if taken to its logical conclusion is the total involution of Western civilization’s colonial societies into nothing more than a game-preserve for stone age nomads:

The last thing these Indians want is for whites to take their guilt trip so seriously that they erase the wealth they created and leave the continent as their ancestors found it. Instead, Indians wish to increase their share in the bounty of white civilization through moral blackmail, which just happens to impeach the legitimacy of that civilization’s very foundations . . .

In truth, indigenous peoples who present themselves as “historical” victims aren’t victims at all. They are actually swindlers . . . Giving in to such moral blackmail does not right old ethnic wrongs (the victims and perpetrators of which are long dead). Instead it creates fresh ethnic wrongs: new victims and new perpetrators and new resentments to fester down through the ages.

This echoes the central issue with the anti-Columbus movement, though with more emphasis on the economic than the symbolic. We should distinguish ethnic Indianist movements from the broader movement against symbols of Eurocolonial existence, as the former is only a coalition member of the latter. American iconoclasm is about trying to collect a moral rent from Eurocolonial peoples by destroying their symbols and charging them with the original sin of ‘racism’. Such a current extends well beyond the morally powerful but politically weak Indians, as it assembles a pan-Colored/Bolshevik alliance of much bigger players against Eurocolonial ethnoi, using autochthonic Indian victimhood as a cudgel.

Public anchors of potential reactionary sentiment which survived the American Cultural Revolution in the 1950s-1970s, like statues of Columbus, Lee, and inevitably Jefferson and Washington, cannot be left alone because they are natural arguments for Eurocolonial solidarity in the face of the ongoing civil cold war between American tribal groups. They are icons of a supposed ‘bourgeoisie’ our post-modern marxists want to smash. Their symbolic demolition demonstrates the coalition’s political, moral, and cultural power over the products of Europe’s expansion.

The power of the anti-Eurocolonial coalition is only possible because of the reign of liberal cosmopolitanism — indeed, most Eurocolonials seem to be on board with yielding their civilization to an angry and vengeful mass of ‘liberated,’ post-colonial, post-caste, semi-marxist, anti-white, and anti-Western people of color and their allies.

In all likelihood it is improbable that symbols of ‘white supremacy’ like Columbian or Confederate statuary will survive the next few decades in a post-Eurocolonial United States, where identity politics of color is routinely weaponized against them, with only legalism and ‘protests’ as defense. More than anything else, statues are symbols of the power wielded by their commissioners, and those people and their memes have long since been replaced. Confederate monuments are generally associated with the post-Reconstruction but pre-Cultural Revolution period of the American South, when the Lost Cause was seen as one fought by American brothers rather than retconned ‘nazis.’ They reflected the sort of people who ran the South and what they valued. Similarly, Columbus statues were associated with patriotic commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the European discovery of the Americas. Most monuments to Columbus date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which also marked the arrival of large waves of immigrants from Italy, who had become influential in northern cities. So during this entire period it was uncontroversial to suggest Europe was the bio-cultural master of the Americas and express this in statuary, as it had been uncontroversial before.

The empires are gone and now even their ruins are being demolished. And so what this truly means in the context of greater time-frames is that the killing blow has long since been dealt. What we are now experiencing is the ancient vice of hubris, at the hands of a wicked and fragile clique. The conquered are denied even their cultural comforts.

In the long run they may regret ever forcing these conversations. The king of kings demands we surrender our dignity, and without even offering us Hellas. They will win the outer struggle over symbols. But in doing so they equip us to win the inner struggle over who and what we are and identify with.