Annual Spanish Invasion Day

When I was growing up, Columbus Day was a semi-historical celebration to which most Americans paid little attention. Though he sailed under the Spanish Flag, he was Genoese, and that did produce a day for the Italian-Americans to celebrate much like St. Patrick's Day for the Irish-Americans. In San Francisco, with its large Italian immigrant population, it was always a big day for celebration.

Since I have neither Spanish nor Italian ancestors, I had simply been taught the traditional couplet "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Of course we quickly developed our own obscene versions of the next line, but that's another story entirely. It wasn't until late in elementary school that I got to exercise my first ethnic indignation when I found out that Columbus wasn't even the first European to discover America. In fact some of my ancient ancestors had sailed in their long boats to the North American mainland long before Columbus ever set foot on that worthless island south of Florida.

I immediately demanded to know why we don't celebrate Leif Erikson day. It didn't last long. First, my ancestors were mostly busy running around in animal skins in the Teutoburg Forest and were probably as delighted at the arrival of the Norsemen as were the Native Americans. And apparently, the distinction has always been made that the Spanish permanently settled America, while my "Germanic" forebears split back to Greenland, Iceland, and Scandinavia. This year's Leif Erikson day celebrations were overshadowed by the announcement that the president had received the Nobel Peace prize.

So--big holiday for Italian-Americans, official holiday for the rest of us. That is right up until political correctness and ethnic grievances became the norm, starting in the late Sixties. Contrary to current received wisdom, those of us who attended school prior to the great leftist awakening actually were taught about Columbus's great accomplishment along with his horrible treatment of the natives and the forced conversions supervised by The Inquisition. Those of us who are Protestants (particularly those of us who are Lutherans with historical perspective) related to their plight, especially when it came to The Inquisition. Our Jewish friends weren't too thrilled with the forced conversion idea, either. But we felt none of the vitriol to come concerning the man who eventually became described by the leftist establishment as Satan's right hand man and the great destroyer of indigenous cultures.

Interestingly, with all the anti-Columbus, anti-European rhetoric of the leftists, the original purpose of enhancing Columbus day was formed in the latter half of the 19th century. Catholic immigrants were a particular target of nativist organizations including the Populists and the Ku Klux Klan. In order to fight discrimination, Catholics developed social organizations to fight prejudice. One of the most famous is the Knights of Columbus, which was instrumental in establishing Columbus Day first as a series of state holidays, and finally in 1934 a federal holiday. Leftists who go into high dudgeon at the mere mention of Columbus's name support unrestricted immigration. Yet they don't see that the original Columbus Day celebrations were all about immigration and non-discrimination (admittedly ignoring the slavery and oppression thing for the most part).

Another interesting sidelight is the vociferousness of the Columbus attacks which come from the Mexican-American leftist organizations. Considering that the vast majority of Mexicans are Spanish-Indian mix, I'm trying to figure out exactly whom they're protesting. Do they march in Columbus Day parades, but only half of the route? Do they object to Columbus attempting to enslave or exterminate half of each of them? Do they punch themselves in the nose? The North American Native American groups are always full-throated about how they were oppressed by Columbus. Of course, the only North American Indian group which had much contact with the Spanish were the Seminoles, with whom the Spanish generally got along very well. Perhaps they don't understand that "Anglo" refers to a specific ethnic group which is not Spanish.

Through the Seventies and Eighties, as radicalism became mainstream and entrenched in the schools of higher "education," Columbus went from hero to villain, and his holiday was continuously demoted to minor status. By 1992, the National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical religious body in the United States, called on Christians to refuse to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World. Columbus shouldn't feel too bad, though. Christ was lowered to a level of secondary importance in the same Council years earlier.

Some sense has started to return by the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The left has bigger fish to hate. With their blood-lust fed by the riots of the Sixties through the Nineties, it suddenly became fashionable to mention the bloodthirstiness and warlike habits of the native American populations. Once Columbus ceased to be the oppressor of a horde of loving shepherds and sweet agrarians, his evil didn't seem so evil anymore. Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute was able to make a statement about Columbus and his successors that didn't even get him put on a leftist hit list: "The European conquest brought reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, and productive achievement to a people who were based in primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism and to a land that was sparsely inhabited, unused and underveloped." The best criticism the radicals could come up with was "the statement was Eurocentric.

Having gotten all that out of the way--HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY.