Today
marks the celebration of Columbus Day, in honor of the man who discovered the
Western Hemisphere. (October 12 is the actual date of his discovery.)
In
view of the fact that there are growing numbers of barbarians living in the
midst of modern Western Civilization, who have no understanding or appreciation
of its value, I find it necessary to quote from my pamphlet Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism
to explain why it is that “… I regard the discoverer of the Western hemisphere
to be Columbus, rather than the very first human beings to arrive on the North
American continent (probably across a landbridge from Asia), and rather than
the Norwegian Leif Ericson. I consider Columbus to be the discoverer not
because of any such absurd reason as a preference for Europeans over Asiatics
(Leif Ericson was as much a European as Columbus), but because it was Columbus
who opened the Western hemisphere to the civilization I have made my own.
Columbus was the man who made it possible to bring to these shores my ideas
and values. It is not from the perspective of the residence of my
ancestors, who were certainly not Italian or Spanish or even West European,
that I regard Columbus as the discoverer of America, but from the perspective
of the residence of my ideas and values. Just as at an earlier time, they
resided in Greece and Rome rather than in the Russia of my ancestors, so in the
15th and 16th centuries, the home of my ideas and values was in
Western Europe. I hold Columbus to have been the discoverer of America from that
perspective. This is the perspective that any educated person would
hold.” (p.6)
Those who
deny the fact that Columbus was the discoverer of America demonstrate that they
have not made the knowledge and values that constitute Western Civilization
their own. They are self-confessed and self-made aliens living in the midst of
Western Civilization yet preferring to all of the knowledge and values that constitute
it, the meagre, primitive state of knowledge and values constituting the
culture of “indigenous peoples,” who are at a level comparable to that of
people who lived many thousands of years ago, with no knowledge of reading or
writing, and hardly any knowledge of science, mathematics, philosophy, music,
or art.
Whoever, in
the words of Ludwig von Mises, prefers life to death, health to disease, and
wealth to poverty, is logically obliged to prefer Western Civilization and its
offshoots of individual freedom and capitalism to all other civilizations and
cultures that have ever existed.
