October 28, 1991
We have almost a whole year before the 500th Anniversary of America’s discovery, and already I am sick and tired of the Columbus bashers.
To Columbus and the other European settlers, Indians were barbarians from the Stone Age. They were dirty, frightening and capable of horrors and a bestiality unknown to newcomers with 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian ethics and sensitivity, along with a far superior technology and social development.
The history of civilization is the history of conflict and conquest, of pushing back frontiers and spreading learning and opportunity to widening beachheads, like America.
Yes, slavery was barbaric, but Columbus didn’t invent it. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and every other civilization had practiced it in some form long before 15th-century America.
And this nonsense about Indians being the only “native Americans” who were deprived of “their” land is a lot of ethnic propaganda and self-serving claptrap.
Today’s Indians used to be Asian immigrants. Just because they got here before the European immigrants and spent several centuries fighting and killing and torturing and raping each others’ tribes doesn’t make me any less of a bona fide Native American than they.
Hooray for Columbus! Hooray for America! Hooray for progress and civilization!
JACK O’NEIL
Sewickley