War on Columbus: Cities Cave to Senseless BLM Rage
After the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests across America devolved into riots. Rioters vandalized public spaces with graffiti and knocked over statues. It began with Confederate monuments, but vandals progressed to targeting America’s heroes, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Then came Mahatma Gandhi, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, black Union soldiers, and freed slave Frederick Douglass. Vandals even attacked a monument to 9/11 firefighters and painted a statue of Jesus black.
Some of these acts of vandalism might have been mistakes, but the attacks on Christopher Columbus seem intentional. Many proponents of Marxist Critical Race Theory blame Christopher Columbus for the defeat and “genocide” of native Americans. Cities across America have caved to the Columbus hate and decided to remove statues of the Italian explorer from their public squares.
As BLM activists toppled statues of Robert E. Lee and George Washington, they carved out some time to vandalize Columbus, too. Rioters toppled a statue in St. Paul, Minn. After rioters removed a statue in Richmond, Va., they carried the statue 200 yards, set it on fire, and cast it into a lake. Another band of vandals removed a Columbus statue’s head in Boston.
In July, a horde of antifa rioters converged on the Columbus statue in Chicago, Ill. They came armed with sharpened umbrellas, frozen water bottles, and fireworks. They proceeded to besiege police who defended the statue in a scene reminiscent of Greek hoplite warfare. The siege left forty-nine officers injured. Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-Chicago) honored the brave cops by caving to antifa agitators and ordering the statue removed.
As Columbus Day approached, other mayors across America followed Lightfoot’s cowardly example. On Friday, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Pueto ordered the removal of the Columbus statue in Schenley Park. On the same day, the mayor of Syracuse, N.Y., also ordered a Columbus statue’s removal. Early last week, leaders of the Italian American Alliance in Boston, Mass., said they were surprised to hear the Columbus statue in Boston would not be returned after the statue was beheaded in June.
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Before these most recent announcements, CBS News reported that no fewer than 33 statues of Christopher Columbus have been taken down since June.
Cities are caving right and left because the radical Left has dominated much of the commanding heights of American culture, and Marxist critical race theorists have demonized Columbus.
“For Native people in the U.S., Columbus Day represents a celebration of genocide and dispossession,” Megan Hill, a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and a program director at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, wrote in The Harvard Gazette.
“The irony is that Columbus didn’t discover anything,” Hill argued. “Not only was he lost, thinking he had landed in India, but there is significant evidence of trans-oceanic contact prior to 1492. The day celebrates a fictionalized and sanitized version of colonialism, whitewashing generations of brutality that many Europeans brought to these shores.”
This anti-Columbus view is tragically mainstream. While Christopher Columbus was not the first European to discover America, his voyages corrected Europeans’ misconceptions about the world and connected Europe, Asia, and Africa with the Americas. Tragically, this enabled grave injustices like slavery and racial stratification. Yet the pre-Columbian states in North and South America had their own injustices, as well, and neither Hernan Cortes nor Francisco Pizarro could have succeeded in defeating the Mexica (Aztec) and Incan Empires without the help of other native Americans whom those empires had previously oppressed.
Accusations of genocide are rarely backed up by evidence. Europeans did often subject native Americans to forms of slavery and oppression, but the major killer of native American populations was disease — diseases that the Europeans unwittingly carried with them. Occasionally, the Europeans used the disease as a weapon (smallpox blankets), but for the most part, the tragic and horrific collapse of native American populations had more to do with unwitting transmission of disease than with intentional slaughter.
Columbus enabled the European conquest of the Americans, but he also initiated the “Columbian Exchange,” linking parts of the world in a trade network that made people in every corner of the globe richer. Crops that had previously only grown in the Americas became available in Europe, Asia, and Africa, while Europeans introduced livestock, writing systems, and new crops like coffee and sugar to the Americas.
Before Columbus, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, and tobacco only grew in the Americas. Potatoes helped Europeans stave off hunger, and they also spread as far as India. In the 1500s, Spanish colonizers introduced corn and sweet potatoes to Asia, resulting in population growth. Pizza was not invented until the 1800s!
Europeans also introduced many new crops to the Americas, including almonds, bananas, carrots, cinnamon, citrus, coffee, garlic, oats, olives, peach, peaches, pistachios, and wheat. Some of these crops helped natives fend off food scarcity and starvation. Livestock like cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses were also introduced, allowing for a more meat-heavy diet.
While writing developed independently in Mesoamerica, the grand Inca Empire of Peru and many other Native American tribes did not have written languages. The Europeans exploited this weakness, but they also introduced writing to these unlettered people.
Europeans also introduced new technologies like the compass, the navigational map, and new forms of crop rotation. The merging of the two worlds had negative consequences, but it also brought long-term benefits that people around the world now enjoy.
The Real Tragedy of Removing Chicago’s Columbus Statue
Columbus Day is a multicultural holiday
Finally, celebrations of Christopher Columbus have a noble history in America.
Much of the demonization of Columbus traces back to an anti-Catholic anti-Italian prejudice that led the Ku Klux Klan and other groups to demonize the Italian explorer. The celebration of Columbus Day actually helped American diversity, integrating this Italian-American hero into America’s pantheon and encouraging acceptance of Italian-Americans (who were not considered “white” at the time).
“Columbus has been a target of white supremacists since the 1920s, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan attacked monuments and celebrations of Columbus from coast to coast,” Patrick Korten, a member of the National Christopher Columbus Association (NCCA) board of directors, said in 2017.
“They hated that he was Mediterranean, not Anglo, that he sailed for Spain, not England, that he was popular in the immigrant community, and most of all, that he was Catholic,” Korten added, noting that “Catholics, along with African Americans and Jews, were regular targets of the Klan.”
The NCCA board member warned that “the disparagement of Columbus today has its roots in a centuries-old habit of painting Italian and Hispanic immigrants in this country as cruel, violent, sexually aggressive and untrustworthy. In the context of Spanish exploration, this is known as the ‘Black Legend’ — based on propaganda peddled about Spain dating from the 16th century, which continues to be the grist for racially tinged comments about Hispanics and Italians to this day.”
One of the catalysts for Columbus Day came on March 14, 1891, when an angry New Orleans mob lynched 11 Italian immigrants after they were cleared of murder charges.
Columbus Day helped Americans recognize Italian immigrants as their fellow Americans — with a noble heritage.
Christopher Columbus and the day on which Americans celebrate him are not symbols of oppression, but symbols of American pluralism, the acceptance of a new influx of Americans from Columbus’ native Italy. Just as the 13th Amendment corrected a historic American evil by abolishing slavery, so this holiday helped combat the anti-Italian prejudice behind a horrific lynching.
Tragically, Black Lives Matter and antifa agitators seem intent on demonizing and erasing this legacy along with so much of America’s noble heritage. Mayors should not cave to this pressure.
Portland Rioters Topple Statues of Roosevelt and Lincoln, Smash Windows at Oregon Historical Society
On Sunday night, rioters in Portland, Ore., toppled statues of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage at the Oregon Historical Society. Declaring a day of action, the “indigenous wing” of antifa threatened violence to anyone caught live-streaming or recording video of their actions leading into Columbus Day.
The statues, once toppled, were covered in what appears to be orange paint.
After toppling the statues, rioters smashed windows at the Oregon Historical Society, an expansive museum on the South Park Blocks near Portland State University.
One person attempted to set the building on fire by throwing a lit flare into the lobby.
The east side of the Oregon Historical Society building faces SW Broadway Street, a heavily traveled thoroughfare through downtown Portland. That side of the building has a large, multistory mural depicting events from Oregon’s history. Rioters defaced the mural by pelting it with paintball guns.
The rioters claimed moral righteousness in destroying as much American history as they could get their hands on.
Federal appeals court strikes down Texas abortion ban, setting up Supreme Court challenge
A federal appeals court has struck down a Texas law banning the most common abortion procedure in the second trimester, a win for abortion rights groups that will most certainly be challenged by the state at the US Supreme Court.
In a two-to-one ruling among the three-judge panel, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling argued that the ban “unduly burdens a woman’s constitutionally protected right” to obtain an abortion, while forcing care providers "to act contrary to their medical judgment [and] the best interest of their patient.”
The law effectively bans the evacuation and dilation procedure, the most common procedure. after the first trimester, effectively banning abortions in the state for women after 12 weeks; pregnancy awareness is roughly at five-and-a-half or more than six weeks.
Judges James Dennis and Carl Stewart, both appointed by former president Bill Clinton, ruled to strike the law, while Donald Trump’s appointee Don Willett dissented.
The ruling arrived as Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential candidate alongside Joe Biden to face Trump in November, grilled the president’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on the future of US healthcare.
The case could be among more than a dozen abortion-related rulings to appeal to the nation’s high court.
State Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, could also ask the full court to reconsider the ruling en banc.
Texas passed the law in 2017 but federal courts blocked it from taking effect, arguing that doctors would have to perform unproven and medically unnecessary methods to cause fetal demise before beginning a dilation and evacuation abortion.
Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit in 2017 on behalf of Whole Woman’s Health and other providers in the state.
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also argued that the dilation and evacuation method is “evidence-based and medically preferred because it results in the fewest complications for women compared to alternative procedures.”
“Efforts to ban specific types of procedures will limit the ability of physicians to provide women with the medically appropriate care they need, and will likely result in worsened outcomes and increased complications," the organisation has said. “These legislative efforts are based on non-medical, subjective language. This language will create confusion, thus putting women at risk and, in certain cases, actually leading to abortion later in pregnancy.”
Under the Texas law, doctors who violated the ban could face up to two years in prison.
“Today’s decision puts a stop to Texas’s strategy to ban one abortion procedure after another until it is all but inaccessible, ” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.
“Politicians should never decide what medical procedures a patient can and cannot receive," she said in a statement. "This ruling follows decades of Supreme Court precedent and the Fifth Circuit has joined every other federal court in striking down these types of bans.”
Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, said with the ruling, “our physicians can continue to practice to the highest level of their training, and Texans will continue to benefit from their expertise. ”
The ruling arrives four months after the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that would have closed all but one abortion health centres in the state. The high court struck down a similar Texas law in 2016.
Democrats fear that the confirmation of Judge Barrett – who has supported anti-abortion campaigns – could threaten the landmark decision in Roe v Wade, which provides constitutional protections for women’s healthcare, by tipping the body of the court to a conservative majority.
The harm in hate-crime laws
Identity politics has long been enshrined in law. A complex mess of equalities legislation, public-order and criminal-justice acts, enacted over the course of several decades, have reduced people to ‘immutable characteristics’, such as skin colour or sexuality, each with associated degrees of privilege or oppression. But, if proposals now set out within the Law Commission’s recently published consultation on hate-crime laws make it on to the statute books, we had all better start swotting up on critical race theory and intersectionality.
Hate-crime laws protect some and criminalise others. Those found guilty of a crime receive a harsher punishment if they are perceived to have been motivated by hatred of their target’s disability, race, religion, transgender identity or sexual orientation. This creates legal double standards. If two violent thugs beat someone up, each dishing out the exact same injuries, they could be punished differently depending on the identity of their victim.
Bizarrely, not only is intent irrelevant to hate crime, but so too is the existence of a victim and the carrying out of a criminal act. As Harry Miller, a former police officer from Huddersfield, found out to his cost, you can be investigated and recorded as having committed a ‘non-crime hate incident’ without having broken the law and without there being any particular victim. Last year, Miller tweeted a limerick ridiculing the notion that people can change sex on a whim. For this, he was visited by the police at his place of work and formally warned about his behaviour.
The Law Commission’s latest consultation aims to simplify and clarify the raft of legislation that hate crime currently falls under. In practice, this means expanding the law to protect more groups and criminalise a broader range of speech and behaviour. The ideology driving this expansion, illustrated by the quotations from choice academics that pepper every page of the consultation, seems cut and pasted from an undergraduate critical-theory module.
In considering the distinct harm of hate speech, the consultation points to arguments that victims perceive ‘their experience as an attack upon the core of their identity’. In relation to acts of racist hate crime, this means that ‘black-minority victims of racist crime will experience the crime more acutely than white-majority group victims because the crime serves as a painful reminder of the cultural heritage of past and ongoing discrimination, stereotyping and stigmatisation of their identity group. When an anti-black racist hate crime occurs, it brings all of the dormant feelings of anger, fear and pain to the collective psychological forefront of the victim.’ This is a view of crime that could have been lifted straight from the pages of Words That Wound, a 1993 book offering one of the first analyses of critical race theory.
Elsewhere, we get Foucault 101. Hate crime, we are told,
‘is a mechanism of power and oppression, intended to reaffirm the precarious hierarchies that characterise a given social order. It attempts to recreate simultaneously the threatened (real or imagined) hegemony of the perpetrator’s group and the “appropriate” subordinate identity of the victim’s group. It is a means of marking both the Self and the Other in such a way as to re-establish their “proper” relative positions, as given and reproduced by broader ideologies and patterns of social and political inequality.’
If all this academese seems confusing to the average man on the street, we need not worry. The whole point of hate-crime law, the Law Commission tells us repeatedly, is to educate the public.
The consultation proposes that ‘gender or sex should be a protected characteristic for the purposes of hate-crime law’ because this would have ‘declaratory importance’. Making misogyny a hate crime would send a message, ‘that culturally endemic negative attitudes towards women are not acceptable’. In such instances, the law is assumed to have ‘educative value’: ‘After a bias incident, there is often discussion about the crime that serves to educate the public. If sexual assaults were appropriately labelled as hate crimes, a similar discussion could occur in regard to rape and other forms of gender-motivated violence that would educate the public about the actual nature of rape and discredit common rape myths.’ In other words, the law needs to change in order to educate the British public into holding the ‘correct’ views.
The ‘correct’ view, it seems, is to affirm the identity of protected groups. The Law Commission flags up a problem with current hate-crime legislation – namely, ‘the lack of acknowledgment of the intersectional nature of victims’ characteristics’. Helpfully, it explains that ‘by “intersectional” we mean the fact that some people experience multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination and abuse’. Of course, this desperate bid to recognise and affirm every identity group leads to a clamour from campaigning groups that want the law extended to protect their members. Commissioners met with ‘older people, homeless people, sex workers, members of alternative subcultures, and those who adhere to non-religious philosophical beliefs. They argued that there is considerable unfairness in the fact that they are excluded altogether from the protection offered by hate-crime laws.’ Likewise, ‘disability groups shared the concerns of LGBT groups about unequal treatment in law compared with race and religion, and the practical and symbolic implications of this’.
The Law Commission’s consultation on hate crime drips with contempt for the British public: we are either hateful and in need of re-education, or pathetic and in need of protection. We already have laws shaped by identity politics, and the proposals put forward by the Law Commission take us further into identitarian terrain. Both free speech and equality before the law are casualties of this. Rather than protecting free expression, the consultation heralds the fact that ‘hate-speech law sets the parameters of morally acceptable speech’, and can therefore ‘represent a permissible interference with freedom of expression’. Meanwhile, equality before the law becomes reinterpreted as equal protection for different victims.
Incredible as it may seem, this new consultation threatens to make a morass of bad laws even more illiberal.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/06/the-harm-in-hate-crime-laws/
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