Focus on good, don’t forget evils of history

Columbus Day a time to reflect on European influence.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently triggered a firestorm by suggesting he might order the removal of Christopher Columbus’ statue from Manhattan’s Columbus Circle.

Americans used to celebrate the courage of Columbus and other explorers who set out into the unknown and began introducing western ways to this new part of the world.

Today, that triumphalist account no longer suffices. We think now of the extraordinary presumption of sticking a flag in someone else’s land and calling it yours. We think more darkly of how European diseases decimated the native peoples of the Americas and how poorly the early explorers — Columbus included — treated them. And we think most darkly of the stain of the slave trade that followed.

These dark thoughts are not misplaced. Yet, we also should remember what the world was like when Europeans collided with the natives of North America and why that world no longer exists.

Europeans headed West in the 15th century to what they thought was Asia because they were blocked from going east by the Muslim empires of the time. In Asia, of course, China was rich and powerful beyond anything to which the Europeans could aspire. Compared to the Muslims and Chinese, the Europeans were poor, backward and weak.

The Europeans who conquered the Western hemisphere acted as people had always acted, no better or no worse; those they conquered suffered as the weaker always suffer, as the Europeans themselves had suffered for years under plagues from Asia and invasions from the Muslim world.

Of course, to say that Europeans acted as others had acted doesn’t justify the awful things Europeans did to each other, and to non-Europeans, in their long history. But it might persuade us to moderate our condemnation of Columbus and to judge him less harshly.

We should remember too that we judge him harshly now because the same power that enabled the Europeans to conquer the world also allowed them to impose their later views of human rights on the world.

Even as the conquest was reaching its zenith in the 19th century, Europeans were bringing to the world the then-novel idea that one group of people did not have the right to impose its will on another group.

This revolution in thinking was announced by the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the self-evident truth of human equality. It was carried further by the British who suppressed the slave trade with their all-powerful navy, commercial might and insistent diplomacy, and led the campaign for the abolition of slavery. It was completed by American insistence after World Wars I and II that people everywhere have the right to self-determination.

This Columbus Day we need no triumphalism. Instead, let it be a day to ponder the good and evil that humans are capable of and to wonder how we might encourage more of the good. DavidTucker is a senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, Ohio, and the authorof“Revolution and Resistance: MoralRevolution, MilitaryMight, and the End of Empire.”Hewrote this for InsideSources.com.