A Boston Paper reports, “Authorities say the statues [of Christopher Columbus] at Harbor Park in
Middletown and Wooster Square in New Haven were vandalized overnight Saturday. The
paint has been cleaned up.”
On August 21st, the Baltimore
Sun reported that a monument to Christopher Columbus had been vandalized
by vandals, a perfect word to describe the members of Antifa,
a group that claims to be anti-fascist, but does not scruple to
employ the methods of fascists, including the beating of non-violent protesters
by masked, black-clad brownshirts.
Columbus, we may state with certainty, was not a fascist. We
know this because fascism dates from Mussolini’s reign in Italy, well after
Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Neither did Columbus approve of
slavery; nor did his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. According to a story printed in The Hill,
a Washington DC publication, “it was Spain that forbade slavery
of most Native Americans and made them Spanish citizens.” The Hill also noted “that
Columbus seems to have faced arrest by his fellow explorers for punishing — even executing — those who
had abused Native Americans.” The zealot “most often cited in smearing Spanish
exploration and with it Columbus,” The Hill noted, was “Bartolome De Las Casas … the one who proposed African slavery for the New World.”
One can’t expect members of Antifa, an anarco-Marxist movement, to take
notice of such exculpatory data before they deface statues or infiltrate
peaceful protests for the purpose of creating havoc and suppressing free
speech. Nihilists and anarchists are not likely to be dissuaded by sweet
reason, which appears to infuriate them. The defacement of the Columbus
monument in Baltimore was recorded
on YouTube by the defacer for posterity and the delectation of his
fellow brownshirts.
While falsely claiming to be anti-fascist, Antifa effortlessly
bridges Marxism and fascism. Fascism, like anarchism and nihilism, is
ungoverned dynamism. It is pure spirit, void of reason, murderously directed to
an end – the destruction of life, property and culture.
As early as 1914, Albert Camus tells us in his book “The
Rebel,” Mussolini “proclaimed the ‘holy religion of anarchy,’ and declared
himself the enemy of every form of Christianity.” Camus adds, “Men of
action, when they are without faith, never believe in anything but action… To
those who despair of everything” – here Camus had in mind post World War I
Germany – “not reason, but only passion,
can provide a faith.” Dynamism for dynamism’s sake is an act of contempt for
both past and future. Camus again: “Fascism is an act of contempt, in fact.
Inversely, every form of contempt, if it intervenes in politics, prepares the
way for, or establishes, Fascism.”
Columbus and those who still admire him, while conscious of
the defects he shared with his own age, can never be friendly towards
Klu-Kluxery. The fury of the KKK was of course directed pitilessly at African
Americans. But the KKK was also contemptuous of Jews and Catholics, and this
boundless contempt was expressed in violent acts against the faith of
non-Protestants who were not Anglo Saxon. The African American Antifa enthusiast
who destroyed the Baltimore statue of Columbus was, by his act of contempt,
marching hand in hand with the Klu-Klux-Klan.
Bill DeBlasio, the mayor of New York City, still teeming
with Italians, is considering removing a statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle.
That monument was dedicated in 1941, fifty years after the largest mass
lynching in U.S. history. The lynching of eleven Italian Americans occurred
after a trial in which nineteen Sicilians had been indicted in the murder of
New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy. The jury regarded the evidence
presented at trial as highly suspect and insufficient. Six defendants were
acquitted and a mistrial was declared for the remaining three because the jury
failed to agree on their verdicts. A mob incited by a lawyer, William
Parkerson, and led by John Wickliffe, editor of the New Delta newspaper, advanced on
the prison shouting “We want the Dagoes!” and murdered the exonerated
Sicilians.
Some newspapers of the day approved the vigilante injustice.
The New York Times, covering itself in blood and shame, editorialized,
“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and
assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the
cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are
to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as
they... Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.”
The modern descendants of the lynch mob – including, anti-capitalist Marxists,
anarco-fascists, the KKK and Antifa – have now taken to lynching statues of
Columbus, erected in part as a rebuke to lawless anarchy and the terrible
silence surrounding the hateful prejudices that make lynching possible. Silence
in the face of anarchy and cultural dissolution is itself an approval of
anarchy and cultural disintegration. In an anarchic universe, we have nothing
to lose -- but everything.
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