In many ways, Columbus Day, which recently passed, has become emblematic not just of the accusation that Columbus was a racist who inaugurated a genocidal campaign against the natives, but a reminder that virtually all Europeans preceding the great era of “woke” were horrible people.
For example, during the summer of 2020, following the death of George Floyd, not just Columbus’s statues but the statues of many traditional heroes of Western and American civilization were attacked on the accusation that the men they represent were all racists and somehow involved in or approved of the slave trade of Africans.
The problem with this otherwise entrenched view is that it completely ignores one central fact: If Europeans were aggressive or exploitative of nonwhites, that is not because they were intrinsically violent or intolerant (a racist point, incidentally) but simply because they were able to.
And that’s the virtual bottom line of all world history: Capability.
Europeans did not defeat and uproot American Indians, enslave Africans, and colonize the rest because they lived according to some sort of unprecedented bellicose creed specific to whites and alien to nonwhites. Quite the contrary: they did so because they—as opposed to natives, blacks, etc.—were able to do so. That is the fundamental difference.
Consider: Had pre-Colombian American Indians developed galleys for transoceanic travel, or firearms, or compasses, or organized military structures and stratagems; and had they arrived on the shores of, say, “Dark Age” Europe—what would they have done? Would they have conquered and subjugated, or would they have looked at the pale savages and “respected” them in the name of “diversity,” leaving them wholly unmolested?
What if sub-Saharan blacks were technologically or militarily more advanced than their northern neighbors of Europe during the premodern era, and therefore could easily have subjugated and enslaved them? Would they have done so, or would they have left them in peace in the name of “multiculturalism”?
These are the hypotheticals that no one seems interested in considering, since the answer to these “what ifs” is as clear as day.
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