rumitoid

The effort is being made to make people more aware of the horror perpetrated by Columbus. They want his day to be renamed Indigenous Peoples Day. Is this just bizarre PC or justice finally recognized?

The same is true of Thanksgiving. To celebrate this holiday, or the Pilgrims so associated with it, is a celebration of genocide. It should be replaced by a National Day of Mourning. Is this bizarre PC again or a t***hful assessment of what happened, again, to the indigenous people in this country.

“One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting,” Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in 2005.

No one likes unsettling changes to the norm. For many, the norm of Thanksgiving is sacrosanct, holy, unassailable and just loving. A treasured time for families to come together and renew bonds. Have a great parade. Tell old stories.

This may be the clearest difference between Conservatives and Liberals. Liberals, I believe, if it did not have to do with getting v**es, would overwhelmingly agree with the changes. Moral enlightenment, not Dark Age rituals.

How do you feel?

Coos Bay Tom Loc: coos bay oregon

For those who wish to celebrate the traditional holiday as it has always been it should remain so. For those who want to celebrate Indigenous peoples day let them do so. Live and let live and don't bother people who are not hurting you. That's how I feel

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

rumitoid

Excellent point...and democratic!

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Thanksgiving: The Real Story

From the journals of William Bradford

“The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century,” the late 1600s.

“The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority [of the Church of England] and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were … imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their [heresy]. A group of separatists” people who wanted no part of that in England “first fled to Holland and established a community.

“After eleven years,” in Holland, “about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to” what was then called “the New World, where they would certainly face hardships,” and experiences that none of them could foresee. But to them it was worth the try, because for them the objective was to “live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences,” their beliefs and their desires. “On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail.

“It carried a total of 102 passengers,” not all of them Pilgrims, “including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract,” for all the Pilgrims to agree to and sign, “that established just and equal laws for all forty Pilgrims of the new community…” It didn’t matter what their religious beliefs were. None of that mattered. They just set up a contractual agreement that dictated behavior and a number of other things. Now, where did the ideas…? This is the Mayflower Compact, by the way, is what it was called.

“Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the” Bible, both “Old and New Testaments.” It was the reason they lived: To read it, to study it, to practice it. “They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture,” this is all according to Bradford’s journal, “they never doubted that their experiment would work.” They were supremely confident that their objective would occur.

But everybody knows “this was no pleasure cruise.” It was long. It was arduous. There were the usual bad relationships and problems on board this tiny ship with 102 people. But they made it. They made it in ways that people would not travel today. They had no other choice. Think of the primitive forms of navigation, lack of knowledge of any upcoming weather or condition of the seas. Yet they did it, “and when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal,” nothing “a cold, barren, desolate,” unsettled, “wilderness.

“There were no friends to greet them, he wrote.” There was nobody to greet them. “There were no houses…” There was no shelter whatsoever, other than the trees. There was nothing that could be considered creature comforts whatsoever. There were no friends. There were no hotels. There were no bathrooms. There was no place “they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning.” They arrived at the onset of winter. Half of them, half of the first 40, “including Bradford’s own wife — died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.”

No houses, no hotels, no Safeway, no American Express. Nothing. They endured the winter as best they could. “When spring finally came, Indians,” the Native American, did welcome them, and “taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats. Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they” were nowhere near prosperity. “This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end.”

This is what the traditional thanksgiving story is. The Pilgrims arrived, barely made it through the winter. Indians befriended them and saved them — and today, to this day, we give thanks to the Indians for having saved the Pilgrims. This could not be further from the t***h. This is not to diminish the assistance, but this is not what Thanksgiving is about. “Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives,” but that’s not what it was.

“Thanksgiving, in t***h, my friends, is “a devout expression of gratitude” to God for their survival, which depending on a whole lot of things after they arrived — a whole lot of things besides assistance by the Indians. “Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into,” the Mayflower Compact, “with their merchant-sponsors in London…” They had no money. They had to have people help them here.

“The original contract … called for everything they produced to go into a common store,” a common account, “and each member of the community was entitled to one common share.” In other words, everybody got the same as everyone else. That’s the way it was set up. It was fairness and it was e******y. “All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community,” not to the people personally. “They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared… Nobody owned anything.

“They just had a share in it. It was a commune,” pure and simple. “It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California — and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way. Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this” wasn’t working. This was collectivism. Nobody had any more than anybody else, nobody had any less, but that did not lead to prosperity. It never does.

So after a while, realizing that there was nothing but stagnation going on, “Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage,” and wh**ever they produced was theirs — and, in an early fashion, this unleashed “the power of the marketplace. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn’t work!” You know why it didn’t work?

When everybody was entitled to the same you have slackers. Slackers didn’t do their share, they didn’t contribute their share, but they got the same amount as everybody else. It led to recriminations and jealousies and anger. Bradford had to change it, and he did. “What Bradford…” It’s all in his journal. “What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation,” i.e., keep a majority of what they produced or earned.

“But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years — trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it — the Pilgrims” learned in less than a year that it was a failure. “What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.” He wrote, “‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing — as if they were wiser than God. …

“‘For this community was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and r****d much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service” didn’t. They waited. They didn’t want to produce for other men’s wives and children what other men should have been providing, and eventually this “was thought injustice.” Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself?

What’s the point? “The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did [they] try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the … principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market” wh**ever they produced, able to sell — for wh**ever price they could get — their crops and their products. What do you think the result was?

“‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands industrious,” which means everybody got off their duffs and started working. “‘[M]uch more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.'” This is when they first began to experience prosperity, and it is for this discovery… By the way, it was at this point that they welcomed the Indians in, because there was so much production after that first barren winter of arrival — not knowing anything, not having anything.

Trying everybody getting fair treatment didn’t work. When they unleashed the incentives (stated simply as you get to keep what you produce), it turned everybody into — compared to the past — mass producers. They had so much more than they needed that they actually had a gratitude winter with the Indians where all of this bounty was shared, and the original Thanksgiving was to give thanks to God for the enlightenment and the courage and the fortitude to withstand all of the hardship and to endure all of the hassles and the problems to finally see through it and prosper.

“So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London” and Holland who had sponsored their trip. “[T]he success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.'” It was the word of success and prosperity among the original Pilgrim arrivals that spread to the New World and spawned to massive additional trips to the New World.

You could reduce it to say it was capitalism versus socialism, which it was. But that would be to undersell — underemphasize what really has happened. A people who had undying faith in God survived circumstances that they never knew they were going to face and ultimately prospered — and, at the end of it all, were still able to practice their religion as they chose who was the original reason for their trip in the first place. And for all of that they were eternally thankful. That is the story of Thanksgiving.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Thanksgiving Proclamation

[New York, 3 October 1789]

By the President of the United States of America. a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be dev**ed by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks—for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation—for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed—for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted—for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other t***sgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed—to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us—and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Trump restored references to God in p**********l Thanksgiving proclamations after Obama abandoned them
by Joshua Lawson
November 28, 2019 12:00 AM

From George Washington’s first in 1789 to President Trump’s in 2018, Thanksgiving proclamations have been declared by U.S. presidents 164 times. They’ve been proclaimed during times of want as well as times of plenty, during financial crisis as well as economic prosperity, and in times of both war, peace, malaise, and hope. Yet by 2017, this tradition was at risk of disregarding its original purpose — until reclaimed by President Trump.

P**********l Thanksgiving proclamations have always kept God at the center. A change occurred, however, with the first Thanksgiving proclamation from Barack Obama in 2009 — “God” was only mentioned once while quoting Washington. From 2010 to 2015, God received only a few passing references. Obama stressed the cultural contributions of Native Americans, typically concluding by asking Americans to be thankful, not to God, but to each other.

In Obama’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 2016, God was absent entirely. Obama’s changes went against the sentiment of almost all Thanksgiving proclamations that had come before him.

In 1798 and again in 1799, John Adams issued proclamations calling for days of “Fasting and Humiliation.” After a 15 year gap, James Madison issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in 1814, followed by another in 1815 which marked an end to the War of 1812 and offered “acknowledgments to Almighty God for His great goodness manifested in restoring to them the blessing of peace.”

After Madison, no president until Abraham Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving proclamation. When, on Oct. 3, 1863, Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday to be held on the last Thursday in November, the proclamation became a p**********l tradition. Despite the Civil War, two World Wars, wars in Korea, Vietnam, and throughout the Middle East, an unbroken line of p**********l proclamations have reminded Americans to give thanks.

What’s remarkable about the proclamations is their consistency. Americans are called to meet in their accustomed houses of worship, to rest from work, and — most importantly — to offer prayers of gratitude to God. Andrew Johnson intoned, “Resting and refraining from secular labors on that day, let us reverently and devoutly give thanks to our Heavenly Father for the mercies and blessings with which He has crowned the now closing year.”

Ulysses S. Grant reminded the nation, “It becomes a people thus favored to make acknowledgment to the Supreme Author from whom such blessings flow of their gratitude and their dependence, to render praise and thanksgiving for the same, and devoutly to implore a continuance of God's mercies.”

Grover Cleveland was the first president to use his Thanksgiving proclamation to encourage Americans to reunite with forgotten friends and seldom-seen relatives, writing, “let there also be on the day thus set apart a reunion of families, sanctified and chastened by tender memories and associations; and let the social intercourse of friends, with pleasant reminiscence, renew the ties of affection and strengthen the bonds of kindly feeling.”

Being the son of a Presbyterian minister, and known for his virtuous character, Cleveland’s Thanksgiving proclamations are especially good. His 1886 proclamation is the first to explicitly call on Americans to remember their private duty to the poor with “cheerful gifts and alms.”

Beginning with his heartfelt proclamation given less than three months after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt’s proclamations were dependably powerful, reverent, and imbued with a sense of duty and purpose. Roosevelt’s 1908 proclamation should be read by every American.

Woodrow Wilson began a trend of progressive Democrats infusing Thanksgiving proclamations with politics. After spending 1916 promising to keep the United States neutral in World War I, Wilson utilized his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1917 to endear Americans to the war cause. Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his 1933 proclamation to advocate for workers’ rights, and his 1934 proclamation to promote “social justice.” Following FDR’s lead, Lyndon Johnson pushed the “war on poverty” in his 1964 proclamation.

Yet in 1944, FDR gave one of the most explicitly Christian Thanksgiving proclamations ever. After thanking our Heavenly Father for the success of D-Day and the start of Europe’s liberation from tyranny, FDR suggested Americans engage in daily readings of Holy Scripture from Thanksgiving to Christmas to renew the nation’s understanding of eternal t***hs.

Gratitude for Heaven’s Grace on the United States goes back to Washington’s proclamations, where he wrote of “signal favors,” “Providence,” and God’s “Divine beneficence” in protecting and preserving the nation. Indeed, regular affirmations of Providence continued in the modern proclamations of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush.

With his first opportunity, President Trump returned the Thanksgiving proclamation to its religious origins, imploring Americans to “seek God's protection, guidance, and wisdom” and recognizing The Almighty as the root of our blessings once more. The president’s 2018 proclamation continued this trend, declaring the nation’s “strong faith in God” remains a “beacon of hope to all Americans.”

And that is certainly something we all give thanks for.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

President Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

rumitoid

Wonderful and stirring presentation, ty.

rumitoid

x2 in power and love. Beautiful. Ty.

Iliamna1

I agree. Let both go our ways in PEACE.

debeda

I like that take!! Sackcloth and ashes NOT a good look.

debeda

Very good piece, thank you for sharing

debeda

Wow, your entire series of posts were terrific, and good reminders. Thank you

Rose42

Its not moral enlightenment. And its based on faulty research about Columbus.

The following excerpt is adapted from “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the F**e History That Turned a Generation against America,” a recently published book by scholar Mary Grabar.

Howard Zinn rode to fame and fortune on the “untold story” of Christopher Columbus—a shocking tale of severed hands, raped women, and gentle, ens***ed people worked to death to slake the white Europeans’ lust for gold.

Today, that story is anything but untold. Zinn’s narrative about the genocidal discoverer of America has captured our education system and popular culture. The defacement of statues of Columbus with red paint had already become an annual ritual in many places.

Zinn is the inspiration behind the current campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” High school teachers cite his book in making the case for the renaming to their local communities. In October 2018, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Rochester, New York, joined at least sixty other cities in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Six states also do not recognize the holiday as Columbus Day.


Many articles reporting on this trend cited Howard Zinn’s role in the change in attitude.

Stanford anthropology Professor Carol Delaney, who was quoted in a Courthouse News Service article to provide a counter-narrative, informed reporters that Columbus acted on his Christian faith and instructed his crew to treat the native people with kindness. But such inconvenient facts are inevitably drowned out by the Columbus-h**e that Howard Zinn has succeeded in spreading.

Presumably extrapolating from the “many volumes” he had read, Zinn found the inspiration for the dramatic opening sentences of “A People’s History of the United States”:

“Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log: ‘They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton, and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . . ’”

The quoted passage from Columbus’s log continues with Columbus’s description of the Arawaks. They are “well-built” and handsomely featured. Having never seen iron, they accidentally cut themselves on the Europeans’ swords when they touch them. The passage ends with Columbus’s now infamous words: “They have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do wh**ever we want.”

The ellipses in this passage are Zinn’s, not mine. Those omissions are essential to Zinn’s dishonest retelling of the Columbus story. By leaving crucial words out of the quotation, Zinn makes Columbus say something very different from what he actually said.

It’s unlikely that he even read as much of “Columbus’s journals” or the works of “Las Casas, the great eyewitness” as he claimed. The t***h is that Zinn’s description of Columbus’s first encounter with the American Indians is lifted from “Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth,” a book for high school students that Zinn’s friend and fellow anti-Vietnam War activist, Hans Koning, first published in 1976.

Zinn perpetuates Koning’s smears. In Koning’s telling and in Zinn’s, Columbus set out to ens***e a uniformly gentle people for the sole purpose of enriching himself with gold. In fact, that is far from the t***h. European efforts to find a sea route to Asia had been going on for hundreds of years. As William and Carla Phillips point out in “The Worlds of Christopher Columbus,” Columbus’s voyages of discovery were a continuation of Europeans’ ventures of sailing to Asia—at first, around Africa—that had begun in 1291. For centuries before Columbus, Portuguese and Spanish explorers had also ventured farther and farther out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Thus, Columbus’s mission was multi-faceted and inspired by several different motivations: “to reach the East Indies, so as to take Islam in the rear, and to effect an alliance with the Great Khan—a mythical personage who was believed to be the sovereign of all that region, and favorable to the Christian religion—and finally . . . to diffuse Christianity throughout that unknown continent and trade with the traditional sources of gold and spices.”

Desires to find new lands for more resources and to escape enemies and persecution are not impulses unique to Europeans. The natives of North America “in prehistoric times” themselves came from Asia and “crossed the land bridge across the Bering Strait to the lands of the Western Hemisphere.”

When he encountered naked natives instead of the Asian merchants he was expecting, Columbus did not jump to thoughts of working them to death for gold as Zinn, following Koning, suggests. For example, in his log entry for October 12, 1492, Columbus wrote, “I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange”—a passage left out by both Koning and Zinn.

But Zinn’s most crucial omissions are in the passage from Columbus’s log that he quotes in the very first paragraph of his People’s History. There he uses ellipses to cover up the fact that he has left out enough of Columbus’s words to deceive his readers about what the discoverer of America actually meant. The omission right before “They would make fine servants” is particularly dishonest. Here’s the nub of what Zinn left out: “I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they come here from the mainland to take them for s***es.”

In his t***slation of Columbus’s log, Robert Fuson discusses the context that Zinn deliberately left out:

“The cultural unity of the Taino [the name for this particular tribe, which Zinn labels “Arawaks”] greatly impressed Columbus…. Those who see Columbus as the founder of s***ery in the New World are grossly in error. This thought occurred to [Samuel Eliot] Morison (and many others), who misinterpreted a statement made by Columbus on the first day in America, when he said, ‘They (the Indians) ought to be good servants.’ In fact, Columbus offered this observation in explanation of an earlier comment he had made, theorizing that people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as s***es because they were so docile and obliging.”

Zinn’s next ellipsis between “They would make fine servants” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do wh**ever we want” covers for Zinn’s dishonest pretense that the second statement has anything at all to do with the first. The sentences that Zinn joins here are not only not in the same paragraph—as he dishonestly pretends by printing them that way on the very first page of A People’s History— but they’re not even in the same entry of Columbus’s log. In fact, they’re from two days apart.

Zinn’s highly selective quotations from Columbus’s log are designed to give the impression that Columbus had no concern for the Indians’ spiritual or physical well-being—that the explorer was motivated only by a “frenzy for money.”

But literally the explorer’s first concern—the hope that he expressed in the initial comment about the natives in his log—was for the Indians’ freedom and their eternal salvation: “I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.”

Zinn just entirely omits the passage in which Columbus expresses his respect and concern for the Indians. Zinn also suppresses—and, where he doesn’t suppress, downplays— the evidence from even the sympathetic Las Casas that the Indians could be violent and cruel. Zinn has to admit that they were “not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes.” But, like Koning, he is eager to explain their violent behavior away, arguing, “but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.”

In Zinn’s telling, the Arawaks—or black s***es, or Cherokees, or New York Irish, or whoever—must always be persecuted innocents and the condemnation of their sufferings must be absolute. The officially oppressed cannot be blamed even for any crimes they themselves commit, which are inevitably the fault of their oppressors.

According to Zinn, there’s no such thing as objective history, anyway: “the historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.”

Once ideology has become a moral virtue, Zinn can discount standards of scholarship—such as those of the American Historical Association—as having to do with nothing more important than “technical problems of excellence”—standards of no importance compared to his kind of history, which consists in forging “tools for contending social classes, races, nations.”

Thus it would seem that the noble political purpose behind Zinn’s history justifies him in omitting facts that are inconvenient for his Columbus-bad-Indians-good narrative.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/howard-zinn-lied-about-christopher-columbus-heres-how/