As leftist media gratuitously fill their coverage of what most of us still call “Columbus Day” with criticism of the imperfect, 500-years-dead Italian explorer, it’s fair to ask some simple questions.
Do any of the woketivists who reflexively take up for history’s losers believe for a moment that today’s “victims” wouldn’t have gladly been the “victimizers” had their cultures developed game-changing technologies first?
If North America’s so-called indigenous people had been first to refine trans-oceanic navigation, steel, gunpowder and muskets, does anyone really believe they wouldn’t have gotten around to taking Europe (and other lands) as their own, feeling the missionary need to bend the more primitive peoples they found there to their “modern” ways?
If Sub-Saharan African chiefs had had sailing ships and artillery, does anyone think they wouldn’t have ordered their warriors and entrepreneurs to sally forth and return with enslaved labor with which to build their empires?
But for happenstance, today’s “oppressed” would have been eager oppressors. And it’s preposterous to argue otherwise. We all rose from the apes, and we all still have a very long way to go to fulfill humanity’s promise.