Columbus Day on campus — VOICES for REASON

“Let’s Take Back Columbus Day” is the theme of talks that I’m giving on several college campuses this month. (The official holiday is October 12, the 517th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America.) I spoke at New York University on October 5, and the following events are planned for next week:

• October 12: University of Virginia, Charlottesville – 7 p.m.
• October 13: University of Maryland – College Park, 6:30 p.m.
• October 15: University of Texas – Austin, 8 p.m.

At these events, I give prepared remarks for less than an hour and then spend at least that much time fielding questions. I’m really looking forward to hearing from students and addressing their concerns. It’s not often they are presented with a clear alternative to the multiculturalism and America-hatred so prevalent on college campuses, and it’s always rewarding when I can clear up confusion. For more details, consult the campus events calendar at the Ayn Rand Center’s website.

Meanwhile, here’s the lecture description:

In years past, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage was an occasion to honor the explorer’s courage and to rejoice in the spread of Western civilization across a savage wilderness. More recently, however, advocates of multiculturalism have damned Columbus and the New World’s settlers as brutal conquerors who destroyed a pristine Indian paradise. Columbus Day, we are told, should be spent in atonement and repentance—or be discarded in favor of “Indigenous Peoples Day.”

Unjustified guilt-mongering about Columbus Day improperly blackens the reputation of America and Western civilization while obscuring the harsh realities of life in the Stone Age, argues attorney Thomas A. Bowden, analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and author of The Enemies of Christopher Columbus.

In this myth-shattering lecture, Mr. Bowden re-examines such controversial topics as the morality of displacing the American Indian tribes (did they really own the land?), the fallacies in the treaty/reservation system (was government too generous?), and the infamous “Trail of Tears” (what caused so many Cherokee deaths on the way west?).

Rejecting as false all notions of racial superiority and collective guilt, Mr. Bowden instead affirms the objective superiority of civilization to savagery. On Columbus Day, he maintains, individuals of all ancestries should guiltlessly celebrate Western civilization’s core values—reason and individualism—at a time when those values are under terrorist assault by America’s declared enemies.

Image: Wikimedia Commons