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Oct. 11, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ARCHITECT OF THE MODERN WORLD Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 193
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Today, guys, a special episode, the whole podcast, on Christopher Columbus.
It's Columbus Day. I'm going to examine the greatness of the man, the magnitude of his achievement, and I'm going to show that his critics are fundamentally wrong.
If it wasn't for Columbus, not only would they not have their lifestyles, they wouldn't even exist.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Today is Columbus Day, a celebration, it should be, of a truly great man.
An entrepreneur, a mariner, an adventurer, someone who was the architect of the modern world.
It's hard to believe that the world as it is now, a world dominated as it has been for the last 500 years by Western freedom and Western enlightenment, this is a world that Columbus was a key figure in making.
And for a long time, the achievement of Columbus was recognized and celebrated.
It was celebrated because America was confident of itself.
And so on the 400th anniversary of the Columbus landing, this would be obviously in 1892, massive celebrations for Columbus.
And then yet, if you fast forward a century to 1992, and this has continued to today, a kind of much more reserved, skeptical, withdrawn attitude.
And of course, it's the same Columbus.
So the difference in this attitude It's more a mark of the country itself, what America was like a century ago versus what it's like today.
Now, starting in the 1960s, there was a campaign to sort of start going after Columbus.
A campaign, again, in the name of minority rights, in this case Native Americans.
And so the first push for sort of Indigenous People's Day goes back almost now 50 years.
But it didn't get much traction then.
There were a couple of Columbus statues that were defaced, but these were episodic instances.
But starting going on through the 80s and then gathering force in the 1990s, There was a much more antagonistic attitude to Columbus, and the idea here was that not just Columbus, but Western civilization itself was a destructive, a colonizing, a slave-owning, kind of a giant mistake, sort of Columbus went too far.
This became the prevailing attitude, and we see it today.
Now, I'm happy to say a judge just in Philadelphia has ordered that a Columbus statue that had been covered with plywood by left-wing activists That the plywood be removed and the statue restored.
But in other cases, you might remember just last year, in the wake of all these protests around the country, in Baltimore Harbor, a big statue of Columbus just toppled over.
Take a peek.
Here it is. I mean, I look at this pathetic spectacle and I kind of shake my head.
I'm almost tempted to say, you know, these people kind of know not what they do.
They have no idea who Columbus was or what he actually accomplished.
And the movement against Columbus isn't just in America, by the way.
Even the Europeans have this kind of critical attitude toward Columbus.
The Nobel Prize for the 500th anniversary of Columbus went to some kind of a Native American.
Later on, she turned out to be a complete fraud, a woman named Rigoberta, Menchu.
But the wacky Norwegians were trying to make a statement, an anti-Columbus statement.
And in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, now Maduro.
These guys have been denouncers of Columbus.
And recently...
After taking Columbus statues down, by the way, over the years, they erected a kind of replacement of Columbus, sort of the native Indian hero.
Take a look at this.
This is the sort of new Columbus monument to indigenous people of Venezuela.
And in Caracas, Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro unveiled a statue honoring the leader of the rebellion against the Spanish Empire, Guaicaipuro.
He did so before heading to Bolivia.
He was accompanied by the First Lady, Celia Flores, and members of the government, as well as several representatives of the indigenous community.
And then Biden issued a statement celebrating Indigenous People's Day.
Indigenous People's Day.
Well, what are we honoring the indigenous people for?
Well, here's Biden.
We're honoring, quote,"...our diverse history." And the indigenous people who contribute to shaping the nation.
Well, I mean, everyone contributes to shaping the nation.
It's very interesting that no achievements, no contributions are really specified.
In the modern era, it seems that you get credit for being a victim.
In other words, if your ancestors were whipped in battles with somebody else's ancestors, this gives you virtue points.
So there's a kind of perverted psychology in which people get credit for nothing that they actually did.
But let's examine just briefly some of the main themes of the critique against Columbus, which I'm going to be examining throughout the podcast.
I'm going to hear a few quotes.
This is the American Indian activist Russell Means.
Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.
It's preposterous on the face of it, but this is the kind of thing you can get away with.
You even find this kind of stuff in the textbooks.
Winona LaDuke deplores, quote, the biological, technological, and ecological invasion that began with Columbus's ill-fated voyage.
So this poor guy is now responsible for, like, carbon-emitting cars, and he's...
Responsible for global warming.
The National Council of Churches.
Columbus's anniversary is, quote, not a time for celebration, but for reflection and repentance.
What are they, repenting of the fact that Western civilization has spread throughout the world?
Historian Glenn Morris accuses Columbus of being a murderer, an architect of a policy of genocide that continues to this day.
And... And so on and so on.
There's a lot more where this came from.
But you gather the main themes.
The guy was a racist.
He inaugurated slavery.
He began this process of wiping out the Indian populations, which were thinned out.
And all of this seems a little plausible.
The Indian population did precipitously decline.
Slavery, of course, did come to the Americas.
And all of this followed Columbus.
And so, therefore, it seems reasonable to say, well, didn't he start all this, even if he didn't do it all?
Wasn't he the kind of originator of things that wreaked tremendous suffering on people?
And my answer to those questions is a resounding no.
But my answer depends on the details, depends upon going closer in to find out who was Columbus.
What did he actually do?
So we're going to learn a lot about Columbus today, and as a result, you're going to be well-equipped when you listen to these critics, not just to laugh at them, but to be able to give chapter and verse as to how they are completely wrong about this great man.
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Who was Christopher Columbus on the 12th of October, 1492?
Columbus and his three ships.
The Ninia, the Pinta, the Santa Maria...
Discovered land in the Americas.
They arrived around the area of the Bahamas.
Columbus fell down on his feet, gave thanks to God.
He named the island that he landed on San Salvador.
Holy Savior.
This man, Christopher Columbus, changed the world.
He was part of a larger crew of great explorers and discoverers.
After him came Vespucci, John Cabot, Magellan, others.
But Columbus was the first, and you do get a lot of points for being first.
He was born Christoforo Columbo.
It's kind of funny when Columbus moves from one country to another how his name kind of changes.
He was the son and grandson of woolen weavers.
He was a proud Genoan.
In that time, Italy wasn't a single country and so Genoa was a kingdom and he was a Genoese sailor, very proud of that.
He learned his craft in Portugal.
The Portuguese were the best sailors in the world.
In fact, the Portuguese had begun their voyages of exploration to the east.
This was all inspired by a Portuguese prince named Henry the Navigator.
And so Columbus studied with these guys and he learned the craft of sailing.
And then he had a huge idea, which is that the Portuguese were rounding the Cape of Good Hope.
They were making their way to the Indies, largely India, to get spices from India, which were that time not available in Europe.
But Columbus thought they might be going the long way.
Why don't I go the short way?
Remember, the people at this time completely knew.
In fact, the ancient Greeks knew that the earth was round.
So all this nonsense, they all thought the earth was flat.
No, they didn't. They knew it was round.
Columbus thought, I can go the other way.
Now, he greatly underestimated the distance.
No one knew the circumference of the earth with any kind of exactitude.
And in fact, Columbus calculated that the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was It was about 2,400 nautical miles.
In fact, it's 10,000 nautical miles.
Columbus didn't know that.
Columbus actually thought that the Earth was 60%, 65% land and 35% water.
In fact, the Earth is the opposite.
It's two-thirds water, one-third land.
So this is really why Columbus He had his fundamental calculation wrong, but you can't blame him.
They didn't have any instruments.
They had no way of knowing how wide and how big that ocean actually was.
And Columbus was a real entrepreneur because he basically decided, and a huge idea that no one else had even really attempted, I'm going to go the other way.
I'm going to find a new route to the Indies.
He went to all these different governments in Europe, and finally he got a taker.
He couldn't get money out of the...
The Holy Roman Emperor.
He couldn't get money out of Italy.
He couldn't get money out of Portugal.
Finally, he got money out of Spain.
And he got money out of Spain by driving a hard bargain because he was an imperious man.
And he basically said, look, I'll do this.
But if I do it, you've got to make me an admiral.
You've got to address me as admiral.
I want a percentage of all the profits that come out of the spice trade.
I want my children to be Inaugurated into the royalties of Columbus was a guy who was, he was entrepreneurial in that he was out for himself, but he was also out to extend the influence of not just Western civilization, he thought of it more as Christianity into the new world.
This was part of a larger argument between the Christians and the Muslims, a dispute over Who was going to control the world?
And Columbus goes, this is going to give the Christians a kind of decisive advantage, which in fact it did.
It's almost unimaginable the conditions that Columbus encountered.
I mean, these were miserably small ships.
Everybody was cramped together.
The food was horrible, a little salted meat.
Bread and water and even the water went bad.
No sleeping quarters. Columbus had a small bunk for himself.
Everybody else sleeps in their normal clothes on the floor.
The voyage took 10 weeks.
Huge swells, terrible seas, thunder and lightning, demands for him to turn back.
You're never going to find land.
Some threats of a mutiny.
The genius of Columbus is he had that indomitable will, and he was a great sailor.
He had the kind of instinct that, no, we're going to find it.
We're going to find it. And 10 weeks later, they did.
They found land, and they made landfall.
Now, interestingly...
The effect of all this was electric.
I mean, this changed the world because after Columbus came more ships, and these were Spanish ships.
Columbus himself, by the way, made four voyages to the Americas.
He didn't just make a single trip.
He made four trips.
But with his second and third and fourth trip, he ran into trouble.
Why did he run into trouble?
Well, the answer is simple.
He was Italian, and all the other people who came were Spanish.
And so you had all these guys who became governor of this province and governor of that province, and they didn't want this upstart Italian telling them what to do.
So they poisoned the Spanish aristocracy against...
Ultimately, Columbus was even thrown in jail, poor guy.
And when he was thrown in jail, very remarkably, his critics, who would laugh at him when he first proposed his voyage, they were like, this is never going to work.
This is ridiculous. It was really only the queen.
Isabella of Aragon, I'm sorry, Isabella of Castile, who encouraged Columbus and decided, I'm going to back you, you go do it.
But all these courtiers, and one of them, you know, a sailor himself, came to Columbus in jail and was like, look at you now!
And Columbus was like, yeah, look at me now, but I think history will remember me differently because I did it and you didn't.
And Columbus recognized the great historical significance Of what he had done.
He made four transatlantic crossings, 1492, 1493, 1498, and 1502.
He discovered the New World.
Now, he didn't call it the New World, he called it the Other World, Otro Mundo.
And by New World, by the way, neither he nor Vespucci, who later got credit for kind of coining the term, they didn't mean that this was a new continent.
What they meant was, this is a part of the world that the ancients had no idea existed.
So it was new in that sense.
It was new in that, from the point of view of the West, there was no awareness that this part of the world even existed.
And again, coming back to Columbus when he was in a bad way, he was not recognized, in fact, The Spanish sort of betrayed him.
They didn't give him all the benefits that they had promised him.
And he made a very kind of telling comment.
He goes, listen, when I came to Spain to propose the voyage, Spain was a very poor country.
Now Spain is rich.
And who made it so?
I did. He did.
And this was just the plain truth of the matter.
So here's a man, a great man, a great mariner, a great adventurer, and someone who changed all our lives, your life and my life, in ways I'm going to spell out.
And when we look at the greatness of this man, the magnitude of his accomplishment, and the kind of pettiness of his critics, there's really no comparison at all.
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I'm ready now to take on some of the familiar leftist Accusations against Columbus.
This is really going to be fun, debunking these ideas.
And I'm going to begin with this idea that Columbus didn't discover America.
The preferred word among historians these days is that he encountered America.
Now, this just seems a little semantic, but not for the activists.
It's really important to them.
Why? Because their point is, how can you discover America, Dinesh, because America was already here?
How can you discover the native peoples, Dinesh?
They were already here. So the idea here is that The concept of discovery is offensive.
It's wrong. And what happened is that it's kind of like Columbus and the Indians were kind of, you know, they're like walking down a street.
Oops, there you are.
It's an encounter. It's not a discovery.
I'm quoting now. The activist Mike Anderson, he goes, the Europeans did not settle a virgin land.
They invaded and displaced a native population.
Homer Ridges, Europeans and native Indians, quote, mutually discovered each other.
Now, there's kind of a method to this madness.
There's a point to this. The left is trying to say that there was Is it a coincidence that it was Columbus A European and Italian with Spanish sponsorship that landed here in the Americas and not Native American boats that landed in Europe.
Do you think that if the Native Americans could have made their way across the Atlantic and then, you know, sailed up the Thames or sailed up the Seine, they wouldn't have done it?
Of course they would. But they couldn't do it.
They didn't know how to do it. They couldn't even begin to do it.
So the simple point of it is that Columbus was a sort of stand-in, a representative, For the civilizational, certainly the technological, but the maritime superiority of Western civilization, he did something that could not have been done, you may say, in reverse.
And then, of course, the left, kind of sulkily conceding this point, begins to say, well, yeah, but you know, Dinesh, the guy was a racist.
Here's Kirkpatrick Sale in his book, The Conquest of Paradise.
And these are white guys saying this nonsense.
Anyway, he goes, Columbus, quote, presumed the inferiority of the natives.
He was prejudiced.
And he represented this Western tendency to, quote, fear what it does not comprehend and hate what it knows is fearful.
This is really the standard line.
And the question is, is it true?
Was Columbus really prejudiced against the Indians?
Well, it turns out that Columbus was prejudiced, but not against the Indians.
He was prejudiced in their favor.
His opinion, his original impression of these people was entirely positive.
I'm actually going to just quote a few lines from Columbus's own journal so you can sort of see for yourself.
He's describing the Guarani people that he first encounters on the first voyage.
Quote, They are artless.
Artless, he means without guile.
And so free with all they possess that no one would believe it without having seen it.
Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they will never say no.
Rather, they invite the person to share it and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts.
They are content with whatever thing or whatever kind may be given to them.
They believe very firmly that I, with these ships and people, came from the sky.
And this does not result from their being ignorant, for they have a very keen intelligence, and so on and so on.
So Columbus here has a very positive view of the Indians.
He says they don't have religion, but don't accuse them of idolatry.
They will be very open to a Christian message if we offer it to them.
He doesn't think there's no evidence Columbus was a racist or he thought these people were inferior.
And by the way, he wasn't alone.
Later people, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, Amerigo Vespucci, Fernand Magellan, Walter Raleigh, all of them registered similar impressions of the Indians.
So the question then becomes, why did these Western attitudes toward the Indians, which were so positive, change?
And my answer is really simple, because the white man discovered that there were other types of Indians, not as pleasant as the Guarani, or later the Hopi, Or rather, there were brutally warlike tribes that had practices.
And remember, the Westerners weren't angels either.
These were greedy, rapacious swordsmen that came from Spain.
But even they were shocked.
They were shocked by what? They were shocked by the Incas in Peru.
They were shocked by the Aztecs in Mexico.
Why? These are people practicing widespread human sacrifice.
They're slaughtering thousands of their own citizens.
Literally, the stairways leading up to the idols that were worshipped were drenched in blood.
They stank of blood.
And so the Spanish were like, oh my gosh!
So the point here is we've got to realize today when we don't see any of this, where we have this kind of, almost you could call it the multicultural picnic view of the Native Americans dancing around in a circle.
They're like sharing their harvest.
You don't get the idea that, no, there were Carib Indians and they did eat human flesh.
In fact, the very term cannibal comes from the term Carib.
So the Spanish and the early Western People who arrived in the Americas were astounded.
They could hardly believe what was going on, and so their original positive impressions began to turn.
Even, by the way, with the early American settlers, we look back, we see that people like Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, these people very positively disposed to the Indians, respected their intelligence, in fact, proposed intermarriage with the Indians as a great way To sort of bring the two groups, the whites and the Indians, together into a new kind of society.
So the point here is that A, Columbus did in fact discover America, and B, the kind of racism that he is accused of harboring, there is no evidence that in fact he did.
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Now I want to turn to perhaps the most serious charge against Columbus, a charge that is often repeated in the classroom and in the culture, the idea that Columbus perpetrated a genocide.
Now, not all by himself, but Columbus was part of a Western genocidal campaign against The native Indian population causing the Indian population to diminish.
Historians debate the amount of the diminution.
National Geographic in a recent article says the native population shrank by about half after European contact.
But other estimates go higher, 60%, even 70% I've seen.
Alvin Josephi estimates that the Indian population went from 15 to 20 million when the white men first arrived to just a small fraction of that 100 years later.
This is presumed to be genocide, but we have to be very careful by looking at what does genocide mean?
Well, genocide means a desire and an intention and a carrying out of that intention to wipe out an entire people.
That's the meaning of genocide.
We know this because there are actually UN definitions of genocide.
Genocide is not the same thing as Holocaust, by the way.
Holocaust is something more specific to what happened to the Jews The Holocaust was a genocide, but there are many other genocides that are not the same as the Holocaust.
Now, why did the Indians perish?
Did they perish because Columbus or others had this genocidal motive?
Genocide requires the motive, but there was no motive.
Columbus had no intention of wiping out the Indians, and neither, as far as we can tell, did anyone else.
There are individual battles.
There's an accusation that Sir Geoffrey Amherst, this is, by the way, the guy after whom Amherst College is named, that in a battle with the Indians, he gave them some smallpox-infected blankets.
Now, this is a matter of some controversy.
There's actually no proof that That Amherst actually did this.
But he seems to have offered the idea of doing it.
And based on that, they go, oh, look, see, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that is really the only, quote, evidence, if you can call it evidence, of a kind of deliberate effort to infect Native peoples.
But by and large, here was the problem.
The white man comes to the Americas and he's carrying, unknown to himself, all these diseases, notably smallpox and the measles. Now, initially people would say tuberculosis, but it's been argued now by scholars that tuberculosis was already in the Americas. But nevertheless, these diseases that the white man brought, to which the Native peoples had no immunities.
Now, this is terrible. I mean, think about it. We're living...
We're talking about a time when there was no medicine, obviously no vaccines.
And so the Indians perished in huge numbers.
But I don't think that this can reasonably be called genocide.
And by the way, the historian William McNeil in his great book called Plagues and Peoples, he agrees with me.
His argument is, look, the carrying of disease has had, in some ways, very tragic influence on human populations.
He makes the point that, where did the white man get all these diseases that he brought to the Americas?
And the answer is, from Asia.
So, in earlier centuries, this goes back, by the way, to the Mongols, the Mongol tribesmen storming across the plains of Central Asia, they brought with them diseases that infected Europe.
And you might remember, remember through history, I mean, the Black Plague, the bubonic plagues, the plagues that wiped out by various estimates, somewhere between one-third and some estimates as much closer to a half.
Of the entire population of Europe wiped out through these plagues.
Now, you know, the left today doesn't call that genocide.
In fact, they don't even mention that.
And they don't call it genocide for a good reason.
It isn't. A population that brings a disease they don't even know they have that then contaminates other people who have no defenses, this is tragic.
But it is not deliberate.
And you have to ask the question, why is it so big?
Why is it so important to the left to sort of pin this charge of genocide on Columbus and on the West?
Because if they didn't do it, they would have a job of explaining something that is very hard to explain.
And what is that? That is, how is it the case that the West could land in the Americas with really very small groups of people?
I mean, you basically have...
In the case of the West, Columbus comes with a handful of people.
I think even in his second, which was his grandest voyage, he brought a few hundred people.
But these are people, and then later this is true with Cortes and with others, they're confronting There's an Aztec empire that by various estimates is like a million people.
So how do a handful of Spaniards on horseback with guns, but even the guns were not a big advantage because in those days the guns were really slow.
People could charge against you while you're trying to load your rifle.
And this gives no explanation for how a handful of Westerners were able to subdue the vast populations, the huge, the Incas in Peru, the Aztecs in Mexico, and take over the Americas.
How is that even possible?
That's the question I propose to answer in the next segment.
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How were a relatively small, in fact, in some respects, tiny force of Westerners arriving In the Americas, able to subdue large empires that dominated the continent, and really both continents.
We're talking now both about North and South America.
The writer Mario Vargas Llosa wrote an essay many years ago in which he attempted to answer this question.
He said basically that the Indians lived in a kind of enchanted universe, a universe governed, as they believed, by spirits.
When the Europeans came, they confused the Europeans with gods.
When things were not going their way, when they encountered things they didn't know, they didn't understand, they couldn't respond to, they responded by sort of sacrificing their own soldiers to their totems.
They were like, listen, our gods are failing us.
We need to kill more of our own people and sacrifice them to the totems.
Montezuma, for example, when his military advisors told him, listen, you're going to lose this battle to the Spanish, He ordered all the people who told him that to be imprisoned, and he killed their wives and children.
So this was the habitual response to a real threat that the Indians could have prevailed had they understood it and known how to respond to it.
But the Indians were kind of used to exterminating their own inferiors.
People in their own society, they were like, oh yeah, you're an aunt, I'm going to step on you.
But in dealing with the Spanish, they for the first time, some of these guys like Moctezuma were dealing with a rival force that they had to contend with and they simply didn't know how to do that.
Now nevertheless, when we look back at these conquests, the conquests of Cortes, the conquests of others, we hear it very often said that the white man stole the land of the Indians.
And this is, again, kind of presented as if it's like obvious, it's gospel.
And of course, it seems to be obvious because, of course, the Indians were in possession of the land.
They had it, and then they didn't have it.
And so who took it from them if not the white man?
So the charge of theft here appears to be, in a sense, irrefutable.
But I want to take what seems obvious and make it a little bit problematic because I want to make it problematic by looking at something that actually Frederick Douglass once said when he was talking about being a young slave in Maryland.
And he said that he would take food from his master.
He would actually take pork from a barrel and he'd eat it.
And he goes, you know, you can't really accuse me of stealing, he says, because he goes, I myself was owned by my master.
So, by the way, was the pig that I ate.
So all I'm doing is transferring the pig...
From one bucket, which the master owns, to another bucket that the master owns, namely me.
And I always chuckle when I think about this because I think what Douglass is really saying is that the modern concept of theft implies an underlying notion of ownership, of property rights, of morality, of Theft requires that someone legitimately own something, so that it's possible for someone else to illegitimately take it.
If I steal your corn, and it turns out it wasn't your corn, you stole it from someone else, then I have in fact committed theft, but not against you, it wasn't your corn.
I have committed theft against the guy that you stole it from, the guy who supposedly owns the corn in the first place.
So this is the key point.
Did the Indians prior to Columbus have any concept of property rights?
No. Or to put it differently, yes, that concept of property rights was takers-keepers.
In other words, the guy who occupies the land owns the land.
And so you had sedentary Indian tribes and nomadic tribes.
The sedentary tribes would cultivate the land.
the nomadic tribes would get tomahawks and axes and spears and then they would raid the sedentary tribes, they would displace them, and then they would become the new sedentary tribes until they were in turn raided. So the point is you couldn't go to one Indian tribe and say it's not your land, they'd be like yeah it's my land, I took it from that guy, so it now belongs to me, I'm the owner, because I'm in possession, possession confers title. So let's remember that by this standard, let's call it the Native American standard, the land belongs to the white man, because the white
man took it by exactly the same rules that the Native American tribes applied to each other.
Now, if you somehow get away from all this and you simply make the broader point and say, listen, the Indians, however you want to look at it, they were here first, and it's therefore their land.
The original occupant of the land, and of course the Indians themselves came as immigrants, they came probably across Originally, the Native Americans came from Asia.
There's some arguments about how they got here.
They come over the Bering Strait.
But nevertheless, the point is they were here first.
That's indisputable. But the question I'm asking is, does being first give you title to two entire continents?
Now, to test this idea, I'm going to look at the example from the Bible of Cain and Abel.
So... Now, let's just say that Cain didn't kill Abel, and they both continued, but every time Cain had descendants, his descendants would cultivate land.
And Abel was a nomad and his descendants are nomads.
They're shepherds with flocks.
And so at the end of the day, what happens is that Cain's descendants occupy all the land, all the available land.
And then they go, we own it.
And not only do we own it, we own it in perpetuity.
Why? Because we told it we were here first.
And you were wandering around.
And so you don't have any claim and we have a claim.
So does this mean that Cain owns the whole world because he was the first to cultivate land and Abel was basically just walking around?
No. It doesn't mean that.
It doesn't follow. The original Bedouin who shows up at an oasis doesn't own the oasis.
They don't have a right to decide who gets to drink water.
Everyone has to pay them a toll.
Nonsense. When there's unoccupied land and other land that can be Let's remember that the white man didn't come to the Americas.
Well, some did, to get rich and go home.
But the majority, and this was true just as much of the Spaniards who came and settled in South America as it's true of the English who came to North America, to what we now call They came as settlers.
They came to live.
They came to relocate.
They came to make their lives and their descendants' lives here.
And to follow a theory that was advanced by John Locke, they came to own land by mixing their labor with it.
They made the land, so to speak, productive.
And their basis of claiming title was that.
It's that we took land, the land by itself is not worth much.
Locke argues that land alone is kind of worthless.
He calls it moss and leaves.
And he says, but what makes land valuable?
Well, what makes land valuable is that when human beings use not just their physical labor, but their ingenuity to get something out of land that is not obviously even present in it, to create, in other words, a civilization, a society...
A community. And by doing that, says Locke, by mixing, in Locke's terms, our labor with land, we come to own that land, that particular piece of land.
And so the point I want to make here is not to settle the issue of property rights, but to argue that the sort of glib idea that the white man stole the land, well, that's not really true.
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In the year 1626, now this is more than a century after Columbus landed, the Dutch bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24.
$24, which works out to, I don't know, $700, $800, maybe a little more in today's dollars.
So it seems like a ripoff.
It seems like It seems like the Dutch just basically took Manhattan and gave the Indians a pittance.
But this, I think, is an error.
It's an error because Manhattan in 1626 was not Manhattan.
There was a piece of land there.
No better, by the way, than any other piece of land.
And the actual value of that land depends, and I'm here once again appealing to luck, depends on what you do with it.
There are places in the world today, you can go to villages in India and buy a large piece of land for $700 or less, but that land is completely worthless.
It's worthless because nothing's been done with it.
Now, I remember when I was filming America, I visited the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
And I was talking to a Native American activist, actually a lovely person named Charmaine Whiteface, and she described to me a big battle that her tribe, which is the Sioux, is having with the U.S. government.
She wants the Black Hills of South Dakota to be returned to the Sioux.
Now, by the way, she has a point in 1868 treaty Did in fact assign the Black Hills to the Sioux.
And the treaty was abrogated by Congress in 1877, so the tribe sued.
And there's a court settlement which awards about a billion dollars.
There's a billion dollars sitting in a kind of escrow account for the Sioux for this treaty violation.
That was their, quote, damages for the treaty being betrayed or being not lived up to.
But the Sioux don't want the money.
And Charmaine Whiteface says, we want the land back.
And we want to restore it.
It needs to go back to what it used to be.
It needs to become tribal land again.
And she even began to talk about how the spirits will come back alive and so on if we do this.
So then I posed the question to her.
I go, well, Charmaine, let me ask you this.
If America stole the land from the Sioux, Didn't the Sioux steal the land from the Cheyenne who were there before them?
And she goes, well...
And I go, listen, if we return the land to you, the Sioux, are you going to turn around and give it back to the Cheyenne who had it before you?
She was like, well...
She said, well, we have to respect the will of the dominant tribe.
The dominant tribe, in this case, being the Sioux.
But notice how hollow and fallacious this is because how did these dominant tribes become dominant in the first place?
The euphemism aside, the simple truth is that the Sioux got land the way every other Indian tribe got land by defeating and displacing the previous inhabitants.
So the stronger tribes, the Sioux, later the Apache, the Comanche, these were, these are by the way, Debbie's ancestors.
These were raiding tribes and they would raid all these peaceful tribes like the Hopi and the Pueblo and take their land.
So you see the problem here with the whole, we got first.
We got here first.
Yeah, you got here first, but...
Inevitably, there was someone else who was there before you who could assert exactly the same claim against you.
I'm not saying, by the way, don't get me wrong, that the American Indians as a group haven't been shafted.
As I document in a couple of my books, they were shafted.
And they were shafted largely by the Democrats.
They were shafted really by ruthless Democratic crooks, people like Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party.
This is the guy responsible for the Trail of Tears.
This is the guy responsible for a lot of other abuses and massacres against the Indians.
I also needed to mention the welfare state, the fact that the Indians have been reduced to abject dependency as I was walking around the Pine Ridge Reservation.
I mean, this was a desolate scene, and I don't just mean physically desolate, emotionally, spiritually desolate, like Stray dogs barking everywhere, kind of a mood of despondency and despair.
Who did that to the Indians?
Well, I'd have to say it was the U.S. government, but operating through the levers of the Democratic Party.
It's not an exaggeration to say that that's plantation politics.
There's a black plantation.
Reservations are essentially democratic plantations.
And the Democrats would like to do to all of America what they've done to the blacks and to the Indians.
All of that being said, the truth of it is that the Indians deserve a fair restitution, but they don't deserve what they're asking.
For example, just take the Black Hills.
There's, and Charmaine Whiteface was quick to point this out to me, there's uranium, all kinds of priceless minerals in the Black Hills.
But again, the ancient Sioux had no idea how, they didn't even know about it.
They couldn't get the minerals out.
That's a whole other matter. So, what you're doing is you're claiming not just a return of the value of what you had before, but the return of much more.
You want someone else who now has the ability to take out those minerals, to take them out and give them to you.
And the same logic would apply to Manhattan.
No, we can't give you back Manhattan because it's now Manhattan.
It's now not worth $700.
And the reason it's not worth $700 is because it has LaGuardia and JFK Airport and FDR Highway and it's got all these skyscrapers and it's the center of commerce.
It's got Wall Street, and it's got publishing, and it's got entertainment, and it's got Greenwich Village.
But who built all that?
The point is that that land was originally virtually worthless.
The people who cultivated Manhattan over the years, the people who developed it and built it, Yes, people like Trump.
These are the people who made Manhattan what it is.
And to say, now, give us back Manhattan, is to utter a complete absurdity.
You didn't make Manhattan. It wasn't even Manhattan before.
And so, sorry, we're going to be, we're going to respect your claim, but at the end we're going to have to say, you didn't do it.
It's not yours.
Inflation is running hot right at the highs of the last couple of decades, and now the Dems are pushing through another massive spending plan.
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I want to play a short clip from my movie, America, in which I posed a question to Charmaine Whiteface, one of the leaders of the Sioux tribe.
Listen. What are the words that come to mind when you hear the phrase, Christopher Columbus?
A lost sailor.
Who is looking for my country.
Yes! But you wish he didn't come.
I wish he didn't come.
She wishes he never came.
So I want now to ask that question.
What if Columbus never came?
Or you can ask the question in a more radical form that I did in that movie.
What if America didn't even exist?
What if there was no physical land mass called America?
Would the world be better today?
No, I don't think so.
Now, what would happen to the Native Americans in this country if Columbus never came?
Now, one argument is, well, you know, all the stuff that the white man brought from penicillin, modern medicine, the technology to build buildings, the space program, the Native Americans would obviously have developed all that.
Well, I don't think so.
I don't think they would have developed it any more than the Asian Indians would have on their own.
brought the things that the British brought to India.
Now, the British didn't bring them out of goodwill.
They brought them out of the desire to rule and dominate India, but they brought them nevertheless.
And so, interestingly, when the British left, the Indians didn't get rid of all those things.
They could have. They could have said, listen, you know, let's pull down all these buildings, these Victorian structures, Churchgate Station right in the middle of Bombay.
Let's get rid of it. British brought us all these, you know, hot suits, not really well suited to the climate.
We don't need to wear ties.
Let's get rid of all this stuff.
Let's get rid of courts and democracy and elections and separation of powers and human rights.
We don't need any of it. But the Indians decided no, let's actually keep I would say most of it.
Yeah, sure, we're going to take Bombay and start calling it Mumbai.
We're going to take Bangalore and call it Bengalaru.
But even notice that even there, the names are so similar to the original names, so nobody gets confused.
And so here's the point.
The point is this, that the Native Americans, as Mario Bagasio said, lived in the enchanted world.
The whole method of using reason to solve problems, the scientific method, the method of discovery, All of this was alien to the Native American tribes and alien to many other people around the world.
So the question is, is this really a practical vision today?
Because people say, well, you know, the world before Columbus was such a paradise.
My point is it was such a paradise.
Why don't you recreate it?
Why don't you? You can have it now.
I mean, there are Indian reservations all over the country.
You could actually decide, well, listen, you know what?
Let's go back to living out over the pages of National Geographic.
I mean, who needs cars?
Who needs electricity?
Who needs modern medicine?
Who needs casinos?
Who needs cheeseburgers?
Let's just get on a horse and go look for food.
By the way, this little riff here about the horse, even that doesn't really work.
You know why? The American Indians had no horses.
There were no horses in the Americas.
The Spanish brought the horse to the Americas.
So even the horse, you know, the famous Indian movies, all these Indians are riding horses.
Yeah, they got that from the West also.
So, the point I'm trying to make is that you can't bring the old world back.
It's almost like saying I want to live like a frog.
You can't live like a frog.
We're human beings. You can't live as if we're not in the 21st century.
And the truth of the matter is if Columbus didn't discover America, you know who would have probably?
The Chinese! They discover America.
So which is better, to have been ruled by the West, Western civilization, which along with oppression, remember there was a conquest ethic even in the West, as there was worldwide, but the West also brought an ethic of freedom, an ethic of liberation, an ethic of human rights.
And if the Chinese did it, if the Chinese came to the Americas, we wouldn't have that, as we see in countries ruled by China.
Look what's happening to Hong Kong today.
Look what they would like to do To Taiwan.
So, you know what? I like National Geographic.
It's kind of fun for me to thumb through the pages.
But I don't want to live in the pages of National Geographic.
And you know what? Neither does anyone else.
All these leftists, oh, Columbus was horrible.
They don't realize not just their lifestyle, not just their cheeseburgers and their cell phones, but their very existence.
Think of all the Latino people here who are mestizo people.
The entire population of Mexico is a mestizo culture created by a mixture of the Spanish and the Indians.
No Columbus? You know what?
You wouldn't exist!
So let's have a little bit of realism in this case against Columbus.
He was in many respects a man of his time, but he was also A great man, a man of indomitable will, he could easily have taken a country estate, And said, listen, I got to America.
That's it. I'm done.
I'm going to be a lord. Call me Lord Columbus.
No, he did a second voyage and a third and a fourth.
Why? Because at heart, he loved the idea of adventure, of discovery, of, with all its hardships, the open sea.
He was a man cut from a completely different cloth of far superior qualities, you might say, than many of the miserable critics who deplore him now.
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