King touts "values Columbus brought"

Rep. Steve King: Obama should impose Christendom on Latin America like Columbus

By Scott KaufmanLast night, Iowa Representative Steve King went before the House of Representatives and delivered a long speech in which, among other things, he bemoaned that President Obama doesn’t believe in “the pillars of American exceptionalism” as instantiated in “the values that Christopher Columbus brought here across the ocean.”

“It has caught my attention, Mr. Speaker, when I listen to the circumstances taking place in Venezuela, I can’t help but think about essentially the sister state of Cuba and how they have led the Marxist socialist regime in the Western Hemisphere since about 1959,” King said.

“I think of this Western Hemisphere, all of it, as the domain of, as Churchill described it from this hemisphere, Western Christendom; the foundation of Western civilization, Judeo-Christianity; the values that come from the Old and New Testament; the values that Christopher Columbus brought here across the ocean,” he continued.

The “values” that Columbus—who was sailing under the aegis of the Catholic Spanish monarchy—brought to what would become the Americas included the idea, as articulated in his own journals, that he could “conquer the whole of [the natives] with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.” His pleasure involved the kidnapping and enslaving of native “Indians,” the majority of whom died on the return trip to Spain.Comment:  So conquering and killing are the values that make America exceptional? Okay, if you say so, King.

I demolished a version of this argument in Multicultural Origins of Civilization. Among the stupidities in King's statement:

Judeo-Christian religion came from the Middle East, not Europe. As did most of the foundations of our civilization.

Remember the Spanish Inquisition? Europe consisted mainly of absolute monarchies and fanatical religions in Columbus's time. The United States was a revolution against the tyrannical European model, not an adoption of it.

The Spanish found Columbus's cruelty and barbarism so abhorrent that they threw him in jail after his third voyage. His murderous "values" were too inhuman even for the despots who hated and killed "heathens."

For more on Columbus, see Columbus Day Celebrates White Superiority and Columbus Day Celebrates Conquest.