America’s woke awakening will fade away as Covid passes

I watched a clip on YouTube recently about the trend within the Black Lives Matter movement to discredit Christopher Columbus. Statues of the great man have been getting the Edward Colston treatment across America, except that the Italian explorer is getting his head cut off rather than being unceremoniously plunged into a nearby harbour.

The beheadings took place in Boston, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Richmond, Virginia, and there are fears that the 14-foot statue of the Italian that stands atop a 28-foot column in New York’s Columbus Circle may be next.

Even as the US election campaign moves into its final stretch, with the choice between another four years of Trumpian insanity and the possibility of measured recovery under Joe Biden, the nation’s Woke Warriors are bent on repudiating the national own past and denying their right to be Americans.

No one who has studied history would ever claim that Columbus was a modern man. He lived in an age of absolute monarchy; he believed in the right of conquest; he was a serial womaniser who as a colonial governor was so addicted to brutality that even the Spanish court, at the height of the Inquisition, felt obliged to remove him from his position and carry him back to Spain in chains. Nor was he even that great a navigator. He thought he had landed in India in 1492, when in fact he had wound up in the Bahamas.

But there is no doubting his place in history. If it hadn’t been for him, it would have been left to some other European to plant his nation’s flag in the northern half of the Americas – most probably an Englishman.

At any rate, New Yorkers in the 1890s, prompted by the city’s growing population of Italian immigrants, felt sufficiently strongly about Columbus to erect a massive statue to his memory at the main entrance to Central Park. And in the 130 years since, Columbus Circle, as the surrounding area is known, has proved to be a popular meeting place and tourist magnet, surrounded by fast-food carts and souvenir stalls – about as Noo Yawk as it is possible to get.

But we can’t have that, can we? No. Columbus must go. He is an affront to everything we hold dear. More than that, he is, by extension, a reminder that the white man, having invaded America, wiped out the natives, imported an army of slaves from Africa, established plantations, built factories, invented Hollywood, and generally behaved as if they owned the place.

Today, 528 years-on from Columbus’s arrival somewhere else entirely, the time has come, apparently, to take revenge. The army of the woke is on the march and it will not be satisfied until every statue of Columbus has been ritually defaced.

But let us step back a little. What is going on? The logical end to this campaign would be the mass evacuation of white Americans back to Europe and the country’s black population removed to Africa unable to walk beneath the weight of reparations payments. Apart from the problems this would create for the UK Border Force (“Prime Minister, 50 million illegal immigrants have just landed in Plymouth”), how would the remaining five million or so Native Americans feel about the change? Their main skill these days is running lucrative casinos

And what about the American Indians – those whose ancestors have actually migrated from India –  whose swelling population has made such economic and political inroads in recent years? Would they have to go as well, even though most of them had never given a moment’s thought to Columbus and his heirs? And then there are those with Japanese, the Korean and African heritage whose parents or grandparents only showed up on American shores in the last hundred years. What about them? What about the Iraqi Christians in Brooklyn? Are they guilty, too?

Woke leaders would reply that I am talking rubbish and that they intend no such reversal of history. All they want, they will insist, is recognition of the evil represented by their ancestors, bended knees in perpetual tribute to the formerly enslaved and a deep and abiding sense of shame in respect of everything represented by Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers and every wave of immigration in the centuries since. Oh, and, before we forget: honour to the Indians … I mean the Native Americans, whose lands we stole and whose traditions we mocked. Them, too.

What gets me is not the awareness felt by Wokesters – consumed as they are by pride in their self-loathing – of the wrongs of the past. Only a fool, or a radical racist, would deny that a great deal of suffering and injustice resulted from the colonisation of America. What gets me is the tacit assumption by the protesters, armed with their paint pots and sledge hammers, that all of what happened over the last 500 years could be atoned for if only America would agree to prostrate itself before the bar of history and admit that it is nothing more than a sack of sh***.

Maybe this is what will happen. It could be that the good folk of the United States, Trumpists and Bidenistas alike, are about to don sackcloth and ashes and wander through the remainder of the twenty-first century as lowly sinners, convinced only of their wretchedness.

But you know what? I don’t think so. I think the Woke awakening (the awokening?) will gradually fade away, possibly at around the same time as a vaccine for Covid-19 becomes available. Black lives do matter; the nation’s poor and destitute do deserve to be raised up; the super-rich and mega-corporations have to pay more tax; healthcare must be introduced as a basic right for all Americans; and a sensible, thought-out response to climate change needs to be implemented as a matter of urgency.

But we don’t have to go mad.