The continual assault on American culture bubbled up this week with the annual attacks on Columbus Day.  Celebrated as the discoverer of the New World when I went to school, Christopher Columbus has become just another way to denounce America.  Columbus is now viewed as a villain because our educational system has been hijacked by Leftists.  Former Communist Party member Howard Zinn’s book,  A People’s History of the United States, has become the foundational text in many of our nation’s schools.   The book adopts the Marxist perspective that history is the story of an ongoing struggle between the ruling class and the oppressed.  Zinn paints the history of America as a story of exploitation, and vilifies most of our historical leaders as motivated by self-interest, greed, and a deceitful compulsion to oppress the masses.  Zinn blames Columbus for the “violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.” The chief complaint about Columbus from Zinn and his fellow travelers is that he aided the spread of capitalism.  Zinn didn’t just make this up, he got it from his teachers, Marx and Engels.  In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx denounced Columbus as the godfather of modern capitalism.  According to Engels, Columbus’s westward journeys unleashed the era of “big commerce,” the world market, and the birth of the bourgeoisie.” “The discovery of America was connected with the advent of machinery,” he wrote in 1847, “and with that the struggle became necessary which we are conducting today, the struggle of the propertyless against the property owners.”  Columbus did all that?  He thought he was going to Japan, never got there, and never truly understood where he was.  No matter.  Today’s reigning Marxist terrorists, the black-hooded bastards of Antifa, have taken up the cudgel against Columbus.  Since August, Antifa A-holes have smashed, decapitated, or defaced numerous Columbus statues in Baltimore, San Jose, and New York, denouncing Columbus for leading “the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere” and claiming that he  initiated a wave of “capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas.”  Sound familiar?  Antifa has declared October 9 a nationwide Deface Columbus Day.  Columbus really can’t catch a break, because its not just the Marxists who hate him.  Funny thing is that, although the Left decries Columbus as a symbol of white supremacy, he’s also been bashed by the KKK because he was a swarthy non-Protestant, like all the filthy immigrants the KKK hates.  Some protesters don’t even know why they’re protesting Columbus, or at least haven’t thought it through.  In New Jersey, there’s outrage over a Columbus statue in an Hispanic area of Long Branch.  Think about that.  “Hispanics” are people with a historical connection to Spain or Spanish culture, like the Spaniards who accompanied Columbus to the New World.  So the outraged Long Branch “Hispanics” are protesting themselves.   I’d like to believe that our public officials know better, but no such luck.  More than 30 U.S. towns and cities have voted to change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and five states (Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, South Dakota, and Vermont) no longer recognize Columbus Day as a holiday.  Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis is a typical voice, “While we cannot change the past, we can realize the pain that millions suffered throughout our nation’s history, as well as the tremendous achievements of the original inhabitants of our continent.” Our nation’s history? Columbus sailed for Spain.  Indigenous peoples?  Original inhabitants?  To whom is Hilda referring?  By all accounts, the Indians of North and South America came over a land bridge in the Bering Straight from Siberia, starting about 16,000 years ago.  Finally, evidence of Russian collusion in America, somebody call Bob Mueller.  The claim is that Columbus enslaved and murdered many indigenous people.  Actually, Columbus took no slaves.  He sailed to find gold and to convert the natives to Christianity.  The sudden arrival of previously unknown European diseases like smallpox in the New World surely sparked epidemics that led to many deaths, but consider two things: first, 15th Century Europeans knew no more about germ theory than did the Indians; and secondly, the Indians got back at the Europeans by spreading syphilis to them.  According to Scientific American, syphilis was unknown in Europe until 1495, after Columbus got back to Spain.   But shouldn’t we celebrate the tremendous achievements of the original inhabitants of our continent?  Name two.  I’m certainly not suggesting that there were no Spanish atrocities in the New World, because there surely were.  However, the Indians Columbus encountered were not the noble peace-loving beings of recent repute. The Arawaks were indigenous to Hispaniola in 1492.  Columbus was surprised to find that Arawak men spoke the Arawak language, while Arawak women spoke the language of the Carib Indian tribe.  Turns out the Caribs were in the habit of attacking and killing the Arawak men, eating their bodies, and then raping the Arawak women.  Murder, rape and cannibalism.  Are those some of the tremendous achievements we need to celebrate?  Maybe Hilda Solis can explain.  But progress can’t be stopped.  Christopher Scalia, a spokesman for the Christopher Columbus Association, had it right when he noted that “progressivism has become the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be celebrating America.”  So let’s not stop at removing or destroying statues of Columbus.  What about the name?  At least 54 American towns are named for Columbus.  They all should be changed to Indiana.  The District of Colombia?  No way.  Columbia is the goddess of Liberty, and we can’t encourage that.  How about the District of Caribia?  Instead of the Land of the Free, we can be the Land of the murdering, raping cannibal Indians.  Columbus Circle?  Nah.  Indigenous Circle.  That’s progress for America.  And hey wait a minute, what about “America?”  It was named for Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who sailed for the equally repugnant, white supremecist, swarthy Portuguese.  Clearly we cannot continue calling our land America.  Columbus ruined everything, so let’s go back to pre-Columbian times.  I suggest we rename America what the map makers called it before Columbus, Terra Incognita, the Unknown Land.  That’s perfect, because what has become of the America I grew up in is totally unrecognizable.  Everybody sing, “so long Columbus, hello Marx!”