Live Event: Columbus Day Without Guilt

What: A FREE, uplifting talk that demolishes multiculturalism’s guilt-mongering about Columbus

When: Monday, Oct. 11, 2004, 6:30 pm, Pacific Time

Where: Hyatt Regency Irvine, 17900 Jamboree Road

Who: Thomas A. Bowden, author of The Enemies of Christopher Columbus

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 blackens the reputation of Western civilization while obscuring the harsh realities of life in the Stone Age, argues attorney Thomas A. Bowden, senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute 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, the fallacies in the treaty/reservation system, and the infamous “Trail of Tears.”

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, science, technology, progress, capitalism, individual rights, law and the selfish pursuit of individual happiness here on earth–at a time when those values are under terrorist assault by America’s declared enemies.