On October 12, 1492, over 500 years ago, a man saw the moon reflected upon the white sands of the Bahamas. His name was Rodrigo – a sailor on the daring expedition of brilliant Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus. That name, Columbus, (it really sounds good, doesn’t it?) has been immortalized by hundreds of years of popular sentiment. If you were to walk into a class of 1st graders they could tell you all about how he sailed across the vast ocean and discovered the New World, just before dying for the sins of white Americans and then subsequently resurrecting to bravely lead a rugged group of American soldiers across the frozen Potomac to attack the tyrannical Count George in his stormy castle.
Well... maybe it’s not quite that extreme. But we really seem to love this guy.
I want to set the record straight: Christopher Columbus was a historically memorable douche-bag, and he shouldn’t have a holiday. In fact, he should be vilified in the history books. I want any memory of him as more than a great navigator eradicated from popular culture, and I’ll tell you why.
See, we've been taught for so long that Christopher Columbus was the first of the brave European explorers who set out to shoulder the white man’s burden, civilize the savages and populate an empty continent. Even in high school and college we focus solely on the perspective of Western civilization: We study all the things happening in Europe during the Renaissance, and then suddenly Columbus comes along, and we’re in the New World.
What we don’t see, however, is the advanced civilization that already existed in the Americas. We don’t see the systematic killing and enslavement of indigenous peoples. We have never learned their history or their culture. We look back and see only discovery and progress, whereas the native Arawaks saw naught but invasion and enslavement.
The main goal of Columbus’ exploits into the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola and other islands was simply slaves and gold. When it was clear that gold was not present in the quantities that Columbus had promised to the Spanish crown, he furiously attempted to pay back those who had invested in his voyage.
In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn writes, “In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he [Columbus] and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.”
What had begun in 1492 as a prosperous Arawak civilization was a dead society by 1650. Columbus had eradicated a population estimated to be anywhere from less than a million up to 8 million. Total genocide. Christopher Columbus was the embodiment of the apocalypse to an entire civilization, yet we remember him as a hero.
Henry Kissinger once wrote, “History is the memory of states.” Let us now, for once, try to remember.
