Every child knows “in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” But in Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen updates it to: “In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole all the could see.” Columbus Day, the second Monday in October in the United States, is a day of fame and infamy. Those who don’t know the facts, or who prefer bullshit, celebrate the annual lovefest for explorer Christopher Columbus as an unqualified example of heroism, patriotism and adventure, even though he simply bumped into a landmass that he never admitted wasn’t in Asia.
But, for those who know the truth, gold-hunting Columbus and his men are guilty of genocide: They enslaved, raped, pillaged, tortured and murdered the indigenous people, whom he claimed he “discovered,” living on their land, the land their ancestors had inhabited for thousands of years. Blaming Columbus and the Spanish, in his History of the Indies, the priest Bartolomé de las Casas writes that “there were 60,000 people living on this island [Hispaniola], including the Indians in 1508; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.”
The first people Columbus encountered were the Arawaks of the Bahamas. Hospitable, generous people they welcomed him and his men. But Columbus did not return the compliment, except to note that, because they were guileless, they could easily be enslaved: “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
During his four trips to the New World, Columbus went about blithely naming everything he saw. He called what is now Puerto Rico, “San Juan Bautista”; Cuba, “Juana”; the Cayman Islands, “Las Tortugas”).With the same aplomb, he had the hands, noses and ears of “the guilty” cut off for offenses from stealing corn to not bringing him enough gold. When Columbus didn’t find the gold he had promised his investors, he became a major slave trader, switching to a different form of brutality.
With unimaginable cultural condescension, Michael S. Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute calls Columbus Day “A Time to Celebrate,” and attacks those who “view the arrival of . . . Columbus . . . as an occasion to be mourned.” He justifies Columbus’s land grab, because “what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped.” For shame that they hadn’t developed shopping malls! “The inhabitants were primarily hunter-gatherers, wandering across the land, living from hand to mouth and from day to day,” he goes on to say. “There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands.” Berliner also contends that “Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today’s Indians [as he persists in calling them] would be infinitely poorer or not even alive”—ignoring the fact that most Indigenous People aren’t alive to enjoy any benefits, thanks to Columbus.
Though Columbus Day is still a national holiday, all across the country, there are more and more protests against keeping it. And, in its place, cities and states celebrate “Native American Day” or “Indigenous People’s Day.”
In the end, the indigenous people of the Americas gave Europeans a gift that has kept on giving: syphilis. Columbus’s men carried it back with them—a reminder that there is a law of karma and that payback, though sometimes slow in coming, is painfully sweet.
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