Columbus Day 2023

 

As Columbus Day morphs into Indigenous Peoples Day in parts of the USA, it is ironic that many of the people calling for the removal of statues of Columbus, or for his elimination from our school history books are people that now call themselves Hispanics.*

 

Who do these people think were on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria back in 1492? Other than Columbus, they were all from what is now called Spain. Columbus, the leader of the expedition, came from Genoa which is now part of Italy. The Spanish crew, especially the Pinzon brothers who captained the Nina and the Pinta, disliked and distrusted Columbus despite his obvious seamanship and great experience on the high seas. 

 

Once they landed on an island off what Columbus  thought was Asia, he had an extremely difficult time controlling the cruelty and rapacity of his crew in their dealing with the natives they found there. 

 

The indigenous islanders themselves were not much better. Modern feminists might be surprised to discover that native men freely shared their women with the new arrivals. After all, what was a woman for, except work, sex, and childbearing? Indeed, indigenous people from other islands often took women captive to breed them so they could feed on their infants.

 

Anyway, in subsequent voyages thousands of Hispanics, the ancestors of today’s protestors, came to the New World and increased the level of cruelty and brutality. It is true that Columbus, participated in this ill-treatment, especially after he found that the settlers he had left behind on his first voyage had all died in suspicious circumstances. Eventually, Columbus lost control over the situation and on one trip was even arrested by the Spanish governor and sent back to Spain in chains.

 

Despite the efforts of Queen Isabella who insisted that the natives of the islands were her subjects, and therefore could not be slaves, the practice of slavery and colonial brutality grew worse. The story was told long ago  by Bartolomeo del las Casas, an early settler who became a priest, gave up his own slaves, and worked for the rest of his life to protect the natives from the ravages of the colonizers. 

 

The efforts of Las Casas were mirrored a couple of centuries later when Junipero Serra, another Franciscan friar, built a mission system in California in the eighteenth century to protect the  natives from the brutality and rapacity of Hispanic colonizers. Only after the Mexican government shut down the missions in the nineteenth century were the natives thrown to the wolves. For his efforts, the Catholic church has canonized Fr. Serra, but protestors now vandalize and tear down commemorative memorials. 

 

The ancestors of these Hispanic colonizers can still be seen today as they brandish AK 47s, and brutally herd thousands of immigrants from Central American through Mexico to the American border. 

 

Although I am dismayed by the hypocrisy of modern Hispanic protestors, I do not want to single Hispanics out as particularly evil. Slavery has been practiced all over the world by all kinds of people. Before African slaves could be sent to the New World, they had to be captured and chained by black tribal leaders and Moslem slave traders. Only then could European slave traders transport them to the Americas. Even indigenous American Indian tribes owned black slaves. 

 

Where did this evil come from? In the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers wrote that all men were created equal, but they did not believe that all men wound up equal. They meant that all humans had the same nature. We are all human despite our gender, or the color of our skin. 

 

In the eighteenth century there was a great debate among intellectuals about human nature. A few novel thinkers rejected the time-honored idea that all humans are imperfect; that we could be capable of great things but that there was a flaw in our nature that could lead us to do wrong or evil. Christian theologians called it original sin and believed we had all inherited it from our first parents.

 

The new thinking of the so-called Enlightenment rejected the notion of original sin and claimed that we are all created perfect or good. The evil in the world could then be traced somehow to corrupt social norms or traditions. The cure for evils like slavery would then lie not in perfecting human weakness, but in reforming society and ridding it of its various ills. 

 

Along with this new theory came a new myth, the myth of the “Noble Savage,” that believed that the indigenous peoples of the New World lived in a state of nature where all was happiness, peace, and serenity. Only when Europeans brought their civilization to America with all its social ills, including religion, was the paradise of the noble savage corrupted and destroyed in the same way that the serpent corrupted Adam and Eve in the biblical story.

 

The myth of the noble savage was not based on any real historical evidence. The proponents of the idea despised and ridiculed the primitive peasants of their own countries but praised the primitive indigenous people of the New World whom they had never seen.

 

Nevertheless, the myth of the noble savage has become pervasive in our own time. So, instead of a human being, capable of good and evil like the rest of us, Columbus has become an evil agent of white supremacy, the man who destroyed the pristine paradise of the New World.

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*Note: I do not understand why I, a descendant of immigrants from Italy, am considered "white" and inherently a "white supremacist," while the descendants of immigrants from Spain are not considered "white" and therefore free of any taint of white supremacy.