Christopher Columbus discovered two continents. Any assessment of the Genoese seafarer that doesn't begin with that fact misses the forest for the trees. Yet, 518 years after Columbus first stepped foot on land in the Bahamas, the navigator's detractors call him a slaver, a murderer, and worse. A more apt label, as I demonstrate in my column @ Human Events, is hero.
More hilarious revisionist apologetics from conservatives: dismiss the fact that a homicidal maniac, using big government Spanish funding, arrived on a small South American island, and, unable to fund his return home, pillaged the countryside and enslaved human beings. But God forbid someone recognize irrefutable historical facts, because those evil liberals are attacking the good name of an ethical egoist conservative Christian hero.
Columbus' voyage has even less meaning for North Americans than for South Americans because Columbus never set foot on our continent, nor did he open it to European trade. Scandinavian Vikings already had settlements here in the eleventh century, and British fisherman probably fished the shores of Canada for decades before Columbus. The first European explorer to thoroughly document his visit to North America was the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, who sailed for England's King Henry VII and became known by his anglicized name, John Cabot. Caboto arrived in 1497 and claimed North America for the English sovereign while Columbus was still searching for India in the Caribbean. After three voyages to America and more than a decade of study, Columbus still believed that Cuba was a part of the continent of Asia, South America was only an island, and the coast of Central America was close to the Ganges River.
-Dr. Jack Weatherford, anthropologist at Macalester College
Homicidal Maniac? More a man of his times (and that's not a compliment).
Ethical egoist conservative Christian hero? Man, you really love that worn out trope.
Revisionist History?
Did you even read Dan's article?
"This is not to whitewash Columbus’s crimes, which have not aged well. The explorer kidnapped natives for show in Spain (none of them made it alive) on his first voyage, enslaved several hundred bellicose Indians on his second visit, and after his third trip faced charges back home of governing as a tyrant."
Oh yeah, Dan sure softened Columbus' image.
The great spagetti monster forbid you read an article without a preconceived notion that you're going to somehow "school" those damned Conservatives.
See, you have to understand the mentality of the detractors. No matter what, it's White European Men bad, everybody else good. For the whites who think that way, that attitude prevails to assuage some kind of weakness they have and the guilt that follows. For non-whites, it’s a social mechanism to advance their belief that they are victims and of a higher moral caliber.
It doesn’t matter that the natives that Columbus and those who followed, who supposedly took advantage of the natives, discovered a civilization who had been taking advantage of each other for centuries through tribal warfare, murder, kidnapping for ransom, enslavement and, in many cases, cannibalism. And without the introduction of modern Western Civilization, they would have carried on.
You had me at "ate a dolphin".
