Another Columbus Day has come and gone, doing nothing more useful than giving FOX News another chance to babble about lib’s trashing a ‘merikan icon. So why are we dragging the “holiday” into News To Make You Furious? Because Columbus is typical of a certain type of hero, and it’s an infuriating one. When it comes to figures like Chris, we aren’t fed lies so much as we’re starved of the truth. We’re fed narrow slices of a much broader story until the hero is only a caricature of the person who lived. And that narrative, once created, can’t be challenged or re-examined… heroes must be always good, villains always bad, and anything that taints the prevailing view is heresy. A worldview that requires a sanitized history based on unchallenged lies to function should be offensive to everyone, so his month we bring you many, many stories about Columbus that you didn’t hear in grade school. It’s not “Columbus-bashing”; it’s filling out the plastic hero with the flesh-and-blood flaws of the real person. But trust us… once you get to know the real Chris, and find out how you’ve been lied to all these years, you’ll be Furious…
Most of us don’t really know much about Christopher Columbus… “1492, NinaPintaSantaMaria, proved the world was round, met by the Indians, discovered America. Didn’t he die of syphilis?” While some know a few more details, for most of us that’s about it and as it turns out, it’s almost all wrong. The date and ships’ names are right, but Columbus’ contemporaries already knew the world was round. He wasn’t met by the “Indians” because he wasn’t in India as he thought, and he never actually set foot on the mainland US. The syphilis thing may or may not be true.
Historians know much more about Columbus than the “man on the street”. There are ample written records of Columbus’ life and voyages to know him as well as any historical figure can be known. Descendants of the natives who first encountered him also know him pretty well. Here are some views from both historians and descendants that give an entirely different view of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea…
If you like your clarified history in video form, then this clip from the documentary “The Canary Effect” could be for you.
8 Myths and Atrocities About Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day Vincent Schilling, Indian Country Today, October 2013
“On the second Monday of October each year, Native Americans cringe at the thought of honoring a man who committed atrocities against Indigenous Peoples.” So begins this catalog of just some of the atrocities committed by Columbus and his men. From rape and murder to slavery and pedophilia, it’s not pretty…
Christopher Columbus’ Log Books- Get the full story in the words of the man himself from these two sources…
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- Swathmore College- Christopher Columbus, Journal (1492)
- Fordham University- Christopher Columbus, Extracts from Journal
The Truth About ChrIstopher Columbus Christopher Minster, About Education
If one must hate Columbus, it is far more reasonable to do so for other reasons. He was a slave trader who heartlessly took men and women away from their families in order to lessen his failure to find a new trade route. His contemporaries despised him. As governor of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, he was a despot who kept all profits for himself and his brothers, and was loathed by the colonists whose lives he controlled. Attempts were made on his life and he was actually sent back to Spain in chains at one point after his third voyage. During his fourth voyage, he and his men were stranded on Jamaica for a year when his ships rotted: no one wanted to travel there from Hispaniola to save him. He was also a cheapskate: after promising a reward to whomever spotted land first on his 1492 voyage, he refused to pay up when sailor Rodrigo de Triana did so, giving the reward to himself instead because he had seen a “glow” the night before…
Time To Expose The Dark Side Of The Columbus Myth Max Benavidez, Los Angeles Times, December 1991
U.S. schoolchildren learn that Columbus “discovered” America. The truth is that he stumbled upon a Caribbean island. The myth also propagates the notion that Columbus, with his European culture, civilized what had once been savages. In fact, within two generations of his arrival, massive numbers of people on the Caribbean islands he visited had died due to the diseases and brutality inflicted upon them by their European conquerors…
Slavery, disease, death: the dark side of the Christopher Columbus story Jay Busbee, Yahoo News, October 2013
Columbus’ Confusion About the New World Edmund Morgan, Smithsonian Magazine, October 2009
The European discovery of America opened possibilities for those with eyes to see. But Columbus was not one of them.
Five scary Christopher Columbus quotes that let you celebrate the holiday the right way IBW21.org, (Originally from Katie Halper, Raw Story, October 2014)
You’ve probably heard lots of great things about Christopher Columbus and tons of inspiring quotes from him about hard work, god, the sea etc. But those don’t really capture what Columbus and the colonial expansion of which he was part were all about. So, without further ado, allow me to present these quotes that you may not have heard, from or about Christopher Columbus.
