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Christopher Columbus was a Hero, Not a Villain

Christopher Columbus was a Hero, Not a Villain

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Monday, October 11, will mark the 50th Columbus Day in America since the first official federal holiday of that name in 1971. The explorer from Genoa made landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492, which was a Wednesday. But we Americans like three-day weekends, so we celebrate his achievement on the second Monday of October. In Central and South America and in the Caribbean, many nations will also take note of the great event next week.

Correction: Not all Americans will celebrate Columbus. Some will ignore or even vilify him. A few places have even struck him from the calendar altogether, substituting “Indigenous Peoples Day” to honor the locals who were allegedly victimized by the foreigner Columbus. It’s a kind of pompous, leftist virtue-signaling rooted in the myth of the “peaceful and noble natives.” One of its most notorious perpetrators was the pseudo-historian Howard Zinn, an angry Marxist liar thoroughly discredited by actual scholars such as Mary Grabar, author of Debunking Howard Zinn and Debunking the 1619 Project.

Extremists among Zinn’s disciples accentuate, exaggerate, and even fabricate the sins of Columbus but never speak of the ugly side of the natives of the region in the 15th Century. On the very island where Columbus’s first landing occurred, which he called San Salvador, tribes were slaughtering each other right and left. The Tianos lived in terror of the ferocious Caribs, who rampaged, murdered, plundered, and enslaved on a regular basis. From the Aztecs to the Mayans to the Incans and most other tribes in the Americas at that time, ritual violence often took the form of brutal warfare and subjugation, child sacrifice and even cannibalism.

Cristopher Columbus portrait (Wikipedia)

The lies about Christopher Columbus

Some of the Spanish conquistadors who came to the Americas over the next century were just as cruel as the worst indigenous brutes but it’s utterly unfair to lump Columbus among them. Columbus executed some of his own crew for acts of cruelty toward the natives. “It’s a sad twist of fate,” writes historian Jarrett Stepman in his authoritative book, The War on History, “that Columbus now gets blamed for the very actions he tried to prevent… Primitive societies are often a far cry from the ideal image of the noble savage famously conjured up” by armchair academic charlatans like Howard Zinn.

Some of those charlatans blame Columbus for inaugurating an influx of European explorers who brought devastating diseases with them, centuries before the world even knew of such things as viruses, bacteria, parasites or sanitation. Diseases among the indigenous peoples were already epidemic and were the leading reasons why few lived beyond the age of 35.

What about the fact that Columbus set sail for Asia and not only never made it, he died in 1506 thinking that in fact, he had? Can we fault him for not knowing when he headed west from Europe that there were two entire continents in the way (North and South America)? If we do, then we should question the wisdom of the many other fathers of accidental discoveries—from x-rays to quinine to corn flakes and Vaseline.

Christopher Columbus deserves admiration for many good reasons: Like the Apollo astronauts, he set out on a dangerous mission with no guarantee of success. He possessed extraordinary seamanship. At a time when how to calculate longitude was two and a half centuries into the future, he excelled at navigation via “dead reckoning.” He was a courageous pioneer, warts and all, whose story is inextricably tied up with the origins of American liberty.

Therein lies, I suspect, the real motive for denigrating Christopher Columbus. If your aim is to delegitimize American liberty or even Western Civilization in general, then Columbus must go even if it requires lies to get the job done.

My recommendation is this: Celebrate Columbus and Columbus Day. Talk to your school-age sons and daughters about the great explorer and find out what they’re learning about him in school. If he’s portrayed as the hero he was, thank the teachers. If he’s painted as a villain, demand an end to the indoctrination and the restoration of truth and history.

For additional information, see:

The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past by Jarrett Stepman

A Defense of Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day by John Hirschauer

Save Western Civilization: Defend Christopher Columbus by Charlotte Cushman

Lawrence writes a weekly op-ed for El American. He is President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Atlanta, Georgia; and is the author of “Real heroes: inspiring true stories of courage, character, and conviction“ and the best-seller “Was Jesus a Socialist?“ //
Lawrence escribe un artículo de opinión semanal para El American. Es presidente emérito de la Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) en Atlanta, Georgia; y es el autor de “Héroes reales: inspirando historias reales de coraje, carácter y convicción” y el best-seller “¿Fue Jesús un socialista?”

3 thoughts on “Christopher Columbus was a Hero, Not a Villain”

  1. The left simply ignores FACTS and substitutes their lies to fit there agenda. If this fails to be stopped, our Nation’s success and the freedoms of its citizens will be destroyed.
    The left lies. It really is that simple.

  2. Islam is why Columbus sailed West to go East!
    Columbus arrived in the Americas only forty years after the Muslim conquest of Constantinople.
    He started the great European exploration and discovery of all the lands previously unknown to the people of Europe.
    After the Fall of Rome, the Eastern and Western Church were out of touch with one another due to barbarians and later Moslems separating them. Travel was very dangerous between the two. Europe’s supply papyrus from Egypt was unavailable due to the Muslims controlling the entire North African coast, and Europe had to make-do with the much more expensive Velum (Animal skin, usually sheep). The lack of written communications was another one of the causes of the Dark Ages.

    Because the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims on May 29, 1453, by the Muslim Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, thus closing the trade routes to the East. This was devastating for European tradesmen, who had until then, since time immemorial had taken the land route through Constantinople and Anatolia to travel to India and trade for silk, spices, and other goods. But when the Muslims conquered Constantinople, these tradesmen would have been taking their lives into their hands if they traveled by these ancient routes. As non-Muslims in Muslim countries, they would have been subject to being taken hostage, or enslaved, or forcibly ‘converted’ to Islam, or killed outright.

    About forty years after Moslems cut off the overland trade routes, Columbus wanted to establish a trade route to China, and thought he could go West to go East. Why did Columbus want to go West to go East? To avoid being robbed, killed, or enslaved by Muslims! Whether using overland routes or going by sea, to anyone going Eastward, all the known routes were blocked by Muslims. Prior to the introduction of compasses to Europe (around 1150 to 1300 AD.) normally sailors would never get out of sight of land.

    Muslims controlled the overland trade routes and there were Muslim pirates off the coast of what we now call Somalia, Yemen, Oman, Iran, and Pakistan in the Arabian Sea, operating just like the modern-day Somali pirates.
    Any travel through Muslim controlled territory was a good way to end up dead or enslaved!

    The Romans used a distance measurement called a “Stadia” which was measured as the length of a complete stride from the right foot to the right foot again. (Two Steps)
    The Roman Army would march back and forth between towns to settle on a corrected average number of Stadia that one town was from the next.

    Most educated people in Christopher Columbus’ time knew that the Earth was round and Columbus was one of them, he knew about Eratosthenes’s calculation of the circumference of the Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
    But because the Stadia was an ancient and obsolete system of measurement, he assumed incorrectly that a Stadia was just one step. Using the distance measurement that was in use at his time, he incorrectly recalculated the circumference of the earth as half as big. That is why when he thought he had reached the outer reaches of the Asian Continent; he had gone less than halfway!
    Columbus went to his grave believing not that he’d discovered new continents, but that he’d merely reached some outer islands of eastern Asia.

    10 Things People Get Wrong About Columbus
    https://tfpstudentaction.org/blog/christopher-columbus-myth-vs-fact

    MORE FACTS
    Fact #1: Christopher Columbus brought the Faith and civilization to America. In fact, Pope Leo XIII issued a glowing encyclical, Quarto Abeunte Saeculo, to celebrate Columbus’ providential mission.

    Fact #2: Columbus was “extremely zealous for the honor and glory of God,” wrote Bartolome de las Casas. “He deeply yearned for the evangelization of these peoples and for the planting and flourishing everywhere of people’s faith in Jesus Christ”.

    Fact #3: Leftist professors hide this fact: Slavery was widespread among the Natives in the Caribbean; this was a long-established fact… long before Columbus arrived.
    NO, it was NOT Columbus or his men that enslaved the natives to work for them… THAT happened LATER, after Columbus’ voyages… no matter what your Leftist Professor said!

    Fact #4: The first tribe Columbus and his men encountered was the Taíno tribe. The first encounter between Europe and the Americas went well. The Taíno were curious and helpful. Columbus was emphatic that his crew treat them with kindness and respect.
    Lest you think that Columbus stumbled on the Garden of Eden, the islands were also inhabited by the Caribs, a tribe of cannibals for whom, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison, babies were a delicacy—or, in Morison’s words, “a…toothsome morsel.” Like every place else on Earth, in every time in history, the local peoples were a mixed bag. Some good, some not so good.

    Fact #5: Leftist professors also hide this fact: Syphilis was an unknown disease in Europe until after Columbus’ men brought it to Europe.
    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/27/wellcome-prize-katherine-wright-syphilis-columbus
    Interesting fact: Sassafras a product of a New World tree, was imported to Europe as a supposed ‘cure’ for syphilis. It is from sassafras that we get Root Beer.

    Fact #6: Columbus insisted on the fair treatment of the Indians. He wrote: “I recognized that they were people who would be better freed [from error] and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force.”
    https://players.brightcove.net/802593642001/BF7mrlFFAd_default/index.html?videoId=6199285870001
    Christopher Columbus was a Hero, Not a Villain
    http://elamerican.com/christopher-columbus-was-a-hero/

    BTW: Do a web-search for pictures of “Columbus”, they show very different paintings of very different looking men, THEY ARE ALL WRONG, that is not what he actually looked like. There is not one painting of Columbus that was ever done while he was still ALIVE, or by anyone who actually saw him!
    Even the very earliest paintings of “Columbus” were all done by people who had never even met him and had no idea what he actually looked like!

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