Today is Columbus Day. I was raised like most white middle-class Americans of my generation. I was steeped in American nationalism and a celebration of the “pioneers” of the “settling” of what became the USA, from the pilgrims to the 49-ers. I attended Junípero Serra Elementary School and heard all about that saint’s life.
After having my life ruined and I began hitting the books, the first inkling that I got that maybe my youthful teachings on those heroes and saints were actually part of my brainwashing was reading a chapter on Christopher Columbus in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Not long afterward, I read David Stannard’s American Holocaust, which is still the one to be reckoned with.
Several years later, when I began writing the essays that comprise my site today, the first two that I wrote were on fluoridation and Columbus. They both created a splash in various circles. My Columbus essay became part of the curriculum for many classes, from middle school to college. About 20 years ago, my Columbus essay got 5,000 hits on Columbus Day. Those days are long gone, partly because social media has cannibalized many forums and also because the idea that Columbus was not the world’s greatest hero is no longer so “radical.” Wikipedia still promotes the propaganda about George Washington, but even Wikipedia has a fairly accurate account of Columbus’s genocidal feat. That is how far Columbus’s star has fallen in my lifetime.
So on this Columbus Day, there are many indigenous celebrations instead, and Columbus was recently categorized by a DNA study as a Sephardic Jew, which seems to settle some of the debate on his origins, as many ethnicities battled over who could claim Columbus as one of their own. He is not the prize that he once was.
When I stumbled onto the Columbus issue, it was part of an effort to see if anything that I had been taught while growing up was true, and not much survived my radicalized scrutiny. But although the lies about Columbus were shameless, over the past generation, I have taken a more sympathetic approach to the Columbus issue. All societies lie to their children, and the USA is no different. As even imperial apologist Steven Pinker admitted, Europe’s “settling” of the Western Hemisphere is history’s greatest crime. But I slowly came to realize that what Europeans did was no different in kind than what any peoples ever did if they had the opportunity to, over the bloody human journey. What we see happening in Gaza today is more of the same genocidal settler colonialism. It is no different in kind from what chimps do.
This is what a world of scarcity and fear looks like, and there is only one remedy that I know of: the end of scarcity; and only one thing can do that.
I am still happy that I wrote my Columbus essay, but I realize that it just helps deflate the West’s self-serving delusions. It is particular to my culture, but all cultures perform similar myth-making, and it is up to all people to shed their ingroup indoctrination, if they want to begin to understand how the world really works.
An amazing bit of irony:
My cell phone has a calendar function in it where I can store reminders of things I need to do each day in the future. This calendar also comes preloaded with important annual holidays. When Monday, October 14 came up as the next version of "today", I looked at what had been preloaded into my calendar by the cell phone's vendor, and was sadly but amusingly surprised at the display. 2 different holidays were both occurring on this same day, and they were (1) Columbus Day (I expected this one) and (2) Indigenous Peoples' Day. I never knew before that Indigenous Peoples had an annual holiday in their honor in the United States, so I did some research. I read the Wikipedia article on "Indigenous People's Day" and learned the following:
"[It] is an official city and state holiday in various localities. It began as a counter-celebration held on the same day as the U.S. federal holiday of Columbus Day, which honors Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. It is celebrated as an alternative to Columbus Day, citing the lasting harm Indigenous tribes suffered because of Columbus's contributions to the European colonization of the Americas.
The roots of the holiday can be traced back to discussions and propositions regarding instituting it as a replacement for Columbus Day that took place in 1977 during The International NGO [non-government organizations] Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2021, Joe Biden formally commemorated the holiday with a presidential proclamation, becoming the first U.S. president to do so, and presidential proclamations have also been issued in 2022 and 2023. Indigenous Peoples’ Day is not a recognized holiday under U.S. Federal Law."
There is a growing movement to replace the celebration of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the western hemisphere with reminding people of what Columbus did after his discovery. His history here in the western hemisphere was extremely sad and brutal. Also, he only discovered various Caribbean islands but never discovered any place which is now a part of the USA, aka America. Details of his sad and brutal rule in the Caribbean are easily found in Wikipedia's biography of him.
If Columbus had not discovered the western hemisphere, I may or may not have been born 450 years later in Abington, Pennsylvania as a descendant of English colonists who arrived in 1630 in what is now Connecticut, but I would have been born somewhere, and certainly some other European explorer would have stumbled upon our continent a few years after Columbus did in 1492.
I join with those who mourn what Columbus did after landing on an island in the Bahamas. His deeds in the New World were so inhumanely vicious that the Catholic Church back in Spain excommunicated him. "Civilized" nations (i.d., European nations) have grown much nicer since 1492, but there are still many butchers on earth killing large numbers of innocent people who are called "enemies" by the governments of those butchers.