The Historical Falsification of Columbus’ ‘Crimes’

[mystery-ak]

The Historical Falsification of Columbus’ ‘Crimes’

In recent decades, Christopher Columbus has been demonized out of ignorance, hatred, and spite.

by Armando Simón
October 10, 2021, 11:05 PM


The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.  — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. — George Orwell, 1984

There are misconceptions, some of them benevolent, some malignant, some neutral, that, repeated, persist for a very long time in spite of their not being true. One such misconception is that Christopher Columbus set out on his voyage to dispel the popular view of his time that the world was flat. In reality, that idea was an urban legend that originated in the mid-1800s. No one, as far back as the Ancient Greeks, really thought that the earth was flat.

But there are other misconceptions about Columbus that are extremely malignant. In recent decades, Christopher Columbus has been demonized. He has been called a war criminal, a thief, a rapist, a bumbling fool, and someone who carried out genocide. These accusations have supposedly been the basis for the recent vandalism and destruction of statues in America of Christopher Columbus in the cities of Richmond, St. Paul, Baltimore, Miami, Wilmington, San Antonio, Sacramento, St. Louis, Detroit, Trenton, Buffalo, Boston, and Providence (in Providence, the vandalism was done by a middle school teacher). In states controlled by Democrats, Columbus Day has been replaced by Indigenous Peoples’ Day, particularly during anniversaries of his discovering the New World (an instance of cultural appropriation), while some Republicans in Congress are trying to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth Day.

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https://spectator.org/historical-falsification-columbus-crimes/

[catfish1957]

Southern Heritage has seen it even worse.  The woke have clutched the narrative, and are seriously trying to re-write history, and demonize anyone who was part of that heritage.  Past or Present.

[PeteS in CA]

A little farther down the article:

Consult, not secondary sources written centuries later by individuals with a political agenda, but primary (i.e., contemporary) sources in the original Spanish: Los Cuatro Viajes del Almirante y su Testamento, and, Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias, both by Bartolomé de las Casas. De las Casas, as every schoolchild in the Caribbean and Spain knows, was The Apostle of the Indians, an indefatigable defender of the Indians who fulminated endlessly against the Spanish crimes on the indigenous people. More importantly, he chronicled the atrocities against the Indians, fearlessly naming the criminals. Not once does he mention Columbus as an evildoer. On the contrary, he documented the exact opposite, that Columbus repeatedly defended the Indians against Spanish depredations.

The third primary source is the biography of the explorer written by his son, Fernando. Should the reader cynically discount his son’s biography as whitewashed because his son somehow saw that 500 years later his father’s statues were going to be vandalized in a new country called the United States and he had to salvage his reputation, think instead that, considering the zeitgeist, Fernando could have easily portrayed his father as a great conqueror of satanic, evil savages who practiced cannibalism (after all, look at all the hagiographies written on Napoleon, who turned Europe into a charnel house). Significantly, Fernando also portrayed the natives in a benevolent light — and this was long before the syrupy “noble savage” mythos that we have been force-fed to this day. He was being faithful to facts.

Lastly, there is the Capitulations, the documents between the Spanish monarchy and the Admiral.

A note wrt the bio by the son Fernando. In the context of 16th Century Spanish culture, a historical-fictional portrayal of his father would have portrayed Christopher Columbus (Cristobal Colon) as a heroic conqueror of savage cannibalistic Indians.

In real life, Columbus was not the best governor, in a managerial sense. Consequently, much that was written of him at the time was by men aiming to replace him. What they claimed should be taken with a multi-ton block of salt. Columbus was eventually replaced for his ineptitude (and some cronyism and nepotism, too, IIRC).

The late 15th and 16th Centuries in Spanish history were a messy time. The Reconquista was finally completed in 1492, and the Inquisition was driving Jews out of Spain. Much of Columbus' crews and later conquistadors' armies came from that warrior and persecution-flight culture.