In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. When he landed he must’ve thought, phew. But where he landed, he hardly knew….
Of course, he thought he had landed in “the Indies”; so, in typical European (imperial) fashion, he named the (Caribbean) natives he met (er, I’m sorry, “discovered”) ashore “Indians”. The rest, as we say, is HIStory.
“They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” (Medieval Sourcebook)This entry from Columbus’s own journal shows what he intended to do from the outset with the hospitable and unsuspecting Tainos who greeted him upon his arrival. It’s only one of the many reasons why eminent historians are finally beginning to cast a critical, if not accusatory, eye at the hagiography his voyages have enjoyed throughout history.
Here, for example, is how Howard Zinn frames this corrected version of history in A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present:
“To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves -- unwittingly -- to justify what was done… The easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) -- that is still with us.”
All the same, Americans have been celebrating Columbus Day for centuries. Yet it wasn’t until 1971 that the US Congress declared the second Monday in October a federal holiday in honor of this sea-faring Italian.
Many other countries throughout the Americas, most notably here in the Caribbean, mark a similar holiday in his name. But a few of us just consider him a glorified pirate -- with apologies to Blackbeard … and to Captain Jack Sparrow.
October 15, 2010
caribbeannewsnow
