Go ahead, take Columbus down

by | Jun 11, 2020 | Features, Politics | 5 comments

The growing push to remove monuments to the Confederacy has metastasized to statues of Christopher Columbus. Protesters in Richmond and Minneapolis toppled statues of the Genoa explorer, and a monument to him in Boston was beheaded. The beheading, in my view, was the most appropriate treatment his likeness could have received. As viceroy of Hispaniola, he regularly beheaded living human beings as a means of instilling discipline in the Indigenous peoples he and his men had subjugated. This may sound provocative, but it comports with a sober view of the history of the western hemisphere, and it points toward the conclusion that monuments to Columbus should come down right alongside statues of Lee, Jackson, and Davis.

It is the result of contrived history that Columbus is even memorialized in the United States at all. After all, he was an Italian and served at the behest of Spain. His colonization of Hispaniola began the establishment of New Spain, not British America. In fact, when England (the progenitor of the United States) first ventured into the game of empire-building, Spain was a bitter enemy of the Tudor crown. Only six decades after the American Founding did Columbus become incorporated into our national memory. Historian George Bancroft jerry-rigged Columbus’ voyage onto the American story in an effort to forge a romantic mythos of inevitable expansion. To remove him from our public spaces is not to desecrate a national hero.

Columbus should not, in fact, be considered a hero at all. Some men really were great builders who did terrible things–think Thomas Jefferson. But Columbus’ “principal legacy,” to borrow a concept from Yale University, consisted of unconscionable brutality. The only genocide as complete as the one Columbus perpetrated against the Taino people was the Roman empire’s exterminatory campaign against Dacia. When Columbus landed on Hispaniola, the island had hundreds of thousands of residents. When he was done with it, only a couple hundred Indigenous people were still alive. Historians increasingly believe that this genocide was not primarily the result of disease, though that possibility would hardly vitiate the evils of what happened. Instead, the Taino fell victim to massacres and overwork as enslaved laborers in mines and plantations.

Columbus ran his colony with an iron, merciless fist. Torture and mutilation of both Indigenous people and Spanish colonists were commonplace. He enslaved as many Taino as he could and worked them to death. His lurid crimes against an invaded civilization would be at home in any of history’s grimmest chapters. What came in the ensuing centuries was even bloodier. In the course of European colonization, between 15 million and 50 million Natives of the western hemisphere lost their lives. The “annihilation of American Indians,” as neuroscienstist Steven Pinker describes the genocide, was one of the ten bloodiest events in human history.

The man who coined the word “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, hoped to introduce a term that would never lose its horror. Columbus committed it, an undeniable historical fact, and his crimes should not be viewed more charitably than anything that happened in the 20th century. He was not part of the story of our country, and he does not deserve veneration in the form of public monuments. By all means, take the statues down.

5 Comments

  1. cocodog

    The first foreigner who settled in this country was in effect challenging the title to land belonging to native Americans. I do not believe it could be called theft for several reasons, (1) land cannot be the subject of theft like a vehicle or personal property. (2) The Native Americans never really occupied the land in the sense developing it.

    Granted, they hunted on it but never really improved all of it for living planting, etc. The legal term adverse possession by colonists could prefect title, depending on other circumstances. Then of course, (and this is where the colonists later got into a lot of trouble bruit force) The Native American were not exactly slouches in this area as they have tons of experience fighting among themselves and in many ways better than the colonists

    Slavery to the English Crown had been a problem, not so much from the moral perspective, but from an economic standpoint. Moreover, not so much in this country but in African, India and other British colonies. Several of the colonists did not like the notion of one farmer or businessman being able to reap a greater profit after recouping the purchase price of his slave, which was not by any means inexpensive. A skilled slave in good health sold from 4,000 up. That would be an astronomical amount in today’s money.

    Where the big issue existed dealt with how much of a taste the crown got of the action. Colonists did not want to share. The crown thought that to be treason (which the king could define to meet the situation) Apparently, failure pay taxes was good enough treason.

  2. Mike Leonard

    Sure, Columbus was a villain but good luck in doing away with a national holiday in his name.

    • Steve Addy

      26 states do not observe the Columbus Day holiday.

  3. cocodog

    I am sure if we do extensive background checks on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, (dig a little, so to speak) there must be something that disqualifies one or two of them from have a statute commemorating their role in the history of this country countries.

    • Steve Addy

      Once you got past the signers who were angry because the English wouldn’t allow them to steal additional Native land, you’d find the signers who were worried that the English were going to make them free their slaves.

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