If the radical left would celebrate one — just one — accomplishment, achievement, victory, or demonstration of genius by the men and women of Western Civilization, they might be forgiven their hatred of Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, Winston Churchill, and other giants upon whose shoulders we stand.
They can't do so because leftists believe in an ideology that must reject these men and their towering achievements, or admit their entire worldview is mistaken. They were "bad men" because they violated the modern ideals and sensibilities upon which the left sits as judge, jury, and executioner. They didn't believe in the same things that leftists do and did not hate what leftists hate, love what leftists love, or worship what leftists worship, thus disqualifying them from enjoying any presumption of historical goodwill.
All of those men had massive flaws as human beings. All acted on some of their worst instincts.
But all of those men had something the leftists can only wish they had: a positive vision for humanity, a burning desire to make their lives meaningful, and a sublime belief in themselves as world-historical figures.
Christopher Columbus was not a scholar, but he was the most learned man to captain a ship in his time. America wasn't even a gleam in Columbus's eye, but his ambition, his striving to better himself, his dismissal of contemporary European social conventions, and his fanatical belief in his own ideas would have made Columbus feel right at home in the USA.
Starting out as an ordinary seaman after leaving his father's wool-weaving shop, he learned navigation, geography, astronomy, and map-making through practical experience while sailing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, with voyages taking him as far as Ireland, Iceland, and the Gold Coast of Africa. By the time he secured permission from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella for his expedition to India, he may have been the best and most knowledgeable navigator alive.
He also knew something about the Atlantic that only a handful of navigators knew: the wind and currents moving from East to West that favored a ship sailing westward. By taking his fleet south to the Canary Islands first and then sailing due west, Columbus harnessed these steady easterly trade winds, which pushed his ships smoothly across the ocean, and later utilized the prevailing westerlies further north for his return journey.
Portugal's sovereign, King John, was very interested in Columbus's expedition. Portugal's leadership was also intrigued, but Columbus made his terms too steep, demanding astronomical rewards and governance over whatever lands he found.
How dare this commoner make such outrageous demands! He should be on his knees, grateful the king agreed to meet with him. Unperturbed, Columbus moved on to the courts of King Charles VIII of France and Henry VII of England, where his demands to be treated as a member of the nobility were treated with equal disdain.
As Daniel J. Flynn points out in National Review, "King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella granted Columbus the title of admiral of the seas, named him governor and viceroy over any conquered lands, and agreed to a 90-10 split (in their favor) on the material Columbus extracted on his journey. As he later reflected in gratitude to the sovereigns, 'All who knew of my enterprise rejected it with mockery and laughter.'”
Needless to say, they all regretted turning Columbus down.
There is much to admire in Columbus's fighting, clawing, and grasping for the top rung of the European social ladder. It was almost unheard of at the time, but the Genoan's ideas landed at the perfect moment. As the Reconquista pushed Muslims out of Europe in the 1470s and 1480s, Western European kingdoms lost access to the fabulously wealthy Indian states and China as the normal East-West trade routes closed. European sovereigns desperately sought another route East.
Why does the left hate Columbus? While many on the left look down on his social climbing, it's Columbus's inner demons that drove him to finally win approval for his expedition while also making him a monstrous administrator: cruel, paranoid, uncaring of the human cost of his efforts.
Columbus wasn't a "racist," at least the way leftists believe. He saw the indigenous people as unbaptized children, incapable of knowing right from wrong and, not having accepted Christ as their savior, little better than the wild beasts that roamed the forests of the New World.
To explorers and monarchs deeply embedded in the religious framework of the era (especially following the Reconquista in Spain), souls outside the Church were viewed as spiritually imperiled. Conversion was seen not just as a religious duty, but as a vital, urgent rescue mission.
This is a more nuanced view of Columbus's depredations. Obviously, the left doesn't do "nuance." To ascribe the contemporary crime of racism to how Columbus treated New World natives is simply wrongheaded. There is no excusing everything Columbus did, such as torturing people to force them to convert or executing them by burning them at the stake. The Columbus narrative needs the vital context lacking in most "corrective" histories about him.
Columbus was not a very nice man. On his first voyage in 1492, the crew nearly mutinied because of his heavy-handed, brutal discipline and their fear that they were on a doomed expedition. While he was governor of Hispaniola, there were several armed revolts, most notably the rebellion led by Francisco Roldán from 1497 to 1498. Discontented settlers who felt cheated out of gold and goods rebelled against Columbus's harsh and inept authoritarian rule, forcing him into damaging political compromises.
The celebrants of Indigenous Peoples’ Day fixate upon his abduction and enslavement of natives. They shout down talk that the natives they celebrate abducted and enslaved and castrated and cannibalized (a word that enters language through Caniba, another name for the Carib people) other natives. The late Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States dismisses Columbus’s discovery as “lucky.” It ignores Columbus’s expertise in cartography, astronomy, and meteorology, his decades of seafaring experience from Galway to Ghana, and the influence of classic works by Seneca, Ptolemy, and Pliny the Elder on the learned Columbus’s belief in his much-doubted expedition.
Columbus, like all of us, was a flawed human being. But focusing on his flaws while ignoring the totality of the man does a disservice to Columbus, the historical figure, and to history itself.
Columbus returned to Spain in 1500 in chains. He had been arrested for numerous infractions against the settlers, but his gravest crime was trying to be someone he wasn't born to be. He left behind a chaotic situation that resulted in the death of thousands of natives. His deal with the Spanish sovereigns made him very wealthy, but he died in 1506 bitterly disappointed, believing his noble titles and lands should have been recognized.
It's too difficult for the left to see in Columbus anything but his faults. He's not useful to them unless he can be demonized and held up as an example of white privilege, or white racism, or capitalist greed, or Western imperialism. Like with Stalin and Mao, the left wants to erase history and rewrite it to reflect their warped ideological viewpoint. They are in the process of doing this and have gotten a fine head start by erasing our true past in slavish devotion to an ideology that recognizes no achievement unless it's "approved" by the apparatchiks in power.
