Defending Columbus
October 13, 2021
Mike Huckabee
With Columbus Day behind us, I normally wouldn’t still be talking about ol’ Chris. But the assaults on Columbus (which are really an assault on the very existence of America) never stop. The liberal news outlets used the holiday to interview radical leftists and historical revisionists, and the Washington Post grabbed a plunger and tried to force its reputation even further down the toilet by printing a list of all remaining monuments to Columbus, which might as well have been titled, “The Vandals’ Roadmap.”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/478763/
So since the America haters refuse to stop attacking Columbus, I thought I’d go ahead and spend a little more space giving you some resources to bookmark so you can refute some of their historical misinformation (the diplomatic way of saying, “slanderous lies.”)
Here’s a link to the John Hinderaker article I referenced yesterday that includes a brief reality check on the real history of America and the Native American tribes.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/happy-indigenous-peoples-day.php
John Hirschauer at National Review has an even more in-depth look at the real Columbus and the complicated history and political pressures of his time, and it paints a picture quite at odds with the wild Hitler comparisons spewed by leftists today that have infected school textbooks and poisoned the minds of our children. He also notes that many of the stories of atrocities repeated about Columbus today came from uncorroborated attacks by his main political rival of the time. Treating them as solid history would be like trying to write an accurate account of the Trump White House by watching reruns of CNN.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/columbus-day-a-defense-of-christopher-columbus/
And if you’d like to take a real deep dive into this subject, retired college professor Armando Simon at the American Spectator did something few people do in this “I saw it on Twitter so I believe it” era: putting aside the recent historical revisionists with an ax to grind, he studied the firsthand accounts and official records of Columbus’ actions and words and his interactions with the Natives in the original Spanish. Here’s what he says these primary sources reveal about Columbus’ alleged crimes against humanity:
They are “a total fabrication. Not true. Not true at all. They are fictional…There is not one single historical source in existence that substantiates any of the ‘crimes.’ Not one. None!”
Simon says the idea that Columbus was a monster on the level of Attila the Hun was created centuries later and has become conventional wisdom, just like the false idea created in the 1800s that he set sail to prove the world wasn’t flat (nobody believed the world was flat in 1492.) To cite just one example, Columbus is accused of selling Native women into sexual slavery, including a nine-year-old girl. But records show that he actually protested mistreatment such as sexual slavery to the Spanish Crown, “including that particular 9-year-old girl.”
You might be astonished to read the original accounts and see how they've been grotesquely distorted by people with a political agenda to turn American children against their own nation. On the other hand, if you’ve ever watched MSNBC, you might find it eerily familiar.
For once, let’s let Columbus speak for himself. Hirschauer quotes him as writing something that could be aimed directly at today’s Twitter mobs who have accomplished nothing of note with their own lives other than to attack, slander and tear down others:
“Let those who are fond of blaming and finding fault, while they sit safely at home, ask, ‘Why did you not do thus and so?’ I wish they were on this voyage; I well believe that another voyage of a different kind awaits them, or our faith is naught.”
Historian Samuel Eliot Morison interpreted (I believe accurately, for once) Columbus to mean, “In other words, to hell with them!”