In our current social turmoil, it is distressing but not surprising that large numbers of citizens, mostly young white people, have been tearing down statues of some of the most prominent figures in American history. In a way, it’s not their fault. Almost all they have been taught to remember, from kindergarten to graduate school, about great men such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is not that they created one of the most astonishing nations in the history of the world but that they owned slaves. Even Abraham Lincoln is not beyond reproach for the pure ideologues.
But it’s been puzzling that, for decades, Christopher Columbus has been tarred with the same brush. He died over a century before 1619 — the year that the New York Times and other progressive voices are now telling us was the “true” beginning of the United States with the arrival in Virginia of the first African slaves. His only real connection to the nation was the opening up of the Americas to the rest of the world, a monumental achievement that changed history. But why the venom directed toward him?
Parents are often surprised to hear from their children that Columbus was a “genocidal maniac.” (Those two words have become a kind of mantra about him in many educational circles.) Or, taking a decades-old line from the American Indian movement, he’s described, of course, as “worse than Hitler.”
By definition, genocide is the deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire people. As every sane historian of the Age of Exploration knows — and is easy to confirm by reading into the history — Columbus never attempted any such thing. He was probably the greatest intuitive navigator in human history but a poor governor on land. Bartolome de las Casas, the great “defender of the Indians,” knew Columbus personally and testified to the “sweetness” of his character despite his failings. It seems, in fact, that he was overly indulgent and then, when his indulgence led to disorder, overly harsh toward both Native Americans and Spaniards.
As to “worse than Hitler,” the Nazis killed around 40 million people, including 6 million Jews. Can any sane person believe that a man who made only four brief voyages to the New World — and those mostly devoted to exploring the Caribbean islands and Venezuelan mainland — was in that league? He made serious, violent mistakes, particularly by our modern lights. But as las Casas, admitting those, remarked, “I knew him, and his intentions were good.”
So why the recent effort to make the explorer into a monster? The answer has less to do with him and more to do with what I would call a “crisis” of the West. No other term will do.
Columbus has been a kind of Rorschach test in various periods of our history. In the early 19th century, for example, Washington Irving and others tried to make him into a symbol of America. Columbus, on that reading, anticipated the Protestant Reformation by ignoring the benighted medieval Catholic “experts” who told him he couldn’t reach the Indies by crossing the Atlantic. (They were right about the true distance, however, and Columbus may have known that.)
Irving also made Columbus into an exemplar of American daring and entrepreneurship. He was a bit closer to the truth there since what he tried to do was partly an economic enterprise. Later, groups like the Knights of Columbus, and Irish, Italian, and Slavic people took him as a kind of patron of immigrants and Catholics. Contrary to modern cynicism, Columbus was a deeply religious Catholic and regarded his voyages as a way of spreading the Gospel. He even left money in his will to support the freeing of Jerusalem from Islamic conquest.
Columbus was idolized at points in the past, but he’s currently being demonized. And again, it’s because he’s a kind of symbol, only this time, he’s a symbol of Western civilization and Christianity. Since shortly after World War II, a strong cultural current, and not only among Marxists, has regarded the rise of the West as a tale of cultural imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and capitalist exploitation.
The fact that these all-too-human evils have always existed everywhere, including in the pre-Columbian era, means nothing to radical critics. “Western Civ has got to go!” It cannot be reformed. A whole civilization has to be canceled. The very same radicals would regard this idea with horror if it were proposed for any other culture.
And there’s another anti-Christian element that has come into play.
Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., recently created the “District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions Working Group,” or DCFACES. It recommended that the city “remove, relocate, or contextualize” over 1,300 statues and landmarks, including the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial:
All decent people today seek to eliminate racism and to mitigate inequality. But it’s clear in statements like this and the published intentions of groups like Black Lives Matter that anti-Western and anti-Judeo-Christian elements drive the furious critique of our history. It’s the Bible, after all, that says in Genesis, “Male and female He created them.”
In a way, the radical critics, wrong as they are about almost all the facts, are right about a figure like Columbus. He’s perhaps the most pivotal figure in making the West the dominant culture in the world today. The radicals fail to realize, however, that it’s only in the light of many Western principles that they are able to criticize Western failures.
Columbus was no saint, but if we’re going to blame him for all the things that have gone wrong in the world since 1492, then in fairness, we should also be grateful to him and honor him and the civilization to which he helped give rise for the many good and great things that have also gone right.
Dr. Robert Royal is the founder and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and author of Columbus and the Crisis of the West, on sale now.
