RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
—-George Orwell, 1984

Columbus Day is almost here (Monday, October 11) and we can expect leftists to, once again, crawl out to engage in their periodic acts of vandalism towards Columbus’ statues while feeling self-righteous, just as they have with statues of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Charles Dickens, the Virgin Mary, Gandhi, Churchill, Jefferson, Miguel de Cervantes, and many others, while conservatives do absolutely nothing to stop them other than shake their heads in disapproval and scratch their rear ends. In Providence, the vandalism was even done by a middle school teacher, which is not too surprising considering the state of education (notice that the desecration of the statues is not reported by the national media except to gloat over the Confederate statues).

And “punishment” for those acts of vandalism? A slap on the wrist. When Mike Forcia was told by the police that he would be charged with criminal damage to property for destroying a statue of Columbus, the AIM barbarian flippantly said, “I’m willing to take that.”

In regards to Churchill’s statue, a British woman declared, “Some say that he’s a racist; some that say he’s a hero. I haven’t personally met him.” These are the type of ignorant savages that are trying to reshape society in their image.

Yet, equally depressing—actually, worse—is that the few defenders appear to be equally ignorant, and have accepted the defamation, arguing that regardless of his “crimes,” Columbus’ exploratory achievements are praiseworthy.

Leftists’ animus towards Columbus is accompanied by accusations of genocide, rape, and mutilation of natives (however, he has not—yet—been accused of not providing transgender bathrooms in his ships). There is just one problem.

They are all a lie. Total fabrications—deliberate fabrications.

Some of the lies are so breathtakingly stupid as to leave one open-mouthed, such as the claims by some Native Americans that Columbus carried out genocide in this country, that he was responsible for “war crimes” committed in North America. State Rep. Rachel Talbot-Ross (D) of Maine called him “a war criminal.” So they have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day in a blatant act of cultural appropriation.

Columbus never set foot in North America.

There is not one single historical foundation to either substantiate or describe these “crimes.” None. Nada. Nothing! They are the creations of modern-day Marxists with a penchant to falsify historical facts to suit their political goals, something that they have done throughout the past century, a practice that Orwell illustrated in 1984. The history of America in the past few decades has been deliberately mutilated and distorted by a resurgence of homegrown communists. Just look at the “1619 Project,” put out by The New York Pravda (the Soviets proclaimed that Russians invented the car, the airplane, the lightbulb, the radio, even baseball and soccer; in the film The Mouse that Roared, a group of ambassadors passes the time playing Monopoly, which the Russian insists was invented in Russia).

The sick irony here is that, if one consults primary (i.e., contemporary) sources, it was Columbus who constantly prevented depredations of the inoffensive natives by the Spaniards, particularly towards the women. This prohibition was resented by the Spaniards, particularly since the Admiral was a foreigner. There is not one single contemporary historical source in existence that substantiates any of the “crimes.” Not a single one. Consult, not secondary sources written centuries later by leftist individuals but primary sources, preferably in the original Spanish: Los Cuatro Viajes del Almirante y su Testamento, and, Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias, both by Bartolomé de las Casas, as well as the Capitulations (also known as the Book of Privileges), and Fernando’s biography of his father. De las Casas, as every schoolchild in the Caribbean and Spain knows, was The Apostle of the Indians, an indefatigable defender of the Indians who fulminated endlessly against the Spanish crimes on the indigenous people. Not once does he mention Columbus as an evildoer. On the contrary.

Years after he died, the Spaniards committed many bloodcurdling crimes against the natives, on a par with those of the Muslims or the Khmer Rouge. Present-day communists have attributed these (documented) crimes to Columbus, committed decades after he died. Historical accuracy has never been a concern of leftists.

Foremost among today’s historical mutilations is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (the word “People’s” in a title is always a dead giveaway that the communists are involved). The book has been relentlessly promoted in television and films, and is being taught in schools which, if nothing else, shows the degree of communist infiltration in the media and the schools. Once you finish reading this mutilated history of America, you will be eager to burn the country to the ground.

Regarding Columbus: “At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two Arawaks were run through with swords and bled to death.”

This encounter occurred on the first voyage’s return trip. Previously, whenever Indians had been encountered, they had initially fled, thinking they were cannibals. The Siboneys/Arawaks/Tainos were terrorized by seafaring cannibals (aka Caribs/Caribes/Canibas), who ranged widely among the islands in boats, landing and capturing their meals; they would take them home alive and if, they were men, were castrated in order to improve their flavor. The cannibals had superior weapons: powerful bows and arrows, whereas their victims had sticks. When it was clear that the Spaniards were not cannibals, the Indians welcomed them, thinking that they came from heaven. A brisk trade ensued for the gold nuggets that the natives wore and was so abundant in Hispaniola that nuggets could be found among the tree roots (another crime attributed to Columbus was that since no gold could be found on the island, in a fit he cut off the Indians’ hands—another lie). Incidentally, all the natives were naked, not wearing even a loin cloth, and some tribes’ members were as white as Europeans. Again, and again, Columbus ordered his men not to steal anything and to respect the Indians, to trade, not steal.

When Columbus encountered the island that Zinn mentions, the situation was different. The natives (cannibals, not Arawaks/Tainos) went towards the lifeboat with their bows and arrows, screaming and “looking ferocious.” Undoubtedly, they were surprised that anyone would come to them. The natives were told to leave their bows, arrows, and ropes off to one side. Columbus traded for two bows (he had collected plants, animals, foods and crafts to take back as proof of his voyage), but the natives refused to trade any more. When the Spaniards were about to leave, the fifty cannibals ran to their bows and arrows and the ropes with which to tie up their dinner and rushed to the seven Spaniards to overwhelm them. For once, their dinner fought back. One cannibal was stabbed in the buttocks and another in the chest, whereupon they all fled. None “bled to death.”

So, as can be seen, Zinn’s account has just enough details to seem truthful. But a mountain of details is deliberately left out that gives a totally different picture. A typical tactic.

But it is not just Zinn. There are many, many others that parrot lies about the man. For starters, just read the horrendous lies published in The Philadelphia Tribune by one Michael Coard. A lot of people repeat the lies that they heard or read, thinking that those lies are true. They are even briefly inserted in television programs (The Sopranos, The Office, The Good Place), like drive-by shootings, one of the favorite tactics of the communists in the media and entertainment industry. It doesn’t even cross people’s minds that they could be lies.

You can find the propaganda on YouTube. And not just there. The same can be found in articles in the propaganda outlets Huffington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and many, many other publications that have saturated the culture, all written by smug, self-confident leftists with a colossal ignorance of history.

There is much ridicule, insults and accusations thrown at the inoffensive explorer, some of them infantile, some others very serious, each of which would take up too much space to detail and thereby dispel. Let me just briefly mention a few.

“On his first voyage back, Columbus brought back hundreds (sometimes it’s thousands) of Indians as slaves.” Only ignorant imbeciles would say this, as a caravel (he was reduced to two towards the end of the trip) is the smallest ship in a navy; I have set foot on one; they are smaller than a tugboat.

“Columbus’ voyage is unimportant because the New World had already been discovered by the natives and/or the Vikings.” The refutation to this was best clarified by Hans Selye in Dreams and Discoveries: “The important difference between the discovery of America by the Indians, by the Norsemen, and by Columbus is only that Columbus succeeded in attaching the American continent to the rest of the world.”

“He proposed enslaving the natives.” He wrote that in a letter to the monarchs. During the second voyage, the explorers entered a deserted village and they found a human arm in the process of being roasted and pots full of human bones. The captured noncannibal women begged to be taken away. When Columbus wrote that they could be enslaved, he was referring to the cannibals to whom he had by now developed an understandable abhorrence (and I, for one, cannot blame him for this).

“He raped a 9 y/o girl.” Or, “He gave a 9 y/o native girl to a friend to rape.” This is based on a letter which has been proven to be fraudulent, since it mentions temples on the islands—temples which did not exist. Plus, the letter has internal inconsistencies.

“As a governor, his rule was so arbitrary and so tyrannical that the Spanish settlers appealed to a man named Bobadilla, who threw the monster in chains and sent him back.” In reality, the Spaniards that came on his second voyage came with the sole purpose of raping native women, stealing gold and returning to Spain. They did not want to be settlers. Columbus thwarted them and they became frustrated. When Bobadilla showed up, he took the side of the mutineers.”

So, in the end, why blacken the memory of a great man? What purpose could it possibly serve? I will quote two writers who lived behind the Iron Curtain. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that, “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

Pair the toppling and the vandalizing of statues with the looting, the killing, and the burning in cities, and it should be obvious by now that the goal of these vandals is not just against Columbus, or Confederate statues, but against civilization itself, or, put another way, cultural destruction. Regardless of the slogans used to rationalize the vandalism by these self-admitted Communists, the participants are destroying our civilization for the joy of destroying it.

Armando Simón is a trilingual native of Cuba, a retired psychologist with a degree in history and is the author of ‘When Evolution Stops’, ‘The Only Red Star I Liked Was a Starfish‘ and ‘Very Peculiar Stories’.