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Columbus: Religious Fanatic and Holy Warrior

By James Benjamin

I thought I'd excerpt a passage or two from David Stannard's book, American Holocaust, a book published in 1992 - five centuries after Columbus began his reign of terror in the Americas. There are numerous passages I could quote, but this one caught my eye due to its placement of Columbus in the context, the Zeitgeist, of Renaissance-era Europe.

Your reading assignment follows:

Apart from navigational skills, what most set Columbus apart from other Europeans of his day were not the things that he believed, but the intensity with which he believed in them and the determination with which he acted upon those beliefs. If most Christians at that time did not walk around wearing the robes of Franciscan monks as Columbus did, few would have denied that the conversion of the world to Christianity (and the destruction of those who resisted) was a necessary prerequisite to Christ's Second Coming - or that there were then present unmistakable signs that such mass conversions and mass destructions were imminent. Similarly, if most people did not cross the ocean in search of the terrestrial paradise or King Solomon's mines, as Columbus did, few would have denied that such places probably existed in some distant, hidden real,. And if most people did not take part in slaving voyages to the coast of Africa "many times," as Columbus acknowledged that he had done, few would have found anything morally improper in such activities.

Columbus was, in most respects, merely an especially active and dramatic embodiment of the European - and especially the Mediterranean - mind and soul of his time: a religious fanatic obsessed with the conversion, conquest, or liquidation of all non-Christians; a latter-day Crusader in search of personal wealth and fame, who expected the enormous and mysterious world he had found to be filled with monstrous races inhabiting wild forests, and with golden people living in Eden. He was also a man with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought. As such, the fact that he launched a campaign of horrific violence against the natives of Hispanola is not something that should surprise anyone. Indeed, it would be surprising if had not inaugurated such carnage. (pp. 199-200)

If one were to read the rest of Stannard's summary, one will be quickly impressed by the combination of the Zeitgeist of the era, the economic conditions existing in Europe at the time, along with Columbus' own unrelenting ambition and fanaticism combined to produce what would be the beginning of a genocide of almost unimaginable proportions and duration. Fellow blogger Jill (see The National Disgrace of Columbus Day)provides a useful overview of precisely what Columbus Day celebrates - genocide - and why it is shameful that it is celebrated at all. It would be almost as if the Germans had a national holiday to celebrate Hitler's commencement of the mass slaughter of Jews, Poles, Roma, and others deemed untermenschen in his day.

At bare minimum, the peoples of the First Nations who were the targets of genocide are owed an apology as Alexa rightly notes. At bare minimum, those of us in a position to educate others should continue to shine the light of truth about Columbus and the evils that were committed not only under his watch, but also for centuries by those who came after. At bare minimum.

At bare minimum.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on October 13, 2008 (boomark / email).