Columbus was a mass murdering tyrant

"Care to present some evidence and facts to back up such a bold, definitive statement?"

His atrocities are well documented. Unfortunately, there is a desire to keep him as a saint. That is how he is taught to school kids in the US. Most modern scholarship paints a very different picture. Try the book, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by Loewen. "The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy" by Sale is also good. Many modern biographies are tearing apart the myth of Columbus, and the actual historical scholarship is even more iconoclastic.

So much of the Columbus story has been mythologized to the the point that fact and fiction are difficult to tell apart. Most of what people "know" about the story is more hagiography than history - he has been absorbed into the American creation myth. So many things about Columbus are presented as facts even though we have no reason to believe them.

I suppose we should be happy that the film at least tries to portray that things quickly turned ugly. Unfortunately, they try to act like Columbus had little to do with it, he was tricked by the people around him. The little historical evidence that we have says that he was at the center of it. For example, the film (and many history books) ignores that those natives that he brought back to Spain - they were taken against their will. It was also his gold-lust that drove many of the tyrannical policies towards the native - that were only hinted at in the film. He enslaved them, murdered and mutilated them as punishment, and let his men have his way with the women when they wanted. On later voyages, he even sent thousands of natives back to the old world to work as slaves.

Another common lie is that the Turks had "cut off the trade routes to the East to the Christians." (Forgive me if I got the quote from the movie wrong.) This ludicrous idea was disproved by the historian A. H. Lybyer in 1915, but for some reason is still presented as fact. Lybyer points out that the Turks promoted trade because it made them money. Duh. And it was often the competing European powers that blockaded trade, like the Portuguese blockade of 1507.

Unfortunately, most of us get our understanding of Columbus from our high school history books, which are just a candy-coated repetition of the myth of Columbus of how he fits in the white-washed American creation myth. Those of us who want to portray a more honest image of Columbus are often ignored as crack-pots. To know the real Columbus it takes a lot of digging, and a strong stomach. Too bad Scott passed up a chance to set the record straight.

Read A People's History Of The United States by Howard Zinn

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

Chapter 1: Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress

Let's not forget what may arguably be the biggest crime committed in connection with Columbus, by that I mean the fact that the majority of Americans to this day still believe that Columbus discovered America and have no idea that it was named for the guy who actually found the mainland. Americas Verspucci (I think that was his name)

Great point judsonkr. He was a man of his times. An explorer who discovered america for the western civilization

I feel sorry for people who dont drink
wake up in the morning and thats the best they feel all day

Well you could say the same about the Nazis/Hitler were men of their time as well. Misunderstood ambitious individuals whose victims never fully comprehended and appreciated their grand plans for world domination.

Not to mention the brave Vietnamese Communists warriors who repelled unwanted yank invaders from their lands.

Or Muslim terrorists/freedom fighters for that matter who courageously wage a holy jihad crusade against the immoral Western infidel scum by crashing planes into the symbols of Western capitalism and blowing up other places Westerners frequent etc, etc, etc..

It's all a matter of perspective and which side you're on (european, arab, asian, indigenous American, etc...) will determine who you sympathize with.

[deleted]

Weren't Stalin and Mao "men of their times" also?

Fantastic post.

I don't think you can use the time period he lived in as an excuse for genocide. Colombus and his policies is directly responsible for the deaths of the entire native population of Hispanola. Yes, it was a more brutal time period, and people had a different moral code than they do today, but honestly his actions go beyond even that. There were certainly contemporaries of his who did not employ such methods, and there were even people like Bartolomé de las Casas who condemned what happened to the natives.

Besides that, we can overlook the bad in people like Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, because the ideals he fought for are so great that they outshine his personal flaws. Columbus was never so noble. He only cared about profit, even at the cost of many lives. Making him into a hero is like making a hero out of Stalin.