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Title: Deconstructing the Columbus Myth
Author: Ward Churchill
Date: 1992
Language: en
Topics: AJODA, AJODA #33, Christopher Columbus, critique, deconstruction, history
Notes: Originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #33 — Summer ’92.

Ward Churchill

Deconstructing the Columbus Myth

Was the “Great Discoverer” Italian or Spanish, Nazi or Jew?

It is perhaps fair to say that our story opens at Alfred University,

where, during the fall of 1990, I served as distinguished scholar of

American Indian Studies for a program funded by the National Endowment

for the Humanities. Insofar as I was something of a curiosity in that

primarily Euroamerican staffed and attended institution, situated as it

is within an area populated primarily by white folk, it followed

naturally that I quickly became a magnet for local journalists seeking

to inject a bit of color into their otherwise uniformly blanched columns

and commentaries. Given our temporal proximity to the much-heralded

quincen-tennial celebration of Christopher Columbus’ late 15^(th)

century ‘discovery’ of a “New World” and its inhabitants, and that I am

construed as being in some part a direct descendant of those

inhabitants, they were wont to query me as to my sentiments concernng

the accomplishments of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

My response, at least in its short version, was (and remains) that

celebration of Columbus and the European conquest of the Western

Hemisphere he set off is generally analogous to celebration of the

glories of nazism and Heinrich Himmler. Publication of this remark in

local newspapers around Rochester, New York, caused me to receive, among

other things, a deluge of lengthy and vociferously framed letters of

protest, two of which I found worthy of remark.

The first of these was sent by a colleague at the university, an

exchange faculty member from Germany, who informed me that while the

human costs begat by Columbus’ navigational experiment were “tragic and

quite regrettable,” comparisons between him and the Reichsfiihrer SS

were nonetheless unfounded. The distinction between Himmler and

Columbus, his argument went, resided not only in differences in “the

magnitude of the genocidal events in which each was involved,” but the

ways in which they were involved. Himmler, he said, was enmeshed as “a

high-ranking and responsible official in the liquidation of entire human

groups” as “a matter of formal state policy” guided by an explicitly

‘racialist’ ideology. Furthermore, he said, the enterprise Himmler

created as the instrument of his genocidal ambitions incorporated,

deliberately and intentionally, considerable economic benefit to the

state in which service he acted. None of this pertained to Columbus, the

good professor concluded, because the “Great Discover” was ultimately

“little more than a gifted seaman,” an individual who unwittingly set in

motion processes over which he had little or no control, in which he

played no direct part, and which might well have been beyond his

imagination. My juxtaposition of the two men, he contended, therefore

tended to “diminish understanding of the unique degree of evil” which

should be associated with Himmler and ultimately precluded “proper

historical understandings of the Nazi phenomenon.”

The second letter came from a member of the Jewish Defense League in

Rochester. His argument ran that, unlike Columbus (whom he described as

“little more than a bit player, without genuine authority or even much

of a role, in the actual process of European civilization in the New

World which his discovery made possible”), Himmler was a “responsible

official in a formal state policy of exterminating an entire human group

for both racial and economic reasons,” and on a scale “unparalleled in

all history.” My analogy between the two, he said, served to “diminish

public respect for the singular nature of the Jewish experience at the

hands of the Nazis,” as well as popular understanding of “the unique

historical significance of the Holocaust.” Finally, he added,

undoubtedly as a crushing capstone to his position, “It is a measure of

your anti-semitism that you compare Himmler to Columbus” because

“Columbus was, of course, himself a Jew.”

I must confess the last assertion struck me first, and only partly

because I’d never before heard claims that Christopher Columbus was of

Jewish ethnicity. “What possible difference could this make?” I asked in

my letter of reply. “If Himmler himself were shown to have been of

Jewish extraction, would it then suddenly become anti-semitic to condemn

him for the genocide he perpetrated against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and

others? Would his historical crimes then suddenly be unmentionable or

even ‘okay’?” To put it another way, I continued, “Simply because Meyer

Lansky, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel and Lepke were all Jewish “by

blood,” is it a gesture of anti-semitism to refer to them as gangsters?

Is it your contention that an individual’s Jewish ethnicity somehow

confers exemption from negative classification or criticism of his/her

conduct? What are you saying?” The question of Columbus’ possible

Jewishness nonetheless remained intriguing, not because I held it to be

especially important in its own right, but because I was (and am still)

mystified as to why any ethnic group, especially one which has suffered

genocide, might be avid to lay claim either to the man or to his legacy.

I promised myself to investigate the matter further.

A Mythic Symbiosis

Meanwhile, I was captivated by certain commonalities of argument

inherent to the positions advanced by my correspondents. Both men

exhibited a near-total ignorance of the actualities of Columbus’ career.

Nor did they demonstrate any particular desire to correct the situation.

Indeed, in their mutual need to separate their preoccupation from

rational scrutiny, they appeared to have conceptually joined hands in a

function composed more of faith than fact. The whole notion of the

“uniqueness of the Holocaust” serves both psychic and political purposes

for Jew and German alike, or so it seems. The two groups are bound to

one another in a truly symbiotic relationship foundationed in the mythic

exclusivity of their experience: one half of the equation simply

completes the other in a perverse sort of collaboration, with the result

that each enjoys a tangible benefit.

For Jews, at least those who have adopted the zionist perspective, a

“unique historical suffering” under nazism translates into fulfillment

of a biblical prophecy that they are “the chosen,” entitled by virtue of

the destiny of a special persecution to assume a rarified status among —

and to consequently enjoy preferential treatment from — the remainder of

humanity. In essence, this translates into a demand that the Jewish

segment of the Holocaust’s victims must now be allowed to participate

equally in the very system which once victimized them, and to receive an

equitable share of the spoils accruing therefrom. To this end, zionist

scholars such as Louis Irving Horowitz and Elie Weisel have labored long

and mightily, defining genocide in terms exclusively related to the

forms it assumed under nazism. In their version of ‘truth’, one must

literally see smoke pouring from the chimneys of Auschwitz in order to

apprehend that a genocide, per se, is occurring.[1] Conversely, they

have coined terms such as ‘ethnocide’ to encompass the fates inflicted

upon other peoples throughout history.[2] Such semantics have served,

not as tools of understanding, but as an expedient means of arbitrarily

differentiating the experience of their people — both qualitatively and

quantitatively — from that of any other. To approach things in any other

fashion would, it must be admitted, tend to undercut ideas like the

“moral right” of the Israeli settler state to impose itself directly

atop the Palestinian Arab homeland.

For Germans to embrace a corresponding “unique historical guilt” because

of what was done to the Jews during the 1940s, is to permanently absolve

themselves of guilt concerning what they may be doing now. No matter how

ugly things may become in contemporary German society, or so the

reasoning goes, it can always (and is) argued that there has been a

marked improvement over the “singular evil which was Nazism.” Anything

other than outright nazification is, by definition, ‘different’,

‘better’ and therefore ‘acceptable’ (“Bad as they are, things could

always be worse.”). Business as usual — which is to say assertions of

racial supremacy, domination and exploitation of ‘inferior’ groups, and

most of the rest of the nazi agenda — is thereby freed to continue in a

manner essentially unhampered by serious stirring of guilt among the

German public so long as it does not adopt the literal trappings of

nazism. Participating for profit and with gusto in the deliberate

starvation of much of the Third World is no particular problem if one is

careful not to goose step while one does it.

By extension, insofar as Germany is often seen (and usually sees itself)

as exemplifying the crowning achievements of “Western Civilization,” the

same principle covers all European and Euro-derived societies. No matter

what they do, it is never ‘really’ what it seems unless it was done in

precisely the same fashion the nazis did it. Consequently, the nazi

master plan of displacing or reducing by extermination the population of

the western USSR and replacing it with settlers of “biologically

superior German breeding stock” is roundly (and rightly) condemned as

ghastly and inhuman. Meanwhile, people holding this view of nazi

ambitions tend overwhelmingly to see consolidation and maintenance of

Euro-dominated settler states in places like Australia, New Zealand,

South Africa, Argentina, the United States and Canada as “basically

okay,” or even as ‘progress’. The ‘distinction’ allowing this

psychological phenomenon is that each of these states went about the j

intentional displacement and extermination of native populations, and

their replacement, in a manner slightly different ’ in its particulars

from that employed by nazis attempting to accomplish exactly the same

thing. Such technical differentiation is then magnified and used as a

sort of all purpose veil, behind which almost anything can be hidden, so

long as it is not openly adorned with a swastika.

Given the psychological, sociocultural and political imperatives

involved, neither correspondent, whether German or Jew, felt constrained

to examine the factual basis of my analogy between Himmler and Columbus

before denying the plausibility or appropriateness of the comparison. To

the contrary, since the paradigm of their mutual understanding em-i

bodies the a priori presumption that there must be no such analogy,

factual investigation is precluded from their posturing. It follows :

that any dissent on the ‘methods’ involved in their arriving at their

conclusions, never mind introduction of countervailing evidence, must be

denied out of hand with accusations of ‘overstatement’, “shoddy

scholarship,” ‘stridency’ and/or ‘anti-semitism’. To this litany have

lately been added such new variations as “white bashing,” “Ethnic

McCarthyism,” “purveyor of political correctitude” and any other epithet

deemed helpful in keeping a “canon of knowledge” fraught with

distortion, deception and outright fraud from being ‘diluted’.[3]

Columbus as Proto-Nazi

It is time to delve into the substance of my remark that Columbus and

Himmler, nazi lebensraumpolitik and the “settlement of the New World”

bear more than casual resemblance to one another. It is not, as my two

correspondents wished to believe, because of his ‘discovery’. This does

not mean that if this were ‘all’ he had done he would somehow be

innocent of what resulted from his find, no more than the scientist who

makes a career of accepting military funding to develop weapons in any

way ‘blameless’ when they are subsequently used against human targets.

Columbus did not sally forth upon the Atlantic for reasons of “neutral

science” or altruism. He went, as his own diaries, reports, and letters

make clear, fully expecting to encounter wealth belonging to others. It

was his stated purpose to seize this wealth, by whatever means necessary

and available, in order to enrich both his sponsors and himself.[4]

Plainly, he prefigured, both in design and by intent, what came next. To

this extent, he not only symbolizes the process of conquest and genocide

which eventually consumed the indigenous peoples of Ameri-ca, but bears

the personal responsibility of having participated in it. Still, if this

were all there was to it, I might be inclined to dismiss him as a mere

thug rather than branding him a counterpart to Himmler.

The 1492 “voyage of discovery” is, however, hardly all that is at issue.

In 1493 Columbus returned with an invasion force of seventeen ships,

appointed at his own request by the Spanish Crown to install himself as

“viceroy and governor of [the Caribbean islands) and the mainland” of

America, a position he held until 1500.[5] Setting up shop on the large

island he called Espanola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he

promptly instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and systematic

extermination against the native Taino population.[6] Columbus’ programs

reduced Taino numbers from as many as 8 million at the outset of his

regime to about 3 million in 1496.[7] Perhaps 100,00 were left by the

time of the governor’s departure. His policies, however, remained, with

the result that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely

22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542, only two hundred were

recorded.[8] Thereafter, they were considered extinct, as were Indians

throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totaled

more than 15 million at the point of first contact with the Admiral of

the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known.[9]

This, to be sure, constitutes an attrition of population in real numbers

every bit as great as the toll of twelve to fifteen million — about half

of them Jewish — most commonly attributed to Himmler’s slaughter mills.

Moreover, the population of indigenous Caribbean population destroyed by

the Spanish in a single generation is, no matter how the figures are

twisted, far greater than the seventy-five percent of European Jews said

to have been exterminated by the nazis.[10] Worst of all, these data

apply only to the Caribbean basin; the process of genocide in the

Americas was only just beginning at the point such statistics became

operant, not ending, as they did upon the fall of the Third Reich. All

told, it is probable that more than one hundred million native people

were ‘eliminated’ in the course of Europe’s ongoing ‘civilization’ of

the Western Hemisphere.[11]

It has long been asserted by “responsible scholars” that this decimation

of American Indians which accompanied the European invasion resulted

primarily from disease rather than direct killing or conscious

policy.[12] There is a certain truth to this, although starvation may

have proven just as lethal in the end. It must be born in mind when

considering such facts that a considerable portion of those who perished

in the nazi death camps died, not as victims of bullets and gas, but

from starvation, as well as epidemics of typhus, dysentery and the like.

Their keepers, who could not be said to have killed these people

directly, were nonetheless found to have been culpable in their deaths

by way of deliberately imposing the conditions which led to the

proliferation of starvation and disease among them.[13] Certainly, the

same can be said of Columbus’ regime, under which the original residents

were, as a first order of business, permanently dispossessed of their

abundant cultivated fields while being converted into chattel,

ultimately to be worked to death for the wealth and ‘glory’ of

Spain.[14]

Nor should more direct means of extermination be relegated to incidental

status. As the matter is framed by Kirkpatrick Sale in his book, The

Conquest of Paradise:

“The tribute system, instituted by the Governor sometime in 1495, was a

simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold while

acknowledging the Spanish distaste for labor. Every Taino over the age

of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk’s bell of gold every

three months (or, in gold-deficient areas, twenty-five pounds of spun

cotton); those who did were given a token to wear around their necks as

proof they had made their payment; those who did not were, as [Columbus’

brother, Fernando] says discreetly, ‘punished’ — by having their hands

cut off, as [the priest, Bartolome de] Las Casas says less discreetly,

and left to bleed to death.”[15]

It is entirely likely that upwards of 10,000 Indians were killed in this

fashion alone, on Espanola alone, as a matter of policy, during

Columbus’ tenure as governor. Las Casas’ Brevisima relation, among other

contemporaneous sources, is also replete with accounts of Spanish

colonists (hidalgos) hanging Tainos en masse, roasting them on spits or

burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking

their children into pieces to be used as dog feed and so forth, all of

it to instill in the natives a “proper attitude of respect” toward their

Spanish ‘superiors.’

”[The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off

his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore babes from

their mother’s breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the

rocks...They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their

mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.”[16]

No SS trooper could be expected to comport himself with a more

unrelenting viciousness. And there is more. All of this was coupled to

wholesale and persistent massacres:

“A Spaniard — suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew

theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill [a group of

Tainos assembled for this purpose]-men, women, children and old folk,

all of whom were seated, off guard and frightened.. And within two

credos, not a man of them there remains alive. The Spaniards enter the

large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same

way, with cuts and stabs, began to kill as many as were found there, so

that a stream of blood was running, as if a great number of cows had

perished.”[17]

Elsewhere, Las Casas went on to recount how:

”In this time, the greatest outrages and slaughters of people were

perpetrated, whole villages being depopulated...The Indians saw that

without any offense on their part they were despoiled of their kingdoms,

their lands and liberties and of their lives, their wives, and homes. As

they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman

treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to earth by the horses, cut in

pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and

suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures...[many surrendered to their

fate, while the survivors] fled to the mountains [to starve].”[18]

The butchery continued until there were no Tainos left to butcher. One

might well ask how a group of human beings, even those like the

Spaniards of Columbus’ day, maddened in a collective lust for wealth and

prestige, might come to treat another with such unrestrained ferocity

over a sustained period. The answer, or some substantial portion of it,

must lie in the fact that the Indians were considered by the Spanish to

be untermenschen, subhumans. That this was the conventional view is

borne out beyond all question in the recorded debates between Las Casas

and the nobleman, Francisco de Sepulveda, who argued for the majority of

Spaniards that American Indians, like African blacks and other “lower

animals,” lacked ‘souls’. The Spaniards, consequently, bore in

Sepulveda’s estimation a holy obligation to enslave and destroy them

wherever they might be encountered.[19] The eugenics theories of nazi

‘philosopher’ Alfred Rosenberg, to which Heinrich Himmler more-or-less

subscribed, elaborated the mission of the SS in very much the same

terms.[20] It was upon such profoundly racist ideas that Christopher

Columbus grounded his policies as initial governor of the new Spanish

empire in America.[21]

In the end, all practical distinctions between Columbus and Himmler — at

least those not accounted for by differences in available technology and

extent of socio-military organization — evaporate upon close inspection.

They are cut of the same cloth, fulfilling the same function and for

exactly the same reasons, each in his own time and place. If there is

one differentiation which may be valid, it is that while the specific

enterprise Himmler represented ultimately failed and is now universally

condemned, that represented by Columbus did not and is not. Instead, as

Sale has observed, the model for colonialism and concomitant genocide

Columbus pioneered during his reign as governor of Espanola was to prove

his “most enduring legacy,” carried as it was “by the conquistadors on

their invasions in Mexico, Peru, and La Florida.”[22] The Columbian

process is ongoing, as is witnessed by the fact that, today, his legacy

is celebrated far and wide.

The Emblematic European

This leaves open the question as to whom, exactly, the horror which was

Columbus rightly ‘belongs’. There are, as it turns out, no shortage of

contenders for the mantle of the man and his ‘accomplishments’. It would

be well to examine the nature of at least the major claims in order to

appreciate the extent of the mad scramble which has been undertaken by

various peoples to associate themselves with what was delineated in the

preceding section. One cannot avoid the suspicion that the spectacle

bespeaks much of the Eurocentric character.

Was Columbus Italian?

The popular wisdom has always maintained the Christopher Columbus was

born in Genoa, a city state which is incorporated into what is now

called Italy. Were this simply an historical truth, it might be accepted

as just one more uncomfortable fact of life for the Italian people, who

are — or should be — still trying to live down what their country did to

the Libyans and Ethiopians during the prelude to World War II. There is

much evidence, however, militating against Columbus’ supposed Genoese

origin. For instance, although such records were kept at the time, there

is no record of his birth in that locale. Nor is there reference to his

having been born or raised there in any of his own written work,

including his personal correspondence. For that matter, there is no

indication that he either wrote or spoke any dialect which might be

associated with Genoa, nor even the Tuscan language which forms the

basis for modern Italian. His own writings — not excluding letters

penned to Genoese friends and the Banco di San Grigorio, one of his

financiers in that city — were uniformly articulated in Castilian, with

a bit of Portuguese and Latin mixed in.[23] Moreover, while several

variations of his name were properly applied to him during his lifetime,

none of them was drawn from a dialect which might be considered Italian.

He himself, in the only known instance in which he rendered his own full

name, utilized the Greek Xpõual de Colón.[24] Still, Genoa, Italy, and

those of Italian descent elsewhere in the world (Italo-Americans, most

loudly of all) have mounted an unceasing clamor during the 20^(th)

century, insisting he must be theirs. Genoa itself invested considerable

resources into ‘resolving’ the question during the 1920s, ultimately

printing a 288 page book assembling an array of depositions and other

documents -all of them authenticated — attesting that Columbus was

indeed Genoese. Published in 1931, the volume, entitled Christopher

Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin, presents what is

still the best circumstantial case as to Columbus’ ethnic identity.[25]

Spanish?

Counterclaims concerning Columbus’ supposed Iberian origin are also

long-standing and have at times been pressed rather vociferously. These

center primarily in the established facts that he spent the bulk of his

adult life in service to Spain, was fluent in both written and spoken

Castilian, and that his mistress, Beatriz Enrfquez de Arna, was

Spanish.[26] During the 1920s, these elements of the case were bolstered

by an assortment of “archival documents” allegedly proving conclusively

that Columbus was a Spaniard from cradle to grave. In 1928, however, the

Spanish Academy determined that these documents had been forged by

parties overly eager to establish Spain’s exclusive claim to the

Columbian legacy. Since then, Spanish chauvinists have had to content

themselves with arguments that The Discoverer is theirs by virtue of

employment and nationality, if not by birth. An excellent summary of the

various Spanish contentions may be found in Enrique de Gandia’s Historia

de Cristobal Colon: analisis critico, first published in 1942.[27]

Portuguese?

Portuguese participation in the fray has been less pronounced, but

follows basically the same course — sans forged documents — as that of

the Spanish. Columbus, the argument goes, was plainly conversant in the

language and his wife, Felipa Moniz Perestrello, is known to have been

Portuguese. Further, the first point at which his whereabouts can be

accurately determined, was in service to Portugal, plying that country’s

slave trade along Africa’s west coast for a period of four years.

Reputedly, he was also co-proprietor of a book and map shop in Lisbon

and/or Madiera for a time, and once sailed to Iceland on a voyage

commissioned by the Portuguese Crown. Portugal’s desire to extend a

serious claim to Spain’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea seems to be gathering

at least some momentum, as is witnessed in Manuel Luciano de Silva’s

1989 book, Columbus Was 100% Portuguese.[28]

Jewish?

The idea that Columbus might have been a Spanish Jew is perhaps best

known for having appeared in Simon Weisenthal’s Sails of Hope in

1973.[29] Therein, it is contended that the future governor of Espanola

hid his ethnicity because of the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain

ordered by King Ferdinand of Aragon on March 30, 1492 (the decree was

executed on August 2 of the same year). Because of this rampant

anti-semitism, the Great Navigator’s true identity has remained shrouded

in mystery, lost to the historical record. Interestingly, given the

tenacity with which at least some sectors of the Jewish community have

latched on to it, this notion is not at all Jewish in origin. Rather, it

was initially developed as a speculation in a 1913 article, “Columbus a

Spaniard and a Jew?”, published by Henry Vignaud in the American History

Review.[30] It was then advanced by Salvador de Madariaga in his

unsympathetic 1939 biography, Christopher Columbus. Madariaga’s most

persuasive argument, at least to himself, seems to have been that

Columbus’ “great love of gold” proved his ‘Jewishness’.[31] This theme

was resuscitated in Brother Nectario Maria’s Juan Colon Was A Spanish

Jew in 1971.[32] Next, we will probably be told that Tlie Merchant of

Venice was an accurate depiction of medieval Jewish life, after all.

And, from there, that the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy really

exists, and has since the Illuminati takeover of the Masonic Orders. One

hopes the JDL doesn’t rally to defense of these ‘interpretations’ of

history as readily as it jumped aboard the “Columbus as Jew”

bandwagon.[33]

Other Contenders

By conservative count, there are presently 253 books and articles

devoted specifically to the question of Columbus’ origin and

national/ethnic identity. Another 300-odd essays or full volumes address

the same question to some extent while pursuing other matters.[34]

Claims to his character, and some imagined luster therefrom, have been

extended not only by the four peoples already discussed, but by Corsica,

Greece, Chios, Majorca, Aragon, Galicia, France and Poland.[35] One can

only wait with bated breath to see whether or not the English might not

weigh in with a quincentennial assertion that he was actually a Briton

born and bred, sent to spy on behalf of Their Royal British Majesties.

Perhaps the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians will advance the case that he

was a descendant of a refugee Viking king, or the Irish that he was a

pure Gaelic adherent to the teachings of Saint Brendan. And then there

are, of course, the Germans....

In the final analysis, it is patently clear that we really have no idea

who Columbus was, where he came from, or where he spent his formative

years. It may be thought that he was indeed born in Genoa, perhaps of

some “degree of Jewish blood,” brought up in Portugal, and ultimately

nationalized as a citizen of Spain, Province of Aragon. Perhaps he also

spent portions of his childhood being educated in Greek and Latin while

residing in Corsica, Majorca, Chios, or all three. Maybe he had

grandparents who had immigrated from what is now Poland and France. It

is possible that each of the parties now vying for a “piece of the

action” in this regard are to some extent correct in their claims. And,

to the same extent, it is true that he was actually of none of them in

the sense that they mean it. He stands, by this definition, not as an

Italian, Spaniard, Portuguese or Jew, but as the penultimate European of

his age, the emblematic personality of all that Europe was, had been,

and would become in the course of its subsequent expansion across the

face of the earth.

As a symbol, then, Christopher Columbus vastly transcends himself. He

stands before the bar of history and humanity, culpable not only for his

literal deeds on Espanola, but, in spirit at least, for the carnage and

cultural obliteration which attended the conquests of Mexico and Peru

during the 1500s. He stands as exemplar of the massacre of Pequots at

Mystic in 1637, and of Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s calculated distribution of

smallpox-laden blankets to the members of Pontiac’s confederacy a

century and a half later. His spirit informed the policies of John Evans

and John Chivington as they set out to exterminate the Cheyennes in

Colorado during 1864, and it rode with the 7^(th) U.S. Cavalry to

Wounded Knee in December of 1890. It guided Alfredo Stroessner’s machete

wielding butchers as they strove to eradicate the Ache people of

Paraguay during the 1970s, and applauds the policies of Brazil toward

the Jivaro, Yanomami and other Amazon Basin peoples at the present

moment.

Too, the ghost of Columbus stood with the British in their wars against

the Zulus and various Arab nations, with the U.S. against the ‘Moros’ of

the Philippines, the French against the peoples of Algeria and

Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia. He was

there for the Opium Wars and the ‘secret’ bombing of Cambodia, for the

systematic slaughter of the indigenous peoples of California during the

19^(th) century and of the Mayans in Guatemala during the 1980s. And,

yes, he was very much present in the corridors of Nazi power, present

among the guards and commandants at Sobibor and Treblinka, and within

the ranks of the einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front. The Third Reich

was, after all, never so much a deviation from as it was a

crystallization of the dominant themes — racial supremacism, conquest

and genocide — of the European culture Columbus so ably exemplifies.

Nazism was never unique: it was instead only one of an endless

succession of “New World Orders” set in motion by “The Discovery.” It

was neither more nor less detestable than the order imposed by

Christopher Columbus upon Espanola; 1493 or 1943, they are part of the

same irreducible whole.

The Specter of Hannibal Lecter

At this juncture, the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in a room

with the socio-cultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of

consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm,

he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even

while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers,

his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine

wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied

in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter’s pathology

that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon which he

feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is

incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost

meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon

being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so

long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he

can never be stopped. The sociocultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter is

the core of an expansionist European ‘civilization’ which has reached

out to engulf the planet.

In coming to grips with Lecter, it is of no useful purpose to engage in

sympathetic biography, to chronicle the nuances of his childhood and

catalogue his many and varied achievements, whether real or imagined.

The recounting of such information is at best diversionary, allowing him

to remain at large just that much longer. More often, it inadvertently

serves to perfect his mask, enabling him not only to maintain his

enterprise, but to pursue it with ever more arrogance and efficiency. At

worst, the biographer is aware of the intrinsic evil lurking beneath the

subject’s veneer of civility, but — because of morbid fascination and a

desire to participate vicariously — deliberately obfuscates the truth in

order that his homicidal activities may continue unchecked. The

biographer thus reveals not only a willing complicity in the subject’s

crimes, but a virulent pathology of his or her own. Such is and has

always been the relationship of “responsible scholarship” to

expansionist Europe and its derivative societies.

The sole legitimate function of information compiled about Lecter is

that which will serve to unmask him and thereby lead to his

apprehension. The purpose of apprehension is not to visit retribution

upon the psychopath — he is, after all, by definition mentally ill and

consequently not in control of his more lethal impulses — but to put an

end to his activities. It is even theoretically possible that, once he

is disempowered, he can be cured. The point, however, is to understand

what he is and what he does well enough to stop him from doing it. This

is the role which must be assumed by scholarship vis-a-vis

Eurosupremacy, if scholarship itself is to have any positive and

constructive meaning. Scholarship is never ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’; it

always works either for the psychopath or against him, to mystify

sociocultural reality or to decode it, to make corrective action

possible or to prevent it.

It may well be that there are better points of departure for

intellectual endeavors to capture the real form and meaning of

Eurocentrism than the life, times and legacy of Christopher Columbus.

Still, since Eurocentrists the world over have so evidently clasped

hands in utilizing him as a (perhaps the) preeminent signifier of their

collective heritage, and are doing so with such apparent sense of

collective jubilation, the point has been rendered effectively moot.

Those who seek to devote their scholarship to apprehending the

psychopath who sits in our room thus have no alternative but to use him

as primary vehicle of articulation. In order to do so, we must approach

him through deployment of the analytical tools which allow him to be

utilized as a medium of explanation, a lens by which to shed light upon

phenomena such as the mass psychologies of racism, a means by which to

shear Eurocentrism of its camouflage, exposing its true contours,

revealing the enduring coherence of the dynamics which forged its

evolution.

Perhaps through such efforts we can begin to genuinely comprehend the

seemingly incomprehensible fact that so many groups are presently

queuing up to associate themselves with a man from whose very memory

wafts the cloying stench of tyranny and genocide. From there, it may be

possible to at least crack the real codes of meaning underlying the

sentiments of the Nuremberg rallies, those spectacles on the plazas of

Rome during which fealty was pledged to Mussolini, and that amazing

red-white-and-blue, tie-a-yellow ribbon frenzy gripping the U.S. public

much more lately. If we force ourselves to see things more clearly, we

can understand. If we can understand, we can apprehend. If we can

apprehend, perhaps we can stop the psychopath before he kills again. We

are obligated to try, from a sense of sheer self-preservation, if

nothing else. Who knows, we may even succeed. But first we must stop

lying to ourselves, or allowing others to do the lying for us, about who

it is with whom we now share our room.

[1] See, for example, Horowitz, Irving Louis, Genocide: State Power and

Mass Murder (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ, 1976) and Weisel,

Elie, Legends of Our Time (Holt, Rine-hart and Winston Publishers, New

York, 1968.) The theme is crystallized in Manvell, Roger, and Hein-rich

Fraenkel, Incomparable Crime; Mass Extermination in the 20^(th) Century:

The Legacy of Guilt, Hine-mann Publishers, London, 1967.

[2] See, as examples, Falk, Richard, “Ethnocide, Genocide, and the

Nuremberg Tradition of Moral Responsibility” (in Virginia Held, Sidney

Morganbesser and Thomas Nagel [eds.], Philosophy, Morality, and

International Affairs, Oxford university Press, New York, 1974,

pp.123–37), Beardsley, Monroe C, “Reflections on Genocide and Ethnocide”

(in Richard Arens [ed.], Genocide in Paraguay, Temple University Press,

Philadelphia, 1976, pp.85–101), and Jaulin, Robert, L’Ethnocide a

trovers LesAmer-iques (Gallimard Publishers, Paris, 1972) and La

decivilisation, poli-tique et pratique de I’ethnocide (Presses

Universitaires de France, Brussels, 1974).

[3] Assaults upon thinking deviating from Eurocentric mythology have

been published with increasing frequency in U.S. mass circulation

publications such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News .and World Report,

Forbes, Commentary, Scientific American and the Wall Street Journal

throughout 1990–91, A perfect illustration for our purposes is Hart,

Jeffrey, “Discovering Columbus,” National Review, October 15, 1990,

pp.56–7.

[4] See Morison, Samuel Eliot (ed. and trans.), Journals and Other

Documents on tire Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Heritage

Publishers, New York, 1963.

[5] The letter of appointment to these positions, signed by Ferdinand

and Isabella, and dated May 28,1493, is quoted in full in Keen, Benjamin

(trans.), The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son

Ferdinand, Rutgers University Press, 1959, pp.105–6.

[6] The best sources on Columbus’ policies are Floyd, Troy, The Columbus

Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492–1526 (University of New Mexico Press,

Albuquerque, 1973) and Schwartz, Stuart B., The Iberian Mediterranean

and Atlantic Traditions in the Formation of Columbus as a Colonizer

(University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986).

[7] Regarding the 8 million figure, see Cook, Sherburn F., and Woodrow

Borah, Essays in Population History, Vol. I, University of California

Press, Berkeley, 1971, esp. Chap. VI. The 3 million figure pertaining to

the year 1496 derives from a survey conducted by Bartolome de Las Casas

in that year, covered in Thatcher, J.B., Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2,

Putnam’s Sons Publishers, New York, 1903–1904, p.348ff.

[8] For summaries of the Spanish census records, see Hanke, Lewis, The

Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, University of

Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1947, p.200ff. Also see Madariaga,

Salvador de, The Rise of the Spanish American Empire, Hollis and Carter

Publishers, London, 1947.

[9] For aggregate estimates of the precontact indigenous population of

the Caribbean Basin, see Denevan, William (ed.), The Native Population

of the Americas in 1492 (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1976),

Dobyns, Henry, Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population

Dynamics in Eastern North America (University of Tennessee Press,

Knoxville, 1983) and Thornton, Russell, American. Indian Holocaust and

Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (University of Oklahoma Press,

1987). For additional information, see Dobyns’ bibliographic Native

American Historical Demography (University of Indiana Press,

Bloomington, 1976).

[10] These figures are utilized in numerous studies. One of the more

immediately accessible is Kuper, Leo, Genocide: Its Political Use in the

Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1981.

[11] See Dobyns, Henry P., “Estimating American Aboriginal Population:

An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current

Anthropology, No. 7, pp.395–416.

[12] An overall pursuit of this theme will be found in Ashburn, P.M.,

The Ranks of Death, Coward Publishers, New York, 1947. Also see Duffy,

John, Epidemics in Colonial America, Louisiana State University Press,

Baton Rouge, 1953. Broader and more sophisticated articulations of the

same idea are embodied in Crosby, Alfred W. Jr., The Columbia Exchange:

Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood Press, Westport,

CT, 1972) and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe

900–1900 (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, Australia, 1986).

[13] One of the more thoughtful elaborations on this theme may be found

in Smith, Bradley F., Reaching Judgement at Nuremberg, Basic Books, New

York, 1977.

[14] See Tpdorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest of America, Harper and Row

Publishers, New York, 1984.

[15] Sale, Kirkpatrick, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus

and the Columbian Legacy, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, New York, 1990,

p.155.

[16] Las Casas, Bartolomi de, The Spanish Colonie (Brevisima relacion),

University Microfilms reprint, 1966.

[17] Las Casas, Bartolome de, Historia de las Indias, Vol. 3, Augustin

Millares Carlo and Lewis Hanke (eds.), Fondo de Cultura Economica,

Mexico City, 1951; esp. Chap. 29.

[18] Las Casas, quoted in Thatcher, op. cit., pp.348ff.

[19] See Hanke, Lewis, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in

Race Prejudice in the Modern World, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago,

1959. Also see Williams, Rob, The American Indian in Western Legal

Thought, Oxford University Press, 1989.

[20] The most succinctly competent overview of this subject matter is

probably Cecil, Robert, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg

and Nazi Ideology, Dodd and Mead Company, New York, 1972.

[21] The polemics of Columbus’ strongest supporters among his

contemporaries amplify this point. See, for example, Oviedo, Historia

general y natural de las Indias, Seville, 1535; Salamanca, 1547,1549;

Valladoid, 1557; Academia Historica, Madrid, 1851–55, esp. Chaps. 29,

30, 37.

[22] Sale, op. cit., p. 156.

[23] On Columbus’ written expression, see Milani, V.I., “The Written

Language of Christopher Columbus,” Forum italicum, 1973. Also see Jane,

Cecil, “The Question of Literacy of Christopher Columbus,” Hispanic

American Historical Review, Vol. 10, 1930.

[24] On Columbus’ signature, see Thatcher, op. cit., p.454.

[25] City of Genoa, Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His

Genoese Origin, Institute d’Arti Grapche, Genoa, 1931 (English language

edition, 1932).

[26] de la Torre, Jose, Beatrix Enriquez de Harana, Iberoamericana

Publishers, Madrid, 1933.

[27] Gandia, Enrique de, Historia de Cristobal Col6n: analisis critico,

Buenos Aires, 1942.

[28] Manuel Luciano de Silva, Columbus Was 100% Portuguese, Bristol, RI,

(self published) 1989.

[29] Weisenthal, Simon, Sails of Hope, Mac-millan Publishers, New York,

1973.

[30] Vignaud, Henry, “Columbus a Spaniard and a Jew?”, American History

Review, Vol. 18,1913. This initial excursion into the idea was followed

in more depth by Francisco Martinez Martinez in his El descubrimiento de

America y las joyas de dona Isabel (Seville, 1916) and Jacob Wasser-man

in Christoph Columbus (S. Fisher Publishers, Berlin, 1929).

[31] Madariaga, Salvador de, Christopher Columbus, Oxford University

Press, London, 1939. His lead was followed by Armando Alvarez Pedroso in

an essay, “Cristobal Colon no fue hebro” (Revista de Historia de

America, 1942) and Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta in Cristobal Colon y el

descubrimiento de America (Savat Publishers, Barcelona/Buenos Aires,

1945).

[32] Maria, Brother Nectario, Juan Colon Was A Spanish Jew, Cedney

Publishers, New York, 1971.

[33] A much sounder handling of the probabilities of early Jewish

migration to the Americas may be found in Keyserling, Meyer, Christopher

Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in tlte Spanish and

Portuguese Discoveries, Longmans, Green Publishers, 1893 (reprinted,

1963).

[34] For a complete count, see Conti, Simonetta, Un secolo di

bibliografia colombiana 1880–1985, Cassa di Risparmio di Genova e

Imperia, Genoa, 1986.

[35] These claims are delineated and debunked in Heers, Jacques,

Christophe Columb, Hachette Publishers, Paris, 1981.