The two big things we're told about Columbus- that he discovered America and did so against a world insisting the Earth was flat- are as real as Santa Claus. The only thing Columbus "discovered" was the island of Hispaniola- modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic - and the fact that the Earth was round was so widely known that it was the primary reason no one was willing to back his expedition.
Every one he asked for money looked at his calculations, saw the he was vastly underestimating the size of the Earth, then sent his sorry ass packing. The only reason Spain backed his play was that they were fresh off the Reconquista and were in the mood to do something bold with their newly minted monarchy.
So why are we told this fairy tale of a raping slaver who was wrong about everything? In a word, practice.
By training us to accept this incompetently constructed fake history around one person, it makes it easier for us to accept the much more thoroughly fabricated stories about our own country's founding and subsequent expansion. If we can get used to dismissing Columbus' atrocities as just "how things where done back then," it's not much of a stretch to hand wave the fact that men celebrated for their commitment to freedom owned human beings like they were animals.
This becomes so ingrained in us that even when confronted with facts like Columbus was stripped of his governorship over the accusations of brutality against the residents of Hispaniola, they're as empty as a twinkie. Likewise, if you point out that abolitionist groups existed in the the late 18th-century, that too spatters like bugs against a windshield.
In this way we become desensitized to the pile of bodies our civilization was built on. "That's just how things were back then" we say, washing the past in uncomplicated guilt to rinse out the messy reality that there were voices of dissent then, too. By doing this we remove the element of choice, that Washington having a set of dentures made from sleeve teeth or Columbus handing out captured indigenous women as sex slaves to his men were all active choices they didn't have to make.
And yet, they did. Because it was comfortable for them to do so. Because they were afforded power and privilege and those they crushed under heel were not. They had the power to treat those beneath as raw material to use up as they saw fit. So they did, simple as that.
We turn all those used up, discarded people into victims not of men, but of History, an unfeeling, impartial, inevitable destroyer of worlds too inferior to survive the ever changing, tumultuous tide of its advancement. This is how the extermination or enslavement of entire peoples goes from a crime to just the cost of doing business.
There can't be any judgment of Columbus because to judge him is to judge ourselves. The only difference in our story as a country versus Columbus was that there was never any higher authority to drag the United States in chains to so it could answer for its actions. We have always had to only answer to our own national conscience and we are, if nothing else, an extremely forgiving people when it comes to ourselves.
And so, we continue to celebrate a bumbling, vicious charlatan all the while wondering how everything could go so terribly wrong.
