Most Columbus Days are marked by rabid condemnations of the Italian explorer as a genocidal maniac bent on destroying the peaceful and innocent native peoples who populated the Caribbean islands that he discovered. These condemnations are not only unwarranted, but are also indicative of the hatred those delivering them have for all that Columbus stood for and brought to the primitive New World.

Two myths regarding Columbus to dispel quickly are:

1. That everyone thought the world was flat while he thought it was round.
2. That the legacy of Columbus was one of death and destruction.

Columbus and everyone else who was educated in Europe knew the Earth was round, a fact that had been proved by the Ancient Greeks. What Columbus got wrong was the circumference of the Earth, causing him to think he could sail from Europe to Asia going west — which, of course, you can. Luckily for him, though, the Americas were in his way or he would have ended up starving.

The legacy of Columbus was not death and destruction. Most Indian deaths were caused by the introduction of diseases that the Europeans brought with them unwittingly. It must also be remembered that the Indians living in the Americas were largely primitive Stone Age-level savages who advanced very little in the thousands of years they inhabited North and South America. The two built-up “civilizations” of the Americas, those of the Incas and the Aztecs, were hardly much better, being built upon irrationality, human sacrifice and brutal primitivism.

Contrary to the myth that Europe unleashed war upon peaceful natives, warfare existed in plenty before Columbus arrived. And it continued, as the Indians clashed with the European explorers and each other. In fact, many tribes lined up to fight with the Europeans to get rid of the Incas and Aztecs.

It is always asserted that Americans, like Columbus, stole the land of the Indians. Could Columbus be responsible for stealing anyone’s land, let alone that of the Indians? This seems dubious considering the nomadic nature of many of the peoples he encountered and their lack of any private property or organized settlements. What was there to steal? The land was not in use, evidenced by the pathetic level of any kind of progress — intellectual or material — on the part of nearly every Indian tribe. This, despite thousands of years inhabiting lands of great plenty and separated from the other people of the world who could have potentially meddled with them.

So what is the true legacy of Columbus? We are. The discovery of the New World allowed people to start anew, away from the growingly absolutist and mercantilist kingdoms of Europe. As a result, the ideas that could not be put into action easily in Europe — those of individual rights, capitalism and limited republican government, all the ideas upon which our country was predicated — were allowed to flourish in an environment far away from the kings and aristocrats of the Old World.

Finally, why are the condemnations of Columbus so visceral and continual year after year? We’re told in college that all cultures are equal and that to prefer our culture to any other is ethnocentrism. Of course this is absolutely absurd. If all cultures are equal, why do people move? Or why do people move, predominantly, to prospering societies as opposed to tribal, primitive Indian-type societies? The answer is simply that not all societies are equal. Some are, indeed, better than others.

But the goal of such bromides as “all cultures are equal,” is to tear down cultures such as ours that are, by every objective standard, far better than those of the primitives out in the middle of forests and oceans who eat other people or sacrifice them to the sun or volcanoes or practice any other such absurdity.

Humans, having the ability to reason, are in a unique position to prosper far more successfully than any other animal. Columbus was the harbinger of reason for a New World that was shockingly devoid of it. Similarly, any defense of the pre-Columbus condition is the glorification of perpetual irrational primitivism and death, while condemning the introduction of reason and the ideas that flowed from it.

Columbus is thus cursed when in fact he should be thanked — not only by us, but also by the descendents of the Indians who escaped conditions barely better than death that their ancestors experienced millennia after millennia.

Thank you, Christopher Columbus.

(from the Las Vegas Review-Journal)