Someone’s going to get a real bargain if they’re going best asshole available, but I didn’t want to move off who I’d already picked.
I select widely celebrated mass murderer, torturer, rapist, slave master and piss-poor navigator Christopher Columbus.
So we all learned the story in grade school, right? In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue… Looking for a shortcut to India, he accidentally discovers the present-day Caribbean and tells everyone in Europe about the New World. Such a brave voyage! Such a noble discovery!
What you never read in school, of course, is what his voyages meant for the people he discovered – not fit for any children’s textbook: When Columbus discovered there was gold on Hispaniola, he forced the indigenous Taino to bring it to him every three months as a form of tribute. Everyone who did was given a token to wear…everyone who didn’t had their hands cut off and were left to die.
And those people may have been the lucky ones. Details of other atrocities are taken directly from firsthand accounts of Columbus’ genocide:
- People were “roasted on spits and burned at the stake”;
- Children were “hacked into pieces”;
- Columbus’ men would “make 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 the babes from their mother’s breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks… They ‘splitted’ the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers… on their swords.”
- They raped pretty much every native woman they could find, of course. Forced many of them into sexual bondage. And not just women – Columbus himself wrote that “girls… from 9-10… are… in demand.”
- There was slavery, too! “When our caravels … were to leave for Spain, we gathered … 1,600 male and female ‘Indians’ … on Feb. 17, 1495 … (and) we let it be known… that … (any of the sailors) who wanted to take … them could do so.”
Of course, Columbus kept going back to Spain, lying that he actually HAD found a shortcut to India and telling his benefactors that everything was hunky-dory to get more money to fund more genocidal voyages. By the time he was finally brought up on charges for all his atrocities, the 8,000,000 indigenous people living on the islands Columbus found were just 100,000. And he opened the floodgates for every other two-bit conquistador who wanted a piece of what Columbus had found (but we’ll save those assholes for another day).
And despite all that, his name is EVERYWHERE. Columbus/Columbia is ubiquitous. Countries, cities, lakes, rivers, counties, a US federal district, a Canadian province, an Ivy League university, a major film studio and record label, a space shuttle, his own goddamn DAY…this asshole had an entire hemisphere basically named after him! And unlike the Civil War statues, that shit is never going away. We are stuck having to commemorate one of the worst people to ever live for all eternity.
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day, everyone.