Was Christopher Columbus a Hero or a Villain?

 Being ungrateful and not being able to apologize when wrong are two deadly relationship characteristics of any person.  Anyone with these two characteristics would be gone as a friend in my book.  Christopher Columbus has been disparaged and insulted from the very beginning with the Spanish authorities for whom he brought fame and fortune.  Indeed, he was treated like a criminal, arrested and jailed in Spain.  At his funeral, no Spanish official attended.  He died without honor, or thanks.   Jesus made this statement about being a prophet; “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”(Mark:6).  

 

For many in the United States, Columbus is now persona non grata; his holiday of October 12 has been cancelled.  After the George Floyd riots, thug rioters destroyed numerous statues.  Abraham Lincoln is number one with 193 taken down, George Washington is second with 171 and Christopher Columbus is third.   Much of this is done by people who are totally ignorant and ungrateful of what these great men did or accomplished.  There are cities and countries named after Columbus, as in Ohio and Georgia but if you asked some of these rioters for whom were these cities and countries named for, they probably could not answer it.  During the Iraq war, General David Petraeus, who defeated the insurgency and saved many of our troop’s lives, was reviled by the Democrats who opposed George Bush.  They called him General “betray us.” These are not serious people.  They are not grateful nor able to apologize; they are the worst of any citizens.

 

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.  In the United States, we stand on the shoulders of the most brilliant men who have ever lived:  The founders of our country; people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and others such as Abraham Lincoln.  We owe a debt of gratitude to these men, yet in the recent past, clueless people have tried to erase these men, simply for the fact that they once owned slaves, or do not meet the today’s “woke” standard.  If any of these people had any knowledge of history, they would have known that owning slaves in those days was like owning a car today.  It was a custom of the day.  You cannot measure a society of the past with today’s measure; it must be done in context.  As Jesus said to the those who wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery: “let him/her who is without sin, throw the first stone.”  No one did.

 

Today history is not taught in schools, or at least it is done poorly or not at all.  Children are taught to be “woke” instead and use “the right pronoun.”  How would you like it if the doctor who is to perform brain surgery on you, never learned how to do it, but was taught “wokeism” instead?  This is what happens when we fail to teach history, we have spoiled rotten people who destroy statues.  Mao Zedong erased thousands of years of great Chinese history so he could remake China in the image of communism.  All those who came before him were deleted.

 

If you send someone to do a random street interview on any street or university campus and ask questions about our forefathers, I will guess that very few would answer correctly.  Who was Christopher Columbus?  An explorer or someone who oppressed indigenous people.  Well, look at any society and see if they committed some sins?  What was their final product?  Did the United States oppress any people?  Perhaps, but with whom can you compare what the United States stands for today?  Cuba, North Korea, Russia?  These tyrannical countries oppress people to this day.  Have you tried visiting Russia or North Korea?  Chances are you would end up as a hostage, like the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovic and Paul Whelan, the ex-Marine currently in Russian jails. Which country has a clean record on sins?  Let the one who is without sin throw out the first stone.  Why are people from all over the world crashing our borders to get in?  Is it because the United States is an oppressor or because this is where you will find freedom and prosperity?  Why is no one storming North Korea or Cuba?  They have free health care there.

 

In the late 1980s a very fine documentary was done and broadcast on public television, called “The Magnificent Voyage of Christopher Columbus.  Broadcast on PBS by WGBH Boston and nationwide in the early 1990s.  The Original was seven hours long.  A two-hour summary is still available on Amazon for less than $5.  This is what should be shown in schools.  Click here for the link.  Somehow, I don’t think many woke teachers would do this. Some may.  I’ll cross my fingers.

NIMBY Syndrome in History: Deja vù All Over Again

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a podcast called “12 Byzantine Rulers: A History of the Byzantine Empire” by Lars Brownworth who also wrote the book “Lost to the West.”  I was impressed with the podcast and followed it up with the book.  A big take-away for the story of the extinction of the Byzantine Empire was the lack of assistance from the Christian world of the west, meaning Western Europe. They had no interest in helping the Byzantines repel the marauding Ottoman Turks as they ate away at their territory piece by piece until only the city of Constantinople was left in the early part of the 15^th century. 

 

The Turks, under Sultan Mehmed II amassed a huge army, estimated to be around 80,000 troops and besieged Constantinople in May of 1453 and destroyed it.  The Byzantines had only 5,000 troops to defend the city.  The last emperor of the Byzantines, Constantine XI, and his officials, made a last-ditch effort to beg their fellow Christians in Europe for help but were turned down.  Giovanni Giustiniani, a Genoese nobleman and military commander was one of the few to respond.  The Venetians sent a few ships, but they were of little help.  A handful of other Europeans volunteered but too small a number to be effective.  Giustiniani gathered 700 mercenaries and made it to Constantinople, but they were totally overwhelmed by the superior Ottoman forces, both in number and in weapons.  The Ottomans had just acquired a cannon capable of breaking the famous impregnable city walls of Constantinople. Giustiniani died the month after the fall of Constantinople, at the age of 35, probably due to wounds he received during the battle. 

 

Upon breaching the city walls, the Turks went on a killing spree.  Marauding Ottoman soldiers swept the city killing all they encountered.  Those not killed were enslaved. Why did their fellow Europeans fail to help them?  The Ottoman Turks had been on a conquest for hundreds of years.  I asked Lars Brownworth, in an e-mail, the same question.  There is no easy answer.  

 

The Catholic-Orthodox schism of 1054 AD did a lot of damage, not only in religious matters but in the tense relations between the Greek Orthodox east and the Roman west.  As in a feuding family, they despised each other.  This, perhaps, was a major reason for the Byzantines getting no help from their brother Christians.  A second reason could be attributed to the notion of “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) syndrome; meaning if the danger is not in my back yard, I don’t care.  This is a common malady today.  Many liberals and conservatives in the United States do not want to help Ukraine against the invading Russians for the same reason.  The Europeans were very wrong about NIMBY for they, themselves, became the next target of the Ottomans.  Within a 70-year span after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans were at the gates of Europe.  In 1529 the first Siege of Vienna happened but was repelled.  By 1571 the battle of Lepanto took place between the Ottomans and a coalition of Europeans, Spanish, Italians, Austrians and others.  The Ottomans lost the huge naval battle at Lepanto, most of their navy and about 25,000 killed.  This marked the largest naval battle since the Greeks and Persians at Salamis in 480 BC.

 

The Ottomans were not yet finished.  They again tried to conquer Europe with the second siege of Vienna in 1683; they were repelled with the help of a European coalition and the fierce counterattack by an army which arrived just in time, led by the king of Poland, King Sobieski, a brilliant military commander.  Finally, the Europeans realized that cooperating was the way to go. With a NIMBY attitude Europe would have been Muslim today.

 

In a fine history book by Victor Davis Hanson called “The Father of us All, War and History,” regarding the Christian League that fought at Lepanto, Hanson says that France and England refused to cooperate in fighting the Ottomans: “both had long ago cut their own deals with the Ottomans.  Indeed, during the winter of 1542 the French had even allowed the Ottoman corsair Barbarossa the use of their harbor at Toulon to refit as he conducted raids along the Italian coast.” (Chapter 7).   Call it what you want but this was treachery at its worst by brother Christians and fellow Europeans.

 

History is a great teacher, but few ever learn.  Same mistakes are committed over and over, whether its World War I or the appeasement of Hitler in World War II.  Hitler did not learn from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812; the United States learned nothing from the French debacle in Vietnam or the problems encountered in Korea in the early 1950s.  This same mistake is repeated today.  When will they ever learn? to take a que from the 1950s song by the Kingston Trio, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?”

 

In today’s Europe, we have leaders like Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, who refused to help Ukraine against the evil Russian regime of the dictator Vladimir Putin.  Now, the first question I would ask Mr. Orban would be:  Sir, your country was viciously oppressed by the Soviet Union for over 70 years.  Remember what the Russians did to Hungary in 1956 when they brought tanks to Budapest to crush you?  Perhaps you never heard of it.  Here is a link for you to look up.  Are you suffering from the Stockholm syndrome?  Similarly, we have some right-wing politicians such as Matteo Salvini in Italy who openly admires Vladimir Putin.  Am I missing something?  NIMBY roars its ugly head again.