What we know
• Columbus did not discover the Western Hemisphere (for Europe) at all. Leif Ericsson had done so 492 years earlier. Scientific carbon-dating of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland has proven that the Vikings were there in the year A.D. 1000.
• When 40 million people already lived here, Columbus "discovered" America only for European colonizers and exploiters.
• His departure for America was bound up with expulsion of Spanish Jews from Spain, with the Inquisition of Tomas Torquemada, and with the defeat of the Islamic Moors of Grenada. But for those events, Columbus' voyage would never have been authorized.
• Columbus was the First Conquistador. He came for gold and to Christianize the natives. He found little gold; he baptized only a few benighted souls; and when the gold proved to be scarce, he turned to the "black gold" of enslavement. His natural successors then were Francisco Pizarro and Hernando Cortes, but no cities in Peru are named after Pizarro, and there is no national holiday in Mexico to honor Cortes.
• His arrival in the New World began a process of genocide. The Taino peoples of the Caribbean who welcomed him openly on the island he named Hispaniola numbered 300,000 when Columbus arrived. After the tuberculosis, small pox and measles that his fellow explorers brought with them, the Taino population was cut in half in four years. In 1508, only 60,000 were left, and by the mid-16th century, the Tainos were exterminated.
• His second voyage of colonization was financed partly by gold that was confiscated by the Spanish Inquisition from the estates of expelled Jews.
His crew called him a fool and a madman. So poor an administrator of his colony was he that he was relieved of command and brought back in chains from his Third Voyage. At best, the myth of Columbus is, therefore, a mixed blessing. He cannot and should not, however, be held up as a figure of contempt. His vision, bravery and accomplishment are beyond question.
For more than 12 years, he persisted in his obsession about a Western passage to the Orient. Head unbowed, he suffered countless rebukes from quacks and pseudo-scientists to press his vision, and he experienced many rejections from the Spanish monarchs and others. He braved the unknowns of the "Gloomy Sea," weathered storms and near mutiny, and vastly expanded European knowledge of the world. His return home from the First Voyage is a triumph of navigation and leadership. But that is not the whole story.
For a country that might be a quarter Hispanic and half minority by the year 2050, our national celebration in October requires a radical makeover.
taken from USATODAY.com
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-10-09-columbus-day-edit_x.htm