The 500th anniversary of 1492 is approaching. Remember 1492? "In Fourteen Hundred Ninety-Two/ Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Discovery and exploration. Bolivar and Jefferson. Liberty and democracy. The last best hope for man.
The left is not amused.
In Madrid the Association of Indian Cultures announces that it will mark the occasion with acts of "sabotage." In the U.S. the Columbus in Context Coalition declares that the coming event provides "progressives" with their best political opening "since the Vietnam War." The National Council of Churches (NCC) condemns the "discovery" as "an invasion and colonization with legalized occupation, genocide, economic exploitation and a deep level of institutional racism and moral decadence." One of its leaders calls for "a year of repentance and reflection rather than a year of celebration."
For the left, the year comes just in time. The revolutions of 1989 having put a dent in the case for the degeneracy of the West, 1992 offers a welcome new point of attack. The point is the Origin. The villain is Columbus. The crime is the discovery -- the rape -- of America.
The attack does, however, present the left with some rather exquisite problems of political correctness. After all, Columbus was an agent of Spain, and his most direct legacy is Hispanic America. The denunciation of the Spanish legacy as one of cruelty and greed has moved one Hispanic leader to call the NCC's resolution "a racist depreciation of the heritages of most of today's American peoples, especially Hispanics."
That same resolution opened an even more ancient debate between Protestants and Catholics over the colonization of the Americas. For Catholics like historian James Muldoon, the (Protestant) attack on Columbus and on the subsequent missionary work of the (Catholic) church in the Americas is little more than a resurrection, a few centuries late, of the Black Legend that was a staple of anti-Catholic propaganda during the Reformation.
The crusade continues nonetheless. Kirkpatrick Sale kicked off the anticelebration with his anti-Columbus tome, The Conquest of Paradise. The group Encounter plans to celebrate 1992 by sailing three ships full of Indians to "discover" Spain. Similar merriment is to be expected wherever a quorum gathers to honor 1492.
The attack on 1492 has two parts. First, establishing the villainy of Columbus and his progeny (i.e., us). Columbus is "the deadest whitest male now offered for our detestation," writes Garry Wills. "If any historical figure can appropriately be loaded up with all the heresies of our time -- Eurocentrism, phallocentrism, imperialism, elitism and all-bad-things- generally-ism -- Columbus is the man."
Therefore, goodbye, Columbus? Balzac once suggested that all great fortunes are founded on a crime. So too all great civilizations. The European conquest of the Americas, like the conquest of other civilizations, was indeed accompanied by great cruelty. But that is to say nothing more than that the European conquest of America was, in this way, much like the rise of Islam, the Norman conquest of Britain and the widespread American Indian tradition of raiding, depopulating and appropriating neighboring lands.