A Big, Infuriating Lie
On truth, its nature, and the unforgettable moments when you find it.
Each year as Thanksgiving rolls around, I am reminded of a lie I was told for the first half of my life.
The year was 2005. I was twenty years old and redoing my first semester of college at the University of Kentucky. The transition between high school and higher education was something I struggled with, and I flunked out my first semester of college in the fall of 2002. The academic rigor of my senior year of high school did not adequately prepare me for what I was to encounter in my college classes, where pop quizzes over lectures that were essentially massive info-dumps could be given at any moment, and where in the smaller confines of a lab or discussion group, I was intimidated by the brainpower consistently on display by my peers. The information I felt raining down upon me during lectures was overwhelming; the knowledge floating in the air as my peers eloquently held forth in the discussion groups caused me to cower.
I just needed a couple of years to buck up, apparently.
It was during my return semester of college, wherein I was the prodigal student renewed and refocused, that I learned something about the world—both the historical world, and about the way the world works in general—that would forever alter the way I thought about knowledge and truth.
In the discussion group for my United States History class, we were assigned to read an article from a book called Portrait of America Volume One: To 1877, a compilation of academic yet readable historical essays about the early years of America. Whereas I do not recall enacting a vigorous exercise of discipline for keeping up with class readings during the semester I flunked, as I flip back through this volume I see marked up and highlighted essays throughout, and pride wells up within me for my twenty-year-old self. Prodigal student, indeed.
The particular eye-opening essay which sought to correct the erroneous historical record imprinted on my mind was about Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the American continent.
Upon reading that, you are thinking one of three things:
1) “Oh boy, here we go”
2) “What is he talking about?”
3) “Yea, Columbus was a murderous asshole.”
If you’re thinking the first, feel free to live in blissful ignorance. If you are thinking the second, allow me to enlighten you, and parental discretion is advised. If you are thinking the third, congratulations on being correct. We of course weren’t taught to think of Columbus in such villainous terms in school.
These days the Columbus debate rages every year around the time of the federal holiday named after him. I was not a news junkie growing up, mostly because it wasn’t in our face at all times, but I don’t recall there ever being a debate back then. I had always accepted what I had been taught in school, not knowing what I had been taught in school was a decidedly incomplete picture of the truth. The image had been cropped so that I could see only that which was deemed necessary: the adventurous, the inspirational, the rose-colored. It was deception by omission. I do not mean to sound melodramatic, but once I found out an essential part of the image had been hidden from me, it felt like a betrayal as personal as if a friend had told me to turn around and watch the sunrise, and then proceeded to stab me in the back.
I had always accepted what I had been taught in school, not knowing what I had been taught in school was a decidedly incomplete picture of the truth. The image had been cropped so that I could see only that which was deemed necessary: the adventurous, the inspirational, the rose-colored.
Now, I know that the true story of Columbus and the true story of Thanksgiving are two different things, but they are forever bound in my mind because of the vanilla versions of each of those stories I learned. I believe the term is—and I don’t mean to trigger some of you here—“whitewashed.” Some might call these versions of the stories misleading. Some might call them outright lies. I know there are age-appropriate considerations to take into account, but that does not change the fact that a lie is a lie, or at the very least, a partial truth is a partial truth. And a partial truth, by definition, is not the truth. All I know is that when I learned the true, documented, full-picture, bloody story of Christopher Columbus and his crew, it felt as if I had been lied to my whole life. The article ripped the band-aid off.
The story I was taught in school was a variation of “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” that effervescent phrase that conjures up the ingenuity of a brilliant seafarer in the mind of a child. To my recollection, my young peers and I were taught the story as if Columbus and his mates set off for a rip-roaring adventure and just happened to discover the very lands where we currently reside. The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were discussed in a sing-song like cadence, which only contributed to the reverence with which we began to hold the world-changing journey in our imaginations.
I have similar feelings of cognitive dissonance as I recall being taught to sing songs about Noah’s Ark and all the pairs of animals in Sunday School, while the part about God wiping out the rest of the poor old fools with a quick crank of the heavenly faucet was omitted entirely. To be fair, that part would have ruined the songs.
I was taught the story of Columbus as an American Hero Myth. Even though he was Italian. Even though his journey was commissioned by Spain. (I suppose I see how it could be confusing.) The power of myth is that it has the capacity to inspire and make us think better of ourselves and our potential. But the only power the myth of Columbus has, in my opinion, is to obscure the dark and heinous truth. Columbus was indeed a murderous asshole; he was a perpetrator of genocide.
Thinking they had landed somewhere in Asia, he and his cronies landed at what today we call the Caribbean islands—one of our favorite modern-day tourist destinations, of course—and made their way through to Cuba and Hispaniola. The New World had finally been discovered by man! Except that it hadn’t. People had already been living there for centuries. Perhaps Columbus found the Americas, stumbled upon the already-functioning homeland of other human beings, but discover them he did not. As Kurt Vonnegut puts it in Breakfast of Champions:
“1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.”
One of the goals—aside from acquiring land and wealth, and thereby gold—of Columbus and his explorers was to convert the native peoples to Christianity (thinking, of course, that they were a part of the “‘pagan’ countries of the Orient,” which they obviously were not; oops). But when the natives proved more stubborn than the Europeans were expecting, when they didn’t ask how high? when the Europeans said jump, or if they just got in the way of any of the stated goals—well, things got dark.
And here it feels appropriate to reveal the title of the essay that completely rocked my world: “The American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World.” A text assigned by Dr. Robert Ireland, the most delightfully crotchety and best history professor I ever had. The man just stood at the lectern and went to town, sans Powerpoint (which would have been, you know, helpful for us undergraduate peons), and if you couldn’t write fast enough that was on you.
I have similar feelings of cognitive dissonance as I recall being taught to sing songs about Noah’s Ark and all the pairs of animals in Sunday School, while the part about God wiping out the rest of the poor old fools with a quick crank of the heavenly faucet was omitted entirely. To be fair, that part would have ruined the songs.
Allowing some grace for my surely well-intentioned teachers in grade school, at best I simply wasn’t given the whole story of Columbus’s voyage and landing. The story I was given is as follows: the Europeans arrived on the islands, met the native people, worked alongside them, were mostly amiable, exchanged goods and crops and animals over the course of many years, and paved the way for the possibility of the United States. There were perhaps some minor conflicts here and there, but that’s it.
At worst, I was taught that this was all that happened. Nothing sinister was being left out, or maybe what was sinister was deemed unimportant because the end result was worth it. Nevermind that what was an historic end result for a conquering people entailed a tragic end result for millions of native inhabitants. Nevermind that the flourishing of a New-World culture required the annihilation of an ancient and established one. I was conditioned to think of Columbus as an American (Spanish? Italian?) hero, one whose visage should glean across my developing mind every time I said the pledge of allegiance.
The whole “American Holocaust” part was left out; it was, to my recollection, not even alluded to, or at the very least glossed over. We learned about the Holocaust of World War II, in vivid detail, as early as sixth grade. I especially remember doing a report and presentation on the Third Reich, a term I thought sounded weird, evil even, in name alone. As you might expect, it was eye-opening. We were taught about other ways human depravity had wrought ugliness and evil throughout history, but rarely in a way that would cut chinks into the American myth—a myth which has its place, don’t get me wrong. It seems a small miracle that we were actually taught that slavery was a real thing that happened in America. It is of course no mystery these days why some states want to do away with teaching it in its entirety. The American Myth must, at all costs, be chiseled to a fine point of positivity, goodness, and heroism, whitewashed and upheld as a beacon for freedom-lovers everywhere. To hell with the hard truths. To hell with the truth.
Nevermind that the flourishing of a New-World culture required the annihilation of an ancient and established one.
Following, I will quote some passages from the “American Holocaust” essay. Imagine me, if you will, beginning to read this article with only my preconceived notion of the Christopher Columbus myth in my head. My preconceived notion that I perceived to be the truth because that’s what I was taught was the truth. And then I see the title of the essay. I am confused and curious. I start reading. I read things previously inconceivable about Columbus and his crew and the “discovery of America.” I am ingesting the shock of the truth at the ripe age of twenty. I can’t read fast enough. The angrier I become, the faster I read. I’m hoping I’ll come across some passage that will quell the rage boiling in my blood, dull the earthquake rattling in my head. I distinctly remember thinking, several times: Why the fuck wasn’t I taught any of this?
To wit (emphases mine):
From the textbook introduction:
“Columbus himself set the example for subsequent Europeans, initiating a policy of genocide, of enslavement and killing that was to result in the near extermination of the first Americans.” (3)
On threatening the natives with the idea of divine mandate trumping everything:
“Following Columbus, each time the Spanish encountered a native individual or group in the course of their travels they were ordered to read to the Indians a statement (the requerimiento) informing them of the truth of Christianity and the necessity to swear immediate allegiance to the Pope and to the Spanish crown…: ‘I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church… We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse their lord and resist and contradict him.’” (9)
One Spanish historian described it as thus:
“After they had been put in chains, someone read the Requerimiento without knowing their language and without any interpreters, and without either the reader or the Indians understanding the language they had no opportunity to reply, being immediately carried away prisoners, the Spanish not failing to use the stick on those who did not go fast enough.”
The supposed black and white truth of Christianity was used as a means for unimaginable killing and cruelty:
“...the proclamation was merely a legalistic rationale for a fanatically religious and fanatically juridical and fanatically brutal people to justify a holocaust.” (10)
The Spanish carried not only a cruel divine mandate but European disease as they traversed the continent:
“Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily armed Spanish forces went out on patrol, accompanied by ferocious armored dogs that had been trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local communities—already plague-enfeebled—forcing them to supply food and women and slaves, and whatever else the soldiers might desire.” (12)
Many Indians attempted to flee. One group, led by a chieftain named Hatuey fled to Cuba, but the invaders found and slaughtered most of them, leaving Hatuey for death by fire:
“Reportedly, as they were tying him to the stake, a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell… The massacres continued.” (13)
At one point Columbus became quite sick for a spell, but when he got better and heard what the men were doing, and the chaotic manner in which they were doing it, he tightened up and doubled down.
“...Columbus’s response to his men’s unorganized depredations was to organize them. In March of 1495 he massed together several hundred armored troops, cavalry, and a score of more trained attack dogs. They set forth across the countryside, tearing into assembled masses of sick and unarmed native people, slaughtering them by the thousands.” (13)
Bartolome de Las Casas, whom we might today call a whistleblower, was a missionary who accompanied the explorers. He documented the atrocities he witnessed so they would be not be lost to history. I will leave out the excerpt in which he describes what a group of the Spanish Christian soldiers did to infants in front of their mothers. Excluding that, here is a sampling of the depravity:
“The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties, the more cruel the better, with which to spill human blood. They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. When the Indians were thus still alive and hanging, the Spaniards tested their strength and their blades against them, ripping chests open with one blow and exposing entrails, and there were those who did worse. Then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive.” (13)
On the island of Hispaniola, the population went from eight million upon the Europeans’ first arrival in 1492 to, by 1535, practically being extinct.
“In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated.” (16)
The essay ends on an ominous note:
“And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun.” (17)
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue!
Sorry to put you though all of that. It was brutal to read, it was brutal to re-read, and it was brutal to type out, even leaving out some of the more disturbing parts. Needless to say, my idea of who Columbus was, what he did, and how he should be remembered was shattered to pieces the day I first read the piece. But this ugly history is part of what led to the establishment of the United States of America, and is therefore a part of American history. Rather than a journey about discovery and adventure, it was a journey about wealth, invasion, and murder. Rather than a journey clothed in the heroic, it was a journey clothed in the barbaric. To omit this from the study of our history is not patriotic. It is the opposite.
All of this brings to mind what is an essential question, it seems to me, for our time: how do we know what is true and what is not true?
I can find the true story of Columbus in two seconds on the internet. I can also find alternative viewpoints extolling Columbus as an unquestionable hero, backed up by evidence. I can find complex examinations that take into account his significance as a world explorer while not remotely letting him off the hook for spearheading genocide. I could find several people, some I’m sure claiming to be historians, saying the brutality was “not as bad as most say it was.” You know, a light genocide, not a heavy one.
I’m sure I could find numerous conspiracy theories about Columbus if I searched hard enough; or maybe I wouldn’t have to search too hard at all. Everything is out there for all to surmise in the Wild West of the internet. In theory, this is good. An inconceivable amount of information is at our fingertips; we can dig through all of it to arrive at a more exhaustive, nuanced, and thorough understanding of the truth, as well as an thorough understanding of what is definitively not the truth.
But how many people actually do this? All too often, it seems, the opposite tends to happen. People can cast doubt on an accepted truth because they have found an alternative viewpoint, no matter how fringe or ridiculous. People can be confronted with the actual truth of a thing and refuse to believe it. People can become overwhelmed by all that is out there and refuse to take a stance at all.
Maybe having so many outlets for information isn’t necessarily a good thing. Maybe it is, and we humans just can’t be trusted to be good faith actors with it. Because along with the age of information has come the age of misinformation and disinformation, and plenty of bad actors perpetuating both. (I’m refusing to mention names here for my sanity, but you know who they are. Oh, okay, Trump, Rogan, Musk, Carlson... Pardon me, I just got depressed and threw up at the same time. God help us.) Needless to say (and no pun intended), when it comes to whether the information age is a net good or net bad for society: I just don’t know. It’s complicated.
People can cast doubt on an accepted truth because they have found an alternative viewpoint, no matter how fringe or ridiculous. People can be confronted with the actual truth of a thing and refuse to believe it.
The difference is that in school, I didn’t choose to be misinformed. For one reason or another—and I will choose to believe the reasons weren’t malicious—the schools I attended chose to leave out a heavy portion of the truth of the story of Christopher Columbus. And when I obtained possession of that portion of the truth, I got mad as hell. I felt betrayed. Columbus didn’t pave the way for the New World by making peaceful exchanges with the native inhabitants, just as the pilgrims didn’t arrive on the east coast and break bread and turkey and discuss the concept of thankfulness with the Indians—and then they all lived happily ever after. How I learned these stories in school is irrelevant in the face of the actual documented truth of them.
We have more ways than ever to attempt to arrive at the truth these days. We have more ways than ever to arrive at our own version of the truth. And we have more ways than ever to arrive at an untruth, whether willingly or by deception, and call it the truth. So it would seem, for now, ironically enough, the thing that has become irrelevant in the age of information is the truth itself. I do not think it is dead yet, but there is a brutality in irrelevancy that’s almost worse than death, particularly in the perceived irrelevancy of something so vital.
And there is not just brutality in that. There is sadness.