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| Columbus: |
Explorer, Destroyer, and Messenger |
recapturing the Lost Soul
of the New World as
we countdown to 2012
CURSE of Columbus |
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| "The key question about the sort of society that issued from the mixing of people following Columbus' voyage has always been whether diversity is a blessing or a curse. R. S. McElvaine |
"In 1492, the Jewish community of Spain was expelled or forced to convert. Millions of Moors suffered the same fate. The fall of Granada in 1492, ending eight centuries of Moorish sovereignty, allowed the Spanish Inquisition to extend its barbaric sway. The stage was set for the decline of Spain, and also for the racism and savagery of the world conquest -- |
| Fuc de Colon
In Dominican folklore, a Dominican who inadvertently speaks the name of Columbus must immediately cry out "Zafa!" to deactivate the jinx |
| Santo Domingo's Colon Memorial Lighthouse In 1992, the Dominican Republic's President Joaquin Balaguer dedicated a modern version of King Tut's tomb to house the remains of the great explorer. Today, many believe it too is cursed |
Painting by Joaquin Sorolla y Basitda
Columbus' voyage to America began a legacy of European brutality, slavery and slave trading on an unprecedented scale, major ethnocide primarily through disease, and also large scale conquest and subjugation administered with merciless military superiority.
For millions, the 500th anniversary of the voyage represented a chance to collectively air their dismay at the centuries of European and even American imperialism, subservience and enslavement imposed primarily by brutality. Even racism itself, a concept as old as the tribes of the human race, was blamed on white European intellectuals as having been invented to justify the atrocity of the Atlantic slave trade Two centuries earlier, the United States had rediscovered Columbus as a symbol of individualism and escape from Old World tyranny. He was the original frontiersman who challenged the unknown sea and brought back stories that fired the imagination of a new beginning where all would be possible. Today, the great discoverer remains not only a symbol of Italian heritage and the age of discovery but also the crimes committed against the indigenous peoples, and four hundred years of mostly African slavery following the European diseases which wiped out 90% of the native populations. Thus, the number of people who celebrate Columbus day as Indigenous people day continues to grow. Yet, Cristobol Colon was a man whose belief in the greater glory of God led him to ride the waves of a destiny, which opened the doors to the greatest mixing of the peoples of the earth. With this sea of change comes ongoing tension and our own challenge to find diversity more blessing than curse.
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