If it’s the second Monday in October it must be time to demonize Christopher Columbus again. Even though the guy was a bit off in his global circumference calculations (when he landed on this continent he thought he reached the East Indies), we used to recall the Italian explorer as brave and bold, eager to discover more of the world as well as to share the gospel with native populations. Now however, public school indoctrination has convinced many that he was a ruthless despot whose main mission was to wipe out the “indigenous people.”
 
Unfortunately, a good chunk of the American sheeple have fallen prey to the Howard Zinn revisionist version of our country’s history. Zinn was a hate-America-first political science professor at Boston University and, oops — a closet Communist. In his 1980 “A People’s History of the United States” he set out to describe the irredeemable America that his warped worldview had invented ~

(T)he founders were bad; the people who built the USA and made it the greatest nation on earth — complete with all its blessings — were evil; capitalism is to blame for everything; every war we ever fought including World War II was conducted either for imperialist ends or to cover our hypocrisy.

Of course,

If the 100 million people who were killed by world Communism could speak, they would be puzzled by Hate-America Howie’s affinity for the murderous movement that has stalked the world for decades.

 
But Zinn has managed to poison the minds of a generation with a pack of lies ~

Zinn wrote America’s story as an uninterrupted narrative of depravity. Born in sin, the nation, as Zinn saw it, would forever be morally defective – at least until such time as its leaders might finally awaken to the healing splendors of Marxism.

 
The real story of Christopher Columbus – as with all we flawed human beings – is one where the good is mixed with the not-so-good ~

The truth is that Columbus set out for the New World thinking he would spread Christianity to regions where it didn’t exist. While Columbus, and certainly his Spanish benefactors, had an interest in the goods and gold he could return from what they thought would be Asia, the explorer’s primary motivation was religious.
 
“This conviction that God destined him to be an instrument for spreading the faith was far more potent than the desire to win glory, wealth, and worldly honors,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison over a half-century ago […]
 
Everybody knows that Columbus was trying to find gold, but they don’t know what the gold was for: to fund a crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims before the end of the world. A lot of people at the time thought that the apocalypse was coming because of all the signs: the plague, famine, earthquakes, and so forth. And it was believed that before the end, Jerusalem had to be back in Christian hands so that Christ could return in judgment […]
 
 
“Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.” – contemporary historian Carol Delaney

 
Judging Columbus out of time and place – from our safe, pampered, affluent position in the 21st century – is patently unfair ~

It is difficult in the 21st century to imagine what Columbus faced as he crossed the Atlantic in search of what he thought was a route to Asia. The hardship and danger was immense. If things went awry, there would be nothing to save his little flotilla besides hope, prayer, and a little courage.

(None of which Zinn, the malcontented commie, ever possessed.)

 
Jarrett Stepman, writing at the Daily Signal, ends “The Truth About Columbus” with this wisdom from Ronald Reagan ~

Columbus is justly admired as a brilliant navigator, a fearless man of action, a visionary who opened the eyes of an older world to an entirely new one. Above all, he personifies a view of the world that many see as quintessentially American: not merely optimistic, but scornful of the very notion of despair.

This uniquely American worldview is precisely what Howard Zinn and his ilk strive to destroy with their deceitful version of history.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Related:
The Truth About Columbus

Annual “Trash Columbus Day”
Leftist hatchet job on Columbus
This Columbus Day, Trigger a Snowflake ~ Oh the irony. Today it’s Antifa destroying Columbus statues. Last century it their intolerant brethren the KKK ~

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan mounted a bigoted campaign against the explorer because he was Catholic, Italian and sailed under the Spanish flag.

How Radical Leftist Howard Zinn Poisoned the Minds of Two Generations
Howard Zinn: Communist liar
Columbus Day and Its Globalist Detractors ~