Another second Monday in October having passed, complaints from Italian Americans that canceling Columbus Day is an insult to them ought to raise a cackle. Columbus himself stands as the principle insult to everything Italian the world over. His bloody colonial enslavement and mass destruction of indigenous people have made Columbus a pariah to all but the willfully blind or deliberately ignorant.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Howard Zinn for his cool-headed outing of Columbus 35 years ago in his “A People’s History of the United States” (Harper & Row, 1980/2009), which has sold over 2 million copies.
Zinn confronted what most historians have famously glossed over, freed himself from exploitative, triumphalist bias, and described Columbus’s crimes against the people of what are now the Bahamas, Cuba and Haiti. Columbus wrote of his first encounter with the Arawaks: “They would make fine servants... With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
The principle source of information about what Columbus and his men did to the people they encountered in 1492 is Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest who was part of the Spanish conquest of Cuba. He transcribed Columbus’s journal and later wrote a long history of the Indies. The journal was available to other historians, but Columbus’s murder, mutilation, plunder, and enslavement of the people who greeted his ships—the Arawaks—was mostly ignored or trivialized by them.
Today, Columbus’s atrocities would be used by the White House and the Pentagon when they’re in need of a new enemy. Worse than Panama’s Gen. Noriega, Libya’s Col. Kaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Bashar Assad, and even the Islamic State, Admiral Columbus seems never to have recognized the inhabitants of the “New World” as human beings.
Zinn quotes Las Casas: “The Spaniards ‘thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.’ Las Casas tells how ‘two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.’”
Adm. Columbus concluded one report to his paymasters in Spain by “…asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage ‘as much gold as they need... and as many slaves as they ask.’”
Columbus’s second expedition was given 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. With them, he kidnapped 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children and put them in guarded pens; later he picked 500 and bound them into slave ships for Spain. En route, 200 died, and the rest were put up for sale. The Great Explorer later wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
Columbus later became desperate to repay his Spanish investors and worked the indigenous islanders to death demanding they bring him gold. On Haiti, Columbus “…ordered all persons 14 years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.”
When the Arawak ran off and later attempted a rebellion against the impossible task of finding gold, Columbus had them hunted and killed them. When the Spanish took prisoners, the soldiers “hanged them or burned them to death. …In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.”
The Arawaks were later killed by the thousands through forced labor. In a mere 23 years, “By the year 1515,” Zinn recounted, “there were perhaps 50,000 Indians left. By 1550, there were 500. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.”
So celebrate Columbus if you want to toast slavery, torture, death camps, and genocide. Otherwise, good riddance and get on with this day’s replacement.

John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin.