Excuse me if I’m being redundant since I did not see the original letter that this article was in response to.

I wouldn’t call the massacre of thousands of human beings a FLAW. A flaw is say, for instance, that one doesn’t know how to talk to people in a social situation. I think your choice of words to describe such horror is incredibly offensive. If Osama bin Laden went on to create something great, would we call the September 11th incident a little flaw? “Oh you know, he has his bad days.”

Hitler also “played an important role” in history. Do Germans have Hitler Day? If you think this is an extreme comparison, how about some accounts of Columbus’ treatment of Native Americans, from A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn:

“In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen 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. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

“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.'”

I’m horrified about my own ignorance of some of the things that were carried out by the Spaniards’ hands. Things that were never taught to me back when I learned about our great Christopher Columbus and those fabulous pilgrims. Textbooks conviently leave out the details that might strike a human chord and cause a student to raise the question, “Hey, wait, that’s not right.” I personally know I have a lot of relearning to do.

A statement by Zinn that I think is the most crucial response to your article:

“My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)—-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)—-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress—is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they—the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of he Supreme Court—represent the nation as a whole.”