Monuments to Christopher Columbus are regularly vandalized throughout the Americas, but Spain remains faithful to his memory. Last week, I visited Seville Cathedral, where his supposed remains are carried shoulder-high by massive statues representing the kings of Castille, Leon, Navarre, and Aragon.
I say “supposed remains” because the old rogue traveled almost as much in death as in life, being interred first in Valladolid, then in Seville, then in Hispaniola, then in Cuba, and finally, when the United States ousted Spain from its last colony in 1898, in Seville again, leading to some dispute over where his bones actually lie.
Whether or not the relics are his, there is no mistaking Spain’s pride in the Italian adventurer who opened the Western Hemisphere and made Spanish the world’s second language. (In an eerie coincidence, Antonio de Nebrija published the first Spanish grammar in 1492, a few weeks before Columbus returned with his world-changing news, asserting in his foreword that “language is the perfect instrument of empire.”)
The anniversary of his reaching the New World, Oct. 12, is Spain’s national day. The only concession to modern sensibilities is that it is now known as the Día de la Hispanidad rather than the Día de la Raza. Seville’s Plaza de España is connected to the Plaza de America by streets named after Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, who respectively conquered the Aztecs and the Incas.
The ideology of inherited grievance and identity politics has burst its American levees and flooded the rest of the Anglosphere, but, so far, the sea walls of Europe are holding. At a tapas bar, I heard a university professor at the next table loudly telling a group of friends that Spain had never engaged in slavery, that the colonization of the Americas had been a selfless exercise in improving the lives of savages, and that stories to the contrary were a “black legend” originating in English propaganda. Leaving aside whether he was right, can you conceive of a British or American academic making such an argument? Can you imagine a book extolling imperialism becoming a bestseller, as Madre Patria by the Argentine political scientist Marcelo Gullo has just done?
Never mind the supposed English slanders. Columbus comes across as a nasty piece of work in accounts written by his immediate colleagues. He sent back false reports to convince the Spanish crown to finance more voyages. He unleashed horrors on the tribes he found in the Caribbean, shipping them to Europe as slaves, handing their women, including young girls, to his followers as prizes. He was obsessed with gold: Natives who failed to hand enough of it over were liable to have their hands lopped off.
Unsurprisingly, the descendants of indigenous Americans have little time for him. In my Lima nursery school in the 1970s, we were taught songs celebrating his arrival. Now, aboriginal Peruvians revile him, and white Peruvians tend to maintain an embarrassed silence. The turning point came during the quincentennial commemorations in 1992. Spain marked them with a massive party: The world's fair in Seville was perhaps the most successful ever. But indigenous groups from all over the Americas came together and declared that they would rather not have been “discovered,” thank you very much.
It should not be controversial to say that both sides, according to their own lights, have a point. An intrepid explorer from a Spanish perspective can be a cruel master from a native American perspective. In any context except colonialism, we take different standpoints for granted. It is perfectly reasonable for the French to cheer Napoleon, just as it is reasonable for the British to revile him and revere his nemesis, the Duke of Wellington.
But the idea that Britain might celebrate, say, Cecil Rhodes in the way that Spain does Columbus seems almost heretical. The English-speaking peoples evince a peculiar compulsion to apologize for their overseas victories — a compulsion not much shared by Arabs or Portuguese or Russians or Turks or Italians. When it comes to self-criticism, only the Germans give us a run for our money.
Why should that be? Is it some curious manifestation of Protestant guilt? Is it that Anglosphere universities, unusually, remove students from their families and their hometowns, leaving them in each other’s company and making them unusually vulnerable to purity spirals and silly ideas? Or is it simply that everyone loves an underdog and the English-speaking peoples are almost never underdogs?
Whatever the explanation, we have reached a strange cultural moment when the countries that did the most to spread personal freedom and representative government across the globe are also the ones most embarrassed about their achievements.
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Why should Spain despise its greatest explorer? - Washington Examiner
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