Christopher Columbus was a Very Bad Man

Let us revile the memory of this supposed Discoverer. Let us question the sanity of our foreparents who made this day a holiday. For Christopher Columbus was a very bad man, his crimes innumerable, and his vices legion.

He was a pronounced Catholic bigot with no respect for other religious traditions, counting Moslems as heretics, and Native Americans as devil worshipping heathens.

He was in league with the supreme anti-Semites of his day, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who sponsored his brutal voyage of conquest and cruelty. The Spanish monarchs had only recently expelled all Moslems from the Iberian Peninsula, and were about to launch the Inquisition, to torture, evict, or convert the Jews who had lived in Spain for centuries.

Christopher Columbus was also a male chauvinist and despicable sexist. Staffing, "manning," he would have said, his three vessels, he insisted that not a single female be recruited, going so far as to say, with no apology, that it was bad luck to have a woman on board.

As leader of this pestilential fleet, Columbus assumed dictatorial powers, never once consulting his crew, or even his mates, but making all decisions himself. There was no vote, there was no consensus. To disobey the orders of this tyrant meant the lash.

Furthermore, besides being a bad man, Columbus was profoundly stupid. Discoverer? Pah! He was lost. he thought he was in China.

It is important to mention these crimes, alongside with his well-known role as enslaver and killer of Native American peoples.

We, his descendents, especially those of us from Italy, where Columbus was born, can only consider ourselves to be the evil spawn of this malignant monster.

It is entirely appropriate that this most awful day in human history, October 12, be a day of mourning, ashes and weeping.

It was all wrong, and everything that happened since then was wrong -- truly there is an Original Sin, but it was not Adam and Eve, but Christopher Columbus, who destroyed the Garden of Eden that was once America.

(Only we need to call it something else besides America, which comes from the name of a self-promoting mapmaker, Amerigo Vespucci -- another one of those damned Italians.)