I thought O'Reilly's defense of Columbus was bad. Breitbart's is worse.

[highplainsdem]

Stupid opinion piece at Breitbart (no, I won't link to it) by Daniel J. Flynn: "Christopher Columbus a Better Man Than Those Defacing His Statues."

Tidbits:

Columbus changed the world more than any man since Jesus Christ. And like all revolutions, the discovery of the Americas witnessed winners and losers. Europeans brought smallpox and the sword. But they also brought draft animals, the concept of zero, written language, and the wheel, strangely found on toys but nowhere else in the pre-Columbian Americas.

Columbus did not hate the indigenous the way their proxy pale-face defenders imagine it. He described the natives as “gentle,” “full of love,” “without greed,” and “free from wickedness.” Columbus imagined the Indians as “a people to be delivered and converted to our holy faith rather by love than by force.” He exclaimed, “I believe there is no better race.”

At the same time, Columbus, during his four trips, saw tribal warfare, cannibalism, castration, and slavery. The indigenous slaughtered the dozens of men he left behind in the New World. In other words, in 1493 the natives conducted a genocide on every white man in the Americas.

The Indians failed to live up to the navigator’s rosy description of them. Columbus, too, failed—both by the standards of his day and certainly by the standards of today. He tricked the locals to labor for him by using his charts to feign the theft of the moon during a lunar eclipse. He kidnapped natives to show off in Spain. He enslaved hundreds of Indians on his second trip. Columbus and his men also dined on a dolphin in that pre-PETA age.

-snip-

If you hate Christianity and America, then hating Columbus follows. If you love Christianity and America, Columbus appears as a heroic figure.

Stunning example of both ignorance (like his claims that Native Americans didn't have writing or the concept of zero; they also used dogs and llamas as draft animals on terrain unfavorable to wheels) and whitewashing so extreme that he accuses the natives of genocide against the invaders who were enslaving and torturing them.

Flynn shows total ignorance of the fact that Columbus was denounced and arrested/imprisoned for his vile behavior, and it wasn't for such innocent-sounding offenses as "tricking" the locals into laboring for him.

And ultimately this Breitbart nitwit claims that you'll view Columbus as a hero if you don't "hate" Christianity and America. Thus getting around to Bannon's crazy holy-war ideology -- Christian and white Europe and America vs everyone else.

[gratuitous]

1. It's like a stupid-off

And there are no winners.

[highplainsdem]

3. Agree. RW media always seemed like a reverse IQ test to me.

[Achilleaze]

2. The Mayans had the concept of zero long before Europeans

Republicans lie about everything.

[Achilleaze]

4. And native nations head high respect for truth and honesty

Proving that they were morally and ethically superior to the Republicans then and now.

[genxlib]

5. I have always suspected that this is really an argument on economic policy

Europeans were out to claim new lands and exploit the resources.

Native populations were connected to the land and had communal property.

It is not hard to draw a line from there to here. Europeans are considered capitalist visionaries while native populations are deemed uncivilized examples of primitive socialism.

I think if you break down opinions about Columbus, they would be a pretty strong correlation to opinions on the Socialism-Capitalism scale.