Columbus Day, established in 1937, was never a celebration of conquest. It honored a man whose daring voyage bridged two worlds and eventually inspired the formation of the modern Western Hemisphere. It was also a recognition of Italian-American contributions, at a time when they were often targets of violence and discrimination.
The movement to “cancel” Columbus stems from revisionist histories like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project—A New Origins Story, both of which promote leftist ideology and its false interpretation of events through a Neo-Marxist lense over actual historical facts.
No one disputes that Howard Zinn was associated with the Communist Party USA. His worldview was far leftist, and his magnum opus, A People’s History of the United States (1980), reflects a Marxist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American point of view.
In this book, Zinn presented Christopher Columbus not as a heroic explorer, but as a ruthless imperialist whose arrival in the New World sparked genocide, slavery, and mass exploitation of native peoples. Zinn’s claims, widely adopted in left-leaning academic circles, cast Columbus as a symbol of European oppression—motivated solely by greed and responsible for the destruction of indigenous societies. However, many of these claims are misleading, exaggerated, or outright false.
Zinn drew heavily from A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest known for his advocacy for indigenous peoples. Yet Zinn failed to mention that de las Casas’s writings were deeply polemical and not always reliable, written decades after Columbus’s voyages and designed to shock the Spanish crown into reforming colonial abuses. Zinn also ignored contrary evidence from Columbus’s own journals and contemporary accounts showing he initially instructed his men to treat natives kindly and trade peacefully.
Zinn falsely claimed that Columbus was responsible for the deaths of “millions” of natives. While it is true that European contact brought disease, which devastated native populations, the majority of these deaths were due to smallpox and other illnesses—not deliberate violence. The portrayal of Columbus as personally orchestrating genocide is unsupported by serious historical scholarship.
Additionally, Zinn claimed that Columbus was obsessed with gold and willing to mutilate and enslave for it. While Columbus did engage in the slave trade (as did many figures of his era), his actions were not unique, nor do they justify modern portrayals that strip away all historical context. Even mainstream liberal historians like Samuel Eliot Morison acknowledged Columbus’s flaws while also recognizing his genuine navigational achievement and lasting impact.
Zinn’s depiction of Columbus is a textbook example of ideological history. His selective use of sources, lack of context, and overt Marxist framing distort the complex reality of exploration and encounter in the 15th century.
While Columbus was no saint, Zinn’s narrative is not history—it is political propaganda masquerading as scholarship.
Let’s expose the ten most common lies told about Columbus, and what real historians like Mary Grabar, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, and Larry Schweikart have shown through evidence.
Lie #1: Columbus came to enslave and plunder.
Truth: Columbus’s primary goal was to establish trade routes to Asia. The notion that he sailed west to enslave people is anachronistic and false.
Lie #2: Columbus introduced slavery to the New World.
Truth: Slavery was already practiced by many Native tribes. It existed long before 1492 on every continent. Singling out Columbus distorts the broader history of global servitude.
Lie #3: Columbus committed genocide.
Truth: Most indigenous deaths came from unintentional disease transmission, not warfare or massacres. There was no coordinated campaign of extermination.
Lie #4: Columbus attacked peaceful natives.
Truth: Columbus allied with peaceful tribes such as the Taino to defend against violent cannibals like the Caribs, who had tortured and eaten Spanish sailors. These were not mindless aggressions but strategic alliances and retaliation for atrocities.
Lie #5: Columbus described Natives as inferior.
Truth: He wrote that they were “noble” and “generous,” and he believed they would make good subjects of the Spanish Crown—not slaves, as modern activists falsely interpret. In 15th-century parlance, “subjects” meant people under lawful rule, not property.
Lie #6: Columbus was a white supremacist.
Truth: The term didn’t exist in his day. Columbus was an Italian explorer under Spanish patronage, operating in a multi-ethnic empire long before race-based ideologies emerged.
Lie #7: Columbus was widely despised even in his own time.
Truth: He was honored by European monarchs and received noble titles. Political rivals criticized his colonial management—but not his exploration.
Lie #8: Columbus Day celebrates oppression.
Truth: It was established partly to affirm Italian-American dignity at a time when lynchings of Italians had occurred in the U.S. Replacing it erases that immigrant struggle.
Lie #9: Pre-Columbian societies were peaceful and harmonious.
Truth: Many tribes engaged in warfare, slavery, and ritual human sacrifice. The Aztecs alone slaughtered tens of thousands per year. Whitewashing this to indict Columbus is intellectually dishonest.
Lie #10: Erasing Columbus is an act of justice.
Truth: This is not about justice—it’s cultural sabotage. As Mary Grabar notes, the goal is to undermine national pride, delegitimize the West, and replace history with ideology.
Columbus is not honored because he was perfect—he wasn’t. He is honored because his voyages connected continents, set off the Age of Discovery, and eventually gave rise to a civilization marked by liberty, science, and self-government.
Further, Neo-Marxists like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Howard Zinn need to acknowledge the heinous history of their intellectual forefathers – Karl Marx, Vladamir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot,
To cancel Columbus is to submit to a historical fraud. It tells our children that the West is a source of shame rather than a foundation of progress. That’s why these myths must be rejected—and why Columbus’s legacy must be defended.
S.D.G.,
Robert Sparkman
rob@christiannewsjunkie.com
RELATED CONTENT
Michael Knowles presents the myths of the left about Christopher Columbus.
Mary Grabar delivers messages on historical revisionism of Howard Zinn and Nikole Hannah-Jones. Howard Zinn is one of two major historical revisionists. He was associated with the American communist party.
Historian Peter Wood addresses the errors of the historical revisionism of Nikole Hannah-Jone’s 1619 Project book sponsored by the New York Times. While The 1619 Project raised important conversations about race and slavery in American history, its framing was ideologically driven and lacked adequate scholarly rigor. Many contributors, including its lead author, were not trained historians, and the project ignored or misrepresented key facts about the American founding, particularly the motives behind the Revolution. It’s telling that some of the most prominent critics of the project were respected liberal historians who rejected its central historical claims.
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