"Happy" Columbus Day

 Richardson examines Trump's inevitable decision to laud Christopher Columbus. Venerating Columbus arose from a set of circumstances in the late 19th and mid 20th century that Richardson lays out clearly (as she always does). Columbus himself has been subject to actual rigorous historical examination in the last few decades and his reputation has been divorced from the myths that were largely woven by Italian immigrants wanting to cement their place in American society.

Trump - or the fascist minion who wrote the proclamation - calls Columbus "an American hero." That's odd. Columbus was an Italian, sailing for Spain, who never set foot in what is now the United States. Sure, there's the extolling of Columbus' faith, which leaves out the atrocities Columbus visited upon the Taino people in the name of his faith. Going further, Spanish priests sent to the New World on Columbus' later voyages decried his brutal treatment of Natives and Spaniards alike. The guy was just a brutal tyrant who was convinced of his own rightness and righteousness regardless of empirical evidence.

I wonder why Trump loves him.

Columbus persisted in the delusion that Cuba was Japan and Mexico was China until his death. His arrogance and cruelty made him persona non grata in the Spanish court and he was stripped of his titles, dying in anonymity in Spain. That's not revisionism. That's what his contemporaries thought of him.

The mythology of Columbus came about for political reasons, not historical ones. Most of those reasons were good actually! Italian immigrants DO belong in America. The Klan IS bad! However, those two positions are no longer really in contention the way they were from the 1870s through the 1960s. 

It's is ironic that Trump is lauding a symbol of immigration, but since those immigrants are now considered White I guess that's OK(Italians were not always considered White in the 19th century. We nearly went to war with Italy over the lynching in New Orleans of Italian immigrants.).

The assault on the historical record is very consistent with Trump and Trumpism and fascism though. You had the Pope quote Hannah Arendt recently: 

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."

That's at the root of Trumpism. An all out attack on the nature of truth, because the actual truth reflects very poorly on him and his rotten project.