Since 1990, November has been celebrated as Native American Heritage Month. And millions of people enjoyed a day off on Monday to honor Indigenous Peoples Day (even if Donald Trump was demanding to “BRING BACK COLUMBUS DAY!”). As with most things, Rudy Giuliani has his very own way of marking the occasion, which this year included delivering a warped history lesson that lionized Christopher Columbus and seemed to suggest that America’s Indigenous peoples got what they deserved. It was not an episode of Drunk History, but it could have been.
Rudy Giuliani claims Christopher Columbus “was a hero” and “benevolent,” and implied the indigenous people were the problem. pic.twitter.com/mkEdrs9yUX
— PatriotTakes
(@patriottakes) October 10, 2022
As Raw Story reports, Giuliani was a guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room, where the former New York City mayor delivered an unhinged history of the world as he sees it:
Columbus is probably the first hero and there’s no evidence that he did any of these things. In fact, most of the atrocities they’re talking about occurred 30 years after he left. If anything, he was… benevolent. He tried very, very hard to avoid the wars that went on… I mean, look: The people he brought over with him, they weren’t saints. They were soldiers. But the people there were living in the third world, including a third world of violence where they scalped each other and killed each other and raped each other. This wasn’t a civilization they came to. This was a third-, fourth-world country. They had no idea of what they were facing. Columbus did everything he could to control it. It got out of control forty years later and he’s being blamed for it.
All of this, of course, is untrue. As Raw Story notes, Columbus — in his own diary — wrote about his very real intentions to enslave any Indigenous populations he encountered and then send them back to King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I as a kind of souvenir.
“They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion,” Columbus wrote. “Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak.”
Yep. Totally benevolent.
(Via Raw Story)