Watch: John Oliver Rightly Asks America, ‘Columbus Day – How Is That Still A Thing?’

Columbus Day is a national federal holiday created to increase the standing of Catholics and Italians in America. But John Oliver is asking Americans to take another look at this ill-conceived “holiday.”

In school we were taught that Christopher Columbus was a great man who discovered America, and that’s why today we celebrate Columbus Day. It turns out, my history teachers left out a few facts.

“For four hundred years-from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army’s massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s-the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence.”

That’s the opening sentence of the description of a book by noted American history writer David E. Stannard.

“During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people,” the description of the book, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, reads. “Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”

That’s a lot to take. 

So are these horrific images from within the book (I urge caution before clicking.)

Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus’s fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched-and in places continue to wage-against the New World’s original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust.

Think Progress today reminds us,

In 2012, one in four American Indians and Alaska Natives lived in poverty, compared to a national rate of 14.5 percent. For those who identify these groups as their only race, their poverty rate was just over 29 percent. Poverty rates are even higher on big Indian reservations: Among the top ten largest, rates range from 20.2 percent for individuals to as much as 53.5 percent. And extreme poverty on these reservations is, on average, four times as high as the national rate.

Last night, British-born comedian John Oliver asked, rightly, “Columbus Day – How Is That Still A Thing?”

Frankly, I have no idea.

America is a great nation — that’s true.

But the savagery and murder of millions of indigenous people that came before our founding — and during it — is unconscionable. No wonder most U.S. students aren’t taught that part of our history. 

Watch:

 

Image: YouTube