In reference to Deborah Kahkejian’s letter which presumes to correct Claudia Tenney’s recent opinion article, “Don’t smash Columbus and our history; build a better America instead,” readers should know that the book Kahkegian uses as support, Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” is rife with misrepresentation of sources, deceptive quotations and plagiarism.
Kahkejian claims that Tenney glosses over “facts about Columbus.” She uses passages from Zinn’s book as proof. For example, she writes, “When Columbus landed in the Bahamas, the Arawak men and women greeted him and brought food, water and gifts. Columbus wrote in his log that the Arawak do not bear arms and would make ‘fine servants ... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.’”
As I discovered in writing “Debunking Howard Zinn,” Zinn plagiarized most of the first five-and-a-half pages of his book which deal with Columbus. Furthermore, the source that Zinn plagiarized is not a book of history, but a polemic written for high school students by a novelist and fellow anti-Vietnam War activist, Hans Koning. The ellipses in the above passage [. . . .] leave out two days’ worth of entries — entire pages! — and critical information from Columbus’s log. One sentence Zinn leaves out is this one: “I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.” This and many similar statements show the devout Catholic Columbus’s concern for the natives. Furthermore, Zinn did not indicate that the subject doing the subjugating and who thinks of the “Arawaks” as making “fine servants” (“they,” left out of Kahkejian’s quotation) are members of an enemy tribe, and not Columbus. Indeed, they bear the scars of such efforts.
Kahkejian repeats Zinn’s claim that “Columbus wanted information about gold, as that is why the King and Queen of Spain financed Columbus’ expedition,” but Zinn ignores the purpose of the gold: to reach China and convince the Grand Khan to join forces with a Crusade intended to liberate Jerusalem, which was being held by the Muslims. On his first return trip, Dr. Carol Delaney, author of “Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem,” writes, Columbus did bring six natives back with him to Spain where they were “baptized with the king (Ferdinand), queen (Isabella), and Columbus standing as godparents. . . . One became Columbus’s godson who accompanied him on many of his later explorations. . . .”
It is true that some of the sailors were rapacious, but never Columbus. As Delaney writes, while “Columbus had control over them he ordered them to treat (the natives) kindly.” Columbus did not mistreat the Indians. He even had one Spaniard hanged for cheating the Indians.
Kahkejian claims that Tenney’s statement that “our nation was founded on the idea that liberty and equality are man’s birthright from God” is “not true.” Again citing Zinn, she writes, “The Founding Fathers did not want “an equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders, Indians and White.”
Zinn’s definition of equality and rights are Marxist, i.e., equality means the equal distribution of wealth and rights emanate from the government. History has shown that the regimes operating under these assumptions have left in their wake over a 100 million dead in the 20th century. Another book besides Zinn’s that Kahkejian might want to consult is “The Black Book of Communism,” where she will find such information.
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., is resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, in Clinton, and author of “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America.”
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