Please stop blaming Columbus

To the editor:

Democratic socialist Assemblywoman Marcela Mitaynes formally introduced legislation to abolish Columbus Day honoring the famed explorer who is a symbol of Italian ethnic pride.

He has been honored for centuries like many other 15th to 16th century explorers of that time for his brilliant navigational skills, bravery in helping Spain’s colonization of the Americas.

Now, centuries later, he has become the target of leftist revisionist historians judging his actions by 21st century morals and values.

Marcela Mitaynes — whose family originates from Peru, home of the Shining Path — actually grew up in Brooklyn.

Her major endorsements come from the Democratic Socialists of America and leftist Working Families Party.

So, we should not be shocked that she and her fellow leftists always seem to focus their attacks mostly on Anglo-Euro people as concerns the colonization of the New World. Their bias and prejudice are more than obvious in the targets they choose.

They intentionally attempt to erase the historical fact that it was the Catholic Spanish crown that destroyed the Maya, Aztec and Inca civilizations in the early 16th century. That it was they alone who mass murdered, brutally tortured prisoners, enslaved and decimated the indigenous populations. And that they also caused massive civilian death by introducing smallpox into the new world.

It was Spain that officially introduced the African slave trade into South America.

The biggest mass murders of that time were not Christopher Columbus, but the mass murdering Conquistadors, Hernan Cortez, Francisco Pizarro, Pedro de Alvarado, Vasco de Balboa and several others.

Now these hysterical revisionist radicals have the gall to attack Northern Europe, England and the United States, who were the first countries on Earth to abolish slavery in their own countries and later their colonies. Following our American civil war, both England and the United States put an ocean blockage along South America’s coast to forcibly stop the importation of African slaves into our hemisphere.

The last two countries of the New World to abolish slavery were, in fact, Brazil and Cuba.

Time to separate fact from hateful propaganda as concerns history.

Lou Deholczer