Columbus and the journey to opposite land.

It was Columbus day across the pond a couple of weeks ago. In recent years there have been moves to celebrate the indigenous people of the US alongside or in place of famous immigrant, Christopher Columbus.

Trump - a renowned scholar of history, probably the greatest ever - has of course seen this as an opportunity to stir the pot and has declared Columbus an all American Hero. Sigh.

This is a typical example of the kind of historical myth-making that has been going on around Columbus for nearly 100 years. It’s a lush story, the facts of which make this new attempt to slide Columbus into the canon of MAGA myth quite hilarious.

First of all it’s worth noting that Columbus never set foot on what is now considered mainland USA and he probably didn’t even set eyes on the continent of North America.

Columbus is celebrated in the USA for several interconnected historical and symbolic reasons. Columbus became a symbol of the broader “discovery” and exploration of the Americas by Europeans, even though he wasn’t the first European to reach the Americas (Vikings arrived centuries earlier) and only visited Caribbean and Central/South American regions.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the newly independent United States was decolonising and clearing out its stock of British heroes and symbols to build a distinct American identity. Columbus, an Italian who sailed from Spain, was a convenient figure who represented European exploration without direct ties to British colonialism. This is why the USA’s capital became Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia), and why many places bear his name.

Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, largely due to advocacy by Italian-American communities who wanted recognition and to celebrate their heritage during a period when they faced significant discrimination in the US. Let’s face it, white supremacy being what it is in the US, Italians at the time weren’t considered “white” by a lot of people.

This led to generations of Americans framing, Columbus as a heroic explorer who “discovered” the New World, opening it to European settlement - a narrative that ignored both the Indigenous peoples already living there and the devastating consequences of European colonization.

So Columbus’s celebration in the US has more to do with mythology and nation-building than with his actual geographical achievements.

The only thing Columbus has in common with Trump and the MAGA crowd is their grasp of geography. Columbus died believing he had reached Asia. Well, all these foreigners look the same, am I right?