We are being asked to celebrate the 500th annivesary of an expedition of discovery undertaken by brave and enlightened men and having the outcome of creating a New World of Christian light and civilised progress.
Leaving aside the question of historical priority (was the unknown land discovered by the Phonecians, the Vikings, by Henry Sinclair of Orkney or anyone else before 1492?) it is urgently necessary to de-romanticise the Columbus story. This is not just a matter of knocking pretentious myths - necessary though that exercise always is. It is a matter of 'coming clean' about the impact Europeans have had upon the rest of the world and the impact that they, and their extra-European descendants, continue to have. That effect is largely bad and world politics will always be sour until that fact is recognised.
1992 is no time to celebrate 1492; it is a specially proper time for white man's repentance - if we have the guts and the humility to admit it.
Almost the only good things to be said about the Columbus affair are 1) the bravery of the sailors - considering that many of them laboured under the needless delusion that the earth is flat and that therefore you could 'fall off the edge' to who knew what; 2) the extraordinary seamanship of the commanders of the various expeditions.
Otherwise the Columbus story is one of atrociously brutal conquest - brazen intrusion into other people's lands, the theft of those people's share of natural resources, the wholesale slaughter of those people by arms and by disease and the wholesale corruption of their lives by the imposition of a form of Christianity designed to justify the relentless ascendancy of the invaders and to demonstrate the supposedly sub-human status of the victims.
The final cruel irony has been that, having wrought such havoc among the various native American peoples, there was not enough suitable labour to work the plantations that succeeded the plundering and mining activities of the immediate post-Columbus dark age. It became necessary to plunder Africa of its active adults and growing children to provide slave labour for the Americas. The slave trade was practised for several centuries until a handful of enlightened people - some Christian and some secularist - succeeded in making slavery officially forbidden.
The whole thing is rather like Hitler and Stalin in slow motion.
We continue to abuse the non-European world in new ways - by extorting punitive interest for the 'aid' we offer and by forcing local economies to produce cheaply things we 'need' as a condition attached to that 'aid'.
Columbus was, on balance, a shameful disaster; unless we change our attitude to the non-European world we are parties to continuing shameful disaster.