Chris Did It

For John, BLUF:  People of all sorts continue to blame Christopher Columbus for all the ills of the world, and by extentino, "The West".  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Global warming?  Blame Christopher Columbus

From The Conservative Woman, by Freelance Journalist Henry Getley, 4 April 2025.

Here is the lede plus two:

GLOBAL warming is man-made, we are endlessly told by the climate change industry. You might think that ‘man’ in this context is a generic term for mankind. But a nutty-sounding professor has now narrowed down the culprit to one particular man . . . Christopher Columbus.

Yes, the Genoese explorer who in 1492 crossed the Atlantic from Spain in search of the Indies and instead found America (actually, he came ashore on an island in the Bahamas) is apparently the villain of the piece.

He is named and blamed in a new book called Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe, an associate professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York.  I haven’t read it, but several reviews – even by sympathetic critics – suggest it’s opaque, rambling and eminently putdownable unless you’re fully signed up to the climate nonsense.

Frankly, the thesis of the book makes one want to shout out Falcon Code 101.  It is hard to believe the author does not realize the activities Admiral Columbus brought with him had beeen ongoing for thouands of years in the other hemisphere.  Or for that matter, in this hemisphere.  The Blog poster goes on:

She tells us that European colonisation of the Caribbean, started by Columbus, ‘first formulated the structures of modern capitalism’ via slavery and racism. The creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the degradation of the environment ‘made territories vulnerable to extreme weather’. And so on.

I think it goes without saying that the arrival of Europeans in new lands during the age of discovery was often harmful to the indigenous inhabitants. But in this case, the author is falling into that familiar trap for historians – judging what happened in the past by modern standards. Slavery and racism are obviously reprehensible from our point of view in 2025. But, like it or not, that’s how they did things 500 years ago.

I have to admit that I thought modern capitalism started in England and The Netherlands.  Spain I think of as an exploitive economy, along the lines laid out in Why Nations Fail:  The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.  That book is captured in a Wikipedia post, of which the follow in an extract:

They emphasize instead organizational conditions and not least the quality of the state and institutions, as well as whose purpose the state and institutions serve.  As long as the state and the institutions do not serve everyone but only an exploitative elite, it is very difficult to achieve economic development for the entire nation.  Democracy as a growth factor is also a central part of the book.

Will I read this book?  Perhaps, after I finish all the tell all books from the 2024 Presidential Election.  I currently have one on my Kindle and two prepurchased.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff