Opinion: Great history has been built by flawed humans

When I was a young man (a college dropout searching for meaning and fun in the 1970s), I made my way to Washington D.C., where I visited the Thomas Jefferson Memorial with a couple of friends.

I wasn’t well-versed in history at that age, and they set me straight when I idolized this Founding Father, a fellow Southerner whose words set in motion the ideal of human equality.

I’ve since learned that great and wonderful things are often set in motion by seriously flawed people, and now that I know a more complete story of Thomas Jefferson, I can appreciate him for what and who he really was.

Now, Christopher Columbus, he’s another story.

When I was a child, he was a hero for bravely going where no European had gone before, to the Americas, but then I learned of the atrocities he imposed on the natives he encountered. He could have tried to make peace with them, but instead his arrival became the tip of a foreign invasion seeking gold and glory across two continents, leaving millions of indigenous men, women and children dead in his wake.

That’s what happened, and it made us all who we are. Columbus was a man who made history in a harsh and brutal way.

As for turning Columbus Day into Indigenous People’s Day, I’m all in favor. It’s about time we tell a more honest story and celebrate the original inhabitants of this continent and country.

Columbus’ place of honor in our history is yet another example of the old Winston Churchill quote, “History is written by the victors.” So true, but only in the short-term.

Over the years, historians dig up greater insights through a more honest study for the conflicts, and the peoples, that shaped our world. Immediately after Churchill’s war (World War II), the world learned of the horrors of the Holocaust, which led to the formation of Israel in a hostile neighborhood. Study all that and you’ll better understand all that’s behind the Israel-Hamas war now being waged.

Understand that I’m no historian, but I am a student of history and, from time to time in my profession as a newspaperman, I get to write history’s first rough draft. Each edition of a newspaper is a snapshot of its community, in that moment in time. Historians, not just students like me, know the value of hometown newspapers.

These days, we’re fighting over our history. There are many who don’t want to hear of the injustices forced upon others; they prefer the victors’ version. Others want to write in condemnations, as if our modern perspectives can explain ancient complexities. The way that I see it, writing history for “the victors” is a form of propaganda, while judging the lives and actions of people in another time is an exercise in futility.

When the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” he didn’t really mean it, but his words would nevertheless launch a centuries-long quest for “a more perfect union.”

Great history, I’d say, built by flawed humans.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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