Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) was “a giant of Western civilization” and “a titan of the age of exploration,” who left us “an extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance and virtue,” and whose “journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas.” These exalted declarations were not taken from a dusty colonial history manual from the early 20^th-century, nor from the pen of a Francoist Spanish ideologue of the 1940s. They appeared in a presidential proclamation by Donald Trump, signed on October 9 in Washington, just days before Columbus Day, which commemorates Columbus’s arrival on a Bahamian island on October 12, 1492. The words found their echo almost simultaneously on the social media platform X, posted by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni: “Columbus’s voyage laid the foundations for the unbreakable bond that unites the two sides of the Atlantic, Europe and America, and represents the core of what we call the West.”

While the rhetorical and ideological excesses of these two leaders come as no surprise, the choice of Columbus as the embodiment of their supremacist fantasies is no accident. The figure of the Genoese navigator, as generations of apologists of Europe’s “civilizing mission” have portrayed him, still looms large in our collective imagination. He even overwhelms it with his thunderous grandiosity, as expressed unreservedly by Gérard Depardieu’s bravado and Vangelis’s symphony Conquest of Paradise in Ridley Scott’s film 1492.

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