NIKITA KHRUSHCEV and the UNITED NATIONS

 by William H. Benson

October 22, 1998

     United Nations Day is Saturday, October 24.  My awareness of a meeting place in New York City for representatives from all the world’s nations dawned on October 12, 1960 when I (stuck in the first grade) was told how the Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had taken off his right shoe and pounded the table.  “Because he was mad,” was the answer I got to the question, “Why?”

     Later, I learned that what had enraged him was a speech by a Phillippine diplomat who accused the Soviet Union of depriving the Eastern European nations of “political and civil rights”, warning that they would be soon “swallowed up by the Soviet Union.”  Then later, Khrushchev banged his fist when the Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold spoke up, and finally he topped things off by shouting at the dignified British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

     The American public, the journalists, and even the comedians never forgot this outrageous display of public behavior by the Soviet Union’s leader;  Nikita became the focal point of a lot of jokes.  Gauche, inappropriate, rude, inpolite his behavior was, like arguing with the minister during a sermon on Sunday morning at church.  Adults just do not do such things. 

     Khrushchev was short, red-faced, balding, with a wide smile that revealed gapped teeth.  It was he who had denounced Stalin in a 50-page speech in February 1956 to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party.  Khrushchev admitted the truth finally to the Soviet citizens that Stalin was a brutal, psychologically deranged torturer, who committed atrocious acts of mass murder creating a powerful reign of terror. 

      Then, it was Khrushchev who met his match in Vice-President Richard Nixon at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.  At the “model kitchen display” sharp exchages between the two men escalated into an argument over capitalism and communism.  Each seemed unwilling to back down in this verbal confrontation of one-upmanship.

      At one point during his public posturing Khrushchev boasted that “we will bury you.”

      Exactly two years after the shoe-pounding display, in October of 1962 the United Nations found itself in the middle of an eyeball to eyeball showdown between Khrushchev and the 45-year-old U. S. President, John F. Kennedy, over certain missiles on Fidel Castro’s Communistic Cuba.  Khrushchev blinked.  He agreed to a United Nations proposal that the Soviet Union would stop sending missiles to Cuba and ship all the weapons back to the Soviet Union if the U.S. would end its blockade of Cuba.  Once again, the Soviet Union’s citizens felt the stings of this public humiliation.

      (Thirteen months later police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and charged him with murdering President Kennedy.  The 24-year-old Oswald once had defected to the Soviet Union and had been active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  Sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s cause and to Communism, he was angered and troubled by Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missiles.)

      Exactly two years after the missile crisis, on October 17, 1964, the Kremlin’s bosses kicked Nikita Khrushchev out.  Pravda called his leadership one of “harebrained scheming, immature conclusions and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality.”  Seven years later on September 11, 1971, Khrushchev died a nonperson in Moscow and was not permitted a state funeral, far removed from the powerful at the Kremlin as well as at the United Nations, where he had embarrassed himself and his country

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

by William H. Benson

October 8, 1998

     On August 2, 1492 the three vessels were ready to sail.  At the Church of St. George every man and boy confessed his sins and received absolution and Communion.  Christopher Columbus, the Captain General from Genoa, Italy, went on board the Santa Maria during the early morning hours of August 3, and at dawn made signal to leave.  The three vessels floated down the Rio Tinto on the morning ebb, bound south and a little west to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean.

      The same tide on the Rio Tinto that carried the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria also floated ships carrying Jews out of Spain north to the Netherlands or to the east to Turkey.  August 2 was the deadline that Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had issued months before permanently ejecting the Jews from Spain or face immense persecution.

     On September 6 Columbus lifted the anchor on the Canary Islands and gave out the course, “West, nothing to the north, nothing to the south.”  The seas were remarkably calm and the weather peaceful during those days of September.  The men turned to griping after week upon week of nothing but ocean.  Finally, on October 1, the wind increased and the rain fell in torrents, replenishing the sailors’ depleted water casks.

     On October 6 Columbus realized the three vessels had sailed more than 2400 miles, and had they known, they were due north of Puerto Rico.  The next day flocks of bird passed over the ships relieving the monotony, and on the 11th signs of land, branches of trees with green leaves and even flowers became so frequent that the complaining among the men died out.  At 2:00 a.m. on October 12 Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Pinta, saw something like a white cliff shining in the moonlight.  He sang out “Tierra!  Tierra!”

     At dawn they passed the southern point of the island and sought an opening on the west coast through the barrier reef.  By noon they had found the opening, sailed into a shallow bay, and anchored.  The commander went ashore in the long boat and named the island San Salvador, claiming it for the King and Queen of Spain.  Columbus’ story is one of daring and adventure and so we, Americans, 500+ years later recognize October 12.

      The other half of the story is not so noteworthy for Columbus defined the meaning of the word “exploit”, both its positive and negative meanings.  On his return trip to Spain he took with him some of the native Arawak Indians, several of which died enroute.  Those living to see Spain endured the leering stares of the Spanish.

      Columbus returned in 1493 this time to the larger island of Hispaniola equipped with cannons, attack dogs, and guns ready to subdue the Arawaks.  That he did, forcing them initially into heavy labor searching for gold and finally into outright slavery.  When the Arawaks had had enough and revolted, Columbus crushed them.

      Conservative estimates place about three million Arawak Indians on the Carribbean islands just prior to Columbus’s arrival.  By 1516 thanks to a sinister Indian slave policy including the cutting off of hands, noses, and ears as the common form of punishment, only 12,000 remained.  By 1542 fewer than 200 still lived, and by 1555 they were virtually all gone.

     Perhaps it is unfair to judge what Columbus did by 1998’s world standard of what is right and what is wrong.  The world had not decided in 1492 that slavery was unethical and improper.  One commentator described the situation,

     “When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans. . . . Perhaps worst of all, when textbooks paint simplistic portraits of a pious, heroic Columbus, they provide feel-good history that bores everyone.”

      The simple truth is that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the ugly truth is that Queen Isabella hounded the Jews out of Spain, and Columbus’s ruthless policy annihilated the Arawak Indians.