Christopher Columbus accidentally ran into the Bahama Islands.

[milestogo]

He was looking for GOLD. The islands were inhabited by native people... Columbus and his successors pretty much killed or enslaved all of them.

He was a pretty good sailor for his day- but he didn't know where he was when he found land. He was greedy and his actions were barbaric.

He wasn't the first one to cross the ocean. Leif Ericsen did that centuries earlier. The Vikings didn't stay- they knew they were outnumbered by the native peoples.

I learned the sanitized story in first grade. I unlearned it by the time I finished high school.

I don't understand WHY we still celebrate "Columbus Day" or why the asshole wants a statue of this guy at the White House. The legacy of Columbus is GENOCIDE.

[Klarkashton]

1. Trump wants the world to be what he remembers

1960 was like as a rich spoiled ignorant asshole adolescent.
Back then there was no Howard Zinn books are much of anything else but post war jingoism.

[wnylib]

2. Colimbus doesn't even hsve the excuse of

"Well, he lived in harsher times than today." Priests who accompanied the Spanish wrote about his cruelty and one of them made a formal complaint to the Crown.

It's easy to see why President Pedo wants a statue of him in the WH. Columbus is his kind of guy, someone to admire and emulate.

[milestogo]

3. The only knowledge that TSF has of American history

seems to be what they taught in the late fifties/early sixties. I think that is the case for a lot of Republicans. Its embarrassing. And its dangerous.

[LakeVermilion]

4. Krasnov would have been about 14 years old in 1960...

Once he reached puberty, he knew all he would need to know.

[chouchou]

5. I've pretty much despised that piece-of-human-garbage for many years.

2 for 0ne, Columbus and Trump.

[Goonch]

6. ;-{) Woops!

[Intractable]

7. why the asshole wants a statue of this guy

To piss off liberals? It is a common motive of his.

We hate what Columbus represents -- murder, slavery, imperialism, etc.

[MineralMan]

8. When the first American settlers came, they weren't too nice

to the indigenous people, either. And it didn't get better. In the end, we almost eliminated them all.

We can curse at Columbus and at the Spanish explorers, but the folks that showed up here from England were equally at fault.

We have not behaved well with regard to the people who were already here. Nope. Not at all. We were the conquerors, not the discoverers.

And that brutality continued right into the 19th century.

I'm sorry, but the myth of how America was settled has always been wrong. We displaced or killed all the people who had lived here before we came. Not a nice picture at all. And then, we made things worse by importing slave labor to boot. There is much to be ashamed of.