Christopher Columbus is still a Damn Blaster Liar...

[HipChick]

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http://www.change.org/petitions/united-states-governors-president-obama-ban-columbus-day-as-a-holiday-and-cease-all-recognition

Where is our attention to the legacy of a butchered people at the hands of Columbus and his men? And if it is mentioned, that is exactly that – a mere mention. What about the horrific nightmare and consequences for those left behind that followed? Human beings were commodities measured in gold, the environment of no value except for what resource it could be raped for. 
. “Why does the United States commemorate a Columbus Day instead of a Genocide Day?”

[NoOneMan]

1. Is it Columbus day in the states?

People are cooking up turkeys in a whole lotta the modern world.

[HipChick]

3. It's Canadian Thanksgiving

and Columbus Day in the States

[NoOneMan]

7. Yep

For some reason I thought it was more than just Canada. People are out in droves today, walking, fishing and living it up, up north here.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

2. Does this mean we no longer support immigration rights?

[HipChick]

4. And were they mass murdered?

[Nuclear Unicorn]

5. Who? The natives? Yes.

But how does that play into support for immigration? Are we allowed to invite people to live on land we stole?

[NoOneMan]

8. Probably not

But depends on your narrative of reality.

[EX500rider]

11. 90% died of new European diseases.

Not really sure that qualifies as "mass murdered" though the Spaniards certainly tried.

[nomorenomore08]

25. Either way, millions died. The precise method seems secondary, considering that...

[Scootaloo]

33. Which still leaves another 10% killed by other means

That's not a small number of people.

[FarCenter]

6. And he wasn't even first.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. In Mexico the destruction of native peoples is given more than a cursory mention

as is in the rest of latin america.

Americans need to do that, but not the rest of the Continent.

Of course the Dia de la Raza means something entirely different than Columbus Day in the US. The juxtaposition is fantastic actually, in places like El Norte

[Jamastiene]

10. I fucking hate this holiday.

Christopher Columbus did not "discover" America. There were people already here. How can someone claim to discover a place that is already populated with people? Obviously, they discovered it long before he came here. And what happened after he landed here WAS genocide, including biological warfare. I don't care what anybody tries to claim. This holiday pisses me off. The War on Halloween pisses me off to, while we are at it. Fucking Christmas commercials on already. They had Christmas trees alongside Halloween decorations at Lowes, two weeks ago when I last went there.

[HipChick]

14. I'm not a Hallmark person but I detest the fact that the history books tried to glorify this man

[nadinbrzezinski]

17. My hubby calls this a navigator error that would have gotten him fired TODAY

[HipChick]

20. Yes..

[GreenStormCloud]

23. There was no way to determine longitude at sea in 1492.

Columbus' actual navigational discovery was the trade winds. So he could sail West with favorable winds and on the return trip use a more northern route and again have favorable winds.

Given the knowledge of his day and the instrumentation of he day, he did well on the navigation.

[nadinbrzezinski]

24. I know, not until a certain Brit started playing with a Clock, a ship clock

did we do that.



But Columbus did make some major errors, and got lucky. Luck at times matters more than anything,

The most critical major error was the size of the globe, well known as early as Erasthothenes. They just did not know of the Americas, though other Europeans and Asians have come across it before. But that is a whole different story.

[GreenStormCloud]

27. The land distance from Spain to the Chinese coast was not accurately known.

Columbus thought it was much longer than it really was. He believed about 15K miles. Actual is about 8K miles. And he believed the earth was about 19 miles around.
http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/pass/passv10/wdaWhoWasRight.pdf

Given the data of the his days, and the instrumentation, he didn't do too badly.

Yes, he was lucky, and very brave.

[nadinbrzezinski]

28. Brave, yes. And don't forget the greedy aspect

There are things about his life that are amazing.

[GreenStormCloud]

32. Definately greedy. No doubt about that.

The title he asked for, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" was not just honorary. It gave him personal ownership of everything out there.

[malaise]

12. We were playing that earlier today

Love it!!

Also listened to a great presentation on Spear Friday at a great conference on Garvey, Rodney et al.
The Musicologist played this as well.

[GreenStormCloud]

13. He was a person of his times.

I don't think it is a good idea to judge the past by the standards of the present.

Yes, he lied. He wanted more money from the Spanish king and queen, so he told them what he though they wanted to hear.

The natives of the new world weren't nice guys by modern standards either. Their culture included human sacrifice on a large scale.

Yes, there were others who crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. And in each case the new world was forgotten about after their discovery. Columbus was the one who made it stick. The new world wasn't forgotten about after his voyages.

[HipChick]

15. People are judged by the past all the time..

Racism is one example..

[GreenStormCloud]

16. Back then, racism was the norm for all cultures. N/T

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. I think racism is a modern hallmark too

excluding the other from the group is quite natural, though not as accepted.

[GreenStormCloud]

19. Yes. N/T

[Scootaloo]

35. No it wasn't

Oh, there was certainly all sorts of bigotry, but racism wasn't really among them, simply because of limitations of contact. An African visiting Europe was just an unusual-looking person - hat was important was whether he was "civilized" (a christian) a "heathen" (Jewish or Muslim) or a "savage" (none of the above.)

Racism, as we understand it today, is a legacy of chattel slavery and widespread imperialism, both of which Colombus may have initiated, but that did not really take off until the 1600's.

[IDemo]

21. No excuse for being a man of his times

He was a thief, slavemaster, butcher and child rapist. Screw cultural adjustments to excuse that just to celebrate a holiday based on the false notion that he actually discovered America.

Columbus supervised the selling of native girls into sexual slavery. Young girls of the ages 9 to 10 were the most desired by his men. In 1500, Columbus casually wrote about it in his log. He said: "A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand."

He forced these peaceful natives work in his gold mines until they died of exhaustion. If an "Indian" worker did not deliver his full quota of gold dust by Columbus' deadline, soldiers would cut off the man's hands and tie them around his neck to send a message. Slavery was so intolerable for these sweet, gentle island people that at one point, 100 of them committed mass suicide. Catholic law forbade the enslavement of Christians, but Columbus solved this problem. He simply refused to baptize the native people of Hispaniola.

On his second trip to the New World, Columbus brought cannons and attack dogs. If a native resisted slavery, he would cut off a nose or an ear. If slaves tried to escape, Columbus had them burned alive. Other times, he sent attack dogs to hunt them down, and the dogs would tear off the arms and legs of the screaming natives while they were still alive. If the Spaniards ran short of meat to feed the dogs, Arawak babies were killed for dog food.

Columbus' acts of cruelty were so unspeakable and so legendary - even in his own day - that Governor Francisco De Bobadilla arrested Columbus and his two brothers, slapped them into chains, and shipped them off to Spain to answer for their crimes against the Arawaks. But the King and Queen of Spain, their treasury filling up with gold, pardoned Columbus and let him go free.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kasum/columbus-day-a-bad-idea_b_742708.html

[polly7]

22. He was a sick, depraved monster. nt.

[LisaLynne]

31. Thank you

He was a monster and the whole "oh it was just the way things were back then" argument is just pathetically lazy, imho.

[HipChick]

36. babies killed for Dog food?

sick fuck

[Jamastiene]

43. I'm glad to know at least somebody "of his times"

saw what he was doing for what it was, sick and depraved.

[nomorenomore08]

26. Whether the natives were "nice guys" or not, they didn't kill millions of Europeans.

That, I think, is the crucial difference.

[GreenStormCloud]

29. They didn't have the chance.

The Europeans had the more advanced war technology. If the technology had been reversed they would have.

[nomorenomore08]

37. I'm not saying it couldn't have happened, but that's still a hypothetical.

The fact is that Europeans killed millions of Indians. And yet the man who helped instigate that mass killing is granted a national holiday.

[GreenStormCloud]

38. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on a large scale.

They didn't sit around and sing Kum-ba-ya. And the Aztecs practiced war too. Yet you think they would have been gentle is they had discovered the tecnhology.

I reject your efforts to make me feel guilty over what happened 500+ years ago.

[Scootaloo]

40. It doesn't look like anyone is trying to make you feel guilty

Just trying to get you to understand that "man of his times" isn't any excuse - especially since other men of the time condmened columbus for his excesses - Bartolomew de Casas, King Ferdinand, even the Pope weighed in against Columbus - he was stripped of his governorship and much of his accumulated wealth by the crown, nominally as punishment for his mistreatment of both the Taino and his own men (though the reality was probably just the crown wanting the booty, the fact that they cited such abuses as the reason is still of import)

Colombus was rather reviled in his time. In the Americas, his noteworthiness only lived as an archaic term for the Americas - Colombia... and even that was superceded by Amerigo Vespucci's name. Even places such as Colombia and the District of Columbia are not named such to honor Christopher, but rather to invoke the images of this lady: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_%28name%29

Cristoforo Colombo did not become a celebrated figure until the waning hours of Manifest Destiny, when an interesting mix of American exceptionalism, imperialist ideology, and - of all things - Italian immigration mingled together to turn the guy into a sort of national hero. In his time he was a pretentious, pious dick, then he pretty much disappeared, only to be revived in his current mythologized form to construct part of a New American Narrative.

I dunno why you take this as someone trying to "make you feel guilty."

=========================================================

As regards the Triple Alliance, they weren't long for the world. Mean, brutal societies that abuse their neighbors rarely last long.

In fact, timing had a pretty interesting part to play in the European toppling of American societies - when Cortes landed, the Triple Alliance was already embroiled in a rebellion... which Cortes happened to become aligned with.

Twenty years later and far to the south, Pizarro found an Inkan empire torn apart by three civil wars brought on by measles epidemics. He wasable to overthrow the Inka by capturing their emperor - not wanting to undergo another long war, the Inkas didn't resist, to protect what tenuous peace they had. When Atahualpa was executed by the Spaniards, then the resistance against them began.

Much later, to the north, we have the Massachusetts colony - Massasoit welcomed, fed, and clothed these immigrants, not because he was just a friendly guy... but because he was currently embroiled in a conflict with a neighboring nation, the Pequots, and intended to utilize the settlers as cannon fodder... and they did so, pretty much wiping out the Pequot (to Massasoit's horror - apparently Wampanoag rules of war were very different from English rules of war.)

[nomorenomore08]

42. I have no desire to make any individual "feel guilty."

And I never implied that the natives were perfectly peaceful - almost no human society is. But how does that make the killing of millions any less atrocious?

[Jamastiene]

44. I reject your efforts to paint all native peoples as less than human beings worthy

of at the very least being considered human beings and your efforts to gloss over just how much of a monster Columbus was. And no, I don't care about his sailing "discoveries" at sea at the time, he still did NOT "discover" this place. There were already people here. Yes, they were people, even though you seem to want to refuse to acknowledge that, just like Columbus refused to acknowledge that. Columbus was a man "of his day." What's your excuse for refusing to see the Native Americans as people? Columbus didn't discover shit. There were people already here who obviously had already discovered it.

And the way your are painting the Native American tribes that were already here trying to defend their homeland as somehow less than human simply because they were trying to defend their own homeland is duly noted. I reject your broad brush of all native tribes. Just because they had their own wars from time to time does not justify genocide of entire tribes. They were human beings. This is why I hate this holiday. People still refuse to see them as human beings to this day.

[GreenStormCloud]

45. They were humans, just as fully human as Europeans.

You are bing racist in imagining that the Native Americans were somehow better humans than the Europeans.

Whether you use "discover" or another word, Columbus made the connection between the Old and New World that lasted. After his voyage, the knowledge of the existance of the New World did not vanish from the Old World.

[Jamastiene]

46. That beats all I have ever seen.

Fine. Call me racist for pointing out the genocide, slavery, child rape, and numerous other atrocities perpetrated by your precious "Europeans." Last I checked, it wasn't the Native Americans that knowingly placed small pox on blankets to commit genocide just to steal lands that could have been shared. But, call me a racist, for pointing that out.

The Earth, no matter where you are on this planet, is the same damn age. This "old world" "new world" crap, the way you are using it, is bullshit.

[LostOne4Ever]

41. I completely disagree

One can take a humanistic or utilitarian look at the times and easily call him what he was: A selfish lazy hatful bigoted rapist who cut off the ears and noses of the natives to extort them for gold.

And the Lucayans did not practive human sacrifice!!! That was the Aztec, Mayans, Incas, and other tribes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucayan

They were a peaceful people who spent HOURS rescuing Columbus' own people from when Santa Maria shipwrecked! Their reward? To have be enslaved, have their women raped, and culture totally destroyed.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

[FarCenter]

30. Why do we need "District of Columbia"? It's redundant with Washington anyway.

Since Columbus was an Italian working for Spain, and had little or nothing to do with the US, there is no need to have an entity named after him.

[Scootaloo]

34. To halfass as a devil's advocate...

Last edited Mon Oct 14, 2013, 02:41 AM - Edit history (1)

Colombus is an exceptionally noteworthy person. His voyages very literally changed the entire world. Every single society on every continent changed, the fauna and flora of multiple ecozones got flipped on their head, even the global climate changed, because of this one Italian tailor's son and some boats some Spanish despots loaned to him. It's a big enough impact that 1492 might be the precise year that the Anthropogene geological era truly began.

No one else has had that sort of impact. no one. The closest anyone else has come to that sort of impact is Temujin - and for similar reasons. We will not have another person of that sort of impact until the first human sets foot on another inhabited world.

Now, this doesn't mean he should be celebrated as a hero, or that false narratives constructed about him for good or ill. But the importance of those voyages and their impact on the entire world simply can't be ignored - neither the bad things nor the good things.

[GreenStormCloud]

39. Excellent post. N/T