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[Arcteryx]

It wasn't just Colombus(almost all the Conquistadors were assholes). That said, the fact that we have a federal holiday based upon it and that he's taught as some kind of messiah to gradeschool kids...smh.

He wasn't even the first outsider to visit the "new" world.

 

[BeerSnob]

Off topic, but I couldn't resist. I'm not sure if they have a day dedicated to him, but he's on their money.

Yup, even has a festival.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5167718.stm

I find it amusing and a bit heartening to see the Western world shocked and appalled by their historic monsters. Even if such humanitarian leanings will eventually undermine our survivability.

 

[Tim the Wiz]

Thank you for this bit of information, it's unfortunate even many of my fellow Latinamericans are ignorant about it but who can blame them, history is written by the winners. It makes the modern figure of Simon Bolivar pushed mainly from Venezuela as something completely ironic.

I do have to add that the natives that supported the Crown were not really a majority.

This is my problem with the outrage about Colombus, he did awful things, but this wasn't a one man only operation, colonization has plenty of Conquistadores that make Colombus look like saint. At least back home in Colombia, no one really cares about Colombus, and the country is even named after him, you see no glorification but no condemnation, he's just sort of there, the guy who made the first trips, which is really his only noteworthy contribution to the whole thing.

I can see where you're coming from. Illuminating the (now dessicated) Columbus myth shouldn't be conflated as being a comprehensive proxy debate about colonization in the New World - which is a far more complex and wide-ranging topic than one man's atrocities, whatever precedent they set. I do find the discomfort that illumination sometimes causes odd, however.

 

[Plywood]

Thread filed under common knowledge, surely?

lol

Nope.

 

[Valhelm]

Wrong. Bartolomé de Las Casas latter abjured of every form of slavery and retracted from that statement. Not to mention that he freed every slave that the owned prior to his pro-indian campaign too, in order to back his words with example.

This is true! But this doesn't negate the fact that his efforts began it. I can kill ten people and apologize, but does that make me an innocent man? Not at all.

Trans-atantic slave trade, albeit a multi-national global business, it was originally a wholly 101% English creation that you guys controlled for the main part of its existance, and whose blame you latter tried to endorse us. The first "commodity" that Britain fought for trading and introducing in the Spanish-controlled ports was not silver, nor gold nor spices, but slaves. So enough with the ridiculous notion of anglo-saxon moral superiority.

What are you talking about? The English did not become the biggest importers of slaves until the 1690s, and the Atlantic slave trade evolved out of the Iberian trade, which imported slaves across Europe. Slavery existed before the sixteenth century, but de las Casas was responsible for bringing it to the New World.

Also, your comment about "Anglo-Saxon superiority" is hilarious. I never once mentioned the English, and wouldn't place them far below the Spanish on a list of "most heinous civilizations". I myself am only 1/8 English by ethnicity, so I assure you that I'm not trying to promote any kind of pro-English agenda.

In addition to that, the Spanish empire's main drive, unfying force and source of balls-to-the-wall intolerance revolved around religion, first and foremost, not race. In just one generation after the conquest, you had Aztecs and Incans occupying higher goverment offices in the Spanish territory, and leading armies in Europe. Noone gave two shits about it because they were Catholics.

Yeah, that's really not true. You can keep believing this revisionist mindset that the Spanish Empire was some kind of bastion of equality, but that just isn't true at all. You've got to be aware of the Castas, which separated peoples of the New World into incredibly specific genetic groups. This system is obviously no longer in place, but manifests itself by way of racism throughout Latin America and in the Hispanic American community.

 

[Caja 117]

Yes, I think everyone is aware of the fragilities of historicity. But -



Even his own supporters at the time admitted he committed atrocities. Even his own son's account entailed them. And I wouldn't class Bartolomé - behind the most damning of the accounts - as someone who wanted Columbus's wealth. This is beyond reasonable doubt territory.

"The report, by Francisco de Bobadilla, lay undiscovered in a state archive in the Spanish city of Valladolid until last year. Bobadilla had already been named governor of the Indies, replacing Columbus, at the time of the report."

Totally unbiased and Clean.

 

[Dany]

Thread filed under common knowledge, surely?

Not with my education system, no.

 

[vas_a_morir]

This is what matters most. White people, especially children, should not feel guilty for what they didn't do, but they should come to terms with the fact that their position in global society was built on the corpses of hundreds of cultures.

This is the thing that some vocal non-white people in American don't quite understand about white people, generally speaking: We don't identify with other white people. We don't feel related or connected to white people who do fucked up stuff. Never even considered that BTK or child murderer had any connection to me. So, I feel no guilt for anything I didn't do. Nobody should, and likewise, only hateful people refer to the acts of a few in a group as representative of or connected to a larger group of good, innocent people.

Besides, every person who lives today lives due to their predecessors building over the corpses of hundreds of cultures. Asian, Middle-Eastern, African, European, Native American, little Moe with the gimpy leg, Boney-Bob, Cliff... I could go on forever baby!

 

[NEOPARADIGM]

Fair enough, I think the one thing that we can all agree on is that the man certainly doesn't deserve a holiday or a place of reverence in the history of the Americas. I'd be interested to hear the argument of anyone who supported that.

The only thing I can think of is that the holiday isn't celebrating "Columbus" proper, despite its name, but instead the symbolism of the event ... which isn't too hot either, so ... lol nevermind.

 

[Kabouter]

Off topic, but I couldn't resist. I'm not sure if they have a day dedicated to him, but he's on their money.

Don't the Uzbeks still celebrate Timur as well? Absolutely terrible. How can you celebrate brutal conquerors who directly ordered the murder of a significant percentage of the world population as national heroes?

 

[Riposte]

Because in the US, they like to pretend that the Natives simply vanished or something, not they were wiped out by various countries including our own. Everyone pretty much ignores the existence of Natives until it comes time to bitch about casinos or gripe about pressure to change a football teams name.

Who is they?

 

[7Th]

In what context does rape, torture, and murder make someone an admirable person? How are you "supposed to" read these facts? The title is my own, the author is simply pointing out how appalling it is that American students are often ignorant of the facts. You can't form proper context with half truths.

Edit: please tell me you weren't being sarcastic due to your tag.

He means that the British colonizers that came to Americ weren't any better and Thanksgiving Day celebrates murder.

 

[leroidys]

I think part of the reason that Columbus is more whitewashed in the US is because it's part of early education here. I remember learning about Columbus in kindergarten and first grade. Ironically, I learned a lot more detail about American atrocities in school than Spanish ones, as my US history class my junior year of high school went into a lot more detail than 6th grade age of exploration or 1st grade whitewashed pilgrim stories.

 

[7Th]

I'm mexican and our history is pretty much like this: Natives were good, conquistadors were bad.

The name of the infamous traitor translator even became synonymous with anti-patriotism; "malinchista".

 

[Zeke]

Wasn't Cortez success heavily relying on his alliance with the Toltec, which were in war with the aztecs at the time?

Cortez was an absolute cunt no doubt but the aztecs were not naive at all about brutality, accounts say there were 20000 sacrifices (more than likely exaggerated, but you get the picture). The Aztec empire was enormous, there was no way Cortez could have been able to take it all just with the spaniards, it is said Tenochtitlan was bigger than the biggest cities of Europe at the time.

Apocalypto is pure trash anyway.

absolutely not, the Toltec were highly regarded among many tribes the Mexica being one of them. The Tlaxcallan's allied themselves with the Spanish to help bring down the Mexica. The Tlaxcallan's and Mexica were enemies thus the alliance between the two. Two reasons for the alliance were 1) the enemy of my enemy is my friend line of thinking and 2) This will help preserve our tribe and people. The Spanish forces consisted mostly of Tlaxcallan warriors.

 

[Arde5643]

This is the thing that some vocal non-white people in American don't quite understand about white people, generally speaking: We don't identify with other white people. We don't feel related or connected to white people who do fucked up stuff. Never even considered that BTK or child murderer had any connection to me. So, I feel no guilt for anything I didn't do. Nobody should, and likewise, only hateful people refer to the acts of a few in a group as representative of or connected to a larger group of good, innocent people.

Besides, every person who lives today lives due to their predecessors building over the corpses of hundreds of cultures. Asian, Middle-Eastern, African, European, Native American, little Moe with the gimpy leg, Boney-Bob, Cliff... I could go on forever baby!

That's part of the so called white privilege actually - whereas most minorities' actions somehow translate to the actions of that person's race, it doesn't apply as such to white people (and this is not just the POV of white people, but also of that of minorities).

 

[Nairume]

Read more history my man. Both robbing indigenous peoples and slave trading across territories have been rampant though many major civilizations in human history.

Yes, slavery did exist prior to Columbus, but the exact form and scale he practiced in the Caribbean and everybody else picked up on was a bit different from what happened before.

Simplifying it down to "slavery existed before Columbus so he's not *that* bad" is a tad bit irresponsible.

 

[Real Hero]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiyLtMPuWRA

 

[vas_a_morir]

That's part of the so called white privilege actually - whereas most minorities' actions somehow translate to the actions of that person's race, it doesn't apply as such to white people (and this is not just the POV of white people, but also of that of minorities).

Yep. In my original post, I wrote that it was the 'real white privilege,' but I was afraid it would send the thread into a tailspin so I deleted it. The implications of talking about 'white privilege,' when coming from a white person, make me feel uncomfortable, as it alludes to a sense of perceived superiority,

 

[User 100115]

I dont know about else where, but we learned all about the slave triangle, the trail of tears, the conquistadors and all that shit. I had the whole shitty Columbus lionization torn down in high school.

Where I am from we didn't learn about that at all. And when people wanted to put a museum that was basically akin to a 'Holocaust museum for Natives' people threw a shit fit because it would be in a place that was also celebrated for it's 'awesome fort' back in the day, and people didn't want to remember that that fort was also responsible for the mass extermination of the tribes in the area.

Not getting more specific because it would narrow down exactly where I grew up heh.

 

[Tzeentch]

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

Oh boy. Talk about trying to oversell something. Columbus had NOTHING on Republican Rome in either seizing land, heinous treatment of natives, or mass long-distance slave trading. And that's just during the Republic!

But no, his later adventures in being an asshole governor are not well covered in the US, primarily because it's not immediately connected with North America.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

"Yeah, it was bad, but everyone was doing it at the time"

 

[DanteFox]

I guess the real question is, if someone does really bad things does that negate the good things they did? At what point should we celebrate people and at what point should we criticize them? Does it need to be either one or the other? Is it possible that in celebrating Columbus day we are celebrating not the man or character in his entirety, but those attributes and actions that we deem praiseworthy? Why do mirrors invert left and right but not up and down?

All these questions and more demand an honest, impartial answer.

 

[ICKE]

I find it extremely hard to care for these wiped out indigenous cultures that were just as barbaric as the explorers - more so had they possessed the capability to project themselves properly on a global scale.

At some point these individuals become historical figures and all the violence is seen as part of that time period. Unless you are all into feeling guilty over the fact that we Europeans were rather efficient in our cruelty, I don't see the point in teaching children how every specific person killed Y and said Z when usually the point is to just tell what John invented or Jane found.

 

[CorvoSol]

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

Regardless of Colombus' faults, it's utter bullshit to say that HE introduced this. People had been taking land from other races and enslaving them long before the Colombian Exchange. Or did Rome suddenly not conquer half of Europe? Did China and Japan not invade Korea countless times? Did the Vikings not ravage Northern Europe for ages? The concept of Empire is much older than Columbus, and Empires are more or less built on exactly that: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to genocide, slavery and racial underclasses.

Human kind is and was brutal. Columbus wasn't some revolutionary in that sense.

Yes, slavery did exist prior to Columbus, but the exact form and scale he practiced in the Caribbean and everybody else picked up on was a bit different from what happened before.

Simplifying it down to "slavery existed before Columbus so he's not *that* bad" is a tad bit irresponsible.

If you want to say that the scale was what was revolutionary, sure, although I don't know that I'd still lay that down to Columbus himself and not all of Europe. But the quote in the OP is just "He introduced taking land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people." which is bullshit, because Europeans had been doing that to each other long before Columbus had been born. If he did it, the problem was that Europe did it. The idea didn't just pop out of his head.

 

[Mr-Joker]

Thread filed under common knowledge, surely?

I didn't know about this and I was taught that he discovered America our teacher made him out to be a hero, though later I found out that him discovering America was a lie.

Had I know this back then I would have challenged her on this.

 

[Karakand]

As a mid-20s American, this startles me every time I think about it. The median age in the US is around 40 years old, so less than 10 years ago most Americans had been alive when Jim Crow laws still were in existence.

We're only ~20 years away from spousal rape being illegal in all 50 states, IIRC.

RE OP: I remember being taken aback that Helen Keller was a radical when I started reading more about American left movements. I was never taught that as a child or young adult. I'm not surprised that her disabilities were used against her when she came out as one.

 

[Varna]

Old news to me. But I never even once learned a bit of this in school.

 

[KingK]

I'm also curious, is this actually a lie Americans are told? While they spared us plenty of details in school here (as they did with most of history), we certainly weren't told that Columbus' 'discovery' of the New World was a positive event, or that Columbus was a good man. Quite the opposite.

At my school, Colombus was presented as a rather inoffensive explorer, definitely not a monster with evil intentions. The deaths of natives was entirely attributed to diseases Europeans unknowingly brought with them to the New World.

 

[NotMyRealName]

Worst part of it all is, Columbus wasn't even that unusual in his cruelty. The brutality of many European colonizers of the new world is matched by few in history :/.

That said, this I'm quite confident is rather misleading:


Because that population decline is almost certainly overwhelmingly due to a genocidal weapon Europeans didn't even know they had, germs. Tens of millions of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas were killed by diseases introduced by Europeans :/.

I'm also curious, is this actually a lie Americans are told? While they spared us plenty of details in school here (as they did with most of history), we certainly weren't told that Columbus' 'discovery' of the New World was a positive event, or that Columbus was a good man. Quite the opposite.

I remember reading this same slight of hand junk data from a Howard Zinn novel when I was in college. Pretty much ruined the entire book's legitimacy.

 

[paile]

So basically a genocidal maniac is considered to be one of the greatest explorers in history?

History written by the victors right? I wonder what else of history is bullshit? Probably most of it. All you gotta do is write it in a book, repeat it over and over and get some 'experts' to talk about it enough and it seems you can conjure any tale you like.

 

[maharg]

I really dislike that Oatmeal comic (and the earlier, very similar one about Edison) that gets thrown around in this kind of conversation. We shouldn't need to find some heroic parallel figure and whitewash them in order to recognize how horrible Columbus was. Just say Columbus was a douchebag and be done with it.

 

[Cocaloch]

So basically a genocidal maniac is considered to be one of the greatest explorers in history?

History written by the victors right? I wonder what else of history is bullshit? Probably most of it. All you gotta do is write it in a book, repeat it over and over and get some 'experts' to talk about it enough and it seems you can conjure any tale you like.

Yup you figured it out. All historians are crazy idiots. Don't confuse the drivel you read in history textbooks with the field.

On topic, he did things that are bad. Things I would never want people to do. That being said I don't understand why every history thread on neogaf devolves into moralizing. What is the rhetorical goal of the people calling him a monster? Blaming him for slavery and primitive accumulation, the second one isn't even really accepted as a thing in current historiography, seems outright bizarre to me. Oh and the argument that he didn't discover america for Europeans is a pretty silly one. He was the one who made Europeans aware of the existence of the Western Hemisphere. The norse had more or less forgotten about it. Heck most Europeans didn't even know anything about Scandinavia until after Olaus Magnus.

 

[HomerSimpson-Man]

I find it incredible that my childhood education (90s kid) completely glossed over the fine details like this and to even have a holiday for this monster. Even what he was famous for wasn't even close to being true to begin with.

 

[mantidor]

I can see where you're coming from. Illuminating the (now dessicated) Columbus myth shouldn't be conflated as being a comprehensive proxy debate about colonization in the New World - which is a far more complex and wide-ranging topic than one man's atrocities, whatever precedent they set. I do find the discomfort that illumination sometimes causes odd, however.

Well I personally didn't know much about him until recent years to be honest, is just that it not only did not surprised me, guys like Pizzarro or Cortez by far outdid him in atrocities, so the sensationalist title of "one of the worst monsters humanity has ever conceived" it's so hyperbolic is almost funny.

 

[maharg]

Well I personally didn't know much about him until recent years to be honest, is just that it not only did not surprised me, guys like Pizzarro or Cortez by far outdid him in atrocities, so the sensationalist title of "one of the worst monsters humanity has ever conceived" it's so hyperbolic is almost funny.

Is it really useful somehow to make this comparison? Whether to make it in the first place (which the kind of statement you're paraphrasing only does indirectly) or to try to debunk it (which involves making the comparison explicit)? What's on the line here?

 

[MattKeil]

Thread filed under common knowledge, surely?

Not in the United States. The vast majority of Americans would find the information in the OP new to them, and many of them probably wouldn't accept it as true anyway.

 

[Toxi]

Of course there people here are defending this guy. It's a thread that's remotely related to race, so of course the defense force comes out.

We've already had "the accounts are exaggerated", "it wasn't that bad in context", and "bububut slavery already existed." What else ya got?

I still am wondering how the hell a guy who raped children and mutilated slaves has a defense force.

I want to know how far this rabbithole goes.

 

[Mgoblue201]

Worst part of it all is, Columbus wasn't even that unusual in his cruelty. The brutality of many European colonizers of the new world is matched by few in history :/.

That said, this I'm quite confident is rather misleading:


Because that population decline is almost certainly overwhelmingly due to a genocidal weapon Europeans didn't even know they had, germs. Tens of millions of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas were killed by diseases introduced by Europeans :/.

I'm also curious, is this actually a lie Americans are told? While they spared us plenty of details in school here (as they did with most of history), we certainly weren't told that Columbus' 'discovery' of the New World was a positive event, or that Columbus was a good man. Quite the opposite.

The population estimates shouldn't be taken too seriously either. Hispaniola (not just Haiti) could have had a population of eight million, but it also could have been one or two million. Loewen makes it sound far more certain than it actually is. This passage from a Charles C. Mann article is the perfect riposte to this sort of speculation:

"It's an absolutely unanswerable question on which tens of thousands of words have been spent to no purpose," Henige says. In 1976 he sat in on a seminar by William Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer. An "epiphanic moment" occurred when he read shortly afterward that scholars had "uncovered" the existence of eight million people in Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of people? he wondered. "We can make of the historical record that there was depopulation and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases," he says. "But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like that—applying large figures like ninety-five percent—we're saying things we shouldn't say. The number implies a level of knowledge that's impossible."

If Loewen is going to cite these figures, he should also mention that the scholars who came up with them also tend to consider disease the largest cause of depopulation, not a mere secondary cause as Loewen suggests. Of course, this shouldn't diminish the misery that the colonizers wrought purposefully and directly. Colonial oppression was every bit as gruesome as it's made out to be.

 

[vas_a_morir]

Not in the United States. The vast majority of Americans would find the information in the OP new to them, and many of them probably wouldn't accept it as true anyway.

Puh-lease. Columbus has been on the shit-list for at least 20 years. I haven't seen a positive portrayal of Columbus since I was in 2nd grade, when they just said 'he discovered America (the hemisphere).'.

 

[Vibranium]

Yep, the guy was a massive scumbag/mass-murderer and should remembered as such through history, as well as pretty much all of the explorers/colonists of the new world. Killing fellow humans through greed, racism, etc.

During my Canadian social studies classes we talked about this and never glossed over it, which I'm super happy about even though it didn't surprise me at all. We learned about how a ton of leaders in Canada were pretty terrible too, I'm glad for that.

 

[Platy]

Took me a good while that you were talking about the america dude, not the Harry Potter director

Fuck translated names =|

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

 

[The Albatross]

Because in the US, they like to pretend that the Natives simply vanished or something, not they were wiped out by various countries including our own. Everyone pretty much ignores the existence of Natives until it comes time to bitch about casinos or gripe about pressure to change a football teams name.

You should ask for a refund from the internet high school that you got your diploma from, because the disgusting history that the US Gov't and settlers have had with Native Americans has been a central theme of US history public school curriculum for some 30+ years.

 

[Deleted member 13876]

They should rename it Chris Columbus day and have everyone watch Gremlins.

Hmm. FOR.

 

[jsnepo]

It's funny seeing this thread since it's only recent that I watched Ridley Scott's 1492.

 

[Rafterman]

You should ask for a refund from the internet high school that you got your diploma from, because the disgusting history that the US Gov't and settlers have had with Native Americans has been a central theme of US history public school curriculum for some 30+ years.

Exactly.

Either people talking about stuff like this don't actually remember what they were taught in school or they had a vastly different curriculum than what I was taught in both middle and high school, over 20 years ago. The Columbus stuff I might buy being glossed over, especially if we are talking about elementary school, which is when kids are introduced to him. The Native American stuff, I'm not buying that anyone wasn't taught that awful history. The idea that we pretend they vanished is absurd, everyone knows what happened to them and they didn't find out on television, they learned it in school.

 

[aceface]

As I understand it, Europeans had been treating each other in similarly shitty ways for the whole of the Middle Ages. Serfs were more or less property of the lords to do with as they pleased, and why should they treat the natives any differently? Although, the natives didn't get any benefit of the doubt cause they weren't Christian.

 

[maharg]

Exactly.

Either people talking about stuff like this don't actually remember what they were taught in school or they had a vastly different curriculum than what I was taught in both middle and high school, over 20 years ago. The Columbus stuff I might buy being glossed over, especially if we are talking about elementary school, which is when kids are introduced to him. The Native American stuff, I'm not buying that anyone wasn't taught that awful history. The idea that we pretend they vanished is absurd, everyone knows what happened to them and they didn't find out on television, they learned it in school.

My experience in Canadian school during the 80s was that most of the basic untruths about Columbus himself were repeated uncritically (particularly that he discovered that the world is round and was trying to prove this against all odds). A lot of time was spent on the misjustices perpetrated on the indigenous population, but in a very abstract no one is to blame kind of way. There was certainly no singling out of any particular conquistadors, explorers, or british governments as being particularly horrible, it was largely just "we bought their land for 10 pelts and a truckload of booze and then we gave them infected blankets".

If this has changed in the meantime I largely expect it to be changing back as the current government is quite intent on whitewashing various bad things about Canadian history.

 

[Liljagare]

NM!

 

[Opiate]

In what context does rape, torture, and murder make someone an admirable person? How are you "supposed to" read these facts? The title is my own, the author is simply pointing out how appalling it is that American students are often ignorant of the facts. You can't form proper context with half truths.

Edit: please tell me you weren't being sarcastic due to your tag.

I just don't think you're looking at this the right way. From some perspectives, Columbus is a hero and an important discoverer. From other, more accurate perspectives, he's a monster. It really just depends on your point of view here.