Celebration of a Psychopath

[marmar]

Published on Oct 6, 2015

Monday, October 12th is Columbus Day, which we have celebrated in this country since the eighteenth century… and that’s probably long enough. When you find out the actual facts of what Columbus did when he got to America, you’ll find one of the darkest chapters in American history. Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola (Think Tank), hosts of the The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

"Second, Columbus wasn't a hero. When he set foot on that sandy beach in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, Columbus discovered that the islands were inhabited by friendly, peaceful people called the Lucayans, Taínos and Arawaks. Writing in his diary, Columbus said they were a handsome, smart and kind people. He noted that the gentle Arawaks were remarkable for their hospitality. "They offered to share with anyone and when you ask for something, they never say no," he said. The Arawaks had no weapons; their society had neither criminals, prisons nor prisoners. They were so kind-hearted that Columbus noted in his diary that on the day the Santa Maria was shipwrecked, the Arawaks labored for hours to save his crew and cargo. The native people were so honest that not one thing was missing.

Columbus was so impressed with the hard work of these gentle islanders, that he immediately seized their land for Spain and enslaved them to work in his brutal gold mines. Within only two years, 125,000 (half of the population) of the original natives on the island were dead.”*

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

[Stargazer99]

1. Who are we kidding that is the American way via corporations

[FlatBaroque]

2. Exactly

Columbus the template of American values AFAIC

[raccoon]

3. You won't get any argument from me on this one. nt

[ryan_cats]

4. I honestly

I honestly thought this was going to be about Trump.

The Arawaks had no weapons; their society had neither criminals, prisons nor prisoners.

I find that to be unpossible.

[1939]

6. The Arawaks lived in fear of attacks from other Native Americans

One of the things that aided the Spanish conquest of Mexico was the fact that the Aztecs were so violent, aggressive, and oppressive that the other tribes gladly helped the Spanish conquer the Aztecs. The idea that the Americas were an idyllic paradise is modern day revisionism. Life in the Americas was nasty, brutish, and short long before Columbus.

The most fatal result was the inadvertent introduction of European epidemic diseases to a "virgin" population with no genetic immunity. The Spanish weren't trying to kill the natives as they wanted them for labor on their plantations. The Spanish were as appalled at the death rate of the native populations as were the natives.

[marmar]

7. "labor on their plantations."

Last edited Mon Oct 12, 2015, 12:06 PM - Edit history (1)

You mean slaves.


And as for the benevolent Spanish who were so horrified by the Native-on-Native violence, the stories of genocide by the Spanish are from Columbus' own diaries.

[1939]

10. Yes, there was killing of Native Americans by Europeans

But it was the exception rather than the rule. The entire hemisphere was depopulated by the ravages of disease.

[malaise]

11. FFS

Indigenous people were slaughtered by Europeans everywhere.

No one is suggesting that there weren't fights among different indigenous tribes but stop the fugging revisionism re the European slaughter.

[1939]

13. Read "Plagues and Peoples" by McNeil

It will open your eyes o some of the historical happenstances.

The English could never have maintained their colonies at Plymouth and Jamestown without the massive depopulation caused by Native American deaths from epidemic disease caused by their contacts with European fishermen and explorers during the years 1550-1600. There were deserted and abandoned villages all along the eastern seaboard. The existing decimated tribes along the seaboard welcomed the Europeans as allies against the still strong tribes of the interior.

[Marr]

15. That simply isn't true.

Here's an account from an unusually honest eyewitness to Columbus' work in Hispaniola, a monk named Bartolomé de Las Casas:

… whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying “Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.” They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.

The Spanish actively slaughtered the indigenous people.

[Spider Jerusalem]

21. It's absolutely true

Smallpox, measles and influenza are estimated to have killed 90% of the Native American population in successive epidemics between 1500 and 1900. There simply weren't enough Spaniards to do that. Yes, the Spaniards committed atrocities, but they weren't what killed most of the natives in the New World. (They didn't even kill most of the inhabitants of Hispaniola; successive epidemics of swine flu and smallpox did that.)

[Marr]

22. Of course disease killed a lot of indigenous peoples.

I was referring to the other poster's claim that the Spaniards 'weren't trying to kill the natives'. They most certainly were, and did, in huge numbers. The fact that disease was a more efficient killer doesn't mean the Spaniards weren't also giving it the old college try.

[applegrove]

17. Within weeks of Europeans arrival everywhere the locals

would start to throw up and die with influenza they had never seen before. Such a tragedy. For sure someone with the values of Columbus would today be considered psychopathic. That is how far humans have come in the last 500+ years. Even 200 years ago the British were handing out 'smallpox blankets' to indigenous people in North America. That is genocide. WW2 taught us that any group can still be murderers and collaborators. We need to be vigilant every generation.

[tabasco]

18. Damn. Pick up a book.

Not one of those Texas school books either.

[bullwinkle428]

12. "Workers", according to that textbook in Texas that received the scrutiny

in the last few days. Clearly, there are plenty willing to take that kind of crap as gospel.

[1939]

20. There was a differentiation by the Spanish

Between slaves which were individual property and those Indians which were a part of an "encomiendas" or land grant where the Indians were more like European serfs. In general, the church and the king both felt that the natives of Hispaniola should not be slaves so long as they became Christian. As the population declined, to obtain more labor, the Spanish raided other islands and rounded up "cannibals" which the Pope decreed were suitable for enslavement.

An extremely good read on the Spanish empire in the New World is the magisterial trilogy by Hugh Thomas. The first book in the trilogy "Rivers of Gold" covers the years 1490-1520.

Another good book on Columbus is "Columbus: The Four Voyages" by Laurence Bergreen which really updates the rather dated (1930s) account in "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" by Samuel Morison

A good account of the colonial and post-colonial eras in the Caribbean can be found in "Empire's Crossroads" by Carrie Gibson.

While Columbus was a determined conquerer and put down "rebellions" fiercely, the cruel and gratuitous barbarity against the Indians was primarily the result of Spanish mutinies against the rule of Columbus and his sons and those successors who usurped Columbus' positions and had him recalled in disgrace to Spain.

[Hortensis]

16. Now, now, 1939, don't impugn this noble native American tribe with

an unpleasantly broadened view of the realities of those days.

I wouldn't dream of pointing out that George Washington petitioned King George to give him and his partners ownership of a million or so acres in America. If granted, that would have turned all the settlers there, who had cleared that land of giant trees by hand and put their lives literally on the line for their dreams of farming their own land, into sharecroppers working Washington's land in return for enough of the crops to keep them going (but not enough to let them leave).

Fortunately for the future United States, King George gave the land to another group, and worry that lands he actually had "title" to would be given away was a big factor in Washington's rebellion against the monarchy.

That was just the way it was until then. Notably, though, this stubborn view of the natural rights of entitled people (Columbus and Washington) versus their inferiors (Arawaks and settlers) also lives on in to various degrees in most conservatives today, who do not really believe in the equality of all men and in their rights to life, liberty and happiness.

BTW, something like 40% of white indentured servants brought to the colonies died before they could earn their freedom. Most of those who survived lived to discover they'd been cheated, all workable farmland already taken by their superiors. That's just the way it was then, too.

[malaise]

5. Christopher Columbus -Black Uhuru

[yodermon]

8. Was this not SOP for colonialism?

I'm not trying to "normalize" it, and he certainly should not be celebrated, but was CC any more barbaric than other colonialists from other countries?

[Recursion]

27. No. Look at the Portuguese in India or Spain in the Philippines

Hell, there are still families in Goa and Mumbai named "D'Souza"... Colonialization did not always (or even usually) involve the wholesale extermination of the colonized.

[GummyBearz]

9. And now...

This continent has a starbucks on every other corner... add it to the list of crap he started

[snooper2]

14. We get these threads every year LOL, in a month we'll be getting the farm turkey threads

Why you eating that fucking factory farmed turkey!

You know what you are doing to the environment!

[Warren DeMontague]

19. I think there's a slight difference.

Last edited Tue Oct 13, 2015, 02:07 AM - Edit history (1)

We're adults, we can handle the truth even when it is different from what we may have learned in elementary school.

Simple fact is, Columbus was a pretty terrible dude, by any objective metric.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day


If I ran things, Giordano Bruno would have a holiday. I dont run things.

[Fumesucker]

23. I think it's safe to say that without Columbus history would have been different

More than likely different enough that none of us would be here now, even those of us from other continents than the Americas.

[Warren DeMontague]

24. I tend to disagree. If not Columbus it would have been someone else, not long after.

Maybe if the Spanish hadn't been Early adopters, so to speak, the names of a lot of towns in California would be different.

But the inquisition was dying, the renaissance was blooming, the age of enlightenment was coming. Europeans wouldn't have stayed in Europe forever.

[Fumesucker]

29. Yeah, but none of *us* would be here, it would be different people

If a different sperm got to the egg that formed me a fraction of a second before the one that actually did then I would not be here, it would be someone different with a different genetic makeup, maybe a man, maybe a woman but not me.

The fine grain of history is very important to our individual existences.

I'm reading Ian Kershaw's bio of Hitler right now and it''s clear that Hitler wasn't preordained to be who he was, he actually did want to be a painter and architect and if someone had bribed the Viennese art school to let him in history would have been profoundly different.

[Warren DeMontague]

30. it's an interesting thought experiment or philosophical question, and put simply I guess we just

don't know.

I mean, the number of potential variables which all coagulated to produce the exact set of circumstances we're in... mind boggling. Someone threw a gum wrapper that missed a garbage can, someone turned left on the way to work when they normally turned right. Your grandparents met by accident at the grocery store, whatever...

in terms of someone like Hitler (or Columbus) I guess much of the question boils down to whether or not history is driven by individuals or larger forces- without Hitler would the anti-semitism, economic distress, and simmering anger over WWI coalesced into Nazism, or not, or something different?

I suspect the truth is a mixture of some of each- individuals and larger forces- but since we're stuck with one set of outcomes, we'll never really know.

[Fumesucker]

34. The history of WWII would have been considerably different in detail without Hitler

Hitler's single biggest skill was as an orator in his particular place and his particular time, he could move the German people viscerally, he was also a pretty decent politician but as a supreme commander he largely sucked. I'm not sure Germany could have outright won WWII but they could damn well have dragged it on a lot longer than they did without a near lunatic at the controls.

People go round and round about this stuff in mind boggling detail in the alternate history newsgroup, I used to follow it some a long time ago. Ended up more interested in history as it's happening.

[Warren DeMontague]

36. I think if Nazi Germany had stayed at peace, or even allied with the USSR

The whole show would have turned out real different.

[Neoma]

33. And I wouldn't exist if Vietnam didn't happen.

Doesn't mean I'm completely thankful that war happened.

[Fumesucker]

35. To me it's an interesting point to ponder when we get self righteous about history

One of my cousins is into genealogy, turns out I've got some pretty good horrors in my own bloodline, it's a near certainty we all do.

[Major Nikon]

25. That will keep GD busy at least till the SI swimsuit edition is released

[Warren DeMontague]

31. THE WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

[marmar]

26. Some of us don't find holidays celebrating genocidal maniacs to be trivial or amusing.

[Recursion]

28. In 1490 the population of the Americas exceeded that of Europe

In 1590 it didn't.

That probably deserves thinking about, a lot, especially for those of us who live in the Americas.

[fadedrose]

32. Columbus Day

Went to Penney's yesterday for some Columbus Day bargains, but mostly to use coupons. Penney's has a good selection of kids' clothes which I need this weekend for birthday presents.

Then I went to Sears and there was no mention of Columbus Day or bargains like in Penney's.

I guess Columbus Day is a problem for merchants who don't want to offend Italians/Spain, and also for stores who don't want to offend groups who got here before Columbus, or the poor Native Americans who suffered greatly after Columbus "discovered" them.

I agree with Sears and didn't notice the lack of Columbus Day sales till I got in the store.