>>Last year I asked, Should Columbus be Celebrated? It is a controversial question, since that day in 1492 meant the eventual end of many cultures in the Western Hemisphere.
Stone Age cultures, most of which were still hunter-gatherers. When did liberals abandon Darwinism?
He wasn’t a villain. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room. But he was no villain.
“It is a controversial question, since that day in 1492 meant the eventual end of many cultures in the Western Hemisphere.”
There is scarcely a historical figure in world history that involved movements of people that did not mean the end of many cultures.
The conquering tribes in the Western Hemisphere not only ended cultures, they annihilated the people with them.
Political correctness reigns.
I recommend The Colombia Affair by Steve Berry. The book is fiction; the history is not. Colombus, as he relates to the discovery of America, is as big a myth as Lincoln.
Sounds like a democrat.
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So, people can claim that others made it to North America before him and it probably did happen, but Columbus got the massive exchange going like no one else.
With diseases - Europe gave the natives smallpox and the natives gave the Europeans syphilis.
Columbus wasn’t much a a villain but the Spanish he brought in and their culture at the time were villains. Remember that the Spanish were pretty much reviled by the rest of the world because of their approach to anyone not Spanish Catholic.
On the other hand, the Spanish didn’t do anything to any group of Indians than the individual tribes did to each other. The idea that Indian tribes all lived in harmony with each other is as big a load of crap as the idea that anywhere an Indian took a dump is sacred ground.
Migration and conquest is an enduring part of human history and there is no turning back. Tribal associations always lead to intertribal warfare and the eventual collapse of whatever civilization they have built. They need to move on.
Columbus was a trailblazer and a hero. We, the USA, would not be here if it wasn’t for his actions. That it lead to enlightenment or death for savages in the Americas is a result of actions by others later. Celebrate Columbus!
America would have been discovered by 1500 at the latest (Cabral) with or without Columbus with all of the same destruction that occurs when Stone Age people living in desirable locations encounter more advanced civilizations.
However, very few people’s accomplishments have changed the history of humanity more than Columbus’s. To ignore him is foolish. To pretend that the discovery of the Americas was, all in all a bad thing is downright evil.
It was a different World in 1492 ,you can’t compare it with today ,well maybe with the Middle East
That is a specious argument blaming Columbus, if not him someone else would have soon found the same route. You can't put the Genie back in the bottle once it's out and exploration and the search for new wealth was only increasing.
This whole Columbus thing is another attempt to inflict guilt on “whitey.” Alistair MacLean wrote about Captain Cook thus:
“Here was the man, the cynics would say, who was going to open up the Pacific to the benefits and riches of Western civilization. Whole books have, in fact, been written roundly condemning Cook for the ever-lasting damage he was responsible for wreaking on the Pacific. Alas, merely because a man can write a book doesn’t mean that he can’t be silly, and such writers are very silly indeed. If it hadn’t been Cook, it would have been someone else. Could anyone possibly be so naive as to imagine that if Cook had never lived that the Pacific would still be a trackless and undiscovered waste?” Source: Captain Cook by Alistair MacLean, page 48. Just so. If it hadn’t been Columbus it would’ve been someone else. This crap is getting old. And how about that quaint multicultural practice of the Aztecs ripping out hearts and eating flesh? The Western Hemisphere wasn’t exactly a Garden of Eden before Cristoforo Colombo arrived, was it?
Now that would be celebrating diversity.