Columbus Day - Celebrate Crimes Against Humanity

Discussion in 'History' started by Shale, Oct 12, 2014.

  1. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    but most especially he wasn't the people who crossed the bearing streight and sailed the south pacific, at least eleven thousand years earlier.
     
  2. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    Why most especially? Was the earliest migration of bigger significance? :D Is his crossing of the atlantic ocean with a wooden ship less impressive than a bunch of people walking a shitload of miles over ice? ;)
     
  3. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    i would have to say so, yes. if we're talking about "discovering" anything, for one thing.
     
  4. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    How so? When Columbus discovered it for the europeans it was just as big of a discovery for those people as it was for those who crossed the pacific and bering sea. No one here knew of those continents. So why would you have to say so indeed? :)

    In fact: the people who stayed behind in Russia/Asia/Polynesia most likely didn't get any knowledge of their relatives' discovery. So why is the one more significant than the other?
     
  5. Shale

    Shale ~

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    I had forgotten that I started this shit last year.

    Oh, well.

    SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
    This Indigenous Peoples' Day


    In the fervor to get all those Rebel Battle Flags off of government property in the South, some ppl also want to take down all those old statues, such as those of Generals Robert E. Lee and G. T. Beauregard in New Orleans.


    Well, not going to waste too much energy fighting that, since New Orleans is history to me and not my city any more but considering that the city was a part of the confederacy, the statues are not entirely out of place. There are references to the French & Spanish who owned that city at one time or another. I see the confederacy as just another part of the history of one of our oldest cities and should just let it be.

    However, if we cannot tolerate those monuments of ppl who have gone out of favor, then Chris Columbus is a good candidate to tear down as well. Then, we can take J. Edgar Hoover off of all those FBI buildings across the United States, because he was a despicable abuser of civil rights. Oh, and back to New Orleans - what about that statue of Andrew Jackson in Place d'Armes. He too was a genocidal murderer of thousands of Native Americans both as a military general and as POTUS.
    Or, just let it slide.

    But Srsly, change the holiday to Indigenous Peoples' Day to not honor Columbus but acknowledge the reality of his impact on the natives he encountered.





    [​IMG]
     
  6. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    Personally I think any removal of a historic monument is unneccessary and more often a shame than not. This does not mean we can't come to new conclusions about historic figures btw ;) But wether or not we do so we still can leave the monuments alone in order to show what people before us valued for centuries. In fact, I think such removal can easily be compared to rewriting historic novels or history in general for PC (e.g. the wrong) reasons.
    We can adjust or image of Columbus without removing historic artifacts and monuments.
     
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  7. BlackBillBlake

    BlackBillBlake resigned HipForums Supporter

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    ^These statues represent attitudes as much as people. In coming to terms with the past and the abuses of the past, removal of some of them would seem to me to be about right.

    Not saying anyone should be airbrushed out of history, but some of those who were honoured in past times as heroes of one kind or another would not be regarded as such today by a great many people. Columbus is a prime example, but there are many others.

    We should remember the past, but maybe we should look carefully at those we hold in esteem from the past. Many of these idols have feet of clay.
     
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  8. Vanilla Gorilla

    Vanilla Gorilla Go Ape

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    Where does everyone get the idea those indigenous populations were peace loving and child like?

    Columbus wouldnt have been in the Bahamas long enough, or mingle with the natives enough to have a clue

    The original migrations down from asia into the americas and south pacific would have been spurned by successive cases of people feeing various war mongering tribes
     
  9. Vanilla Gorilla

    Vanilla Gorilla Go Ape

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    Australia is a unique case becuase the 'slaves' were white, so they didnt really need to enslave the local population

    Whats not really talked about as its not terribly PC, is that what happened for the most part, especially in Tasmania is that whites brought a power imbalance and new diseases, and apart from things like smallpox, it was the indigenous popultions that wiped each other out
     
  10. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    i think if his own logs were translated into english and people read them, that columbus day everywhere would be turned into indiginous people's day instead.

    i don't think that any reasonable person could read his own accounts of what he did, without it turning their stomic.
     
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  11. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    It seems many people, besides that most are not fully aware of the details of this conquest, apply some distinctions on the person Columbus and the impact of his journey(s). It is really not so that they are glorifying his nasty deeds and those of the people he was responsible for (at least not in my experience, maybe it is different in America). They are celebrating the discovery for the europeans and the huge impact it had on the world. This would most likely not totally diminish when people would be fully aware of what happened on Columbus' expeditions as it does not change the fact how much this discovery influenced Europe, the americas and frankly the whole world. So that's why it seems to me there are statues of the guy and a Columbus day. He had the tenacity to whine at the courts of european kings and queens for an expedition over the atlantic ocean until he got it and it had a significant impact on world history wether we like it or not.
     
  12. Shale

    Shale ~

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    From the Huffington Post Article:

    "Columbus Day, as we know it in the United States, was invented by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization. Back in the 1930s, they were looking for a Catholic hero as a role-model their kids could look up to. In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt signed Columbus Day into law as a federal holiday to honor this courageous explorer. Or so we thought.

    There are several problems with this. First of all, Columbus wasn't the first European to discover America. As we all know, the Viking, Leif Ericson probably founded a Norse village on Newfoundland some 500 years earlier. So, hat's off to Leif. But if you think about it, the whole concept of discovering America is, well, arrogant. After all, the Native Americans discovered North America about 14,000 years before Columbus was even born! Surprisingly, DNA evidence now suggests that courageous Polynesian adventurers sailed dugout canoes across the Pacific and settled in South America long before the Vikings.

    Second, Columbus wasn't a hero. ..."
     
  13. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    The problems people have with the discovering part is really not a problem on itself. It is made an issue because some people went and discovered it first. But fact is most people in the world didn't knew shit about that. So yes, cool that some guy named Leif was the first known european to reach the americas, but it doesn't make the discovery of the americas (island, continent, just the fact that is was there) by the spanish any less significant. Maybe if you're a fan of the guinnes book of records it matters to you but otherwise I don't see the problem there. It is simply turned into an extra problem mostly by people who have a problem with Columbus.
     
  14. BlackBillBlake

    BlackBillBlake resigned HipForums Supporter

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    The fact that 'in fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue' is obviously a part of history. It was in a history lesson at school I learned that rhyme. But we were taught nothing about the people who already lived in the Americas, other than that they smoked tobacco, didn't wear too many clothes and ate potatoes. The fate they suffered at the hands of Columbus and his cronies was never mentioned, but skipped over in the crowded curriculum, and overall the tone was that this was a good and progressive thing that happened.

    Triumphalist. And that's really the attitude expressed in statues of Columbus.
    Because the statue is there, and because of the shallow nature of modern education, many people who look at the statue will assume he was OK. Beyond reproach. One of the good guys.

    But I think one's attitude towards all this will be determined by one's attitude towards indigenous cultures in general, and their relation to imperialist forces in the past and in the present.
    My view is that some feeling of repentance on the part of the imperialist powers would be very much in order. Admit that there were terrible abuses. Cease to celebrate those who enacted them. Make reparations where that's feasible. (note that Jamaica won't be getting the reparations they were demanding from the UK government following Cameron's recent visit there - a scumbag whose own family evidently profited from the slave trade))

    The UK is littered with statues I'd like to see removed - but let's not go there at the moment.

    .
     
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  15. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    where is from is own logs and the accounts of those where were with him. he also returned four times, with an army of thugs, and began the slave trade. his treatment of the people he met there would make hitler blush. murder, torture, rape, as a matter of course. all for gold for spain to pay more thungs to make more wars.

    the whole reason he was on his way to india was to do the same thing there. so the carribian got in his way. target of opportunity.

    indigenous cultures were and are as diverse as dominant ones today. if anything even more so. conflating peaceful with childlike is itself a cultural prejudice and assumption, however, again from his own logs, those he exploited by torture and rape, had been at peace, and considerate of each other, and obviously nieve of the ways of war.

    now this argument that we would could never advance without being belligerently inclined, is nothing more then making excuses for attrocities, and as long as we continue to make excuses for them, they continue to occur. and the truth is none of them have ever had to. and as far as being advanced by them, a rather well known thousand years interuption and impediment to advancement, a little thing called the middle ages, was precesly the result, and given the excuse of divine commision, of this attitude and excuse of our having and requiring a belligerent nature.
     
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  16. 6-eyed shaman

    6-eyed shaman Sock-eye salmon

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    I agree with this to an extent. While history has been extremely kind to Columbus with all the monuments they have built in his honor despite all his atrocities, society can build Anti-Columbus monuments instead. Something that depicts the brutal atrocities of a false hero.

    For Example: In Portland, OR there is an Anti-Government monument in the waterfront park that memorializes the Japanese internment camps that were set up by the Roosevelt admin during WWII
     
  17. Gongshaman

    Gongshaman Modus Lascivious

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    What makes it "anti-govornment"?
     
  18. 6-eyed shaman

    6-eyed shaman Sock-eye salmon

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    I think it's anti-government because it paints a reminder that our own leadership is capable of committing acts of tyranny at the expense of the lives of its own innocent citizens. Often it's true stories like these that are often swept under the rug and forgotten about.

    Visiting a memorial seems to leave a much bigger impact on people than merely reading about it in a book.
     
  19. Gongshaman

    Gongshaman Modus Lascivious

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    Well in some peoples minds the internment was nessesary to insure the safety of the country. The japanese employed some pretty nefarious tactics during that war, and though I feel badly for those American citizens that were of japanese decent, or immigrants, I can understand where our leaders were coming from. They just couldn't take the chance.
     
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  20. scratcho

    scratcho Lifetime Supporter Lifetime Supporter

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    Hawaii was discovered by Polynesians sailing BIG catamarans from Tahiti north through the Marquesas and then on to discover Hawaii. Greatest sailors in human history, IMO. I don't agree that they came from the north.

    I don't think history should be hidden or changed by removing statues or other remnants of the past. What happened throughout the past should be preserved and kept for future generations to reflect on, good or bad. The STORIES can and should change regarding Columbus, and any and all others that brought terror and disruption to indigenous populations anywhere.

    Future generations need to know-George Wallace standing in the doorway proclaiming "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever." They need to know that a certain segment of the population detested the Kennedys enough to kill them. They need to know how black people got here and the ramifications/results of their ongoing struggles. They need to know what the Spanish conquistadors did in South America.The holocaust Etc,etc,etc. History should not be hidden, lest repetition proves the insanity
    of us all, especially in those that "lead."
     
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