There's a movement in the US to change the holiday to "Indigenous People's Day." That might not be as a catchy or popular, but there's a strong case to quit celebrating Columbus, the original ISIS leader. See also: 9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel Is there any way this isn't as bad as it seems?
I was in the DR. a few years back and let's just say, they don't like Columbus verry much in the Caribbean.
We had an all staff meeting at my company on Tuesday, and a 22 year old made this suggestion, explaining to all of us old fucks in the room all about why she refuses to celebrate Columbus, etc. Believe it or not, this debate has been around for a few decades. Anyway, my main thought was that she's kind of immature to think this is the most important thing to discuss. Due to a scheduling conflict, I missed the management team meeting later in the day, where apparently her idea was discussed and adopted. So I am now enjoying Indigenous People's weekend, or something. A day off is a day off, whatever.
Most of that is utter BS made up by Hearst to stir up the Spanish American war. I can't believe it's still repeated. For example: 56 years after Columbus's first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 Indians remained on Hispaniola Which is nonsense because only 12 percent of Hispaniola now has European mitochondrial DNA. The 150 surviving Indian women must have had 5,000 babies each. The Taino who make up 2/3rds of Hispanola's population are pretty irritated at being declared extinct by each new generation of while American college idiots.
Meh, no loss. Like all the other non-religious long-weekend holidays, it's just an excuse to sell cars and mattresses... Poor @Soma. No one will even sell him a mattress...
I've heard this argument for years and I shrugged it off as "welp, 1492 sucked for everyone." The more I hear, the more it seems like this goes way beyond that. He's got a place in the history books and even for being a shitty human being I think that's worth acknowledging. But it's kinda what I feel for Lincoln: his heroism is grossly exaggerated (which for Columbus is putting it lightly). I'm all for renaming the holiday.
How the fuck did you avoid being in the dumb rep spam group? It can't be because you are smarter than they are. Perhaps you pissed in dim bulb's cherios.
Not that I really celebrated the man to begin with, but I am all for spitting on his grave considering what sort of person he was.
And what sort of person was he? Most of what we believe is vicious anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic propaganda aimed at bolstering US interests in the Caribbean and Latin America. A lot of it is lies, such as that the entire Indian population of Hispaniola was slaughtered, with not a single survivor. Even now Wikipedia says: The Taíno became nearly extinct as a culture following settlement by Spanish colonists, primarily due to infectious diseasesto which they had no immunity. The first recorded smallpox outbreak in Hispaniola occurred in December 1518 or January 1519. The 1518 smallpoxepidemic killed 90% of the natives who had not already perished.[Warfare and harsh enslavement by the colonists had also caused many deaths.[9] By 1548, the native population had declined to fewer than 500, and within 150 years of contact the Taino were extinct. Except for the millions Taino who still live there, and their culture and their language, with words we still use like "hurricane", "Caribbean", "Haiti", "Cuba", and "iguana", and some really strange religious voodoo.
We only really celebrate Columbus because at the time it was to thumb our noses at England. Other than that, we might celebrate John Cabot Day. As a member of a Lakota tribe, I can't say as I feel all that strongly about this proposal. Columbus was definitely a monster, and there really isn't much positive to say about him. Seems to me his own men mutinied against him, and that he was actually imprisoned by the Spanish government for being incompetent at the whole being a governor thing. I don't think we should have a holiday celebrating him anymore than Jackson should be on our currency, but it's not really something I'm real worked up about or feel is a big priority or anything. For what it's worth, the holiday is largely ignored anyway.
How about Leif Ericson Day instead? If we must celebrate a European Explorer "discovering" an already populated land....
I think we should celebrate the first Asians who crossed the Bering land bridge. There's a village in Siberia that has a direct link to one of our tribes. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080326-language-link.html
You should judge people of a different era by the standards of that era and not modern sensibilities. Columbus was one hell of a great navigator. Getting across the Atlantic four times and back in ships that were optimized for the far different Mediterranean Sea.
And yet nothing really special when compared to other explorers of the day, or when one considers Leif Erikson and other Vikings doing it centuries prior.
Part of exploration is leaving records of your work so it benefits those who follow. I don't recall Erikson leaving much in the way of accounts of their voyages. In all sciences and missions of discovery, isn't documentation of critical importance?
He did. How do you think we even know about it at all? He called it Vinland. It's just that it's only been in the last 100 years or so that the significance of what records there are has been recognized and has been interpreted to be Newfoundland, in part due to archeological evidence.
Yeah, but that's like the Canadian professor who invented rocket travel in the 1860's, but nobody read his book, so Tsiolkovsky and Goddard got the credit. His work had been misfiled as theology because it talked about the cosmos and stuff.
And? Was it his or was it Columbus' voyage that lead to the chain of events which lead to the creation of the USA?
You have to admit, though, that there's a difference between the Vikings' island hopping exploration and striking out directly across the Atlantic at its widest point, maintaining latitude, and measuring longitudinal progress. Columbus as a navigator accomplished something far in excess of what his predecessors did. And as others have pointed out, his voyage set off a chain of events that created the modern world. Plenty of ugliness in service of that result, no doubt. But a unified world civilization is traceable to Columbus, not Erickson, not the Africans who crossed to South America, and not the Chinese explorers who visited the Grand Canyon.
The "who discovered the Americas first?" is not unlike the "who flew the first manned airplane?" question. There have been a whole bunch of claims that someone flew an airplane BEFORE the Wright brothers. One or two of those claims might even be valid. But it was the Wright brothers who kept careful records, had witnesses, and hell even photographed the first flight.
Many years ago a fellow security guard (a cranky middle aged dickhead) tried to tell me the automobile was invented in Russia and driven across the frozen Bering Sea to Alaska, where we stole the idea & claimed it as our invention.
He might've been confused by a famous auto race from New York to Paris that of course took place across Russia as well. The Americans won even though the German car got to Paris several days earlier (the Germans had been penalized for putting their car on a train part of the way).
