The Attrocities of Christopher Columbus
 

As per Lebell's request:

And if you still believe that countering a celebration of Christopher Columbus is nothing more than "holding onto the hurt of the past":
I'm not sure what commentary you might have been looking for here when you asked me to create this thread, lebell. I'll leave that to you.

HAHAHAHAH!!! Nice! Columbus deserves a holiday as much as Ghengis Kahn. Actually, I'd rather celebrate Ghengis Kahn day.

Columbus is, as said above, is a symbol of imperialism. He is nothing more.

Hey, that's a whole lot of text and post to read to find out what most of us already know. I think only pretty young kids still hold the impression that Columbus was someone to be admired. Most adults I know understand that 1. He didn't discover America, 2. He was greedy and cruel is his dealings with native peoples. Not much new here. Unless I am wrong about most adults already understanding this.

He did have enormous faith (or foolhardiness) to attempt a trans-atlantic crossing at a time when all of his contemporaries insisted that it couldn't be done.

I think you are wrong. Most don't understand the complexity of the history.


This too is a good point...



Ultimately, this is the main thing about history (hell even the news of things that happened yesterday), they are coloured by those who tell the story.

Manx, I consistently make an honest and fact filled effort to expose these of the "move on" mentality, to what is happening today in America, to expose them to the effects of what they voted for in 2000, and in 2004. I've reminded them that they are complicit and culpable for the support that they give to our alleged war criminals who hold national office. The reaction towards current events is as muted and evasive as the reaction that I predict you will receive from this thread, if you receive any reaction at all.

It's too unpleasant to contemplate, Manx, and impossible for the "move ons" to own up to, in any way. Much easier to rail against affirmative action, or the selfishness of the poor, and their leaders encourage them to do so.

Exposure to this mindset has helped me too, Manx, and this way of thinking has helped me to sleep at night. Why, just a few weeks ago, I discovered that I am directly descended from a man who owned and traded slaves. I was briefly concerned, but it happened a long time ago, and besides, my ancestor was a patriot who fought in the revolution, alongside one of his slaves.

Thanks to what I've learned on the TFP politics forum, I'll suspect that the evidence that he owned slaves isn't true, or has been exaggerated, or that the slaves he owned were better off than if they had to live back then as free men in colonial New England.
Manx, as you can read above, the apologist historian who wrote the "History of Wallingford", in 1870, described my great- x 8- grandfather's type of slaveholding as a "mild form".

It was a long time ago, and Abel was from my mother's side of my family;
with the different last name, and the fact that we aren't from the south,
I'm movin' on, Manx. I suggest that you try to, too.

edit:

Thread title changed per request of poster.

I'm in the Move on camp. Our great nation was born at the edge of the sword and the barrel of a gun, along with a few infected blankets. I realize it, I don't particularly like the fact, but I can't change it. History remembers the conquerers. The Indians plain and simple lost the war, the white man was smarter, we had better technology, deal with it.

Venni Vetti Vicci, too paraphrase a TV show, I suppose Caesar was too feel bad about his conquests, I suppose the Roman Empire and everything that was born of it was too be bound by the sins of the past. Imagine that boundless culpability. "I came, I saw, I felt bad".

For all intents and purposes Columbus was a douche lander, but you have to fucking accept that what's done is done.

Mojo - That's one way to deal with it.

Another would be to include this information when discussing the beginnings of Western imperialization of the New World.

And of course another would be to ignore this information entirely and celebrate Columbus as some kind of heroic figure. And you can take this one step further by criticizing anyone who would attempt to remind you of these facts.

So that's 2 options plus whatever "move on" means.

More guilt from ManX.

Man, you act like the West was the only civilization that has done horrible things to people in the past. Is it horrible what Colombus and the subsequent conquerers done to the natives? Of course it is. However, every civilazation has it's thugs, even the practioners of the Religion of Peace, even the Native Americans, even the Sub-Saharan Africans, even the Chinese, ect...

Was Colombus a hero for sailing West into the great unknown? Yes, so why shouldn't that be celebrated? Also, you mention that we need to "include this information when discussing the beginnings of Western imperialization of the New World". OK, fine, but teaching our children to feel guilt and hostility towards the West over something they or their parents had nothing to with doesn't do them or society any good

I always thought we celebrated Colombus day because he discovered the new world from the European point of view, not for conquering it. You know courageously going where no European man has gone before type of thing.

This opened the door for the Europeans to eventually take over the new continent which led to the formation of our nation. I can understand why the people who lived here do not find this a cause for celebration.

The real issue to me is that there is little we can do to change what happened hundreds of years ago.

No one is seriously suggesting that the existing governments of North and South America hand over the keys to their various nations, are they? No one to be taken seriously anyway.

At the same time, if we, as nations are currently against Imperialism, Genocide, etc. It is essential that we understand the actions taken in the past to create the nations in which we currently live.

Guilt? Possibly. It all depends on how you feel about what happened in the past. Ultimately there is nothing you can do to change the past. Like any understanding of history, the important thing is to try and learn from mistakes so we don't make them again.

Dwelling on the past means you to remain in the past. Learn the lesson and move on.

So basically you want to celebrate him and be proud of him, but you don't want to be remembered to his atrocities because those happend in the past?

Pretty much ;)


I think it is important to remember the atrocities, but not at the expense of what he had done for Western Civ. He's not the first to commit such horrid acts, but he was the first Westerner to cross into the great unknown and discover the New World for the West

You sound like any other right winger, You want to remember the good past and ignore the bad past.
I thought you right wingers are always so fond of the "whole picture" so you have to see Columbus as whole. Including his atrocities and the bit of luck he had to re-discover america.

I think you need to hold both ideas of Columbus in your head at the same time... Why should we have such a black and white view of things... Grey is often the reality of the situation.

Columbus should be celebrated for his achievements BUT only while acknowledging that his great achievements were tempered with some pretty horrible things... I see no need to white wash the past.

It is uncomfortable for many to accept that our ancesters were nasty people. The truth is it was a harsh place to live period.

You can get upset about slavery but many skim over the fact that slavery was practiced by just about everyone (i.e. blacks enslaved blacks and sold them to whites; The Grand Turk would enslave just about anyone who fell into his net). We tend to focus on what happened in the west without looking at the precidence.

I think we should remember the atrocities but we should also acknowledge the accomplishments. As an example we celebrate Abraham Lincoln for holding the union together and the end of slavery while at the same time remembering that he was a racist for most of his life. We can celebrate Colombus for his discovery while still remembering the atrocities.

He made the trains run on time? That's the worst excuse for genocide i've heard all week, and i've been reading Sudenese statements on the darfur.

Like so: 

No civilization is without evil and dastardly deeds. The Indians were not ALL peaceful, loving, kind peoples, some tribes were very, very cold and calculating and destroyed weaker tribes. It is how we survived. Whether you believe in evolution or not, the fact remains the strong survive and the weaker die off. IT IS NATURE AND IT IS HOW MAN HAS PROGRESSED AS FAR AS HE HAS.

Mankind whether we like it or not is a very agressive animal that lashes out and fights to conquer what is unknown or what will further their existence. It is our past and when we venture to the stars it may very well be our future.

To sit here 500+ years after Columbus and pass judgement on what he did is self-righteous ignorance. To say you would have treated the Indians better and that you are above the greed of the past is lieing either to yourself or to others. Who knows how we would have reacted in Columbus's shoes or what we would have done, to presuppose anything is the crime.

All we can do is learn from the past and move forward and hope we do not repeat the past. But we cannot make promises that we won't repeat past mistakes, after all we are only human and we are agressive, selfish and territorial by nature.

All we achieve, by bringing up the past and using it in ways to show how evil someone 500 years ago was, is division, resentments and allowing some to feel self righteous over others. It is bullshit and to say "we are doing it so we can learnfrom mistakes" is equally bullshit because to learn from mistakes we must learn why those mistakes were made, what situations were going on, in other words we must wear Columbus's shoes, the Indians shoes and the shoes of those who lost and profited most. And we must do this without any bias' and prejudgements. Then and only then can we see the whole picture and learn from it.

I can't reconcile the inherent contradictions in those two statements.

We need to learn from the past.

Bringing up the past is divisive.
And this one hurts my head ...

It's bullshit to claim bringing up the past is an attempt to learn from mistakes because we need to bring up the past in order to learn from mistakes.

Columbus was not the only Westerner to "discover" the Americas.

What about Amerigos Vespucci, Leif Ericson etc...I think there's even a claim that the Chinese have a settlement or naval base somewhere in America before Columbus...hmmmm....

Maybe Columbus is overated......

Anyways, acknowledge ALL his deeds, good and bad: we learn and move on but not forget. Sounds like a good idea to me, best of both worlds (pun intended).

Manx, don't let it hurt your head, it's not really worth it. :icare:

leif ericson wasn't able to set up a permanent colony or conquer the natives. all that's left to remember him are some sewing spindles and other archeological remains... (and i don't think it was until sometime in the 20th century that proof of his settlement was found).

amerigo vespucci just continued on with what columbus did, and a bit further north. a lot of lay people remember that it was alexander fleming who created penicillian (the first antibiotic), but who remembers the person who created the second, third or eigth?

i think credit shoudl be given to columbus where it is due, but it that doesn't mean that we need to overlook what he did (both good and bad) to accomplish it. there has to be a good mix of remembering his attrocities while not dwelling on them in the past. i just don't know what that mix is.

Sorry, let me explain.

If you sit there and show how evil Columbus was and discount the good he did, then you do a disservice to the past.

It's like bringing up one side of slavery and not mentioning how there were just as many in the US at the time running the underground RR or fighting to abolish slavery. So if we listen to those who fight for "reperations" we punish not just the people who profitted but those who did fight for the rights of ALL MEN.

If you only bring up one side to show the evil then you cannot learn because you have to show the positive that was also gained.

WW2 yes the Holocaust was horrendous but from there we learned how one small group can control a nation and almost destroy a whole religious entity not to mention the world.

I just can't get into looking at only the evil and not seeing something positive to grow and learn from.

Too many use too much energy to focus on the negative only takes away any energy and value to learn how to prevent such things from happening again.

I am simply trying to say we cannot change history, we cannot just focus on the evils, or punish the progeny for the mistakes of their ancestors. It truly does nothing but bring up more hatreds. All we can do is learn from the past.

It's like me working with addicts.... those that find recovery and grow into more productive people with better lives are the ones that realize they made mistakes but instead of focussing on what evils they did, they learn from the mistakes they made and work hard not to repeat them.

I have yet to see someone that focuses on their negatives and their past in a negative way find recovery and stay away from their addiction. More often than not those who focus on the negatives once they do try recovery relapse and dive further and deeper into the addiction because of the guilt.

That is what happens when we only focus on history (such as the above on Columbus) in only negative ways. Negativity begets negativity and nothing positive will ever grow from it.

In many cases those who only focus on the negative issues of history are doing so because of hate, anger or a desire to create problems today. They are not interested in trying to move forward and build a better planet.

That was a fantastic post, pan6467.

I've been holding back posting until I've seen a the responses and have had time to do the thread justice, but I had to say something about what you said.

preeminently well put, pan6467.

you hit this one out of the park.

memorable post, thanks.

Balance:
Pro: wonderful faith and great ambition led him to discover new continents for the Europeans and started the legacy that is now America, Canada, and all of the American countries. He was a brave explorer who's mistake planted the seeds of the west.
Con: he was extremly selfish and greedy, not placing any value on the lives of the natives. His mistake in searching for asian wealth lead to the extinctuion of many peoples and the eventual near extinction of the native American people.

An interesting thought: this thread is specifically about the attrocities of Christopher Columbus, yet people are outraged about the lack of the positive light on CC. I'm sure a post about how good Chritopher Columbus was would do fine, but that would be a different thread. This is about the poor decisions, selishness, and barbarism that CC carried out, and the resulting wars and deaths.

If you want a balance of good for the bad in this thread, go start The Acheivments of Christopher Columbus thread. This is about the attrocities.

This is your culture to beleive this, and i repect the sincerity with which you post, pan.

What i'll say is that we are a nation of fixers. We really think that human beings are capable of solving everything, and that we're obligated to. Most of the time, it inspires great acts. Some of the time...it inspires a very selective memory that has no time to grieve.

"Yes, the Holocaust was bad, but..."

That sentence is so typical, and so much the problem here. Do you really think that you can and should skip from the horror of the Shoah to the neatly packaged moral lesson in on sentece? I don't think so.

This fix-it-ness doesn't give us patience for dealing with complexity, and it even leads us to resent the people who make things complicated, who challenge our notion that we've moved on.

We haven't. This culture still exports violence with stunning regularity. We still ghettoize and defraud Native populations (The BIA is hideously mis-managed and loses trust money every year it seems). We didn't "fix it."

This addict is still shooting up. Focus on the future? Sure. Once we actually face up to what's happened...steps 5 and 8 really. We haven't done 'em.

I couldn't have put it better myself. Perfectly said.

So we should just all pay for the sins of our forebearers and not move on?

The world whether we argee politically and philosophically or not is a far better and more civilized place today than it was say 100 years ago or even 50 years ago.

Granted we are not perfect but we are in better shape as a planet. we are growing and we are learning and we do make mistakes and we do fall backward in some cases BUT we are striving forward in many ways.

To only focus on the negatives of the past and expect some magician to all of a sudden set everything right is detrimental and will never allow us progress.

IF you wallow in self pity and hatred of the past and demand immediate changes from society, you only turn those that wanted to help away, and those that stay are usually in it just for the power and greed.

You want things changed you don't keep rehashing the past.... you stand up and say we need to learn from the mistakes and not judge what others did in a time we were not alive in and have no idea how the people were educated to believe, react or what truly happened.

It's very easy to play armchair QB on a Monday or Tuesday and proclaim, "that this was wrong and this should have been done and blah blah blah and since it wasn't that way well we hold in disgrace and total disgust all that was done by these peoples."

In all honesty what does that achieve but trying to make YOU feel better and trying to score points with those who blame 100, 200, 300 years ago on their failures to advance. Are you changing anything? NO, you just condemn and offer solutions that cannot possibly happen.

What do you want? For all peoples of European ancestory to leave the Western Hemisphere? For every white man to beg forgiveness for slavery? What is your purpose? Am I supposed to walk around with my head down and be appologetic for my ancestors? I see nothing positive or noble in demanding the sons pay for the sins of the fathers when the sons are moving forward and trying to make the world better.

This is one of the most serious problems that is destroying the Democratic party. A minority wants to play holier than thou and point out every little thing in history that we did wrong. They offer no solutions, but they expect everyone else to feel bad and appologize and cry and give into the most ridiculous of demands.

Use your energies for positive change not trying to live on the past and expect everyone to see your way.

You say the culture still exports violence and poverty.... yes but where are your solutions that work .... all I see are fingers being pointed and refusals to see any of the true positive changes that have been made.

I never said to discount the Holocaust, I said we can learn from it, in positive ways. We can't condemn every German for it.

You make no sense to me.... which feeds your egos so you can believe you are enlightened.... but with enligthenment comes working solutions and I don't see you offering any, just hatreds and prejudices and angers over the past.

Move on and make the world better today and tomorrow.

The addict still shooting up is the one that refuses to work for a better future because he is lost in his past and finds it easier to repeat.

I do not see that of mankind as a whole. I see us striving forward, making mistakes and learning from them. To say otherwise, is just an excuse to keep putting the needle in your arm.... or worse yet to try to get others so wrapped up in the past that they take to the needle.

It's time to drop the needle make amends and move forward and live life as best as YOU can. You want change then work for change in a positive light, fighting for positive change and living in negativity will only bring about negative changes.

This thread is specifically about the attrocities of Christopher Columbus, yet people are outraged about the lack of the positive light on CC. I'm sure a post about how good Chritopher Columbus was would do fine, but that would be a different thread. This is about the poor decisions, selishness, and barbarism that CC carried out, and the resulting wars and deaths.

If you want a balance of good for the bad in this thread, go start The Acheivments of Christopher Columbus thread. This is about the attrocities.

If you want to move on, why are you posting? Are you telling other poeple to move on? You don't have to be bothered by reading about Christopher Columbus' terrible decisions. You can go whereever you want to go on TFP. You clicked on the title named "The Attrocities of Christopher Columbus". If you want people to move on, lead by example and stop trying to judge us for not ignoring a big part of our couyntries history.

"But Willravel, you can't just focus on the bad stuff. Yeah, it happened, but there was lots of other great stuff too! Move on!!" No. This thread isn't about moving on. This thread is about the attrocities of Christopher Columbus. Forgive us if we want to talk about the attrocities of Christopher Columbus in a thread called "The Attrocities of Christopher Columbus".

This also itn' about anyone apologizing. I'm sorry that Christopher Columbus was an assshole to the natives, but I know it wasn't my fault.

pan:

what you say above might obtain if what was at stake in revisiting the often very ugly past was as much an exercise in simple moralizing as its inverse, the one-dimensional heroic narratives--to think this way, you have to assume that the aim of the heroic version is some kind of Uplift, some kind of National Pride or other such nonsense: from there it is simple to invert the whole thing and arrive at the conclusion that one looks to the ugliness (or more neutrallly the complexity) of history as an exercize in self-flagellation.

i think this position as shallow as that of the Heroic Narrative--it uses the same arguments, is embedded in the same logic.

you elaborate a similar--but even more reductive--interpretation of the motives of those who might undertake such a look into the past.

what if one of the reasons to undertake an investigation of the holocaust--say--which is an enormously difficult topic to go into affectively for anyone, really, with overwhelming violence compounded by problems of how you write about that violence--is not simply to inflict guilt on people like yourself, but to understand something more complicated, and more worrisome on the order of how was this possible? you will find very little in the way of answers to this kind of question if you remain at the Great Men level of history---to my mind the central question lay in the engineering of consent, in the various ways the nazis were able to bend bourgeois common sense, using the topoi of nation and exploiting anti-semitism, to create something approaching a kind of collective assent to atrocity--one that operated so efficiently as to enable a significant segment of the german population of the period to at once know and not know that something horrific was going on around them.

this kind of analysis would not be about making you feel bad--were i writing it, i would not care at all about that type of response--i find it little more than a refusal to look and a refusal to think--rather it would be about how particular types of claims, elaborated in contexts not that different from this one that we live through, using mass media, exploiting notions of nationalism, of national unity, looped into racism became a basic condition of possibility for genocide.

genocide in this case was but one aspect of an authoritarian system of governance that imposed a single frame on its population, eliminated systematically opposition internal and where possible external, propped itself up with the rhetoric of self-righteousness and national mission.

history is not made by Great Men. it is made by masses of people, every day--these people make thier history in and through particular frames of reference--political power resides in controlling that frame of reference--the consequences of particular types of control can be appalling--but it is also possible that those who consent to this type of outcome do so on "moral" grounds, with the effect that they might see and not see what is happening--they might see and not care because they oppose for whatever reason something in or about those people who are being killed in great number.

to my mind, you would examine the holocaust in significant measure because you would want to make sure--as sure as you can--that nothing remotely like it would happen again.

something parallel would obtain for almost any history that moves away from the Heroic Narratives and into the horror that often--too often--lay around figures in these narratives.

it is not about making you feel bad.
and even if it was, there would be no consequence to it.
because history is more than a sentimental narrative that enables you to look back on the Great Men who were acting in particular, ambiguous situations so that you can pretend that ambiguity begins and ends with the lives of Great Men and so is no longer something for you to worry about. judgements about the present are shaped in situations of enormous ambiguity. to pretend otherwise is to set yourself up for disaster. which you may prefer, if you can feel good about yourself along the way.

All I'm going to say in this... Keep it up Pan. I would post my own opinion but it'd only be the exact same things you've been stating.

You can go into the past and point out the evils without harping and expecting people to express guilt and wanting to change because of guilt.

That's all this is about and it doesn't work. Guilt and negativity will never work they only bring about more negativity and hatreds.

Look you can look into the Holocaust find out why it happened how it happened and work to making sure it never happens again.

Or you can point fingers, shove guilt for it happening down people's throats and not learn.

Articles like this are not for learning but to exploit the past and spread hatreds and bring up old prejudices. Where is the moving forward? Where is the CC did this but because of his opening the Western Hemisphere mankind was able to grow eventually?

We cannot change the past, we cannot live in the past. All we can do is move forward and try to learn from the past and not repeat it.

All you people who keep pushing this guilt and hate of the past are doing is trying to guilt people into something.

What do you want? Seriously, what is it that you people want from those of us living in the here and now and are trying to better the world as best we can? Do you want me to appologize for CC? Do you want me to say what a horrendous man and how evil and dastardly and blah blah blah?

What do you want to achieve? Because all I see is you having a desire to try to spread anger hate and fear.

Imagine if all this energy you spent trying to convince people how evil the past was.... was spent trying to change the future in positive ways. I think the changes would happen faster if you focussed on positive change and with less resentments and hatreds and you might get more people to work with you.

Roachboy captures the general theory a lot better than i would, so i'll just tack a few responses in. He is right on with "Great Man" syndrome. Ambiguity isthe watchword of history, IMO. Not only is history greater than the activities of the Great Men, but the moral context in which they are set is anything but firm. There is no provable "March Of Progress" that justifies the mistakes and atrocities of these figures. They are responsible for their acts, and even by the standards of contemporaries, such as Bishops Toral or De Las Casas, Columbus was the original Banana Republic dictator. He was recalled for his incompetance by Spain.

Not what i suggested. It seems that when the argument is forwarded to complicate history, the historical grand narrative progressionists are apt to claim that we are asking to halt history. I'm not sure where you get this claim. Do you expect us to beleive that it is not possible to look to the future and carefully examine the past at the same time? I believe we're all smart enough to do that, and indeed that our intellectual curiousity should drive us to this...even outside of any moral obligation i might claim.

I'm not inclined to grant you a "grand progression" of history. Famine, genocide, petty dictators, and the like are still common on this planet. Some progresses and advances have been made...indeed, many important and critical advances have been made. But this is not a case of rising tides bring up all ships.

This is, again, not the project being suggested. Making villians of the past does not help us much, either. Careful history is not the exclusive focus on the negative, nor does it paralyze.

I don't follow this argument at all. I do not hate myself, or my ancestors. I do believe in accountability. Many of my ancestors are responsible for serious mistakes. This does not preclude pride in my heritage, but it does complicate it.

Is all history that is not simple paralytic? I do not grant that you have effectively argued for the link between failure to act in positive ways and the practice of complicating history. I would like to see you justify why you hold this beleif.

We can cheer, but we cannot critque? Why is the historical narrative you propose better? This argument is a non-sequiter. History in general has been validated as an academic discipline. Why would coming to certain conclusions, a priori, be better than others.

Where is this coming from? I really don't know...and i'm not asking to be a wise ass. I'm leaving out your charactization of liberal politics. I consider it to be deeply misleading, but it is off topic.

This is a misleading argument. The purpose of this thread is not to discuss alternatives to the violence of our civilization. I, and others, have offered solutions in various threads on international politics threads. One step i will offer here for our continual export of violence?

Learn about history. Learn that good intentions are not enough. Learn that the West doesn't and hasn't always known best. Learn that there have been sucesses, but that they required great effort and careful dillegence. Learn that there are always places to improve, and lessons to be gained from history...mistakes and sucesses alike.

You may be being easier on Germans than Germany. They have mantained collective responsibility for the Shoah, and worked to maintain the memory of those events. They have praised those who did work against it, but also have paid attention to the way that general consent for the regime allowed the Shoah to occur.

At least this is mutual. You are not propsing knowledge. You are arguing for a whitewash of history. Careful study may produce a less glamorous picture than you're used to. This does not mean there is a problem with the scholarship. It probably indicates a problem with the grand narrative that sold you on the idea of these men as heros in the first place.

Well said MartinGuerre, well said.

Yes, it's surprising to me that those who have mentioned the words guilt, and self-loathing etc are the ones who might generally label themselves as being more patriotic. It's as if their patriotism is being spoilt by the negativity of others. Like someone saying something nasty about their mother, they are emotionally upset by slurs on their ancestors.

Meanwhile these others are quite happy to accept the evils of the past as having past, it may complicate their feelings of patriotic pride, but it means they probably have a better (or rather more complete) idea about what that pride entails. In other words, they do not feel guilty of the crimes of the past - why should they? A fact is a fact, it was not us enslaving and killing people, but it is up to us to choose whether to attach a moral significance to those facts.

Slavery was the backbone of all of the great Civilisations from Egypt and Rome to the British and now Western Empires of the world. That always has been and will always be the case. Like it or loathe it, find it morally reprehensible or not, it is simply the case. I don't condem those people for enslaving the weak, but neither do I applaud them. If I met them tomorrow, I might be appalled at their conceit, but now they are long dead, that is not likely to occur.

While they are dead, some of their conceit (nationalism and patriotism) lives on - and I would prefer it if people would concentrate on being proud of their own achievements, rather than those of others who happened to be born, or land upon the same shores as themselves. Especially when one's nationality has plainly nothing to do with anything that matters like ability, acceptance, love or kindness.

And shouldn't it be the Spanish who are proud/guilty of Columbus rather than the Americans?

I think things like this are important to air - and am surprised by the emotion that has been generated by its airing. What damage does it do to understand in detail the events of the past?

Where did I say whitewash the past??????

Hey Zeus Freaking Chrissy mas, I'm now someone who is supposedly evil because I choose to see the BAD AND GOOD equally and not condemn those in the past.

Rather I choose to move on live as best as I can and try to change TODAY and TOMORROW from the mistakes of the past.

It's amazingly ignorant to sit there and tell me what I'm trying to be as you shove guilt for my ancestors down my throat.

For the final time I CHOOSE NOT TO GET INTO YOUR GUILT GAMES OF THE PAST AND INSTEAD I CHOOSE TO LIVE IN TODAY AND CHANGE WHAT I CAN TODAY AND NOT CRY ABOUT THE PAST.

If you want change so freaking bad work for it, don't shove your guilt down my throat and expect me to be sympathetic.

I"m proud of Columbus and no.... for the poster above Columbus was not Spanish he was Italian, as am 1/4 of I.

You people wish to keep hate alive and let it fester..... so choke on it. I've said all I can obviously you enlightened ones who believe you must totally blame everything on the past refuse to move and build a better positive future.

I would think you'd realize you are fighting a war you cannot win and wasting time arguing over the past. Instead why not use this energy for positive changes?

i dont really understand this busby berkley notion of nation you have going there, pan (hey kids, let's put on a musical...now the only way we can do this is to pull as a team....no moping......now let's go put on a show.......imagine all this being said by richard simmons.
see it?

shudder....)

even the troopers who put on these musicals you see in movies have scripts that enable them to account for something of the past in order to structure their view of the present in order to orient themselves coherently toward a future.

what is at issue is not your attitude toward anything--what is at stake is what view of the past you have--which shapes something of how you understand the present--which in turn shapes what you might understand a desirable to be like and how you might coherently move toward it. a polity able to extend a self-critical awareness of itself into the past might be one in a position to exercize real power over its collective affairs--if this awareness results in the smashing of idols, so be it....but a collective that prefers as a question of attitude adjustment to see only a pollyanna version of the past in effect refuses coherence at the same time--one the basis of that, no coherent mode of action is easily or directly possible in the present---such a collective is fleeing from the possibility of exercizing power itself, of participating in anything like a democratic present.

this is why plato--no champion of democracy by any means---hated rhetoric. rhetoric appealed to the emotions--it made you feel good, feel sad--it manipulated its audience on this basis--but you could not tell if the content of the messages were true or not--this is why he hated the sophists---both are antithetical to debate filtered through agreed-upon conventions that you might call reason.

so in principle at least, you choose alot more than emphasizing the positive when you try to argue that critical views of the past are undesirable because they are, like, a bummer, man.

You haven't been listening to me but that's cool. And I have not chosen to attack you except to say don't shove your guilt down my throat and expect me to help you try to change things.

I admitted there is need for change but to hold the past up and continue to use it to spread hate and anger which is what you do is not the way to get things changed.

Not to mention you pick and choose which evils you want to bring out. Don't hear you yelping about Genghis Khan or the Mayans and Incas or the African tribes that sold the white men their prisoners as slaves, or on and on and on. You choose to focus solely on the European ancestory and it's bullshit.

My ancestors were not saints but they were no worse or better than any other civilization out there.

So go preach your hate and cries and anger to people you can sell it to because I'm not buying it.

How is saying "I look for the positive and work to change the mistakes made in the past" rhetoric?

Looking at just the evils and demanding and crying and spreading hate, anger divisiveness, is rhetoric because you are not being constructive or realistic.

post edited because I really don't want to waste my breath on this one

mods feel free to delete.

From this and the other thread, this seems to be the recurring theme and basis of your arguement, roachboy:

"i think this position as shallow as that of the Heroic Narrative--it uses the same arguments, is embedded in the same logic."

What I and I think Pan are trying to say is it is not a Heroic Narrative or Myth that we are advocating.

Rather it is recognizing the whole of history, which I believe you are also advocating even while I believe you are not practicing it yourself. (I am not trying to be insulting, but that is how I see it from your posts.)

The other thing which I think ties in is this:

"history is not made by Great Men. it is made by masses of people, every day"

While I understand what you are saying, I disagree with it.

It was not the everyday man that conquered most of the Ancient world, it was Alexander the Great. It was not the average man that killed over 6 million people in WW2, it was a fanatic who could inspire fanatics, Hitler. The same for Lenin, Benjamin Franklin, Bill Gates, Napoleaon, Patton, Elizabeth I, etc.

It is men and women who have exceptional drive and vision that become "heros", but it is not the "hero" label that got them there.

It is their deeds that those average men and women recognize as "greatness". I posit that the fact that the average man and woman have created so many "heros" directly contradicts this basic argument of yours, that they recognize what you do not.

That is not to say that it is real people that don't help make history. Alexander could not have conquered without his armies and Elizabeth could not have reigned without subjects. But if there had not been an Alexander, could the same leaderless army have gone on to such conquests? If there had not been a Franklin, could a conglomerate of independent commonwealths come to see themselves as a nation or would Europe support the fledgling nation?

Columbus's sins are real. But so was his drive to sail west when no one else wanted to, as was his skill at finding passages and currents and collecting information from various sources as to how to proceed. So too was the reality of what the discovery of the New World meant to Europe (and yes, to the Natives in America). In Europe, it can easily be claimed that this new discovery was one of the final nails in the feudal system and helped usher in the Renaissance as well as creating the fledgling nations that we know today.

But back to what I also see as guilt peddling.

My honest view is that the negativity (as eloquently expressed in Pan's posts) is one of the fundamental sins of the Democratic party, intentional or not. IMO, it helps foster the victim culture that keeps too many down.

Indians can fail because the White man stole their land and forced them on reservations and made them drunk.

Blacks can fail because they were slaves and they never got the hand up they needed and because there is still prejudice.

To me this is exactly identical to Pan's addict that continues to blame his current failure on the past. It is identical to the convict/criminal that continues to blame his drunk dad or the boss that hated him, or the other bad breaks for the fact that he is a criminal.

In reality, I want EXACTLY what you want. I want personal responsibility and recognition of the evils that we perpetuate on each other. I also want guys (white, black or purple) who hire based on race to be punished. But you want the sins of the past to perpetuate through things like Affirmative Action, making discrimination against another group ok because of the sins of the father.

And this victim mentality that I believe is perpetuated by things like vilifying Columbus or Jefferson or whoever enables those who buy into it agree that this discrimation is OK.

"Hey, whitey took my great great great grand-daddy away from africa, so it's ok that he get's his now."

I've seen this very sentiment expressed on these boards, but by (presumably white guys.)

This is what makes me believe that it is not equality that you (collective "you") are interested in, it is guilt, but this time, guilt for the sins of your fathers (and the source of my self flagillation comment in the other post.)

But I refuse to buy into it.

Life is complicated, but I continue and will always maintain that there are somethings that can be expressed simply, in a "Things I learned in Kindergarten" way and one of them is that discrimination against someone based on the color of their skin is wrong.

You can dress up your argument (and indeed, many here have) all you want. You can post numbers on University enrollments. You can post surveys and studies on how minorities benefit from AA, but two wrongs don't make a right.

Oh yes, it's simplistic and I think it is a major source of conflict between the intelligentsia of academia and the heartland of America, as aptly demonstrated in the last election.

Middle America is not interested in feeling guilty about what Columbus did 500 years ago. But they ALSO would not support someone who enslaved someone and stole their gold. They know, perhaps too simply for some here, that it was a hell of a feat sailing across the Atlantic when you didn't know what you would find and that someone who did it deserves some kudos. For those who know about the bad things Columbus did, I would conjecture that they can say what some here have been saying, which basically, yeah, that's a shitty thing that he did.

So I see this discussion tying in to many discussions that we have had on these boards, ranging to what is wrong with the Democratic party, why did they lose the last election, Affirmative Action, and revisionist history.

I sincerely doubt you will magically see my point and change yours, but this is an honest attempt to post my own view of what I see as wrong with what you are espousing and how it relates to the mind set that I and many others fundamentally reject and the reason why the Democratic party is in trouble.

NOWHERE have I seen any proof that Manx is asking us to feel guilty, nor anyone else. Apart from the fact that I would probably agree with anything Manx said because of the avatar he has chosen, all I have seen him do is present us with a truth (which so far no one has disputed, so please save it for another thread).

To be aware of this truth is not necessarily guilt, but I have to say, if I was American, it'd be awfully hard to admire CC. Not liking a historical figure is in no way equal to guilt.

Besides, why is it necessarily a great acheivement to have landed in the west anyways? He didn't discover it, because there were already folks here. I realise what a difficult navigational goal it was, but you don't see many Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin High Schools, and they made it to the moon!

For those that accuse Manx of sour grapes by not talking about Genghis Khan or anyone else, well, he was specifically asked to start this thread by Lebell.

P.S. martinguerre, your eloquence is breath taking.

Try to change what? All this thread is about is raising awarness of a less common part of history.
Spread hate? I don't hate CC. Do you hate CC? I don't want people to hate CC. I want people to understand him, good and bad together. This thread is to show the less popular bad side.
This thread isn't about Genghis Kahn or the Mayans. We are centering on the acts of ONE MAN, not all of Europe. Don't try to change the subject.
Of course not. Are you a direct blood decendant of CC? If not, you can't play the ancestor card.
My father is a pastor, he preaches. We are in a community of discussion, we discuss.
This thread isn't about the positive. This thread is specifically about the negative. If you feel the need to balance the universe, go start a positive CC thread.
So it's not realistic to say Christopher Columbus hurt people? Looking at the evils is out of the ordinary as far as CC. What most people know of CC is what they learned in grammer school, WHICH IS ONE SIDED. All you learn in grammar school is that Columbus discovered America. Yay Columbus! Let's give him a holiday! Then the pilgrams (people who wore buckels and loved God) came and ate corn, or maze, with the indians and everything was smiles and lollypops. In order to balance this - balance obviously being something that is clearly important to you - we want to make people aware that CC also was very bad. This is constructive because you cannot fully understand a historical figure like CC unless you know the whole story. This is the otehr half of the story.

This thread is about the ATROCITIES of CC. This is not the thread about CC in general, or the thread about CC balancing good with bad. This is strictly about the bad. This thread exists for the purpous of discussing the bad of CC.

I am surprised to observe several posters debating a university level history professor on the finer points of his areas of expertise.

What you describe as the "fundamental sins", Lebell, I see as a way of thinking that is the root cause of the divide between the conservative, mostly white, current "ruling class" in America, and....to an extent in the U.K., vs. the "rest of the world".

Your view seems to me to be too simplistic, and as an earlier poster pointed out. The following quote describes it better than I'm able to:
If you found out that your grandfather eight generations in the past, kept slaves, how would it effect your thinking? I have to tell, you, discovering this complicates mine. It makes me endeavor to further the advocacy for AA that I already embraced. It makes me wonder why I've never met anybody who
admits to a direct descent from a slave owning, American ancestor. I asked a couple of black friend if anyone had ever confided such a thing to them, and they had not.

The lily white, "god is on our side", projection that too many Americans personally hold as their opinion of their country and it's society, seems belligerent and threatening to much of the world. They easily see this as delusional. Why do you think, even during the impeachment period of Clinton's presidency, he was welcomed enthusiastically everywhere he traveled outside of the U.S., while the reaction that Bush receives when he travels speaks to the track record of his administration. It took a considerable number of policy actions and communications from this administration to largely negate the good will that Clinton had engendered, in addition to the overwhelmingly sympathetic gestures of worlwide support in the period immediately after 9/11.

Empathy and understanding; the ability to see ourselves as others see us.
I study history to refine that side of my nature; and conservatives seem to concern themselves with how to prevent other people rom benefitting by using past injustices as leverage to influence a political/economic advantage. It seems very similar to the justifications for the bankruptcy "reform" bill; musn't let anyone abuse the system. This concern and the "solutions" that it fosters, always seems to be directed at the disadvantaged, never at those at the upper echelons of society and in dollar terms, massive white collar crime.

Your "way" will bankrupt the U.S. treasury, indeed, it is already unaffordable.
Why are you so disturbed, to the point of seeming to feel threatned, about encouraging a trend toward a more complex view of history? The truth is that everywhere caucasian christian europeans have ventured., outside of their own borders, they have projected violence, disease, colonization, and exploitatioin of the world's people and it's evironment. A study of the foreign projections of muslim societies seems less violent and more tolerant.

The U.S. must lead by example; a way that would make the U.S. more approachable, much easier to be aligned with.

I am pretty sure that roachboy will agree that the more you study history, the more complicated it becomes to reach conclusions. This is not a bad thing, Lebell. The popular U.S. opinion of itself and the foreign policy that results is not cost effective, or attractive to potential allies, let alone third world societies that Bush espouses to export "freedom" to.

Rumsfeld, Bush, and Bremer were oblivious enough of the Iraqi's recent history to continue to use Abu Ghraib prison in too similar of a way that it was used in the past. They just changed the guards and engaged in their own kinder, gentler, version of torture. Documents emerged that Bush's official legal counsel endeavored to find loopholes that would permit Bush to order torture, and circumvent the Geneva Convention. Does this seem like an administration that learns from it's study of history and avoids repeating it's mistakes.

My way is harder, Lebell. I want to find other people who are willing to admit that they descend from slave holding ancestors, and who are willing to discuss their reactions to that knowledge, and what, if anything, they plan to do differently because of it. There may be no conclusions to be reached, no plans to be made, but the exercise is worth it. If it seems that I'm being too negative to you by immersing myself in this, consider that if the Bush admin. had made a strong effort to put itself as best it could, in the point of view of Iraqis, Abu Ghraib would have been leveled instead of being reoccupied, and
if a study of Britain's last expedition into Iraq had been fully examined, we might not have invaded in the first place.

What you see as liberal "negativity", I see as a near obsessive curiousity to perceive as accurately as I possibly can, what past events were about. By the time I examine any event, it is in the past. I have lived through the same recent U.S. era as you have. My methods of information gathering lead me to believe that the Bush administration is failing politically, economically, and militarily. I have examined at length information that makes me lean toward conclusions that this admininstrations economic policies favor wealth consolidation toward the already wealthiest, toward the major oil companies, military contractors, away from most everyone else, and put alarming downward pressure on the value of U.S. currency. The military and intelligence operations seem to foster the commission of war crimes, from enlisted troops to the commander in chief. There seems to be an assault on the independence of the judiciary, and on support and enforcement of the provisions of the constitution. There seems to be a priority on operating the government in secrecy and avoidance of accountiblity, even to the extent of inhibiting assurances of honest and open elections. Foreign policy seems to be a message to the world that "you're either with us or against us".
Theocracy seems to be encouraged and embraced as it seems to be replacing secular representation and administration in the government. Loyalty is the requirement for advancement in the Bush administration, instead of competence.

I have not made up my mind about the accuracy of all my suspicions that I described above, but I have good reasons for including all of them, and they
probably strike you as negative, repetitive points, posted by a predictably negative liberal. My opinions require a lot of research and are more often not concluded. We won't agree on much, but I would rather end up with a very well informed sense of an event, issue, news or history making person, so that I can avoid a black or white, good or bad, judgment about that subject, whether my focus is on something that happened yesterday or 2000 years ago. It would be easier if I could accept Jesus the way the Baptist or the Catholic church wants me to, if I could accept Bush as the Texas rancher that K. Rove wants me to see. Trouble is.....I know that he bought his ranch six months before the Nov. 2000 election, was born in CT, comes from a Greenwich, CT family, frequents his father's long owned home in Maine, attended four years of New England prepratory high school, four years at Yale University, and three years at Harvard Business School. I am more curious about Bush's 32 year absence from Yale after he graduated, and his seeming effort to display a political image that does not seem to be an accurate representation of who he is. What are the ties that bind Bush? Why has so much effort been put into projecting Bush as a Texan, instead of who he actually is; a New England prep school, Ivy leaguer of advanced education, of a New England family of long standing political, economic, and social influence. My study of Bush prompts me to be much more suspicious about his integrity and his motives than I would be if he wasn't so......packaged.
If more people took an in depth view of the first Bush administration, the U.S. might have moved on with a new administration.

I know it's messy, it seems negative, but to me it isn't. It's the way I approach things. There are only two major political parties. I'm not sure about one of them, but compared to the other one, the black or white conservative one, I'll take the messy, negative seeming one.I'll take history that way. too,
even if it means no Christmas, Thanksgiving, Columbus, or MLK jr. holidays.

Where and how did we leap from Christopher Columbus to Affirmative Action??????

In what way are these things linked? As someone living outside of the US, I really have no idea what these two subjects have in common.

Lebell...

I think you may misunderstand the history of the non-hero. What i have always taken it to mean is that Great Men do not occur in vacuums. That indeed, nothing does. Hitler didn't just wake up one morning and inspire fanatics, he was part of a long chain of anti-Semites, and traditions of anti-Semitic violence in Christendom. The history isn't just Columbus landing on the beach, but what that looked like from Arawak eyes as well. Why is the story told from white eyes? Are invaders or explorers always given precident? Then why are Moslem advances on Europe told as the "defence" of Europe? Or is it that we always tell history from whiteness?

I dispute none of your points about what various individuals have done to contribute to history, but retain my caveat that they do not happen in isolation, and that they are not the sole legitimate focus of historical inquiry. Elizabeth is a particularly good example, as her government was particularly dependant on a broader spectrum of the population in a way that other monarchs had not been, by virtue of the gender issues of the day. It makes sense to study that, and ask what goes in to the equation from both sides...not just the elite.



You're shooting the messenger. When people are telling you "this system is unjust" or "there needs to be conscious action taken to counteract white privildge" your response is accusatory. I think you owe it to them and to yourself to do a better job of listening. I see your project to be the construction of a defense of white privildege...to feel comfortable about the ways that doors simply open for you and people of similar heritage. (They open for me, as well...i'm middle class and ethnically German and WASP)

They don't open for some folks. To bring it back to topic, some people don't see themselves in history books. you think for one second that if something like that had happened to a european nation that it wouldn't have been front and center in history? Why is that? Why is Pearl Harbor a major event in a way that the US invasion of Mexico is not? Why are victims white and agressors non-white? All of these things point to method failure, where the cultural assumptions of our culture have short circuited the quest for history. Seeing these things can be a painful process...but it makes sense to try to see them.

I'm all for progress, moving forward, and all that. But what are we improving from? What is it that we're trying to fix? What exactly has gone wrong?

general point: if there is one thing i wish i had not said in this thread, it would be to specify my day job. i think it advanced very little when i said it and hasnt really helped anything else. if i could erase it, i would.


=====
lebell:

well at least there is a definite point at which things split between us:

there is a way in which i guess you are right----in the way implied by memorial parks and battlefields, postage stamps and other such: that history is something tied up with Extraordinary Events and Great Individuals--but what do people do during periods where there are no Big Adventures to be had?

what do you make of--o i dunno--the development of Agricutlure, of capitalism, of the workers movement, etc.--are they not history? are they not historical because they cannot be reduced to a Great Event or a series of Great Events which can be associated with or attributed to an Individual?

what do people do when there is not Great Event happening? what do they live through every day? nothing? a waiting room? "life"?

it follows that for you there is probably an a priori order to the world that human being are somehow shaped by in their actions. i would expect that your suspicion of the notion that history is made by people as they live every day runs up against an assumption of the priority of the individual. both of these probably connect back to a set of religious assumptions. at one level or the other.

i think this view does several things:

1. it implies that everyday life involves nothing fundamental. history is great events, big changes--the rest is the running of a machine put in place presumably by a creator of some type or another. i think such meanings, such orders as are understood to exist in the world are the results of human activity. i also understand assumptions that the order of the world exists a priori to be ideological. that in the marxist sense.

2. it would appear that for you, lebell (and i am transposing some of your terms into what seems to me a convenient alternate version), one model for thinking about history in general might well be the Incarnation--it is about ruptures that can be attributed to a single Individual. at best, this view leads to a kind of christianized aristotle (in the politics)--hierarchies are natural, etc. btw, this view of aristotles, as influential as it may be, was developed out of plato, who in turn was opposed to democracy on fundamental grounds--as violating "human nature" because it assumed hierarchies were malleable, were functions of actual human practice.

another way of seeing the same thing: the view that there is a natural or a priori order that shapes human beings and their collective actions trades away what people do for a metaphysical double of what they do, the question of thinking about how groups move through shifting, ambiguous spaces for the possibility of certainty--which has everything to do with the psychological needs of the observer and nothing to do with the nature of that which is observed.

i do not subscribe to your position.


the idea that a history focussed on individuals and great events is more capacious than a history that sees it as unfolding across everyday life seems surreal. it seems to me like the kind of thing one would simply repeat, that would function as a simple statement, and would not have anything like a material correlate.

a bit on questions of detail (sort of--detail given the abstract character of this exchange i guess--pseudo-detail maybe):

1. your view of fascism as the work of a diabolical individual is, i think, debilitating. but i have said this two or three times in these discussions:
1. fascism is not identical with germany in the 1930s-1940s: there were other variants, there are other variants.
2. if you think about it, your view would lead you to think that the consent of the population to fascism was a simple result of--well what?--it does not seem to me that your view could explain it--i am not sure that you would find the question interesting, even.
i guess i could understand how this position could operate--i would reject it out of hand for myself---but what i really dont understand is how you could possibly claim that yours is the more capacious position. (this is the last time i'll raise this--it occurs to me that this tack could degenerate into a size queen conflict (mine is bigger than yours) displaced onto this question...which seems tedious)

second example:

do you really imagine that you would understand the russian revolution by focussing on lenin? you do know that by 1916 lenin was in exile, almost totally isolated in the context of the 3rd international, etc....the position the bolsheviks found themselves in in 1917 has to do with all kinds of factors--lenin's organizational conceptions were among these--but they did not have to do with the person of lenin himself in the period immediately leading up to it--if you focus on lenin, you do not even have a way to introduce the general character of the reovlution: an urban coup d'etat grafted uneasily (and ultimately problematically) onto a peasant revolt (the conditions of possibility of which extend back to 1860 land reforms) compounded by the economic and miltiary implosion of the czarist regime under the pressures of world war 1. lenin as a human being was writing in a parisian cafe as these factors were beginning to converge.
all the above is at the level of plot summary, but i think you can see my point---you cannot explain anything about the origin, course, outcomes, conflicts within the russian revolution by focussing on lenin as an individual.

the irony is that the exclusive focus of an understanding of the russian revolution as a result of the actions of lenin the Heroic Individual does have a precedent: stalin's "short course of the history of the soviet communist party" runs out such an interpretation--but to confuse that with history is something i dont think even stalin would have done (read the text--it is just insane).

this is not to say that lenin is unimportant of course--and there is nothing about the approach to the revolution outlined above that would lead to erasing lenin--quite the contrary.

this is nice but i do not know that it is other than mythology.

once again, you have what seems to me an unacceptable tradeoff between the desire to see History as shaped by Exemplary Individuals and a far messier reality. focus on franklin in this way lets you say nothing about the actual course of the american revolution, for example: the very real question of whether it was an extension of the wars between england and france by the end (an extension that bankrupted the french state and which is a nontrivial precondition for the french revolution at this level), the period of the articles of confederation (which most histories of america like to pretend never happened)...it does not let you talk about the problems encountered by the colonists themselves in fashioning connections between themselves (which required that they break with the whole social and economic organization generated by the english, which routed economic and social relations back through england, not through each other)---it is only by erasing huge swatches of complexity that you get to a position where franklin can be associated with the unity of some nation. the same holds for setting up a space in which it makes any sense to reduce the activities of the framers of the constitution to a conclave of Great Men to whom the only coherent relation is something just short of worship that a cynical chap might understand as fetishism.

as for the long digression about affirmative action: i do not know how you got to that--i did not speak about it. i find it an interesting turn in your argument in that it is the point where what you say crosses over into the conventional "wisdom" of the conservative ideological apparatus. suffice it to say three things:

1. i do not accept anything you say about the matter.
2. you should not be either surprised or outraged if, in speaking to you across the medium of this board, you find that i invoke the larger framework of conservative ideology--your position is to a siginficant extent, coincident with it.
3. it seems that the main point of your digression into affirmative action is that you do not like it, that you feel somehow put upon because it exists and that you move from this sense of being-victimized to a view of the role of history that i find to be other than compelling.
but i do wonder if this is the central trigger for the entire debate we have been having from your side, lebell.

Color me not suprised that Lebell congratulated you on this post. Seeing as how this thread was created SPECIFICALLY at lebell's request to list the "sins" of Columbus.

And you seek balance. This thread is balance. Lebell and many others prefer not to hear this information - it is blocked from public discourse. You want the good with the bad? Well, in this case it's the other way around: you must have the bad with the good, and you've already had unending good. The point was made in the other thread, by lebell, that he disapproves of the American Indian Movement protesting celebrations of Columbus. Why would he disapprove if not to block this information, the balance you claim to seek?

As will said: this thread is about the attrocities of Columbus, created at the specific request for a thread about the attrocities of Columbus. The title of the thread is not "Christopher Columbus, Hero and Murderer". It doesn't need to be because it is a response to someone who claims that this Columbus should only be celebrated.

This thread is not hate and anger - this thread is the missing piece of history.

And instead of welcoming the information in this thread as the balance that is necessary, as you claim, you criticize it for not echoing the oft repeated claim of heroism.

To that I say: you do yourself a disservice.

As far as I can see, no one has kept anyone from posting information.

The problem was the inflammatory thread title which has since been changed.

As to responding to the charges of the original post, this is a discussion board.

I think you need to check this again, I read Columbus was a Catalan.

I don't know what you're talking about. Are you responding to the fact that the information presented in this thread is blocked from public discourse? It is. And you take part in that by critisizing the American Indian Movement for protesting Denver's Columbus celebrations.
Sure it is. And this discussion is about the attrocities of Christopher Columbus. If your response to a list of attrocities is to claim that it does no one any good to list his attrocities because he was somehow heroic for discovering America, my response is going to be that you're whitewashing history. And I would be entirely correct in the matter.

Maybe if the sum total information on Christopher Columbus was not massively weighted towards his greatness (do a Google search and see how difficult it is to find negative information on Columbus for all the positive information that comes up), there would be no need to protest a celebration or start a thread that only listed some of his attrocities. But that's not the world we live in.

From here, it suggests he was from Genoa, but sailed under the Catalan (Spanish) flag.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus

I think I need to dispell a few of these misconceptions and move on.

First, we seem to be discussing it.

I will repeat, for the last time, that the reason for closing the thread was it's title, which was: "Columbus was an Asshole".

This was not a thread title that was conducive to a discussion.

Second: My beef with AIM is not that they protest, but that they ACTIVELY TRY TO PREVENT the Sons of Italy from holding their own parade. People like Russell Means are free to protest. But they should not be free to prevent others from their right to hold a parade. (Ironically, Ward Churchill who recently has been in the news arguing for academic freedom of speech also has no problem preventing others from exercising their own freedom of speech when he doesn't like it.)

Third: I have acknowledged the all the "sins" presented. I have not "whitewashed" them as you have charged. I would indeed say that if anyone is "whitewashing" (or perhaps more correctly, "blackwashing"), it's those who chose to have as myopic a view of historical individuals in a black light as those who hold them in a white light.

And finally: This a discussion board. I was once told long ago that the poster cannot dictate the direction of the discussion. It is not up to you (or me) to dictate the responses to your post. If some defend Columbus, then some defend Columbus. If others say "move on" then they say "move on". And likewise, if some agree with you, then they agree with you.

Welcome to America :D

I was wondering just what the heck I was thinking until I saw this part:
I guess I should have mentioned that what I read specifically contradicted (and said as much) the historically inaccurate portrayal of Columbus as Italian ;)

Such is the danger of mythos. :thumbsup:


lol, so I read this portion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christo...ject_of_Debate

and the fucker may have been portuguese!

Now he's My Hero!



EDIT: now, I may be wrong, but the thread title was changed days ago. I don't know why it's even a point in discussion. The only reference to the divisive "version" is by a moderator, actually. But aside from that, the dude has been dead for what, like 500 years? Why is anyone offended by him being called anything derogatory?

I'm assuming pan was pissed because he thought he was italian. but he wasn't, he's portuguese and I don't care if you'all call him something nasty ;)

We all know the good CC did. Blackwashing would be to say 'Columbus never did anything good or positive'. We aren't saying that. We are pointing out the less popular aspect. That's not a wash of any color. You have been charged with whitewashing because you have yet to reply to the topic. When we say, "CC was bad and he did this, this, and this.", you reply "stop looking at the negative. Why are you spreading hate?". That's whitewashing.
This is a discussion about the attrocities of CC. If someone started posting about the war on terror or homosexual marriage rights, they'd be off topic. Discussion or not. Talking about balance of good and bad, or questioning the entire topic in this thread is equally off topic.

THE TOPIC TO DISCUSS: THE ATTROCITIES OF CC. Nothing to do with the good, or some balance of good and bad. This is bad. If you can't follow such a simple guideline as this, we'll never get a decent discussion going.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...9&postcount=43

All that work for nothing!!

*sob!*











:icare:

Columbus was an asshole. I'm not sure who gets offended by that statement, an Italian maybe? Would a German get offended if I called Hitler an gaping cankerous asshole? Regardless, if you disagreed, we could have discussed it. But you locked the thread and threatened to temp ban me instead.

AIM has the right to attempt to prevent parades honoring Columbus. Because this is America. Welcome to it.

I haven't seen anyone here hold a myopic view of the negative side of Columbus. But I have seen quite a bit of criticism of even mentioning his utter reprehsibility without also glorifying him at the same time. It is entirely disingenous to claim this thread topic is myopic when it was in DIRECT response to your request for exactly the information it presents.

And finally: I don't need a lesson on what a discussion board happens to be. I did not make any attempt to dictate the discussion (notwithstanding the fact that all posts are attempts to dictate a discussion). I did state that if your response to a discussion about the attrocities of Columbus is to claim the discussion is weak, myopic, one-sided, imbalanced, etc. because it doesn't include information on positive aspects of the man, I would respond as I have: there is already vastly more information on his heroism vs. his despotism - this thread is but a small step towards the balance you claim, but fail, to seek.

But sure, I'm done now. So let's move on.

lebell, other board comrades:
this has been an interesting exchange, despite the lack of movement and so.
thought i would wave bye bye and say thanks now
as it seems to be starting to tank.

Indeed.

I must say the same.

Cheers ;)

I think that showing multiple aspects of historical figures like CC can help to show people that the faults inside of us all do not prevent greatness. Jefferson had slaves, but he was arguabally one of the greatest Americans, and one of the fathers of our country. Would you enjoy a movie where the protagonist was totally and completly pure and virtuous? Or would you enjoy a reluctant hero, or a hero with obvious flaws? It is human nature to raise heros to the height of Gods in our eyes, so that we may have something to aspire to. It is equalli important to know that being a hero such as CC is not unreachable. While CC was crossing the Atlantic for selfish reasons, it was extremly brave of him to explore and cross over the great ocean. He was one of the first people from Europe to cross the Atlantic. I'm pretty sure he was the first Eurpoean to return from America.

So what's the problem? When I was in grammar school, I remember saying "Columbubs sailed the ocean blue in 1492" and "Columbus discovered America!" and "Thanksgiving is about the peace and unity between the settlers and the natives". The ommision was obviously to save young children from hearing about things that disgust even adults. We want the kids to learn morality. But at what cots? The cost for the lie of morality is reality. That's hardly an even trade. The reality is that if we were to hold a poll in some random town in America about CC, people would call him a hero and an explorer and nothing more. Never in grammar school or high school did I ever learn the whole story of CC. We heard about the 'indians' attacking stagecoaches, but that was only the hollywood version.

What Manx posted in the first post is very important because it acknowledges that the reader already has morality, and is ready for reality. No one here is under 18, so you already have a good idea of what is right to imitate and what is wrong to imitate. It is right to be brave, it is wrong to enslave (<---consider that phrase coined as of now). Christopher Columbus was and is responsible for many, many deaths, and the mistreatment of innocent people. The islanders did not declair war on or try to enslave the Europeans. He treaded them as lower than human for no reason beyond the fact that they did not have the technology of the Europeans. That was wrong.

Just for kicks, I looked up 'asshole'. "A thoroughly contemptible, detestable person." I am able to detest and hold in contempt Christopher Columbus. That makes him an asshole.

Balance is both sides Manx, just as we sgree on some issues we disagree on some. Doesn't mean I look only at one side of you and curse you or believe you to be wonderful. YOU are a man just as I and we make mistakes and I am sure we both have done things we are not proud of and hurt others.

Such is the case with Columbus. To simply say this man was evil and yet not find anything at all in which to believe he had some good in him is as hypocritical and nonsensical as those who make the same claims about Clinton and Bush.

You didn't start this thread balanced. This thread contained an opinion based on some facts. I should be allowed my opinions based on the facts I know. And yes, before I read this I knew what attrocities Columbus had made but I also know at that time, that was where we as a peoples were. I cannot judge a man 500+ yrs later for actions he made not knowing truly how he was educated, what the exterior factors were, what reasonings the man had. I can't and won't judge the man..... good or bad. All I can do is say he was human and I do believe that in his day he did what he believed right. MY OPINION NOT WHITEWASH.

Would I support his actions today? NO

But he isn't in today and I am not responsible nor accountable for the sins of my ancestors, I can only be responsible and held accountable for my sins and hope my children learn from my mistakes and don't repeat them.

What my impression of the start of this thread is, is that you wish to condemn a man and condemn all those who follow after him.

I can't do that. I choose to see his good and bad and pay respect for the good he did.

You seem to have prejudged that those who disagree with your views are whitewashing the past, refuse to see the attrocities and hero worshipping.

You are wrong in this prejudgement of me and you obviously have not truly understood my posts. I see the evil but I choose to build on what positives I can learn from this. I cannot focus on the negatives and demand negativity and expect positive results from it.

That is what I see your argument as being, you want a man condemned because 500+ years later our morality dictates what he did as evil. His morality and teachings may have said it was ok.

Lets say you MANX do something famous makes you forever known in history. Then 500 years from now people start publishing how you looked at porn, ate meat, whatever and to them that is most vile.

Do you believe your accomplishments should be totally forgotten because you did something at the time that was legal but in the future it makes you a man to be reviled?

Do you believe that your progeny should pay retribution and forsake everything good you did because the morality in that future dictates you were evil (even though at the time you believed it was ok)?

I cannot judge a man in the past and discount his greatness, it doesn't mean I discount the evil (that my morality sees). It just means, I see him as a human being and I cannot judge him and his actions that is between God and him. But I can honor his great accomplishments, that helped mankind move forward.

Just out of curiosity (since a few threads here have involved religion and its current power) I thought I'd look up what the National Council of Churches had to say about Columbus. I was expecting them to hold the "elitist" viewpoint extolling Columbus' bravery, heroism, and insight.

To my surprise I found the exact opposite, namely a lengthy resolution that says, among many other things, that "For the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands, Christopher Columbus's invasion marked the beginning of slavery and their eventual genocide . . . . What some historians have termed a 'discovery' in reality was an invasion and colonization with legalized occupation, genocide, economic exploitation and a deep level of institutional racism and moral decadence. . . For the church, this is not a time for celebration." And so on (see the appended quote below).

This resolution was made in 1990 well before the publicized AIM demonstrations in 1992.

On reflection, I guess I'm not so surprised. My recollection is that Columbus' reputation hit a nadir around 1990 and was in the gutter through most of the 90s, and only has started to rise again in the last few years. Just about all the history books for the last 15 years have pointed out the negative aspects, although I agree with willravel that few "average" people are really very aware of them. That's no surprise though, given that a lot of "average" Americans probably think Columbus was our first president too.

But more educated people I think have been well aware for probably the last 40 years of the disease, slavery, and slaughter. These negative aspects have been fairly well represented in college history textbooks since the 1960s, and still are. And I think ironically it wasn't the Indians or civil rights movement that brought them to the foreground, I think it was the aftermath of WWII, with discovery of places like Auschwitz and Belsen, that brought an increased desire to acknowledge and record these kinds of atrocities.

I don't know much about Columbus, but I personally see nothing particularly worth celebrating about 1492.

What I'd like to know is who the first Indian was who stepped out of a plane and discovered Columbus' birthplace of Italy.

Maybe we should replace Columbus Day with the name of this Indian, and use it as a day to celebrate native culture all across America.

Host, your last post was beautifully written. I thank you.

I'll say it one more time:

This thread was started at the request to start a thread that listed bad things. The request was not to list any thing, it was specific to those things that are commonly considered wrong. Here is the request:
And you can read the entire exchange that brought about the request here: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...59#post1733459

The thread that your criticize for not being "balanced" was specifically created to address 1 side.

Now, going beyond the purpose of this thread created to fulfill a specific request, the question becomes: Does a thread that lists only the attrocities of Columbus do a disservice? And to that I emphatically say: No. Everyone and their brother knows that Columbus marked the beginnings of European civilization in the Americas which eventually brought us to where we are today. They know this because it has been and continues to be the near sum total information that is presented about the man - to the exclusion of this other side. Is it deceptive to state only his attrocities? No, because everyone already knows what is considered his qualities. With the information here you can make a far better informed opinion on the man. There was simply no need for this thread to repeat well known information (even beyond the fact that it wasn't requested).

I see your side and how the post was designed. Education of ALL facets of someone or an era is how we learn.

I just felt personally, you set out to attack a man and not give him deserved credit. As you point out, my opinion was wrong and therefore I appologize for the misunderstanding.

I do believe this discussion had it's merits on both sides though.

I now see that this thread would have benefitted from a direct quotation of lebell's request.

I wouldn't say that the discussion in this thread is not meritorious. I do believe this thread did not require internal balance of the history of Columbus. Externally, such balance is still lacking greatly when it comes to knowledge of his failings.