Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: karajorma on October 13, 2013, 07:13:40 am
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http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
I figured this was a fairly worthy cause, even if I'm not from America.
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yet again the oatmeal wades into history with smug contrarianism and cutesy moral certitude
i'm not sure if this is worse than the tesla one, though
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the oatmeal is hardly breaking any news here, I thought most people were already at least peripherally aware of Columbus being a douche.
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I'm just going to be Canadian and go "Happy Thanksgiving"
Oatmeal still cracks me up
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Yeah, Columbus was terrible... what's this "smug contrarianism" nonsense? You don't like finding out the stuff they taught you in school was wrong? Then you should be mad at your school's curriculum, not the person who showed you better.
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...no, I'm not disputing any issues of fact here (although doubtless the author has yet again misinterpreted or misrepresented all of his sources), what I hate is this smarmy "oh look the simplistic view of history you were fed at school is wrong, let me feed you this simplistic but also AWESOME and BADASS history instead" attitude (cracked is pretty bad on this count too).
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Suppose the problem here is the fact it is looking at him in isolation, Columbus, whilst a complete bastard, was part of a set produced by a 'complete bastard manufacturing system' known as Colonialism. He would never have succeeded in what he attempted had he not had the backing of other complete bastards.
Both the UK and Spain had Empires that enslaved, raped and murdered several indigenous populations in order to increase that Empire, the Conquistadors slaughtered by design or accident a vast percentage of the South American tribes, and similarly, I believe the UK depopulated Tasmania by simply landing at one end and shooting everyone the saw till they reached the opposite end of the island (though that's totally from memory, I'd go look for some solid evidence but I'm sort of strapped for time). The Dutch and the French worked along similar lines.
After all, if you take Churchill as a drunk, mildly obese, cigar-smoking ex-soldier who spent most of a war trying to convince his army to drop chemical and biological weapons on the enemy, it is an accurate description, but because it's in isolation, it's not a complete one.
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Even beyond Columbus's awful personal attributes, whether part of a general cultural pattern or not, I've been wondering since grade school why the hell we celebrate someone who had no freaking clue where he'd actually landed. I mean last time I checked, the continents are called North and South America, i.e. after Vespucci, not Columbia.
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Because he was the only man in history who gave up, pulled over, and asked for directions.
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I'm just going to be Canadian and go "Happy Thanksgiving"
Oatmeal still cracks me up
+1. We have nothing to do with Columbus.
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columbus is overrated. cave men discovered america.
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It's true that Colombus could be considered merely a product of his time. All the more reason to celebrate someone who didn't just go along with everybody else. Someone who stood apart a bit. So I'm all for Bartolome Day.
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So uh... Columbus day is celebrating the guy's birthday, right? Do they have the same birthday or something?
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The day celebrates his arrival on America, not his birthday.
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I mean last time I checked, the continents are called North and South America, i.e. after Vespucci, not Columbia.
There's considerable dispute (http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/america.html) about exactly who (if anyone) the continents are named after.
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columbus is overrated. cave men discovered america.
Legend has it they nuked all the horses, and then the Spaniards brought those **** factories back.
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@PH and Flipside, simplistic though the Oatmeal's view may be (I've read the sources he cited although it's been a while), you'd be hard pressed to make the case that anything Columbus did benefited the native Americans in any meaningful way, certainly not in the long run.
Admittedly all there is to go off of at the moment is the Oatmeal and its sources, but while Columbus was certainly a product of his time, he might well have simply been a greedy, vicious bastard on top of that, and those exist in every time period. I don't know enough to say whether he was any worse than his peers, but even if he wasn't, who's to say that they weren't all of that type while still products of their time?
EDIT: Reminds me of when I visited the National Museum of the American Indian (http://nmai.si.edu/home/) a few years back. The exhibits were too family-friendly to state outright "The Europeans came and raped the continent" but they got as close as they could to saying it.
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Product of his time or not, is he someone we should be celebrating now?
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Product of his time or not, is he someone we should be celebrating now?
No.
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As I said before, he was a complete bastard. The thing about history is that it divides into two things, people and actions. The actions of Columbus, whatever their motivations and faults, changed the world (for better or worse) but only thanks to a vast logistics system that allowed him to do so. The person of Columbus, however, was nothing really special it was just by blind luck that he managed to be remembered specifically.
Personally, I think the actions of Columbus should be remembered, i.e. the modern establishment of the New World, but as a person he really doesn't have much going for him to celebrate, he was really not that far removed from a lot of other cut-throat 'adventurers' of his time.
As far as the Native Americans are concerned, I don't recall anyone actually saying that anything Columbus did was good for them, in fact, I recall drawing a comparison to the fate of the South American tribes during the age of the Conquistadors.
To be honest, the mistake is putting Columbus forward as some kind of evidence of a 'manifest destiny' for the US, rather than as evidence of how far we have come (and, of course how far still needs to be gone) since those days.
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For anyone saying that Columbus was part of the culture of Colonialism...
The governor of Spain wanted him arrested for crimes against humanities:
http://www.examiner.com/article/christopher-columbus-the-murderous-truth
He was a terrible person, and him being celebrated is disturbing. I blame the Catholics.
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We're talking about the age of the Marquis Adventurer here, one mans pirate was another mans war-hero, and you will note that he bought his way out of that crime with stolen gold, which was another common pastime.
In many ways this shows exactly why Columbus was part of the Culture of Colonialism, this is pretty much how it worked, in many ways it's practically a carbon copy of Colonizations around the world.
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I can't say I know too much about the subject besides the link I posted, but you seem to have a fair point.
In primary school, I think I recall a history book teaching us that Christopher Columbus brought civilization (or some such) to the American Indians.
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Ok so it's his arrival here and not his birthday, whatever... what if anything has the date got to do with this Bartolome guy? Because not celebrating Columbus on a day that is reasonable to associate with Columbus does not go hand in hand with celebrating some other guy on a day that is reasonable to associate with Columbus.
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Ok so it's his arrival here and not his birthday, whatever... what if anything has the date got to do with this Bartolome guy? Because not celebrating Columbus on a day that is reasonable to associate with Columbus does not go hand in hand with celebrating some other guy on a day that is reasonable to associate with Columbus.
It'll make the transition easier if Americans have something to occupy themselves with on the second Monday of October, than if they simply abolish or ignore the holiday altogether. Which some states have already done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day#Non-observance