Re: If we have a Columbus day, let's have an Adolf Hitler day too

On Mar 28, 9:20 pm, Scotius <wolvz...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 28 Mar 2007 08:51:27 -0700, "zeez" <Ultim...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[Columbus's men] "Laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword,
could split a man in two. They took infants from their mothers and
threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter. They burned
captives alive, and, because on few and far between occasions, the
Indians justifiably killed some Christians, the Spaniards made a rule
among themselves that for every Christian slain, they would slay a
hundred Indians.?"

Same as the nazis did in some of the regions of Europe they
occupied.

http://math.nmu.edu/~lhanson/PowderKeg/PK7/Columbus.html

The Great Columbus Day Farce

Why Columbus Day should NOT be a celebrated holiday

We should seriously consider this. A lot of people will say
it's messing with "our heritage", but that's not really true. If we're
going to have a Columbus day, we may as well have a Hitler day too,
and since that makes no sense, neither does a Columbus day.



Another Columbus Day is coming near. And, as with every Columbus
Day for the past 4 years, I ask myself ?why do we celebrate a man who
was no more than a murderer?? Columbus sparked many a great western
ideal. Capitalism, science as a religion, the establishment of a
global monoculture,

How do you figure he's the father of capitalism and a "global
monoculture"? Or even science as religion?

the enslavement of other races,

That wasn't going on before Columbus?

the destruction of
the environment,

European royals in many countries had to import trees from
other countries, since many nations then were already running out of
the large trees that many supporting beams in castles were mostly made
of.

the eradication and abuse of life,

Something else Columbus certainly didn't start.

and the genocide
of America?s indigenous people are just a few of those ideals.

None of which is morally acceptable, but even this one isn't
something that Columbus started. Geronimo of the Apaches had to try
for a long time to get natives from different tribes to unite against
European colonizers, and that was after more than a hundred years of
violence between tribes when they should already have seen that they
couldn't afford to fight each other.
The fact is, many natives in North America at that time
considered warfare almost like a sport, and it was a normal thing for
Apaches to raid even the camps of other Apaches of a different
sub-group. Ridiculous, yes, but true. That doesn't excuse what
Columbus did, but let's not pretend that it wasn't happening before he
arrived.

If
these are the ideals that he sparked, then why should we celebrate a
power-hungry man, no better than Hitler?

We shouldn't, but we don't have to attribute things that were
going on for thousands of years before his arrival to him either. This
reminds me of the way some people say the US is responsible for the
World's problems. The US is responsible for the problems that it's
government creates, to a degree, and the problems that it's corporate
entities in cooperation with it's government create, to a degree.
Speaking of which, you could be pointing out constructively that
Bush's privatization of many military functions, including killing
"the enemy" is really just the logical next step after the US military
has been used for so long to push and defend corporate interests
anyway.
It's getting more difficult to use the English language to
justify why the military must be sent to 3rd world hellholes that just
happen to have a lot of oil, so why not privatize the military
instead? Has anyone considered that that might be their goal?



History has always been a powerful storyteller, but not accurate.
Often, accounts of injustice, stories of war, and genocide disappear
for the people need to validate their position. History is written by
the victors, the ones who carry out the genocide, the leaders of the
conquest. Lies are sold as truth, and the truth is buried and
forgotten.

That can also depend on how hard the person hearing the
vitor's version is listening. By now we should all be paying attention
when the history professor, or the history book says "To be sure,
there were some conflicts, but on the whole the settlers were more
civilized than...", and you can put almost any group after that that
existed where other groups sought to establish a colony.

The truth has been erased and rewritten by generations of
killers, ignorant accomplices, and speechless victims.

Even modern historians identify Columbus? conquest as the birth of
racism.

If that's true, the ones who do so are idiots. At least one
Egyptian pharoah had images of the Kushites of North Africa emblazoned
on the soles of his sandles so he could virtually trample them every
time he deigned to walk, rather than be carried.

Columbus? journey was fueled by greed,

I agree that he was not a fair-minded man, because of what he
allowed to go on under his authority, but this is way too simplistic.
Yes, he probably did seek status, but I'm sure that in his mind he was
looking for land for Europeans to expand to. That in itself would not
necessarily be wrong, depending on how many people already lived in
whatever lands he would sail to, and whether or not they were amenable
to having people move in next to them. The natives the pilgrims met in
the US didn't mind having new people around. Of course, they didn't
foresee then that it would become a conquest, and probably neither did
most of the pilgrims foresee that so many other Europeans would
emigrate to the "new land".

the betterment of his
people over others (and not the betterment of themselves as a people),
and a desire to convert all peoples to Christianity.

CATHOLICISM, not "Christianity". The catholic church is just a
glazed over version of the religion of old Rome, which itself was
adapted from an earlier Babylonian religion. Please don't pretend to
believe that Columbus saw his work "for the church" as something God
would approve of. I'm sure he knew how the game was played in Europe,
and thus would be played wherever European went (from the catholic
countries anyway, which was most of Europe).
Back then the Vatican pretty well ran a lot of European
countries. It didn't have status as a nation itself until 1927 when
Mussolini signed the agreement that made it a state within a state.
And that probably only happened so recently because the Vatican power
brokers were still dreaming of reclaiming more direct leadership of
many European nations they had lost to parliaments and voters.

The conquest was
the birth of an international slave trade, the start of the factory
system of labor, and the death of an ancient way of life.

Columbus was obsessed by the idea that he could sail to India, and
he spent years arguing for someone to finance his voyage. Columbus,
whose religious convictions are often not taken into account, promised
the king and queen of Spain that he would convert the ?heathens? to
Catholicism and use their gold to fund their holy war with the
Muslims.

Grenada was the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, and the
Spaniards were wanting some territory that Muslims held, probably,
after they had all of their's back. That was politics. They may have
called it a holy war to whip people into a frenzy, but it was for
land. I'm sure the "average" person then was not a religious zealot
any more than most people today are, and most probably knew that the
"holy war" was as crooked as the Vatican had pretty well always been.
Rush Limbaugh is not a religious zealot. He's an armchair
politician, economist, etc, and he has a lot of people listening to
him. Rest assured the Spanish had their Limbaughs too.

Besides believing that all people should be Catholic, he
wrote in his diaries that he believed the world was destined to end in
1650.

Nostradamus said it would end in 1999, and a lot of people
took it seriously. Of course, a lot of people still do refer to his
retouched-beyond-recognition-by-the-Rosicrucians ramblings seriously,
despite that the World did not end in 1999. Consider him plonked.





15th century Spain has been described by medieval scholars as ?a
culture of death?. The unbalance in the monarchal government led to a
contentious society. Milton Melton described Columbus? world in his
book ?Columbus and the World Around Him? as:

?Not many children lived to maturity. Landowners punished
poachers. Health care was non-existent. The frequent wars promoted
organized violence on a large scale. People were killed casually in
quarrels, for cheating in gambling, over malicious gossip, in drinking
bouts, and in urban riots.?

These descriptions are tribute to Columbus and his successors who
successfully duplicated the land they left in the new land.

There were about 100 million people in the new land, as compared
to the approximately 60 or 70 million people in Europe. It has been
found difficult to describe these natives though, for they had been
destroyed too quickly, and what was written about them was written by
the ones doing the killing.

The first culture which Columbus came in contact with were the
Tainos. The Europeans described the Tainos as primitive, but the
Tainos lived in small, clean huts, practiced sustainable agriculture,
and they bathed often, three things that were not seen much in Europe.
The two records of their meeting contradict and clash as violently as
the cultures. On October 12, 1492, Columbus wrote ?The people are as
naked as their mothers bore them, but well-dispositioned.? He went on
to say, ?they are a people who can be made free and converted to our
Holy Faith. They ought to make good and skilled servants.?

In a book written by Columbus? son Ferdinand Columbus, a skirmish
between the ?Indians and the Christians? is described as a lesson
intended to strike fear into the hearts of the natives.

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