Going too far?
 

History is a changing friends. Good guys are now bad guys. The founding fathers are next you watch!:nope:



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091011/...ching_columbus

This is nothing new. They were beating up on Columbus back in 1992 on the 500th anniversary of his voyage. However, sooner or later some European nation was going to discover the continents in the Western Hemisphere and given the plundering attitudes of the times and the diseases rampant then, such a meeting probably wasn't going to be pretty.

Geez. Columbus didn't 'found' the United States and it was the Russians who colonized what we now call Alaska. They didn't exactly win any humanitarian awards for their performance there either.

The founding fathers have already been routinely trashed for years on campuses as rich, elitist white slaveholders who didn't give any voting rights to women or minorities and kept slavery as an institution. What they got right doesn't count. Nothing new under the sun there.

What? You think Columbus traveled to the new world to spread freedom and good will? I don't think so. :nope:

It is about time that real history is being taught to our children. :yeah:

As much as what some of that article says is nonsense, I was not aware of Columbus being some kind of hero. It's quite known that as Governor of the West Indies, Colombus routinely tortured, killed and oppressed both the natives and the settlers under him; In the end he was also imprisoned for tyranny both in Hispanola and later Spain for quite a while before the King of Aragon released him and allowed him to go on his fourth voyage.

Well he was responsible for creating an environment that was to later become the United states of America. He brought the New world to European attention. And European the masses fought, conquered, explored and died to create this nation. I don't believe in collective guilt that is being sold to our children. He did what no one else before him accomplished (Okay so Lieff Erikson did it a few hundred years sooner, but failed to capitalize on it)

He was still an incredible explorer doing at the time what was unknown, I mean the earth was flat he could have fallen off!

Even before Columbus most people thaught the Earth was round.
Even after Columbus the minority that thought it was flat where still in force.

It would appear after his death that his remains underwent nearly as much travelling as he did when he was alive :DL

Well, before they did that, they took care of the real owners and natives on the Caribean islands, in Central and Northern America, and South America as well. It continued with the Spanish and French powers ruling in the region in the later centuries, and creating social, economical, cultural and environmental conditions that in several places decisively influence the desolate outcome and the violence in desperate places like for example Haiti or better: the whole island of Hispaniola, until today. And when I saw a TV documentary on the nuclear test series on the Bikini atoll this evening, I realised that we still act like our ancestors did back then, if it serves our purposes, by the only justification of being the stronger one.

for the people originally living in these places, it would have been better if neither the Spanish nor anyone else ever would have arrived and the United States nor any other nation ever would have been founded there. Because the price for the changes to that new world were - genocides. Compared to that mass dying due to diseases and mass killing and mass torturing and mass enslaving throughout North and South America and the Caribean, the independence war and the civil war fade in quantitative horror.

Whether all the native civilisations would have survived until today if left to themnselves, is another question. We know that many managed to wipe out themselves, over suicidal economical reasons leading to cataclystic environmental conditions. Other local civilisations in northern america especially, managed to balance their birth rates and economic options versus the environment, and survived until the arrival of the Europeans, which equalled a meteor impact for them.

It certainly would have benefited the Incas, Aztecs and other native American peoples to have had the luxury of a wider ocean. Japan escaped the same fate because geographically she was at the extreme edge of imperial reach. Western powers at this time, venturing into Japanese waters, were at the outer limits of their respective capacities. Russia, even after beginning construction of the Trans-Siberian railway in 1891, was able to do no more that extend it's fingertips into Manchuria and China proper. The European maritime powers possessed neither the regional naval base facilities or expendable land power to plant more than outposts in peripheral areas like China and Indonesia. The US after Admiral Perry's famous visit was too occupied with the Civil War and western expansion. The result of this slow march east was that by the 1860s the example of what was happening in next-door China suggested to Japan that it would be well advised to take control of it's fate and begin modernizing on it's own terms.

The USofA has helped alot of people and countrys.

I have always wondered " what if Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor "

Would've the US later entered WWII or maybe not.

History might've been changed if not for Japan. :hmmm:

Well, when Perry arrived in Japan, Japan already had it's history of experiences with Dutch and Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, an era that was put to end by the Tokugawa shoguns, the first of whom very legitimately feared the growing influence of the Europeans and catholicism in Japan since it already back then pressed for foreign explpoitation of Japan'S natural ressources (and from today's perspective we know how the eurppeans behaved in other parts of the world where they arrived newly, and none of their victims could have had a reasonable desire for what the Europeans brought upon them). When the internal social order increasingly became threatened by japanese feudal lords converting to Catholicsm, the shogun made short process, killed many of these, Catholicism was banned, and of course he threw the europeans out, which imo was a very wise decision from the perspective back then as well as that of today. that Japan until today combines both a high population density and still a very superbly functioning system of natural preservation and forest cultivation (Japan are amongst the very top nations with the hidgest density of forest coverage, three quarters of Japan are covered with cultivated forest!) - the Tokugawa jurisdiction needs to be given credit for. That way Japan avoided the fate many other societies with high population densities and consuming their natural resources until none were left fell victim to. However, Perry was send to Japan with the explicit order to break up the Japanese isolation, for one wanted access to it's ressouces, as well as it'S harbours' logistic supply capacity - to widen exactly that operational range Torplexed is pointing at. Perry dictated these conditions, because the superiority of the modern firearms of the europeans was too obvious.

Maybe the Perry invasion - that's what it was, if not in scale then in intention - came at the most "ideal" time for Japan. It had managed to estzablish a system of autarcy and preserving use of it'S natural ressources, mainly wood, and was in a state were it was not strong to reject the American demands and fight for that, but was strong enough not to fall completely to wetsern interests. the result is the industrialisiation (and militarisation) that made it such a strong player in the first half of the last century, and a major industrial player today. However, the price for that, from a modern perspective, is that it has lost it'S autarcy - The Japanese industry depends heavily on exports of goods, and imports of ressources. Which imo makes it a weak economy, like the German one that I consider to be a weak - or better: very vulnerable one - as well.

China slept too long, and when it was awakened by the europeans, it had become so static and paralysed that the small force of europeans and the influence they unfolded was able to dominate this huge empire and it's government, and exploit this weakness for Western interests without china being able to resists. Maybe the contact with China should have come earlier when the Chinese feudal hierarchy was not already so much paralysed by ritual and lacking flexibility, maybe then the europeans would not have been able to dominate them like they did. What would have happened if the West would have "cracked open" China later than it actually had, must remain speculative. Maybe the bad awakening would just have been delayed, but maybe china would have taken the additional time to realise that there was a world beyond China that was threatening to take it over, would have started to move, to adapt and to meet the challenge of the arriving Europeans.

Seen that, Japan was better off with the way it went there.

I belong to that camp that believes that Roosevelt pressed the Japanese only for one reason over the oil so hard until they finally either had to completely give up their ambitions to become the regional dominating power, or would need to attack America and overcome it in order to break open the "oil-garotte": Roosevelt wanted america netering the war in Europe as well, but was opposed by a congress and a public mood that simply was opposing that idea and preferred the production of cars and refrigerators to that of tanks and warplanes. If Roosevelt would have failed to make the Japanese attack, he would have found another way to enter the war. I am very sure he also saw the chance that America would inherit the Britsh empire's estate, because after the air battle of Britain and the U-Boot war having brought Britain twice to breaking point it was clear that however the war ended, the empire never would be able to live up to it'S former power and glory again. If in the wake of that taking over from the British, Japanese interference with American intentions for domination in the Pacific could be switched off as well - the better.

I think of Roosevelt as both being sly and intelloigent, and unscrupellous. considering the cirucmstances at that time of history, that maybe was the best imaginable combination of characteristics for the US leader.

@Skybird: Have you heard of the book "Day of Deceit"? If you haven't read it, the basis for the book is to clear Kimmel and Shorts names in the Pearl Harbor attack. While some of the accusations are alittle far fetched, a large portion of the book is from recently declassified info (first hand sources). In a nutshell, the author says that FDR was pushing Japan into an attack, so the US would be in a posistion to go to Britain's aid. I'd be curious to hear your opinion on the book. Many of the critics of the book stat: A US president would NEVER do anything like that, or it's not first hand info (which is totally wrong, it's all first hand data).
Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

Don't know that book, sorry. Maybe I have read references to it in other lecture I had. But I hardly memorise every single such reference detail when reading something.

The Japanese have been gearing up to fight the US since the early 1900's. I think we would have butted heads sooner or later.