Going too far?

[Freiwillige]

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



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

[Torplexed]

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.

"We have a very large Alaska native population, so just the whole Columbus being the founder of the United States, doesn't sit well with a lot of people, myself included," said Paul Prussing, deputy director of Alaska's Division of Teaching and Learning Support.

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.

[Raptor1]

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.

[Freiwillige]

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!

[Letum]

Originally Posted by Freiwillige

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.

[Jimbuna]

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

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Freiwillige

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.

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.

[Torplexed]

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.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Freiwillige

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



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

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

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