Happy Columbus day!

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   jackclee lmposted 7 years ago

   It is Columbus Day. What is the controversy?
   When I was growing up, we were taught American history.
   Columbus, with his three ships, sailed from Spain discovered America in 1492...
   The rest is history...

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      Castlepalomaposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Before Columbus there were 5 times the native population compared to Europe living then. With Mexico city larger than any city in Europe. It was not a good day for native American people. That is why they want to change  to native day. I am with Native day for they can be our savior for the natural environment.  Vs. Columbus goal rush, piracy, salvery and genocide. He was a great sailor running from piracy even in Europe.
      
      The natural environment is the greatest threat to mankind allow natives to take the lead.

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         wildernessposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         I'd be interested in seeing the census that showed over 350M people in North America in 1400.  Or did you mean that the population of two major continents was greater than a single, smaller, continent?
         
         But isn't it a little disingenuous to blame Columbus?  It was inevitable that the more technologically advance society of Europe would meet the stone age tribes of the Americas, and when it did the result was just as inevitable.  Columbus might have been a catalyst, but that's all.

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            ptosisposted 7 years agoin reply to this

            That is so wrong! They were NOT  'stone-age tribes'. Damn it W.
            
            Iroquois Constitution: A Forerunner to Colonists Democratic Principles, the Iroquois had equality for all. Not this Animal Farm version of 'some are more equal than others' version that the US has.
            
            The version of the constitution now held authentic by the Iroquois of New York and Ontario, embraces a narrative of the events in the lives of Hiawatha and Dekanawida that lead up to its foundation. Its special interest lies in the fact that it is an attempt of the Iroquois themselves to explain their own civic and social system.
            
            Senate resolution 331, from the 100th congress in 1988, the Senate acknowledges, “the confederation of the original thirteen colonies into one republic was influenced…by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself.”
            
            The earth’s oldest democracy isn’t the United States of America, but rather the Six Nation Confederacy of the Iroquois.
            
            Before Europeans settled upstate in the 1600's, the Five Nations of the Iroquois lived under a constitution that had three main principles, peace, equity or justice and ''the power of the good minds,'' that of the elders over the young, since 1200 C.E.
            
            At the meeting, representatives of the six Indian nations and seven colonies heard Benjamin Franklin. champion the Iroquois example as he presented his Plan of Union.
            
            ''It would be a strange thing,'' he told the assembly, ''if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming such a union, and yet it has subsisted for ages and appears indissolvable, and yet a like union should be impractical for 10 or a dozen English colonies.'' Granting of Powers
            
            The Great Law of Peace includes:
            
            freedom of speech,
            
            freedom of religion,
            
            the right of women to participate in government,
            
            separation of powers,
            
            checks and balances within government.
            
            a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,”
            
            three branches of government: two houses and a grand counsel,
            
            A Women’s Council, which is the Iroquois equivalent of our Supreme Court –settling disputes and judging legal violations.
            
            Are you saying that white European males are the superior species?
            Is that what you are saying W?
            Because it sure sounds like it!
            Defend your statements with your cultured superior intellect!
            
            BTW, by saying ignorant savages is self delusional appeasement of guilt for genocide.
            
            10 million+ Estimated number of Native Americans living in land that is now the United States when European explorers first arrived in the 15th century
            
            Less than 300,000 Estimated number of Native Americans living in the United States around 1900
            
            Until the 1960s, scholars lacked an appreciation for the massive loss of life from what Alfred Crosby termed “virgin soil epidemics,” and so they drastically understated the size of the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere population.
            
            To obtain gold, Spaniards needed Indians’ knowledge and labor and so enslaved them, using violence to secure Native peoples and keep them in chains. Some accounts, such as one by Bartolomé de Las Casas of Spaniards making bets “as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow” or tearing “babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dash[ing] their heads against the rocks,” suggest a genocidal mentality, though such accounts may imply that these actions were the product of particularly depraved men and unrelated to the purposes of the expedition.
            
            The 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide states: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

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            1. 89

               wildernessposted 7 years agoin reply to this

               "That is so wrong! They were NOT  'stone-age tribes'. Damn it W."
               
               Really?  We have records of iron, or even bronze, implements and tools from Amerindians before the Europeans arrived?  We have their kilns for smelting iron ore, and their metal jewelry (yes, I know they occasionally found nearly pure copper and beat it into small tokens, but that is not the same as working metals)?  That would be a surprise to me; those people were mostly nomads and even animal husbandry was just starting out.
               
               "Are you saying that white European males are the superior species?
               Is that what you are saying W? "
               
               Despite your outrage, the answer is that yes, Americans were technologically inferior to Europeans.  Set aside your emotional outburst and even a liberal should acknowledge that; it's really a very simple fact that has nothing to do with morality, ethics or genocide.
               
               "10 million+ Estimated number of Native Americans living in land that is now the United States when European explorers first arrived in the 15th century"
               
               10M is not 5X the population of Europe in the 15th century, which is the claim that was made.  Once more, set aside your fake outrage over nothing and read what was said.
               
               The rest of your post can likewise be ignored as it has nothing to do with anything I said.  The European culture of the time was far advanced, technologically, and did not recognize much except "might makes right".  What happened was inevitable and was NOT caused by Columbus; it was caused by two very different cultures, one with far more technology, that were both barbaric by today's standards, meeting.

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                  ptosisposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                  Delusional denial to the bitter end,eh?

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                     wildernessposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                     I don't see any links to 1400 Amerindians producing iron, or even bronze.  Can't find any, eh?

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                        ptosisposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                        eh? I wasn't looking for it.
                        
                        Not too sure if you ever saw the movie, but the movie "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is what I think is your position is.
                        
                        Some don't like the book's tone of determinism and inevitability--taking what we know to have happened and then finding reasons why it must have happened that way. It's a starting point because it does clear away a lot of common, unconsciously-racist assumptions, and forces people to think about a very charged subject in a more rigorous way.
                        
                        Diamond's book argues that the differences in progress for different societies around the world do not result from one group being smarter or more resourceful than another. Rather, he focuses on the impact of geography -- whether food and other key items were plentiful, whether and how disease spread, and how these developments led to different levels of industrialization, and wealth.
                        
                        I disagree , I agree more with "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty"
                        
                        In that book geography, culture, food, none of that matters, it's the government. One of the first examples is Nogales, a border town that is half in Sonora, Mexico and the other half in Arizona, USA.
                        Both have same language, culture, food,  geography, etc, but one is dirt poor and the US side is thriving.
                        
                        None of this probably answers your questions. Sorry.
                        
                        But I still hold on that 'morality, ethics or genocide', are major factors and should not be dismissed so casually.
                        
                        https://www.redletterchristians.org/chr … americans/
                        
                        "Barton recently compared the Native Americans who resisted the encroachment of “white guys” –his words- to “terrorists.
                        
                        This is most apparent when he speaks of the destruction of the vast herds of buffalo in the western plains by the American military and hunters. “Doing that is what brought the Indians to their knees because…that’s where they got their meat. That’s where they got their coats; the hides provided coats. They provided cover for their teepees. The military wiped out the supply line by wiping out the buffalo.”  The “just war’ tradition certainly allows for cutting off the supply line for weapons or equipment related to armed conflict. But to cut off the supply line for food and the essentials for life for an entire people offends against the principle of noncombatant immunity.
                        
                        
                        
                        By then [1891] the native population had been reduced to 2.5% of its original numbers and 97.5% of the aboriginal land base had been expropriated....Hundreds upon hundreds of native tribes with unique languages, learning, customs, and cultures had simply been erased from the face of the earth, most often without even the pretense of justice or law." Peter Montague
                        
                        "From the beginning, the Spaniards saw the native Americans as natural slaves, beasts of burden, part of the loot. When working them to death was more economical than treating them somewhat humanely, they worked them to death. The English, on the other hand, had no use for the native peoples. They saw them as devil worshippers, savages who were beyond salvation by the church, and exterminating them increasingly became accepted policy."  - Hans Koning

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                           wildernessposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                           "eh? I wasn't looking for it."
                           
                           Well, if you want to show they weren't "stone age" peoples ("That is so wrong! They were NOT  'stone-age tribes'. Damn it W."), that's the place to start.  To my knowledge they used flint arrows/spears, clay pottery, etc.  The only metal working came from beating nearly pure copper they found lying on top of the ground - the rest was stone, clay, wood, bones, etc.  We have a tendency to ignore that simple fact in favor of glorifying a barbaric culture, but it was key in what happened.
                           
                           I've pondered on just why the peoples of Europe were so inventive, so fast, compared to the rest of the world.  Even China was left in the dust and huge areas of the planet were stuck in the stone age while Europe forged ahead.  Personally, I tend towards environment and local climate, not genetics, but I could be wrong.  Or it could be centralized government, but Europe was in the steel grip of religion, and religion does NOT encourage new ideas and concepts.  Plus, seems to me that the advance began before those strong governments; technology and learning builds on technology and learning in an accelerating curve. 
                           
                           As for the rest, we all understand that Europeans decimated the Americas.  Partly from technology, partly from a culture that did not particularly value human life and partly from population pressure from immigrants.

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                              ptosisposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                              The only metal working came from beating nearly pure copper they found lying on top of the ground - the rest was stone, clay, wood, bones, etc.
                              
                              Maybe in your local area. I thought we were talking about the entire Western Hemisphere.
                              
                              10th–16th century, Colombia; cast gold
                              
                              
                              What if the Northeast had the gold, and was conquered by Spain? Would the Brits go to South America? If the Brits went to SA - they would probably never be heard from again.
                              
                              Quetzalcoatl had a helmet & a beard.( native SA's do not have facial hair). Thinking that Cortés could be Quetzalcoatl, Montezuma greeted the party with great honor by killing 20k South Americans in one day.  So ' God Quetzalcoatl', Cortez was like, "Uh… yes?", then captured Montezuma, ransomed him for a crap ton of gold, and ruled the Aztec Empire through him.
                              
                              

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                                 wildernessposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                                 Well, I wasn't; the topic was Columbus, who was all about the Northern Hemisphere.  Yes, the southern hemisphere was considerably ahead of the North, though nowhere near the level of Europeans.

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         jackclee lmposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         This is just attempt to change history or re-write it...
         Native americans were just as violent to each other as any other nation or race being conquered or conquering...
         Here is the Aztecs-
         https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_s … ec_culture
         There is no evidence that everything would be just peachy if Columbus had not landed here...
         This whole debate over tearing down statues is a smoke screen...
         Who cares about these statues?
         It is about tearing down western civilization as we know it.
         What is next?
         Burning the Constitution? It was created by white men that own slaves...

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      colorfuloneposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Happy Columbus Day! 

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         Castlepalomaposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         From my experience building museums and history display of mostly of the Americas, both North and South America. Columbus was not even the first European to discover the New World of Americas. There was the Chinese, Vikings and a few others. It all depends on who is writing the story. Often enough, old stories get to be a fine line between history and fantasy.
         
         At least for. barbaric wars genocides and violence since Columbus. The world Championship has to go to white Christians.

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            jackclee lmposted 7 years agoin reply to this

            You have a better idea?
            What is the alternative?
            It is not like we can go back and change history or re-write it?
            Tearing down a statue of Christopher Columbus will do little.
            Those who think they are better are hypocrites.
            They are living in a country that have brought them wealth and comfort and opportunity greater than any in history...
            They should kiss the ground and praise God for being born in America.

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               Castlepalomaposted 7 years agoin reply to this

               At one time North America was the best for me,  not now found better places.

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                  jackclee lmposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                  To each his own...

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   jackclee lmposted 7 years ago

   http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/10/09/ … umbus-day/

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