Video essay about Columbus, bad but not pure evil?

[Politesse]

In the video and earlier in the thread there is a discussion that a sizeable portion of the the violent and genocidal attributed to Columbus were actually done by his contemporaries or within a couple generations after Columbus.

These acts DID happen, attribution of responsibility is a bit more tricky.

The question is, what can we reliably attribute to the man himself? Even a brief review of the primary documents: plenty. The video is building something of a strawman; no one believes that he was a soulless monster and personally responsible for every single death in Hispaniola. What he is responsible for is his own conduct, and for what was under his control. He had named himself admiral of the fleet. There was no authority on these islands higher than his own. And he used that authority to sanction murder, rape, and enslavement. From whom, if not Columbus, were his men to take their cue? It really doesn't seem like the creator of that video has spent the time to read the documentary evidence for themselves. It is not hard to find.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

How on earth do you get that from what steve_bank actually wrote? I would like to know the thought process behind that leap.

I'm baffled as to what other message could be contrived.

That conquest and brutality was nothing new to these victims of the Spanish. I don't see a need to read in any excusing of the Spaniards' actions.

 

[Politesse]

How on earth do you get that from what steve_bank actually wrote? I would like to know the thought process behind that leap.

I'm baffled as to what other message could be contrived.

That conquest and brutality was nothing new to these victims of the Spanish. I don't see a need to read in any excusing of the Spaniards' actions.

What the hell kind of a point is that? Why would it be important to make it, except to excuse Columbus' actions? Why is it relevant?

Especially since I have never heard anyone claim otherwise. The situation in the Caribbean is and has been well-understood for centuries, and everyone in the world, even the most ardent of pacificists, knows what violence and brutality are. That doesn't mean you somehow deserve to get slaughtered by your neighbors. What is this, some sort of original sin bullshit?

And his post doesn't prove that anyway, since none of his "examples" had to do with the people that Columbus actually encountered, unless you accept his argument that "Native Americans" are somehow all the same homogenous group across all time and space. I'm still waiting for an innocent, non-racist explanation for why the dealings of Squahomish or Lakota people living in the 19th century (Neither of which nations, even in the 15th century, ever encountered a Spaniard) have anything to do with the discussion. By the same logic, can I show that Steve's category of "White People" weren't as violent as commonly supposed by pointing out the actions of 19th century Quakers in Pennsylvania? I mean, those are equally relevant facts, yes? Which is to say they have nothing to do with the conversation except through a twisted "race" category that didn't even exist in 1490.

 

[steve_bank]

Through the 19th century with no global communications the semior man on a sg=hip or with a group of shps was the law, life and death. The story of the HMS Bounty and Captain Bligh.

I think you are hard pressed to paint Columbus any better or worse than the rest of the times. There are historical figures that engaged in wanton abuse and mass killings. Caligula, Nero, Henry 8th, Hitler. Genghis Kahn.

If it was not Columbus it would have been someone else who opened the Americas to exploitation.

When Columbus landed there were no American Hispanics and Latinos. Latinos today in Mexico and the USA are a mix of indigenous blood and Spanish-Portuguese mostly.

Those who trace ancestry directly back to Spain and identify as Hispanic sometimes object to be conflated with Latino. Latino comes from Latin America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic

The term Hispanic (Spanish: hispano or hispánico) broadly refers to the people, nations, and cultures that have a historical link to the Spanish language or the country of Spain, depending on the context.

It commonly applies to countries once under colonial possession by the Spanish Empire following Spanish colonization of the Americas, parts of the Asia-Pacific region and Africa. Principally, what are today the countries of Hispanic America, the Spanish Philippines, Spanish Guinea and Spanish Sahara where Spanish may or may not be the predominant or official language and their cultures are heavily derived from Spain although with strong local indigenous or other foreign influences.

It could be argued that the term Hispanic should apply to all Spanish-speaking cultures or countries, as the historical roots of the word specifically pertain to the Iberian region. It is difficult to label a nation or culture with one term, such as Hispanic, as the ethnicities, customs, traditions, and art forms (music, literature, dress, culture, cuisine, and others) vary greatly by country and region. The Spanish language and Spanish culture are the main distinctions.[1][2]

Hispanus was used to define people of ancient Roman Hispania, which roughly comprised the Iberian Peninsula, including the contemporary states of Spain, Portugal, and Andorra, and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.[3][4][5]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans#National_origin

 

[steve_bank]

The actions of Spain and Portugal are all well known and studied. I had an intro in high school in the 60s. So what are we debating?

Native American cultures were not monolithic. We can star threads an Myan, Incan, Aztec and other cultures. Some were certainly as brutal and genocidal as the Europeans.

That doesn't make Columbus a good guy, but it softens the image of native populations as victims solely of the Europeans.

 

[skepticalbip]

The actions of Spain and Portugal are all well known and studied. I had an intro in high school in the 60s. So what are we debating?

Native American cultures were not monolithic. We can star threads an Myan, Incan, Aztec and other cultures. Some were certainly as brutal and genocidal as the Europeans.

That doesn't make Columbus a good guy, but it softens the image of native populations as victims solely of the Europeans.

Those who judge individuals from different eras and different cultures based on their own personal sense of morality suffer from a serious case of egocentrism and/or ethnocentrism. The world was quite different in the 1500s than today and the different cultures were quite different in that world, all of them pretty damned brutal by the moral standards in the U.S. of today. In another hundred years the moral codes in the U.S. at that time could quite possibly condemn anyone living here today.

It would be fair and reasonable to judge individuals like Pol Pot as 'evil', however, because he certainly was by the morality of his own culture and time.

 

[Politesse]

The actions of Spain and Portugal are all well known and studied. I had an intro in high school in the 60s. So what are we debating?

Native American cultures were not monolithic. We can star threads an Myan, Incan, Aztec and other cultures. Some were certainly as brutal and genocidal as the Europeans.

That doesn't make Columbus a good guy, but it softens the image of native populations as victims solely of the Europeans.

No one has that image. Most Americans grew up on heavy doses of propaganda depicting Native American peoples as merciless villains persecuting innocent settlers. Modern portrayals are more sympathetic, but still rely on a lot of racist tropes and a fascination with practices that seem morbid or exotic from a European-American perspective. The most widely seen depiction of pre-Columbian culture in the last decade was Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, which was largely ahistorical and heavily implied that the arrival Spanish was somehow a just punishment for evil and violent behavior practiced centuries before they appeared, just as you are now doing. I imagine you enjoyed the movie?

I do not accept your argument, in any case, that committing a crime somehow makes you not a "victim solely" of another one. Let alone that a crime committed by someone else with no connection to you but a common skin color somehow makes a crime committed against you not a crime. How does this logic even work?

Let's take a Columbus quote for an example, from his 1500 letter to Lady Juana de la Torre: “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”

In the case of a nine-year-old girl abducted from her home and sold into sex slavery, what crime are you alleging that would make her anything but a "victim solely of the Europeans"? Aside from the dubiously vague term "Europeans", of course.

 

[steve_bank]

That would be another topic, resurrect my thread on propaganda on political discussions. Or we can start one on the role of propaganda and myth in civilization. Joseph Campbell covered it in his series The Power Of Myth.

Complex cultures need myths and propaganda. The Columbus myth was about courage and adventure, setting of into the unknown which is not far from the truth.

I can still remember the song, 'In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue...'

Columbus is symbolic for Latinos. There have been demonstrations protesting Columbus Day. In reality the real bad guys were the Conquistadors searching for treasure and staking out land. I'd have to fact check I believe Columbus got pushed aside once he fulfilled his task.

I'd have to look up the details. There was a battle with maybe 100 Europeans armed with cannon and muskets that slaughter a large number of Incas. All of it was brutal. And there was the Catholics and their abuses in the name of god.

The Spanish and Portuguese practiced a structured method of conquest, Columbus did not factor in once the discovery was made, at least compared to the all of it. He was a more a businessman who had the Spays crown as an investor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquistador

Conquistador (/kɒnˈkɪstədɔːr/; from Spanish or Portuguese conquistador "conqueror"; Spanish: [koŋkistaˈðoɾes], Portuguese: [kũkiʃtɐˈdoɾis, kõkiʃtɐˈðoɾɨʃ]) is a term widely used to refer to the knights, soldiers and explorers of the Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire.[1][2] During the Age of Discovery, conquistadors sailed beyond Europe to the Americas, Oceania, Africa, and Asia, conquering territory and opening trade routes. They colonized much of the world for Spain and Portugal in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

After Columbus's discovery of the West Indies in 1492, the Spanish conquistadors, who were primarily poor nobles from the impoverished west and south of Spain, began building up an American empire in the Caribbean, using islands such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola as bases. Florida fell to Juan Ponce de León after 1513. From 1519 to 1521, Hernán Cortés waged a campaign against the Aztec Empire, ruled by Moctezuma II. From the territories of the Aztec Empire conquistadors expanded Spanish rule to northern Central America and parts of what is now southern and western United States. Other conquistadors took over the Inca Empire after crossing the Isthmus of Panama and sailing the Pacific to northern Peru. As Francisco Pizarro subdued the empire in a manner similar to Cortés other conquistadores used Peru as base for conquering much of Ecuador and Chile. In Colombia, Bolivia, and Argentina conquistadors from Peru linked up with other conquistadors arriving more directly from the Caribbean and Río de la Plata-Paraguay respectively. Conquistadors founded numerous cities many of them on locations with pre-existing pre-colonial settlements including the capitals of most Latin American countries.

Besides conquests, Spanish conquistadors made significant explorations into the Amazon Jungle, Patagonia, the interior of North America, and the Pacific Ocean.

Background[edit]

Hernando de Soto and Spanish conquistadors seeing the Mississippi River for the first time.
The conquistadors were professional warriors, using European tactics, firearms, and cavalry. Their units (compañia, companhia) would often specialize in forms of combat that required long periods of training that were too costly for informal groups. Their armies were mostly composed of Iberian and other European soldiers.

 

[steve_bank]

As to crimes in the 15th century again meaningless. As to the portrayal of Coboys vs Indians I grew up with yes one sided, but not always.

Custer was made into a hero by the endian after slaughtering a villager of children and old people. It was told as a courageous battle. Custer was a pig.

You are rehashing what is common history. It was only during the last 30 years or so that the white conservatives publically in the media could acknowledge the reality of slavery and the treatment of NA.

So, what is the point you are trying to make? Bashing European Americans? What is it that is making your blood boil so to speak?

The clash of civilizations goes back to the organs of human civilization. And we are seeing rise again right now. China, USA, Russia, and Europe. Persians vs Arabs. The conflict in Yemen and Syria is just as bad as the old clashes.

Ancient Egypt, Persia, Syria, and the rest. I am far more worried about a clash in the South China Sea right now than what happened 500 years ago.

We are making progress. We now have wide open public media debate on ethnic and race issues. I look at where we are going and the progress of the last 200 years. I am more concerned about loosing that progress to political bickering than Columbus.

Columbus was a man of his times. As were Jefferson, Madison and the rest. Men with what we would cal moral failures today.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I think what is happening here is that apologists set the bar too low by comparing Columbus to emperors' imperial conquests, enslavements, etc. A similar thing is done when trying to put slave owning founding fathers into "historical context" to excuse their slave owning. Somewhere in there, it is completely forgotten that many individuals did not take part, nor never wanted to take part in owning or murdering human beings en masse. Who we ought to chose to honor are those people who stood up against the trend, who did not say "well, everyone else is doing it," and chose to fight against it in some way: the abolitionist movement for example or people who came up with theories on civil government, civil rights, human rights, made legal arguments against slavery or moral arguments against mass murder. Those persons exist and if we don't know it, it's because we focus too much on the wrong people in our cultural learning through these very celebrations under discussion. Celebrate the Magna Carta, John Locke, Harriet Tubman, John Adams. And the reason I bring up the Magna Carta as an example is because the history of fighting for fairness even under despotism and understanding fairness to other human beings is a longer history than Columbus. Let me put this another way. Would you expect Germans to celebrate various military personnel from their Nazi German past while saying "he was not really a terrible person because everyone was doing it," or would you expect them to honor the Germans who stood up to the mass evil of the time such as Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose Society? Sure, it makes sense to learn about Columbus because his existence was impactful, but not to celebrate him.

I think I addressed the points above from steve_bank and others before they were made back at post#20. No one really responded to this.

So specifically steve_bank has written this:

Columbus was a man of his times. As were Jefferson, Madison and the rest. Men with what we would cal moral failures today.

The whole "man of his times" thing treats history as if there was a monolithic acceptance of slavery but there wasn't. In the times of Jefferson there was moral discussion of slavery as a bad thing. And as above, there was a trend over centuries toward greater rights of people. Jefferson knew what was right but had a conflict of interest as he was controlling human beings.

It wouldn't make sense to have a Thomas Jefferson Day any more than it would make sense to have a Michael Jackson Day, but we can celebrate the good things that Jefferson did or the good music of Michael Jackson. Just like for Columbus, we do not need to honor him, but instead we could honor something else that was good that came out of his actions.

 

[Politesse]

By the logic expressed above with respect to Columbus Day above, a Thomas Jefferson day would not be a celebration of him personally, but of Virginians, since he is a famous Virginian. And not wanting Jefferson Day means you hate "Whites". There is no other motive for questioning holidays. Just race hatred.

Sorry, I've about had it with this thread. Are people incapable of discussing actual history? When I name facts and figures, and what I get back is a link to a wikipedia page about thinly related topics, it really makes my blood rise. I could care less about your stupid race war. Documentary evidence is documentary evidence.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Why is it relevant?

That's a pretty good question you could have asked instead it leaping to your own answer to it and projecting it onto him. It may not be relevant at all. Or it may be relevant for a reason that did not occur to you. You will only know why he wrote what he wrote if you ask him.

 

[Politesse]

Why is it relevant?

That's a pretty good question you could have asked instead it leaping to your own answer to it and projecting it onto him. It may not be relevant at all. Or it may be relevant for a reason that did not occur to you. You will only know why he wrote what he wrote if you ask him.

Or I could simply assume that the obvious is true. People don't just write things by happenstance. And all the race crap you three keep bringing into this appropo of nothing anyone else has written is incredibly revealing as to your motives.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Why is it relevant?

That's a pretty good question you could have asked instead it leaping to your own answer to it and projecting it onto him. It may not be relevant at all. Or it may be relevant for a reason that did not occur to you. You will only know why he wrote what he wrote if you ask him.

Or I could simply assume that the obvious is true.

What you think is "obvious" may not be so.

And all the race crap you three keep bringing into this appropo of nothing anyone else has written is incredibly revealing as to your motives.

You brought up race. The quote you responded to, about the victims of the Spanish, was not about race.

 

[Politesse]

Or I could simply assume that the obvious is true.

What you think is "obvious" may not be so.

And all the race crap you three keep bringing into this appropo of nothing anyone else has written is incredibly revealing as to your motives.

You brought up race. The quote you responded to, about the victims of the Spanish, was not about race.

What are you talking about? I've been complaining about the ahistorical race claims in this thread from the start. Modern racial categories do not apply to 15th century Hispaniola. I do not know how this could be any more clearly stated. And they definitely do not link the victims of Columbus (the several chiefdoms of the Taino) to anyone on the American mainland. Steve's argument is completely illegitimate, and comprised entirely of red herrings with ugly racial overtones. For reasons I hope to outline in a following post (need to consult some notes) even using the term "Spanish" here is more than a little bit misleading. The Spanish Crown did not endorse these actions, and it eventually condemned them in full.

 

[Politesse]

I think what is happening here is that apologists set the bar too low by comparing Columbus to emperors' imperial conquests, enslavements, etc. A similar thing is done when trying to put slave owning founding fathers into "historical context" to excuse their slave owning. Somewhere in there, it is completely forgotten that many individuals did not take part, nor never wanted to take part in owning or murdering human beings en masse. Who we ought to chose to honor are those people who stood up against the trend, who did not say "well, everyone else is doing it," and chose to fight against it in some way: the abolitionist movement for example or people who came up with theories on civil government, civil rights, human rights, made legal arguments against slavery or moral arguments against mass murder. Those persons exist and if we don't know it, it's because we focus too much on the wrong people in our cultural learning through these very celebrations under discussion. Celebrate the Magna Carta, John Locke, Harriet Tubman, John Adams. And the reason I bring up the Magna Carta as an example is because the history of fighting for fairness even under despotism and understanding fairness to other human beings is a longer history than Columbus. Let me put this another way. Would you expect Germans to celebrate various military personnel from their Nazi German past while saying "he was not really a terrible person because everyone was doing it," or would you expect them to honor the Germans who stood up to the mass evil of the time such as Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose Society? Sure, it makes sense to learn about Columbus because his existence was impactful, but not to celebrate him.

I would like to call attention to this excellent post by Don2, and add that even in the Spanish court, public opinion turned swiftly against Columbus during his own lifetime. One of his soldiers, Bartolome de las Casas, wrote the first history of the Conquest based on personal knowledge, and his testimony completely outraged the court of Charles V. They immediately outlawed slavery and persecution in all of the Spanish territories in the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians (1542). At this time, thousands of the people who participated in the genocide were still alive, and many of their first victims were still being actively trafficked through the Caribbean slave markets. None of them were published, and the New Laws were never meaningfully executed, but the claim that no one at the time could have possibly known that rape, murder, and theft were wrong is both inaccurate and ethnocentric. Everyone knew. Even Columbus seems a bit disgusted by the conduct of some of his subjects in his later writings (ie after they had "betrayed" him and he no longer felt motivated to defend them). But those in the colony itself valued profit over morality, and that includes Colombus, under whose direct rule and instructions these depradations began. His later paper-thin regrets do not erase his actions or his legacy.

 

[steve_bank]

Stating the obvious about the founders is often used to paint people as justifying slavery. Slavery was a hot issue well before the revolution. The founders kicked the can down the road because a constriction dealing with slavery would never be ratified by all. The USA may never have been at all.

There is always social context, unless you assume in moral hindsight that there are always absolute moral decisions to be made guaranteeing the best outcomes. That is caked Monday morning quarterbacking.

Hindsight and dealing with an unknown future in the moment are two very different things.

 

[Politesse]

Stating the obvious about the founders is often used to paint people as justifying slavery. Slavery was a hot issue well before the revolution. The founders kicked the can down the road because a constriction dealing with slavery would never be ratified by all. The USA may never have been at all.

There is always social context, unless you assume in moral hindsight that there are always absolute moral decisions to be made guaranteeing the best outcomes. That is caked Monday morning quarterbacking.

Hindsight and dealing with an unknown future in the moment are two very different things.

So should we never look at the past and decide what was right and wrong based on what we now know about the outcome? Of course things look different in the moment than they do down the road, that's exactly why the study of history is critically important to the continuance of civil society. It forces you to look at consequences rather than merely ends. This doesn't work if you refuse to engage in critical anslysis of what happened and why.

But your moral relativism is billshit anyway, because you continue to ignore that this wasn't a case of someone blindly following cultiral patterns. This is a study of someone who committed a horrific crime even by the standards of his time.

This doesn't mean that we should look only at flaws of some people and only at virtues of others, but only your fantasy enemies do that. Real historians understand that people are morally complicated in every society. What I reject is the idea that this makes the civic worship of an individual who is guilty of genocide acceptable. If we are all fallible in the same ways, then we need to be ready to take lessons from anyone's history. Not instinctively defend a monster because you imagine he's somehow on your side in a modern political argument over what skin colors are acceptable. That's just bad history.

 

[steve_bank]

When I was reading histories and biographies one has to read seeral authors, they have diffent views.

Were the Jews in Pakestine right otr wrong to unilateraly eclare a Jewish state? They were suoressed bt the Brits in the Mandate and the Jeiwsh genoice in Europe just happned.

Not for me to judge, I wasn;t even born.

Was slavery right or wrong? Today we say yes without equivocation. But historically slavery has a long human history. It was practiced in South America. In Africa blacks and Arabs were part of slavery and made money on it.

Colonial slavery was a natural continuance of history. Right or wrong that is the way it was.

We are all products of our upbringing and experience and cultural. Same back then as now.

Thinking, philosophy, and morality evolves. We are inheritors of Enlightenment thought. Human rights as individuals. It was new when the ideas emerged in Europe. Britain, Portugal, Spain, france, and back to Rome and earlier were all brutal enslvers by our standards. We recognize and study it, but we do not dwell on it.

Human social evolution. Certainly 200 years from now with our foolish development of nuclear weapons and widespread devastation based on race, religion, and ethnic will seem bizarre and strange and immoral. Much as we few past cultures considering ourselves advanced.

 

[skepticalbip]

^^^

Ethnocentrists "know" that their morality is the absolute morality by which all other cultures should be judged. Assume that, in the next 200 years, Islam is successful in attaining their world caliphate ruled by someone like the current Sultan of Brunei for the previous hundred years. The people of that time (including North America and Europe) would "know" that their morality was the absolute morality. In their eyes, the "decadence" (allowing gays to live, women showing bare arms, etc.) of today's western societies would be widely condemned on 'absolute, universal moral grounds'.