Columbus: Hero, or Scumbag?

[Gothic Sponge]

Just something to think about for Columbus Day.

http://www.amonhotep.com/2003/2911.html

[JohnKleeb]

1. see my poll

Its pretty obvious how I feel.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

2. Heroic scumbag

there, how's that?

[qnr]

7. Actually, I was thinking that too

Much as I dislike the things he did, there is the fact that he got off his posterior and pursued something in an environment like that.

[Nightowl_2004]

12. Well said!

A lot of heroes are like that, I mean after all...they were just ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Over time they are glorified

[Wat_Tyler]

3. Scumbag. It was the style at the time.

That and codpieces.

[MrScorpio]

4. Scumbag, no doubt

Murdering money grubbing slaver and exploiter

Great role model for our American youth

[JohnKleeb]

6. Me and my brother were discussing him, yes the same one who got drunk

and he feels that they make Columbus out to be some great hero, a young guy, my brother and I both feel that Columbus laid the ground for genocide and was motivated by greed.

[prole_for_peace]

5. Murdering, ethnocentric scumbag.

[jilln]

8. Why do you hate America???

kidding

[Deja Q]

9. Other:

Human, of conservative persuasion

[Gothic Sponge]

10. AKA scumbag?

[Bombero1956]

13. an article by Jack Weatherford says it best

After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply -- human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.

Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines and plantations which he, his family and followers created throughout the Caribbean. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit -- beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola, his men had killed or exported one-third of the original Indian population of 300,000. Within another 50 years, the Taino people had been made extinct -- the first casualties of the holocaust of American Indians. The plantation owners then turned to the American mainland and to Africa for new slaves to follow the tragic path of the Taino.

This was the great cultural encounter initiated by Christopher Columbus. This is the event we celebrate each year on Columbus Day. The United States honors only two men with federal holidays bearing their names. In January we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., who struggled to lift the blinders of racial prejudice and to cut the remaining bonds of slavery in America. In October, we honor Christopher Columbus, who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history.

[Leilani]

14. Could you please provide a link?

Thanks

[Eugene]

11. Both.

He was brilliant and heroic, but
his greed and brutality were extreme
even by the standards of his time.

:dem:

[jonnyblitz]

15. scumbag. n/t

[jpgray]

16. Heroic scumbag, like Cortez

If you read Bernal Diaz del Castillo's account of the conquest of Mexico, you can see Cortez was brilliant, courageous and cunning at the same time he was a nasty SOB.