defend the indefensible: christopher columbus

Plus didn't he write Gremlins?

http://www.rtsi.ch/prog/images/Trasm/gerard_depardieu-b.jpg

YAY COLUMBUS! YAY SLAVERY! oh wait

yup, pretty much OTM.

yep, that's pretty much guaranteed to be what you think if you're a pre-columbian native american.

This is gonna be such a togetherness moment for NYC Democrats...

http://gothamist.com/2017/08/22/not_so_columbus_circle.php

Who shall we rename Columbus Circle for? I'm thinkin' Jerry Lewis.

the logical endpoint to all of this is we completely erase the USA and act like we just got here

I don't know where you took logic classes but that doesn't sound right.

let's rename it Vespucci Circle

will keep the Knights of Columbus happ... well, maybe not.

gremlins circle

cute!

About the best you can say about CC is that the general European mindset of expansionism and colonialism had already taken hold well before he sailed, and if he hadn't been the one who showed the way to cross the open ocean into the more tropical zone of the western hemisphere, someone else would have done it within decades.

The technology for long ocean voyages was already well developed by the Portuguese by 1490. And the greed for exploitation of foreign lands was already there. So, he was just the vehicle for those larger forces already at work. But, obviously the results for Native Americans (and West Africans) were definitely catastrophic, and CC is a legitimate shorthand for the source of that catastrophe.

Indefensible, in the final analysis.

The contextual defense Maria mentioned up-thread is worth quite a lot imo

Though if you read Bernal Diaz Conquest of New Spain there are moments along the voyage where the Conquistadores have a team talk, and will sometimes decide to be Christians, and sometimes decide to be businessmen/pirates. They constantly affirm their allegiance to the Crown, but also constantly try to take parcels of land and property (and people) for themselves as individuals. There's a lot of golden ducks being hidden in jerkins so as to avoid having to cough them up when back in Spain. They give the native Mexicans a lot of talk about human sacrifice being wrong, but then use Mexican corpses for fat to tie up their wounds; tell them not to worship false idols, but pretend to be gods when it suits them. Some Spanish are found that have 'gone native' and one of them says he has facial tattoos and his ears are pierced, why should he come back to Spain when this is his home now.

All of which is to say that when these historical people do things we don't like, there's a mass of social pressure on them to behave that way, but also, at least some awareness/consciousness of what they're doing. The man with the facial tattoos might show it was possible for at least that one man to grasp the differences between cultures and understand that one culture has different norms to the other.

... and make a conscious decision to reject a set of norms

are there any monuments to Hernan de Soto in the US?

the results for Native Americans (and West Africans) were definitely catastrophic, and CC is a legitimate shorthand for the source of that catastrophe

imo it just seems super reductionist and a bit convenient to use him as shorthand, like the native genocide was something that happened hundreds of years ago because of a bad racist, as opposed to an ongoing campaign of oppression often using the country's legal framework and violent campaigns publicly supported by presidents that grace our money

I found a few via GIS - this one's in Arkansas:

http://c8.alamy.com/comp/APGNWK/spanish-explorer-and-conquistador-hernando-de-soto-statue-at-fordyce-APGNWK.jpg

About slave trading specifically. There was the edict from (iirc) Queen Isabella forbidding slavery; rather native Americans are to be assigned to a Spaniard of good breeding and status who will keep them fed, housed and employed whilst teaching them about Christianity, this was called an encomienda (again iirc). Of course this still gave the Spanish ownership over people and of course everyone used it for slavery; it doesn't so much raise the moral status of the project ('The slavery was done by Kurtzian badmen on the ground, beyond central control'), as point out that people at the top of the European hierarchy a) knew exactly what slavery was, b) knew that it was meant to be contra to their religion, and arguably c) thought up clever ways of getting round this problem.

imo it just seems super reductionist and a bit convenient to use him as shorthand, like the native genocide was something that happened hundreds of years ago because of a bad racist, as opposed to an ongoing campaign of oppression often using the country's legal framework and violent campaigns publicly supported by presidents that grace our money

^ Key point

Yes. But the New World activities of the Spanish, English, French monarchies and later the American government, over centuries, were entirely consonant with Columbus's ideas about the dominion of those governments over native people and his treatment of natives was no different than the genocide that continued after his death. So, pointing out the presence of further crimes by others does not defend Columbus, it merely expands the number of his fellow criminals. That's just, but it's no exoneration of him.

Sure.

It does remind us that it's not only olden days Latin/Catholic people with blood on their hands, but also homely Protestant presidents - this seems a thing worth remembering.

Another kind of defense to consider would be a sort of argument from economic inevitability - suppose some starving people move into the next valley, and fight the people there for possession of food; we don't like the violence, but there's a force pushing events forward that perhaps lessens the moral culpability of the people involved.

Not that I'm 100% on that, and also, I'm not well-up enough on the economic side of early modern history to be able to say whether such a force 'pushed' Columbus and co on their voyages in the same way we might talk about a tribe being so pushed into the next valley. The Italian Wars were going on, and Spain would have wanted access to resources to fight against France; getting to the Americas cuts out the Venetians and Ottomans and their trading monopolies nicely too. The voyages helped Spain to continue to exist but whether that's the same as the voyages happened out of necessity, not sure.

It is a much clearer case if we're talking about the Portugese Jewish merchant-explorer-pirates, going out south and east to Africa and Asia - forcibly converted, but held in suspicion as Nuevos Christianos, and instrumentalised by the Portugese as traders (because of deep trading contacts with the Islamic world). Those guys were most definitely pushed (go out there and come back with money, fail to bring back money, the Crown attacks your family using the Inquisition), and in that theatre they would have largely come up against opponents with a comparative level of weaponry and tactical sophistication (fire-arms well established).

^ Whereas the thing is, if you take a square look at that period there's a noticeable difference between the thrashing around of various powerful empires in Europe and Asia, who are all playing much the same game, and the relatively easy sweep the Europeans are able to make through the Americas. As a European, you couldn't have just fobbed off anyone in Asia with a worthless glass bead, they knew what you were about already; from the other side, the Ottoman empire was unashamedly conquering and converting people that stood in its way. Whereas Europeans in America seem to hit an extreme for cruelty against unprepared people that stands out from 'just politics'.

As a European, you couldn't have just fobbed off anyone in Asia with a worthless glass bead

feel like this is really selling the natives short. this is a stereotype. natives were offered everything from money to legally binding documents and none of it meant anything. they were still hunted, their land stolen, their cultures censored. also there is a massive, massive geographic difference here. comparing Europeans who have been fighting and living together for thousands of years to Native Americans first encounters with their (new) permanent neighbors seems unfair. also the "relatively easy sweep" as you call it was a sustained 500 year long war killing over 50 million people.

I'm not well-up enough on the economic side of early modern history to be able to say whether such a force 'pushed' Columbus and co on their voyages

there was definitely a market for travelling voyages. this is partially how the wealthy spend their money. travel was very prohibitive not only monetarily but time-consuming as well. the ruling class didn't have the time to travel and see these places so they sent people out for them. people are curious about the world. nowadays we can accomplish most of this virtually with the internet but at the time the only way to find something was to send someone across the world to physically obtain it. on top of this you had all these wars involving hardened pirates and mercenaries, people that during peacetime were looking for work, and would be in that market to travel and loot and plunder. yeah some of these people turned out to be pirates.

i was taught that the Renaissance and the enlightenment of post-religious philosophy brought us out of the Dark Ages, that the Renaissance and the humanists, with their fetishizing of Greek and Roman culture and thought, helped bring us to a more democratic, more free future. it is a bit more complicated than that. the humanists worshipped Greek/Roman culture, and a big part of that culture was the purity of the homeland and the barbarism of outsiders. many of them were Latin bigots, sneering at anything written in a non-Latin language, thinking of those people as less than human. many of the humanists worked for the church during the Inquisition, their fortunes earned and careers spent providing the Latin legal language to justify centuries of mass torture and oppression. they morally excused themselves because they didn't believe any of that silliness and they were cultured, they had Roman gardens after all. you know there were gaudy rich people back in the day just like now. you know they would compete to see who could fund the craziest "scientific expeditions".

Who shall we rename Columbus Circle for?

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, August 22, 2017 11:04 AM (six hours ago)

Thomas Keller

Scratch the surface of those exploratory expeditions and they were always looking for something that was valued because it would be a money maker for the backers.

Christopher Columbus monument vandalized in Baltimore

Stick with the theme and name it after Oppenheimer. He grew up on Riverside & 88th, close enough.

lol yes

the results for Native Americans (and West Africans) were definitely catastrophic, and CC is a legitimate shorthand for the source of that catastrophe

imo it just seems super reductionist and a bit convenient to use him as shorthand, like the native genocide was something that happened hundreds of years ago because of a bad racist, as opposed to an ongoing campaign of oppression often using the country's legal framework and violent campaigns publicly supported by presidents that grace our money

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, August 22, 2017 1:31 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean he is literally the first colonizer of the americas and a pioneer in the enslavement, torture, murder, and mutilation of the native inhabitants. the second he sees a native he notes in his journal how easy it will be to enslave them and subjugate them, and he ended up being fired as governor of the indies by the king and queen for his brutality and incompetence.

I am just about done with this book and while I am not interested in being an apologist for Colombus who was m/l an incompetent dick, it has given me a sense of how complicated the fate of Native Americans really was. So much of their decline was also about disease - which the colonial powers didn't even understand, much less have any control over - and in-fighting. And once the Europeans' trade in guns and horses started to filter and spread among the tribes, there was this avalanche of unintended consequences that gradually made the Native Americans both dependent on the colonial powers and also more self-destructive. Combine that with a rapacious, amoral and more technologically advanced culture and their decimation takes on this air of tragic inevitability (something DeTocqueville astutely acknowledged as well iirc).

DeSoto statue above from the Fordyce Bath House & Museum in Hot Springs, Arkansas. FYI.

feel like this is really selling the natives short. this is a stereotype. natives were offered everything from money to legally binding documents and none of it meant anything. they were still hunted, their land stolen, their cultures censored. also there is a massive, massive geographic difference here. comparing Europeans who have been fighting and living together for thousands of years to Native Americans first encounters with their (new) permanent neighbors seems unfair. also the "relatively easy sweep" as you call it was a sustained 500 year long war killing over 50 million people.

Didn't mean this to come off as disparaging - yr points are good

it's true - the natives had a totally different conception of what those "deals" constituted. A good example is the colonists portraying their royal governments as literal "fathers", assuming that invoking paternalism would carry the standard European implications of obedience, hierarchy etc. But for many native tribes the "father" was not the central figure in the tribe or family, and didn't connote a relationship of deference or even respect.

The suffering that must have been wrought by the new diseases is completely unimaginable. Was watching a program about Danish colonial crimes in Greenland tonight, and they do this and it's awful, and they do that and it's dehumanizing. And then there was a smallpox epidemic that killed 75% of all native Greenlanders. Combine this with forced labor in the Caribbean... It's estimated 80 to 90% of people in Hispaniola died in the first thirty years after Columbus arrived.

re my original post on the coming NYC Columbus wars:

Brooklyn Councilman Vinny Gentile says Columbus had to be a real warrior since many Native Americans weren't that welcoming.

— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) August 24, 2017

The suffering that must have been wrought by the new diseases is completely unimaginable.

yeah it's insane. and while it's technically the colonists' "fault" it was hardly by intention or design or even, in many cases, in their interest (they would've preferred slaves!)

knew that it was meant to be contra to their religion

cardamon, is this true? it's a lacuna in my religious studies but i don't really know what christendom's take on slavery is. it is clearly permitted (if carefully delineated) in the Torah.

my proposal: take everything named after Columbus and rename it for Columbo pic.twitter.com/PEZemyKol4

— slackbot (@pareene) August 24, 2017

even if diseases are responsible for 90% of all NA deaths, that's still 5-10 million people brutally murdered.

also im sure forced relocation and concentration camps exacerbated said "unintentional" diseases.

I have only the general impression that the church considered it wrong to enslave other Christians. The natives of the western hemisphere were conveniently non-Christians and part of the charade enacted by the Spanish was that the natives were being 'saved' through the charitable act of giving them instruction in Christianity, administered by priests sent out for that purpose, where in fact the enslaved population were brutalized and often worked to death.

As I recall, Africans were first imported to the West Indies to take the place of enslaved natives on the plantations, mainly because they were less likely to die from malaria, which had been imported a few decades earlier, and you could squeeze more work out of them. The same 'benign religious instruction' charade applied to the black Africans as well.

I'm not excusing anything, just trying to add some perspective

and yeah the impact on population distribution and concentration totally exacerbated the spread of disease. Both because native populations were gathered into higher concentrations, but then also because fleeing native populations carried infection with them to places the colonists didn't even go. pre-colonial America was ideal and ripe for invasive species of all kinds to crush it once the barrier of the ocean was breached, and they did.

xp

i don't think there was a major christian church sect that was against slavery per settled doctrine prior to the quakers in the late 17th century -- tho i suppose some of the earlier antinomian sects were so by definition (antinomian = "against law" = overthrow of the settled order as a consequence of their reading of xtian belief)

in the big churches -- patristic and catholic -- there were certainly individual teachers who were strongly against it, but it wasn't general doctrine (the catholic church was timid about this up to the late 19th century iirc)

i've always wondered why the disease vectors weren't more symmetrical: europe got syphilis, which obviously wasn't great, but nothing compared to the vast and horrible die-offs in parts of the new world, tho it was just as clustered and war-struck in the 16th and 17th centuries, and medicine was barely more advanced (even if it thought it was)

church sect = church OR sect

i've always wondered why the disease vectors weren't more symmetrical: europe got syphilis, which obviously wasn't great, but nothing compared to the vast and horrible die-offs in parts of the new world, tho it was just as clustered and war-struck in the 16th and 17th centuries, and medicine was barely more advanced (even if it thought it was)

― mark s, 24. august 2017 23:55 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The thing that stuck with me in history class is that diseases travel more easily east-west than north-south, because they have trouble moving in different climates, which made wide Eurasia a hotbed of diseases for millennia.

So Eurasian colonizers brought a lot more diseases with them than vice versa.

i shd reread william mcneill's plagues and peoples, the single thing i now recall from it is that humans originally caught the common cold from horses

The disapproval of enslaving Christians was more a matter of tradition than doctrine.

i've always wondered why the disease vectors weren't more symmetrical

Some of this is addressed in Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond. Factors like the greater land mass of the east hemisphere within which populations migrated sand shared diseases, more domesticated animals (diseases often originate among them and jump to humans), and more population centers with high densities where diseases could maintain transference. Not only did this increase the number of pestilent diseases, it also created an adult population with more resistance to them. Even measles was extremely deadly when it arrived in the western hemisphere.

fwiw aimless, galley slavery was widely practiced among christians in early modern europe. it was not, obviously, directed at entire populations.

I have only the general impression that the church considered it wrong to enslave other Christians.

what the church considers right at that point in history is probably as far from a Christian reading as you can get. this was the height of Catholic corruption, before the Reformation, in the era of selling Indulgences and joining secular courts around Europe in the persecution and genocide of "witches". Columbus sailed two generations after The Great Schism, when three men simultaneously claimed to be the pope. the Reformation didn't begin until 1517.

The disapproval of enslaving Christians was more a matter of tradition than doctrine.

fwiw fighting slavery is a big part of the Bible, as God's number one prophet Moses is born a slave and leads his people to freedom. this is the Exodus. this is where the Ten Commandments come from. this is God carving DO NOT KILL in solid rock from a mountainside. how do you get more official than that? it should be obvious where the writers of the Bible stand on the question.

no way. it could be argued that the OT slavery laws are more compassionate because of the slavery in egypt but the laws are present + comprehensive. it's not accurate to say that the bible is against slavery in principle.

It isn't. (xp)

Oops, was about to say, "Over to Mordy", too.

cf Lev 25:39-43 & 25:45-46

If a member of your people has become poor among you and sells himself to you, do not make him do the work of a slave. 40 Rather, you are to treat him like an employee or a tenant; he will work for you until the year of yovel. 41 Then he will leave you, he and his children with him, and return to his own family and regain possession of his ancestral land. 42 For they are my slaves, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; therefore they are not to be sold as slaves. 43 Do not treat him harshly, but fear your God.

45 You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. 46 You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.

what shocks me so much is just how much land was stolen, an entire continent, hundreds of unique nations. the scope of it is staggering.

it is fucking stupid because i have driven around the US across many states and there is so much land out there still.

it includes laws and rules bc that was part of maintaining the tradition, correct? there are many things we do not do in there, things that were normalized or thought necessary at the time. they were written down to preserve them, to preserve the culture. imo there were parts written for this sort of practical reasoning as well as parts written for mystical revelation.

xps I know the Ottomans and Barbary states used galleys in the Mediterranean for a long time and rich Christians would sometimes ransom the Christians among those galley slaves as an act of merit, similar to building chapels or buying relics. I'm not sure which Christian maritime powers might have been powering galleys with Christian slaves. Genoa? Venice? Sicily? Or was this practice labeled as punishment for criminals as opposed to chattel slavery?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_slave

considerable "citation needed" and passages with no cites so ymmv

Adam

i have driven around the US across many states and there is so much land out there still.

Yabbut there's a difference between an acre of the Hudson Valley and an acre of desert in New Mexico. Just as a Manhattan brownstone and a Mississippi tarpaper shack are both "houses."

European "settlers" of the Americas had no problem telling the difference between quantity and quality of land.

xps I know the Ottomans and Barbary states used galleys in the Mediterranean for a long time and rich Christians would sometimes ransom the Christians among those galley slaves as an act of merit, similar to building chapels or buying relics. I'm not sure which Christian maritime powers might have been powering galleys with Christian slaves. Genoa? Venice? Sicily? Or was this practice labeled as punishment for criminals as opposed to chattel slavery?

There's a good book about this by John F Gilmartin called Gunpwder & Galleys.

The galleys couldn't spend a long time out at sea because they didn't have much storage space after you account for the oars and artillery, so they needed to hover around a dock to re-supply. The result being that no-one had 'control of the sea' in the sense that came later in the Atlantic - you could only lay claim to coastal settlements, the open sea was a free-for-all; Christian ships would happily attack eachother out there if the odds looked good, especially Venetians and Genoans, but even ships from the Papal States could expect to be attacked by other Christians. If you captured a ship you captured its enslaved oarsmen too. Prisoners of war would be sent to the galleys, and galley slavery was also used a form of debtor's prison.

So if you were a Christian galley slave on a Christian ship it would sometimes be punishment for your criminal acts, potentially with freedom after a certain amount of time, and sometimes it would just be flat out you are owned by the entrepreneur that owns this ship.

cardamon, is this true? it's a lacuna in my religious studies but i don't really know what christendom's take on slavery is. it is clearly permitted (if carefully delineated) in the Torah.

I have no idea what the consensus was (as usual it probably varies a lot from place to place), but the idea that Christians shouldn't have slaves was in circulation, to such an extent that you can argue quite strongly that 'they knew what they were doing'. And again, Christians also experienced slavery themselves, which would add to that I guess.

The encomienda system (slavery disguised as spiritual care-taking) was used to get some kind of license for exploration from the Pope, I think.

^ There again though, as with most of the slavery that precedes the Atlantic Trade (going all the way back through Medieval and Roman and Greek and Biblical slavery), it's, well, not so much morally superior; but the whole social system and setup is fuzzy, clumsy and permeable enough to allow the possibility of escape from slavery, or for slavery to be a part of a biography that includes also high-status roles. As opposed to the efficient (and also consciously designed) system of Atlantic slavery and plantations

As a result of this thread I am now reading A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by de la Casas. He witnessed the encomienda system firsthand and was tireless in denouncing it as an atrocity.

Peripherally relevant, Roy Edroso today posted a piece of Jonah Goldberg's latest wet fart of an NRO column, which includes this atrocity:

What fascinates me about this civilizational auto-immune disorder is how superficial it is. Mark-Viverito is from Puerto Rico. More than 95 percent of the people there speak Spanish. The dominant religion of Puerto Rico is Catholicism (85 percent). As far as I can tell, Mark-Viverito, who is of mixed European ancestry (her mother, Elizabeth Viverito, was of Italian descent and a prominent Puerto Rican feminist; her father, Anthony Mark, was a prominent doctor), does not speak Taino, the native language of the Arawak tribes who inhabited Puerto Rico when Columbus arrived. Rather, she speaks the languages of her alleged oppressors — Spanish and, of course, English. She even attended Columbia University. I could find no mention on the Internet that she has burned her diploma in protest.

All the other stupidity aside, I can't decide whether it's worse if Goldberg DOES know that colonizers usually forbade the speaking of indigenous languages, causing them to die out; or if he DOESN'T know.

if any of this was about respecting Italian or American history we'd have Garibaldi statues everywhere, because he's a national hero of both countries, but if I were an Italian-American New York elected official I would simply say "it's La Guardia Circle now"

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) June 12, 2020

icymi:

#BREAKING: Gov. Andrew Cuomo says it's not time for Christopher Columbus statue to go: "The Christopher Columbus statue in some way represents the Italian American legacy in this country." pic.twitter.com/lUa9Fuwif3

— The Hill (@thehill) June 11, 2020

As an Italian-American and a cousin of the president who helped make Columbus Day a thing, I say dump all the statues in the sea.

an acquaintance in Columbus OH was advocating the other day that the city be renamed "Columbo," which i think would be welcome in basically all of these cases

Yes!

do the Just One More Thing

do italian-americans really think columbus "represents" their "legacy"?

what a piss-poor excuse. you'd think italian-americans would be like "actually i heard columbus was more sympathetic to castile and aragon, also spain, he's really not very italian at all, go ahead and tear down that statue and bury it at the bottom of the ocean"

love 2 learn history from statues

the whole Columbus thing is on a different scale in the NYC area, tho it was a lot worse 30+ years ago

ie if Cuomo goes for another term he aint doing shit about it