Yes, but Columbus was actually considered to be pretty terrible even by CONTEMPORARY standards. They actually sent out an investigator when tales of his tyranical governorship took place AND HE WAS RELIEVED OF IT AND CARTED AWAY IN CHAINS TO TRIAL IN SPAIN.
Now the travesty was that he wasn’t executed for his crimes, but merely locked up for a few weeks and lost the chance to ever be governor again. His representation that much of what he did was in the name of converting the heathens probably played a factor.
I’m sure that the Aztecs would have built a Totally Fucking Metal skull pyramid right in St. Peter’s square, because that’s how they roll; but isn’t adding ‘enabling worldview’ and ‘social organizations’ to the list kind of cheating? Anybody who develops the same ‘enabling worldview’ as a genocidal imperialist will be a genocidal imperialist if they get the chance, that’s sort of what developing the enabling worldview means. The real question is ‘If they had ships and guns, what would they do?’
Read up on pre-Columbian history in north america. It’s fascinating stuff, mostly because it turns out there was a lot of stuff going on here that was never once brought up in my time at public schools. Public education would have us believe history started at 1492, but it turns out there was quite a lot happening.
I agree that those works are really important for understanding our culture as it is now, and are fantasic.
I don’t think I’m using “fantastic” in the same way that you are, however. Ar eyou familiar with the Oscar Handlin review of “A Peoples History”?:
“Hence the deranged quality of this fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history. It may be unfair to expose to critical scrutiny a work patched together from secondary sources, many used uncritically (Jennings, Williams), others ravaged for material torn out of context (Young, Pike). Any careful reader will perceive that Zinn is a stranger to evidence bearing upon the people about whom he purports to write. But only critics who know the sources will recognize the complex array of devices that pervert his pages… On the other hand, the book conveniently omits whatever does not fit its overriding thesis…”
I wonder why the K of C didn’t spring for Bartolome de las Casas as their hero? They still would have had a white, male, Catholic role model that their children could actually look up to.
While I agree with Cory that an indigenous role model might have been better, I don’t know of any who would be an obvious choice. Any suggestions? This time last year Maggie promoted ‘Exploration Day’ to celebrate explorers past and present, including scientific exploration in a lab and the original American settlers. While it lacks a specific role model, it is something that we can more easily identify with and celebrate without supporting very flawed characters or the imperialism that brought about the exploration in the first place.
Yeah. I grew up Catholic, and up until adulthood, I associated the Knights of Columbus with friendly old men throwing pancake breakfasts. As an usher, (the lone young female in a crew of old men, plus one young man) I was sort of an unofficial Knight of Columbus, I guess, and they gave me a $500 scholarship when I went to college. As I grew up, however, I realized that their entire name–“Knight” and “Columbus” was highly problematic. (And probably, they themselves have more problematic goals than just making pancakes, pointing out empty seats, and unwittingly giving girls money to go found college BDSM clubs.)
They probably never will change it, because hey, tradition. Maybe Pope Francis will chime in on the issue.
It’s not like “genocidal conquerer” is a role that is just screaming to be filled.
And on a side note, Jared Diamond’s book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” was written specifically to address the question of “why didn’t the New World develop technology first and come conquer Europe?”
I read somewhere that imported disease wiped out even more of the indigenous folks than weapons of war did, so they probably would have been f***ed over pretty badly no matter what.
Were the Vikings the first people to travel across the Atlantic? I’m sure I remember hearing that there’s evidence of Egyptians making it across even earlier.
Anyway, as a brit I’m just thankful that for once it wasn’t a Briton turning up somewhere and telling the inhabitants “we own you now”.
Columbus was no saint, for certain, even by the standards of the time, which really need to be fully taken into account. What is debatable are some of Bartolomeo de las Casas’ claims. The quoted mention of feeding natives to the dogs and cutting off hands has been pretty convincingly proven by scholars to be an exaggeration to make a point. Not that there is still not a lot to answer for, as mentioned, Columbus and his merry crew of war-hardened Medievalites were far from “pleasant”, but let’s use the best possible scholarship on the subject, shall we, else we fall into the same trap as the cult which has arisen around Columbus (who, incidentally, was likely not Genoese) . The treatment of native people’s by Europeans has been reprehensible, even in much later times and well into “The Age of Enlightenment.” One needs only look at the treatment of Africans to realize how recent and how close to home this brutality is, and how a certain book which is on every pulpit and many homes was used to justify it.
But there is a major biological aspect to this too. While European conquest was rather brutal in the Caribbean and what became Latin America, these populations were encountering diseases they had little to no immunities to.
I find Diamond a little too environmentally deterministic for my tastes and he kind of lets the west off the hook for its imperialist past (and present). It also presumes that conquest of the kind that came out of the post-Colombian explorations was just inevitable, rather than out of choices that people made. I’d say it also ignores the very real multi-polar world system that was seen in the period up to the 19th century. But see this discussion on some of the problems scholars have had with Diamond’s work:
Also, you can check out this work by world historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who argues that we should understand they success of cultures by their ability to fit and manipulate their environment, more so than their ability to conquere and subdue others–or rather what does civilization mean, is it just modern capitalist society, or can it be hunter-gatherer societies as well:
I highly recommend it: it really changed the way I understood how the colonization of North America took place, and a whole new level of respect and understanding of the people and civilizations involved: not passive victims of a technologically superior culture, but thoughtful, judicious and usually well-informed highly developed cultures facing down an inexorable wave of aggressors after surviving an unprecedented plague, and managing against the odds to secure their people’s survival.
So, this is not pre-Colombian, but still an interesting rewriting of how we understand Native Americans–Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire is a great book, showing how much agency and power the Comanche had well into the 19th century:
