To some people, today is Columbus Day. Those people have a cultish dedication to believing that a rapist, a thief, a slaver, and an oppressor was a hero — I guess nowadays we can believe there will be subset of the citizenry who ignore the facts to invent a cherished symbol. To be fair, here’s a bit from the Friends of Italian-Americans.
Even by today’s impossible utopian standards, Columbus was without a doubt the greatest hero of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. He was a capitalist in the age of Empires, and what he did began the downfall of imperialism. He was a scientist in the age of superstition. He was a civil rights activist in the age of oppression. And he was a pacifist in the age of war-mongering. Thus, Columbus was an icon and a paragon.
For a quick dismissal of their claims, consider that they condemn Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States by citing a PragerU video.
I think this is a better summary of Columbus’s character.
Italian-American Trade Unionists of America Condemn Columbus on Columbus Day The Italian-American Trade Unionists of America (IATUOA) has once again reaffirmed its condemnation of Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day.
“We only mention the son of a bitch’s name once a year and it’s when we announce that he’s a son of a bitch on his name day,” the IATUOA Executive Committee announced from a dark, smoke-filled room in the Italian-American Club of Shamokin, PA.
The IATUOA, founded on the principles of cultural solidarity through bargaining, mutual aid, shared dining experiences, and anti-imperialism, believes Columbus represents the antithesis of these core values. Based on his writing and contemporary accounts, Columbus was a greedy, self-indulgent strunz, a jerk-off that gleefully engaged in the enslavement and genocide of indigenous people for personal gain and fame.
Further, this fucking guy, supposedly Genoese, rarely spoke or wrote in Ligurian or any Italic language. What kind of “Italian” does that?
Italian-Americans deserve recognition and a holiday in the United States, but also deserve a figure worthy of their name. “If you’re gonna name the fuckin’ day Columbus Day, you might as well go-all in and make the fucking holiday Columbus/Mussolini Day to piss on a few more graves,” the IATOUA Executive Committee further scoffed.
I’d quite like to meet this Columbus that the Friends of Italian-Americans are describing. He sounds lovely. I expect he’d hate the real one, though.
Even if true, which it isn’t, that couldn’t have been his intention. He was happily claiming new lands for the Spanish Enpire after all.
I have the strong impression that most people who are considered heroes, actually were rapists, thieves, slavers, oppressors etc. Consider Julius Caesar, for example. How would we call him if he invaded France today?
I would nominate Galileo or da Vinci as better models of Italian identity than Columbus or any of the Caesars.
Interestingly a report came out this week that DNA from his supposed remains indicate he was Jewish. The report is already being criticised for the methods used and the conclusions made.
Walter Solomon@2: Yeah no idea how C. could be seen as the beginning of the downfallmof imperialism.
I mean, his discovery and claiming the new lands for Spain, pretty much started the European empires, didn’t it?
@5: And the fact that they announced the results in a televised press conference rather than a peer-reviewed journal article.
Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada.
I shall “celebrate” with a TV dinner and a bottle of plonk.
Since Columbus never set foot in what was to become the US nor on any part of the North American continent, have a holiday to celebrate the man is ridiculous. Factor in his rather unsavory penchant for slavery, torture, and other assorted behaviors often associated with European conquering “heroes”, we may as well have a holiday for King Leopold of Belgium who had many of the same qualities.
I know what you mean.
My ancestors were the Vikings.
AFAICT, they were just thugs, looters, raiders, slavers, and conquerors who terrorized the countries around them for a few hundred years.
The first raid on Britain was a monastery full of unarmed monks.
How hard was it to loot and destroy that monastery?
They managed to conquer and occupy parts of Ireland and France (Normandy). Well good for them but the native populations probably had a different idea about watching their land and stuff being stolen.
They only look good to us now because they’ve been dead for 1,000 years and are distant from us in time and space. And some of us had ancestors who were on the winning side
Also keep in mind that three days before “Columbus Day”, it’s Leif Eriksson Day.
Side note… Columbus only survived his initial voyage because he was using the wrong size for the Earth.
Let me guess, their entire argument is “Zinn in a COMMUNIST (dramatic sting) so therefore he’s wrong.” Didn’t there “kids” channel produce a cartoon that argued that Columbus enslaving the natives, which was totally cool back then, was a more moral option than killing them?
Rhetorical question! Of course they did! (https://youtu.be/PKJU0K_ebfU?si=FI0gVs39MmhkyYVd)
Of course, what can you say about a YouTube channel whose quisling founder laments that he can’t use the n-word in public anymore.
Both of those statements read like parody to me (I assume the second one actually is).
Well, imperialism has to rise before it can fall, right?
Fun Fact: Columbus’ motives for establishing an Atlantic trade route to Asia wasn’t just simple greed. Columbus wanted to fund a final Crusade to kick the Ottoman Empire of the Holy Land before the imminent return of Christ.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/columbus.html
Columbus Day is a concession to Italian-Americans, and why not? But Columbus is not the best exemplar. He wasn’t American; he didn’t even set foot on the American continent. How about Frank Sinatra? Or Enrico Fermi? Or Yogi Berra?
unkhead Factoid:
Did Columbus spot a UFO?
Around 10 p.m. on the night of October 11, 1492 Columbus spotted an eery light glowing above the water. The following account is taken from “The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus”:
Christopher Columbus and Pedro Gutierrez while on the deck of the Santa Maira, observed, “a light glimmering at a great distance.” It vanished and reappeared several times during the night, moving up and down, “in sudden and passing gleams.” It was sighted 4 hours before land was sighted, and taken by Columbus as a sign they would soon come to land.
As I recall, even the Spanish and Italians themselves both hated Columbus in his day. His crew certainly hated him. Sadly, they didn’t let their hatred of him influence them towards, you know, not behaving like him in all important respects. Not that that is unusual in history in any way, but it’s still depressing.
I’m pretty sure that “cultish” has a connotation of minority populations.
I agree that he was a monster. But I think that makes us the cultish ones.
“Columbus didn’t find America”: Show of Hands
prager is an opponent of honesty and truth. He is trying indoctrinate people by forcing xtian terrorist fictional ideas down everyone’s throat. His pompous attitude and his phony ‘prager u’ are laughable.
It would be more appropriate if phrase was a threat made by a thug ‘Yeah, we’re gonna prater u’.
In contrast, the most outstanding and honest perspectives on history are found at:
https://www.howardzinn.org/
https://skepticalvet.com/ Danny Sjursen
Want an angry laugh, tell our tribal members how the murderous columbus ‘discovered’ america.
Oh, typos, sleepless in scarizona, I’m sorry. Should be:
It would be more appropriate if the phrase was a threat made by a thug ‘Yeah, we’re gonna prager u’.
@ 15 Leonard da Vinci gets my vote.
Raven @10
And they didn’t get any better after adopting Christianity. They just continued the conquest in the name of Christ. Tancred, for example, was the leader of the First Crusade and the first “Prince of Galilee” and he was an Italo-Norman.
“He was a capitalist in the age of Empires,
and what he did began the downfall of imperialism.
He was a scientist in the age of superstition.
He was a civil rights activist in the age of oppression.
And he was a pacifist in the age of war-mongering.
Thus, Columbus was an icon and a paragon.”
All right, now I know that some people live in different dimensions. So about this:
– not a capitalist, he was always lapping at the feet of his queen to get cash & honours, but certainly a thief and a robber.
– not an anti-imperialist, he kick-started the biggest empire ever and a monstrous, continent-wide pillage campaign.
– not a scientist, he underestimated Earth’s circumference by about 50%, in fact he thought he was in India. The people he met he called Indians, right? And so we got “American Indians”, such nonsense:
– not a civil rights activist, he was a slaver and he is on record mentioning what good slave material the islanders he contacted were.
– and lastly, pacifist and slaver do not go together. So, an icon and a paragon? Rather, a paragon of ickiness.
I’d be glad to ascertain he was no Italian. But I very much doubt the coffin that was examined was his, after half a millennium you never know who’s buried in a particular location and his cadaver did a bit of back-and forth between continents.
Really, fuck that guy.
At the beginning Columbus wasn’t working for the “Spanish Empire” because said empire didn’t exist until 1492, or later. He was working for the Spanish crown.
As for enslaving indigenous people, it’s no excuse but he was doing exactly the same thing that almost everyone did, such as raven’s Vikings who enslaved people they didn’t just kill. It would be hundred years before slavery was considered normal and largely erased…and even now there are vestiges of it. California is considering a proposition to end forced labor in prison, ie slavery by another name. I assume Mississippi embraces prison slavery with all its perks for local growers.
@3 going by the rightwing drift of modern France, probably a hero.
Robro:
Close, but not quite.
Wikipedia: “On 1 May 1486, permission having been granted, Columbus presented his plans to Queen Isabella, who, in turn, referred it to a committee.”
He approached the Spanish monarchs with a proposal, and was given support and patronage.
Not the same as working for them, as if they had sought him out and employed him.
Not entirely coincidentally, also Wikipedia: “Beginning with the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus and continuing for over three centuries, the Spanish Empire would expand […]”
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BTW, as I was growing up in Spain, he was lauded as an honorary Spaniard, with the grudging admission he was born in Italy. A minor detail, that.
Columbus? He didn’t discover the Americas. 🤷🏾♀️ I celebrate Indigenous Day as some of my ancestors are Cherokee.
Raven @10:
In fact, the word “slave” comes from “Slav” because the Slavs were the favorite target of the Norse when it came to slave hunting.
On the other hand, it’s hard to find anyone in Europe at the time who was any better.
I’m sorry, but is being a capitalist supposed to be a “good” thing?
Hey, you can diss the Vikings all you want, but my ancestors were good ol’ stay-at-home peasants.
“He was a scientist in the age of superstition” I wonder if the Friends of Italian-Americans have fallen for the flat earth historical myth. Not the myth that the earth is flat but the myth that most 15th century educated Europeans thought the earth was flat. Classically educated Europeans of that time knew the earth was spherical; it permeated their culture (think Dante’s Inferno which had a spherical earth). This concept had probably trickled down to most people. The best educated knew that Columbus was badly wrong about the size and that he had also likely overestimated how far east Asia went.
Classically trained Romans had known the shape of the earth since before the Roman Empire had been established. Augustine of Hippo (prominent Christian 5th century) knew the earth was spherical. He did castigate some other Christians who claimed it was flat. Admittedly they also all thought that the earth was at the center and planets (including moon and sun) and stars circled around it (Copernicus was young and didn’t publish until his death in 1543 and even then was welded to the idea of circular not elliptical orbits).
I would agree with Da Vinci (1452-1519) as probably the Italian most deserving of fame from that era.
Erp:
Presumably you would were it not the case that the celebration is about his arrival in the New World, not about his nationality.
It’s not about the fame, but about he “discovery” and subsequent conquest and pillaging and colonisation.
It marks the day.
(A bit like Australia Day for us, I suppose)
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Also, were not the Vikings those Norsemen who went a-Viking?
(Or, the people who could be called up to arms by their lord)
I had never heard about this aspect of the history of Columbus day, and I don’t know how accurate I should assume it to be but… It was interesting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/13/columbus-day-holiday-accident-history/
John Morales @33: Yeah, “viking” was an activity, not an occupation. Specifically, it was the action of rowing one of their longboats.
As an Italian-Italian(-Australian-Swedish) I support this message!
And LOL, the IATUOA statement is GLORIOUS!
Love me some anarchists.
@PZ: where did you find it? I couldn’t find any source. =(
Walter Solomon #23
Very true. There’s an often-told story about the origin of the Danish flag, namely that it fell from heaven. It sounds so romantic and mythical, doesn’t it?
Then you hear that it occurred during a battle in modern Estonia. What was the Danish king doing all the way out in Estonia? He was killing heathens and expanding his empire, all under the banner of the Northern Crusades; a much more profitable venture than going to the Holy Land.
Religion sure is a handy way of rubber stamping what you already wanted to do, isn’t it?
Robro@25,
Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands began in 1402. This was the first overseas possession of Spain, so it seems reasonable to count that date as the beginning of the Spanish Empire.
Viking is a verb which means to travel by water, just as hiking is a verb that means to travel by foot. The Old Norse verb for rowing is (s)vef, which is cognate with English sweep and the root of Sweden. The initial s drops out of Old Norse by the 1100’s.
Columbus of course did not discover America, nor is that his actual name. Cristobo Colón was a brutal colonial governor who was eventually removed from his post, deported from ‘Hispaniola’ and arrested/prosecuted by the Crown of Castile for his crimes.
Cristobo Colón → Cristobal Colón in Spanish.
(Original name was Cristoforo Colombo)
[also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci was not inconsequential in a nominative sense]
Yup, Amerigo being the nominative of the land of cherries and all that.
Cristobal is just a Latin spelling of the name.
There is probably a Grimm law of sound changes that details the whole f-v-b-p thing.
Christopher was anything but peaceful, Colón suits him better than Colombo.
I walked to the post office yesterday, it was closed. My first thought was not ‘it’s a federal holiday on a Monday I wonder which one it is’. It was ‘of course DeJoy is still postmaster general so it is closed without any mention of why on the door jeez’. And since it was at a bus stop I whipped out my pass and got halfway to the larger post office nearby before it occurred to me that it was Columbus Day.
I hadn’t thought it was an important day to start with. And it took me nearly an hour to figure it out.