Wait, though…what do we have to be happy about it? It’s hard to celebrate over 500 years of genocide.
You think Columbus couldn’t possibly be such a bad guy? He was the freakin’ worst.
We have the account of his personal friend, Michele de Cuneo.
While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.
They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
There followed many years of repeated voyages to the Caribbean, much raping and slavery, hand-chopping and murder and theft. None of which I was told about in school.
So what’s an appropriate way to honor this day? Cupcakes are right out, I think.
You can’t even claim that Columbus was just a “product of his time”, either – Columbus was bad even by his own time period. The man was so brutal that even his supporters hated him, and Ferdinand & Isabella eventually yanked his governorship (although they still let him carry out his fourth voyage and restored his wealth and title).
I found out myself from a copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me, which a high school history teacher lent me when I was 16. Eye-opening stuff – I’d known already that the Cortez and Pizarro conquests were nasty affairs, but not about Columbus.
I live in hope that things will improve for our indigenous peoples. This is such a complex issue that it will take a long time to resolve, so long as right-wing politics holds sway.
Happy IP Day to all! Columbus was bad enough (this came up in the Rhetorical question thread), and I linked this article, about the philosophy of “The only good Indian is a dead Indian“, which was espoused by many people throughout the 500 years following Columbus, including one of our presidents. It’s a good article, and it barely addresses the iceberg.
I also posted this in the Rhetorical thread:
Dick @ 2:
:Snort: Please, don’t be thinking this is a problem of right wing politics. The left wing don’t have any love for us, either.
But in the end the Caribs came out fine, right?
Columbus and the Conquistadores did a lot of very nasty stuff. So did the indiginous peoples to the earlier indiginous peoples they found when they arrived in North America. Homo sapiens of all races seems to have a nasty habit of finding new lands to invade and kill off or assimilate the inhabitants. In that respect, the only thing that made the European colonizers so much worse is the mere fact that they had better technology.
Check out the 4th myth in this link. I don’t get why the author is trying to dance around the fact that Columbus was directly involved in genocide.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-christopher-columbus/2015/10/08/3e80f358-6d23-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html?tid=ptv_rellink
Columbus, like many other Europeans, simply killed Indigenous peoples who got in their way of amassing wealth and land. He’s in no way a hero — unless you like your heroes with blood on their hands.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
eeyore, #6
Thanks for that. PZ almost pulled a fast one on us. We all know criticizing white people for horrific atrocities is the same thing as saying non-white people are angels. Glad you were here to clear it up.
Next time there’s racist police brutality, don’t forget to chime in about how black people have killed too.
eeyore:
Jesus, you can’t even manage to spell indigenous correctly, even though it’s right there in the post title, and in following comments. Contrary to what a lot of white people think, all Indians aten’t dead, and this one isn’t in the mood for your racism apologia. This is supposed to be a good day for us Indigenous folk, so why don’t you take your bigotry elsewhere for the day? Short form, because you aren’t so good at the thinky stuff: fuck off.
O/T but has anyone else been getting Bad Gateway errors? I sometimes have to try two or three times before getting in to Pharyngula.
As for celebrating, um, no. Last week, however, Obama’s administration did settle a big lawsuit with The Chickasaw Nation and The Choctaw Nation ($186 million), so there is that.
petesh @ 10:
Only took 10 years, too. That’s close to light speed when it comes to dealing with Indian Nations. (May contain trace elments of sarcasm.) The Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations had to go to federal court just to get the state gov’t to talk with them about water rights.
Caine @11: Is it time for a really bad joke about gambling &/or drinking? Why no, no it’s not. But we all know they’re out there. I literally have no idea how to address discrimination against the indigenous (other than #everyonematters and similar idiocy), but perhaps that would be a good topic for the day. Any suggestions?
Saad and Caine, my objection is not to pointing out that white people do nasty stuff — they do — so much as to what often comes across as an unwillingness to ignore that people in general are shits, and it isn’t a problem that’s restricted to any one race, gender, or sexual orientation. And focusing on specific incidents — like Columbus or the earlier thread about the bombing of the hospital in Afghanistan — is actually counter-productive because it focuses attention on one small slice of people being shits rather than fixing the broader problem of how to get people of all kinds from being shits. We’re on the same side here. I never said, nor would I, that because the Indians treated earlier Indians badly, that that somehow excuses what Columbus did. It doesn’t.
The white Europeans managed to acquire the technology to loot, pillage and plunder the rest of the world sooner than anyone else did, but does anyone seriously think that if the Africans hadn’t found that technology first, that they would have behaved any better? Or that blacks and Indians aren’t just as racist as whites? This is a human nature problem, not a white problem.
Sorry if I’m detracting from your meme, but if we’re going to work to fixing the problem, focusing on one specific symptom of it doesn’t help. And if you think I’m racist for pointing that out, that’s your issue and not mine.
@Saad
Seriously. I can recognize that what the Spanish did in what became Latin America was bad, while also recognizing that the empires they overthrew weren’t saints either – especially the Triple Alliance/Mexica/Aztecs.
@eeyore
We know that at least some of them did do better. The Chinese sent out the Treasure Fleet expeditions, but they didn’t conquer and colonize everywhere they went (including eastern Africa).
It really doesn’t matter if non-white people are or were or may be shits, in this context. We have here a more-or-less official holiday dedicated to a specific shit whose actions caused specific and documented harms, extending as far as genocide. Don’t muddy that.
For that very reason, I tend to support keeping the name “Columbus Day” — but only on condition that we focus on the historical Columbus and his role in the racist mythology of the next half millennium. Since that’s unlikely, Indigenous Peoples Day is an appropriate reframing. Kvetching about other folks being bad does not help.
Isn’t that enough? The better technology means they/we *succeeded* and isn’t that enough to qualify them/us for judgement of history?
Like you, I dislike the blanket sanctification of non-europeans and the blanket vilification of europeans. But millions is bigger thousands and global conquest is more tribal wars. We/they were the bad guys at a global massive scale. Numbers do matter.
petesh @ 12:
I’m sure they’ll rear their head, they usually do. People like to joke about casinos, but those are the only economic drivers for many tribes. Alcohol, well. This issue hits home, because Pine Ridge Rez (SD) was recently divided over the alcohol vote. No alcohol has been allowed on the rez, ever (this hasn’t stopped anyone from drinking, though), but the alcohol ban was put to a vote a couple years ago, and the vote went for legalizing it, and allowing liquor stores on the rez. Lots of arguing, and naturally, Whiteclay came up, a border town in Nebraska filled with asshole bigots, but are happy enough to sell liquor to Indians, selling literally millions of cans of beer and malt liquor, almost all of which flows into Pine Ridge.
So, one of the arguments was that liquor sales on the rez could be used for the rez, including funding alcohol abuse help, which is the main reason the other tribes which have legalized alcohol have done it. Some of those tribes, though, have managed to build a strong economy and branch out from there, like the Winnebago in Nebraska, and they started with a casino. I don’t think this is workable for Pine Ridge, not now. Unemployment is 80%, and more than half of the people live below the federal poverty line. Life expectancy is in the early 50s. Without a strong economic framework, I don’t think the legalization is going to work out that well, but the [Whiteclay] border blockades and protests weren’t working, either, and the lawsuit against the beer companies was lost.
Pine Ridge sort of has a casino, but it’s bound up in problems, and it brings in only 1 million a year, which is barely enough to offset all the gov’t cuts which have made the poverty on the rez much worse. Successful, well set up casinos on reservations can easily bring in a a million a day. Then there’s been the recent fight against the pipeline going through Lakota territory (lots of articles here). Nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems.
Friends and allies are always welcome. Generally, I just point in the direction of news, and let people go from there:
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/
http://www.indiancountrynews.com/
https://twitter.com/indiancountry
One thing everyone can do: http://greggdeal.com/ABOLISHCOLUMBUSDAY
Obviously Columbus was a horrible person, by any standards, and does not deserve the kind of public celebrations in the US that he routinely gets. That’s not really up for debate. It’s pretty cut and dried. There are lots of other vaunted people who deserve a lot more careful scrutiny as well. In my own country, Winston Churchill is a byword for greatness, but his early years busying himself with the racist suppression of India do not seem to cast the shadow over him they ought to. He’s a darling icon of the right, being pretty much the quintessential upper-class Tory hero, and too long have they set the narrative of popular historical memory.
One thing that fascinates me about Columbus, though, is how he is habitually considered “Italian” by people in the US. Now, he was Genoese, and these days Genoa and its territories are a part of Italy, but in his time Genoa was an independent republic (it owned Corsica for centuries) with very strong ties to Spain. It was virtually a satellite state of Ferdinand and Isabella’s newly united Spanish kingdom, and all of Columbus’s military, mercantile and slaving ventures were conducted under Spanish aegises and to the benefit of Spanish patrons. The reason he is lauded as a specifically Italian hero seems to be that he was seized upon by Italian-American communities in the aftermath of the US civil war as a distinctively Catholic figurehead in a characteristically Protestant country. The irony being, of course, that he never set foot on any territory that now makes up the United States. If anyone should consider him a pivotal figure in their history it’s the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
No, and if they had we’d be condemning them as the global imperialists. But they didn’t, so we aren’t.
To be fair, I think that is probably because they didn’t means to maintain control or the foresight to view these foreign lands as of value to colonize. Which I suppose this lack of foresight could be considered to make them “better”.
There’s a rather assholish conservative historian named Niall Fergusan who made a documentary (and book but I didn’t read it) “Called the West and the Rest”, which if you can get over it’s noxious “west is best ’cause we have 5 killer apps” attitude had some interesting points that claim the west had attitudes for conquest which others lacked. Which I guess from our more left viewpoint that conquest, rape, murder and slavery are wrong would mean europeans *are* the baddies. Although the attitude of the documentary would have been the opposite.
Caine: Thanks for the links. Except for some personal connections and concern about the Havasupai in the context of DNA research (a major interest of mine), I am aware of my ignorance, which doesn’t excuse it.
I swear, I remember this but I can’t find any sign of it on the googleverse, but I remember way back in the early nineties, a native activist group made a list of the ten worst offenses of cultural insensitivity (or maybe some other more nuanced offense) for the year. On it, they included the city of Berkeley for renaming Columbus Day to Indigenous People Day as the seventh worst offense of the year. (Berkeley was the only city to do that at the time). They claimed Berkeley taking a cultural pride day away from one ethnic group for another. I actually think that they, the native activist group, were just trying to thumb their noses at the self-righteous Berkeley attitude that we are *soooo* much more sensitive to the oppressed than any-one else in the country so *of courrrse* we are beloved and beyond reproach to every oppressed minority because our shit smells like patchouli and lavender (and, of course, we needn’t actually *consult* any minority representatives because *obviously* our righteousness is apparent and self-justifying).
Anyone else remember this? Or am I imagining things?
You object to what comes across as an unwillingness to ignore that people are shits?
I’m going to assume you couldn’t keep track of all the negatives and meant “willingness.” So, who’s actually doing that?
I guess “to get them from being shits” means to prevent them from being that or to mitigate it.
So, fuck history and all its “specific incidents” like genocide. Yeah, totally. Because everybody’s a shit, you know. Indeed, I saw someone committing genocide — that is, “being a shit” — just the other day at the grocery store. Oh, fuck, no I didn’t.
No, we’re not. I’m pretty fucking sure of that, given all of the preposterous shit you’ve said in the past.
How is it relevant then?
You think that we’re assuming racist things about white people? They have some genetic predisposition to using technology for nefarious purposes? Why the fuck would we be doing anything like that, and where is your evidence that anyone here (except you, naturally) is being a racist asshole?
The Red Nation
look I will agree that all people can and have been bad in regards to racism, exploitation, oppression, concurring and such. This day like many other days has been singled out as a day about the european discovery of the rest of the world. That started a new wave of concurring and suppression and colonization so the character of the day’s celebration has been changed to focus on the “negative” parts of it. Fuck all the they all did that crap. No one asked for it. It was an invasion and that can’t be white washed even with a dirty brush.
uncle frogy
Erik Loomis is pretty good, at LGM, and has been for a while:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/10/indigenous-peoples-day
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/10/happy-genocide-day-2
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/10/happy-genocide-day
Can’t seem to find what he was writing on this sad occasion in 2013.
One more: does anyone think that if they had found it first, blah, blah, blah…?
No. We’re done here? Or is it going to come across the wrong way somehow, if we don’t continually acknowledge the importance of your pointless blather?
petesh @ 22:
You might find this interesting then: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/05/28/trauma-may-be-woven-dna-native-americans-160508
I’m not a scientist of any type, so I read it all with a healthy dose of salt, but a lot of it makes sense to me.
haste and spellcheck fuck
substitute conquering for concurring
aahhhhh!
uncle frogy
eeyore: we should never meet. If we do, I could, perhaps, pull out a hammer and threaten to beat you unless you give me all of your money. And perhaps, after you’ve handed over your wallet, I will give you a few whacks anyway.
Don’t take it personally. After all, I’m sure that if you had the hammer, you’d do exactly the same thing. You may have been bludgeoning people at will in the past already…I don’t know that, of course, but speaking hypothetically, you may have, and that’s all that matters.
Now you may consider having me arrested, or suing me. Tut, tut. Let’s not worry about the specific details of this particular brutal robbery. Human beings have been beating each other and robbing each other for many millennia, so my particular crime would have been irrelevant in the light of the human condition.
Let us all forget any specific incidents, now and for all time.
eeyore @ 6
The OP is not focusing on Columbus as the pinnacle of the nasty whites, en masse. He is simply reminding us that whites are not exempt from nasty behavior. It is worth posting such a reminder as today is a celebration of Columbus as “The Founder” of America. To say that he was nasty is different that he was representtive of the entire race being nasty (and all other races are goodys).
—–
ack OT rant to follow:
This is my first post after starting use of a new computer and losing my password for the WordPress account for replying. Struggled several times requesting to be emailed a password reset, that never showed up. Fired up my old computer, got Firefox to tell me the password it had stored for my convenience, typed it in here and Bingo: back again.
Like to add my voice to the issue of “cloud flares”, often intruding, while trying to read the site. May I suggest mentioning this to the IT guys who maintain the network links for the servers for FreeThoughtBlogs.
Is there a Denial Of Servers Attack underway? Keep getting “bad gateway”, “no cached version of site available”, type errors. The frequency of occurrences has skyrocketed so I wonder if an attack is is process.
The Santee Sioux have decided to go with marijuana to continue building a strong economy.
eeyore:
I don’t give a fuck what your “objection” is – you had the opportunity to not be a compleat asshole for once, and leave this thread untainted by your continued bigotry and repulsive apologia. You didn’t do that, though. Instead, you’re here, to make yet another thread all about you. A person might think you had enough of a shred of decency to not do that on a day that is supposed to be about Indigenous People, and not your bigoted, asshole take on matters.
eeyore,
Read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel for an explanation of why the Europeans had technological superiority over others.
The Oatmeal’s take http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
Consciousness 24, I assume you think racist things about white people because I’m trying to remember when was the last time I read anything here about a racist asshole who wasn’t white, and probably Christian as well. If there were a blog about crime that only mentioned criminal things black people do, but rarely or never talked about criminal things white people do, you don’t think anyone would notice? It’s the mirror image issue here.
PZ, No. 31, the point is, though, that if you did bludgeon me so that you could steal my money, it wouldn’t be because you’re white. It would be because you’re a criminal. And talking about it from the standpoint of white crime would make little sense in that context. If a black person bludgeoned me so he could take my money it wouldn’t be because he’s black; it would be because he’s criminal. And talking about black crime in that context would make little sense too. And on this blog, that shouldn’t even be a controversial proposition since I think we all agree that the race of a particular perpetrator is irrelevant, at least absent unusual circumstances.
Yes, the Indians were treated horribly. Yes, genocide is a very bad thing. I’d rather focus on the root causes of assholery, which seems to be present in every race, color, gender and socio-economic class, than focusing on the skin color of whoever is being an asshole right at the moment. And how that makes me a racist is beyond me, except that I’m not sticking to your meme.
Eeyore… this might surprise you, but PZ is an American… and in America, it is almost always white folks who are the bigots, and equally almost always christians. Not always, of course. There’s Ben Carson after all. But racism requires not just bigotry, but a power structure. And we who are pasty have the power.
Now, the reason why you are viewed as racist (and I, too, hold this view of you) is because EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME we bring up an incident of something bad that white people did, or that america did, you come FUCKING CHARGING IN to defend us poor, defenseless white americans from the heinous crime… of having our heinous crimes be recognized as such.
On this SPECIFIC DAY, a day that FUCKING CELEBRATES a genocidal, slave trafficking asshole of a human being, you’re telling us to IGNORE THAT because sometimes the natives were mean to each other! NOT ALL WHITES!
FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, you racist asshat.
eeyore
Somebody make that shit stop, because it hurts.
#allsortsofpeopleareshit isn’t the answer to white supremacy, imperialism and genocide any more than #alllivesmatter is to police brutality. The fact that you can probably find a heinous crime committed by any human subgroup you can find does note rase the fact that violence, imperialism and genocide have been and still are heavily divided along the lines of race and gender.
Source.
Um, Columbus in particular was so horrible that even contemporary Spaniards criticized him. Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Bobadilla, for instance. Bobadilla’s report on his brutality and mismanagement was a major factor in the Spanish Crown taking away Columbus’ governorship of Hispaniola.
I like my holidays to honor people who were exceptionally non-supervillainous for their time/place/tech level, personally. Or for communities of people who are still around and doing awesome things.
@#1, brett
Yikes. I mean, I knew Columbus was a rotten human being (saw the Oatmeal cartoon before — which really isn’t a cartoon so much as a hand-lettered blog post with a few illustrations, for those of you who didn’t follow the link up above) but for Ferdinand and Isabella to consider you too horrible to support? That’s like… oh, say, Dick Cheney or Henry Kissinger telling you that you don’t have enough consideration for arabs.
Caine @29: Thanks for the link. I was aware of the research, but not the article and not the oral traditions (very interesting). My only quibble is with the ending — I’m with PZ on the “gene for” issue: effectively, they don’t exist.
@16 re: “I tend to support keeping the name “Columbus Day” — but only on condition that we focus on the historical Columbus and his role in the racist mythology of the next half millennium.”
I’m sort of wondering how this would work in other contexts.
Should we be celebrating/commemorating September 1 as “Hitler Day”?
How would this go over in the Polish or Jewish communities.
Oh good, another flavor of ridiculous horseshit. You’re a criminal because (for example) you steal money, not the other way around. There are no people who simply are criminals, without ever having committed any sort of crime. You’re doing nothing at all to explain what a crime is or how/why it happens, by saying that “it’s something criminals do.” Asshole.
@45: The next sentence was: “Since that’s unlikely, Indigenous Peoples Day is an appropriate reframing.”
Columbus Day exists and the question is, how to deal with it. Absurd hypotheticals about the reaction of other communities (I am thinking you are neither Polish nor Jewish, from the phrasing of your comment; nor am I) to an absurd hypothetical, in response to an unfairly truncated quote, are irrelevant.
petesh @ 44:
I have been reading here long enough that I should have caught that. Thank you for pointing it out.
Dear eeyore,
We are talking about Columbus only because today is the day erected in his honor. Yes, he was an asshole. Yes, there are many other assholes in history besides him. No, the fact that we are talking about one asshole in particular does not mean that we have to mention all other assholes in order to be “inclusive”. When there is a national holiday devoted to Huitzilopochtli, THEN we can spend time deploring the centuries of savagery practiced by many native Americans. But for now, stay on topic.
Giliel, No. 40, “violence, imperialism and genocide” may be heavily divided along the lines of gender, since those tend to be male activities, but race? Not so much. You are aware that both African tribes and American Indian tribes committed genocide, right? And that black Africans had slaves? Violence, imperialism and genocide tend to be crimes of opportunity, and my whole point is that making it into a racial thing actually makes it harder to combat. By focusing on who is committing the crime rather than on the fact that it’s a crime of opportunity, you’ve immediately made it that much harder to find a solution that might actually fix the problem. Granted, in this country at this time, a lot of it is being done by whites, but that’s mostly because they managed to claw their way to the top of the food chain.
Rowan, No. 39, I certainly hope you feel better now that you’ve gotten that out of your system.
Consciousness, No. 46, criminals are criminals because of their worldview. They see themselves as entitled, they see their desires as more important than the rights of other people, and they think that they can just go take whatever they want. Which is why some of them grow up to be imperialist, genocidal maniacs. Which is why it’s an exercise in futility to focus on the fact that a particular atrocity was committed by a white guy rather than to focus on the world view that made Columbus possible. You don’t have to actually molest a child to be a pedophile; the mere fact that you have the desires makes you a pedophile whether or not you ever act on them. Likewise, criminality is a state of mind; the actual criminal acts are just the outward manifestation.
Treefrogdundee, No. 49, being inclusive has nothing to do with it. It’s a matter of wanting to deal with roots rather than symptoms. And the vehement reaction I mostly get here tells me that a lot of y’all would rather talk about symptoms. Fine, let me know how that works out for you.
Fortunately I live in a country in the western hemisphere that doesn’t celebrate Columbus Day, but does celebrate Day of the Indigenous (August 9th) and Day of the Marroons (October 10th).
Bullshit. Nobody is suggesting some wide-ranging discussion of the roots and/or symptoms of violence and brutality. The topic is a very simple one of asking why we have a national holiday devoted to someone of Columbus’ moral character. You are grossly distorting the basic premise of the discussion so that you can throw out your red herring.
Exactly. Fuck Columbus and fuck Columbus Day. That’s it.
But it’s not really it, not now. Fuck you too, eeyore. I don’t give a shit about your whiteness. You were the one to introduce it into the conversation, so how the fuck is it supposed to work, that we’re responsible for turning it in that direction? Because you were able to make up some paranoid bullshit about our motivations? Couldn’t I do the same for you? You want to have a productive conversation about important things, then don’t make shit up which distracts us from those things, then go on to blame us for bothering to respond to your own nonsense. And more generally, don’t be such a stupid fucking troll.
Bye, eeyore. You’re too stupid and too obliviously racist for me to want to have you hanging about my place.
Well, shit.
I just finished composing a calm and cogent email to PZ about why eeyore’s time is up.
—
I wish I could control this telepathy thing.
I’d be Benevolent.
I promise.
@The Vicar
Yep. A brave sailor and capable military commander (not that that meant much when the people you were conquering only had stone weapons), but a brutal, nasty, cruel tyrant of a ruler. He was fortunate that he didn’t lose it all after being recalled back to Europe – his brother must have been pretty persuasive.
Honestly, he was about the worst possible person to start the Columbian Exchange. Literally any sort of other contact within the bounds of late 15th century/early 16th century realistic sailing capabilities would have been better.
I want a list of all events considered genocide since Columbus. Maybe we can see something there…
The stupid, it burns. A crime of opportunity is stealing a purse because it’S been left unattended. Words, how do they work?
And I knew “blacks were involved in the slave trade” would come up in one form or the other….
This comic by the Oatmeal also illustrates it well:
The Oatmeal: Columbus Day
Oh, sorry, it was already posted…
@47. You are entirely missing my point. Which is that the name “Columbus Day” is *itself* is a problem. Your followup sentence was irrelevant to this — it’s not *just* a matter of reframing.
In other contexts we do NOT commemorate perpetrators of genocide. Yes the Hitler hypothetical is intentionally absurd; that’s the whole f**king point — no one would even *think* of commemorating Sept. 1 in this way, any more than we would commemorate 9/11 as “Al Quaida Day”. This is completely analogous from the point of view of the indigenous peoples; that we rarely consider that point of view IS the problem.
Hey, here’s an idea: How about if we call it “10/12”?
Way fewer syllables and might even get the point across.
Eeyore’s posts remind me very much of Dickensian villains, who see their middle class selves as the moral core of society, while those disenfranchised are innate criminals preying on the wealthy — each individual a criminal, even if they haven’t committed a crime. “You committed a crime, because you’re a criminal. If you haven’t yet, you will, because you are just a criminal-in-waiting.”
Wasn’t Bartolomé de las Casas the one who got the African slave trade to the Americas started to protect “his” “noble savages”?
He helped, yes… but he did deeply regret that later.
From the footnote on the Oatmeal comic: