It’s Indigenous People’s Day! I hope everyone takes a moment to think about the people who were here in the Americas first.
You know what weirds me out, that I find terribly troubling about humanity? That in 1492 an intelligent man made a long, difficult journey from Europe to the Caribbean, where he met the Taíno people and their sophisticated culture, and he decided that the appropriate thing to do was to use guns and swords to enslave, rape, mutilate, and murder people to steal their labor and wealth. I don’t understand that at all. It’s certainly not how I would respond to discovering a new civilization, even if it was militarily weaker than mine. This would be an opportunity to learn new ideas and, even if I was a capitalist at heart, establish new trade networks of mutual benefit.
Fortunately, to feed my cynicism and learn how that could be, all I have to do is open today’s newspaper.
There’s Trump, baiting audiences with an opportunity to use a racial slur.
Surrounded by his adoring flock, Trump bellowed, “You know Putin mentioned the n-word. Do you know what the n-word is?”
Plenty of people shouted the answer they thought Trump was looking for — because there is only one answer. Hardly surprised by the response to his purposefully provocative question, Trump jumped in and said, “No, no, no, it’s the ‘nuclear’ word.”
There’s Tommy Tuberville, inciting racists with his claim that the Democrats want to support reparations because, in his mind, the victims of slavery are synonymous with the perpetrators of crimes. Hey, Tommy, the criminals were the ones who kidnapped people and then made them work in cane and tobacco and cotton fields. But as one of the dumbest people in the Senate, you wouldn’t know that.
Tuberville, appearing with Trump in a rural area of Nevada in support of those candidates, first told the crowd that the Democratic Party is “pro-crime, they want crime.” Then he exclaimed, “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have.” What that means is hard to say, but GOP leaders know their base well, so telling the audience that Democrats want to steal what you have was the message Tuberville believes will animate some Republican voters.
Tuberville’s comment that caused such a backlash must also be viewed in the same light. Raising his voice in anger, the senator shouted, “They want reparations, because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullsh**!” That line drew big cheers from the audience, with Tuberville adding, “They are not owed that.”
Then you see right-wing radio hosts blaming the Holocaust on LGBTQ people.
Do you know that part of the Weimer Republic was social degeneracy Europe had never seen before? Do you know, the whole LGBTQ thing? Do you know, that was going wild in places like Berlin at this time? And do you know that there were so many Germans, Jew-hatred or not, so many Germans who were willing to accept anything to make that degeneracy stop? They wanted it stopped. This is actually part – I’m glad you brought this up. This is part of why I’ve been warning time and time and time again – not cheering for – warning.
We’re still finding the bodies of dead Indian children at boarding schools.
Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools, and by 1925 that number had more than tripled. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture for speaking their Native languages. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at what that jerk Columbus did when he found new people — he exploited them.
I suggest a taxonomic revision. No longer “Homo sapiens,” because boy, that is a misnomer, and instead classify us as “Homo culus,” because we’re naturally assholes.
A few weeks back, the Behind the Bastards podcast devoted a series on Columbus and they brought up an aspect of his voyages I had not heard before: Columbus was a Christian fanatic, even for his extremely religious time. He believed the world was about to end with the next couple of centuries and that Jerusalem needed to be put back into Christian hands before the tribulation began, lest Gawd condemn humanity. To do this would require another war against the Ottoman Empire, his entire drive to establish an Atlantic trade route to Asia was to fund this Crusade.
Once again, religion poisons everything.
A few weeks back, the Behind the Bastards podcast devoted a series on Columbus and they brought up an aspect of his voyages I had not heard before: Columbus was a Christian fanatic, even for his extremely religious time. He believed the world was about to end with the next couple of centuries and that Jerusalem needed to be put back into Christian hands before the tribulation began, lest Gawd condemn humanity. To do this would require another war against the Ottoman Empire, his entire drive to establish an Atlantic trade route to Asia was to fund this Crusade.
Once again, religion poisons everything.
Whoops! Sorry for the redundant post. I swear I only hit the “post” button once.
No.
It is already too late and it is still morning here.
The Russians are losing and only have terrorist attacks left. This is appalling.
So much for the collective “We”.
If you mean the singular “We”, well OK.
I won’t launch cruise missiles and drones on Russian targets in a tit for tat exchange.
Today, anyway.
@1–@3 reminds me there was a poorly-evidenced claim circulating awhile back, Was Columbus secretly a Jew? (CNN guest(?) opinion column, May 2012). The ghist of the assertion is that he was a Marrano, “a Jew who converted to the Christian faith to escape persecution but who continued to practice Judaism secretly” to avoid persecution.
The opinion column’s claims include that his “grand passion [was] the quest liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims”, possibly because “In Columbus’ day, Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to be liberated and the Temple rebuilt for the Messiah to come.” (I’ve no idea if either quoted claim is plausible, albeit both seem not-impossible.)
I’ve never even attempted to go down that rabbit-hole. I would not be too surprised if the claims are the result of a variant of “bible code” delusions.
Columbus’ motivations were not discovery for the benefit of mankind – he was looking for an exploitable new trade route, or any other thing he could do to line his pockets. Every interaction with the locals thereafter was about colonialism and extraction. His motives were never anything but base – he wanted to claim new lands for Spain, not map the world.
(Ps: I don’t get how anyone can sail up on a populated continent and decide “I discovered this!” No, the people living there had obviously discovered it before he did.)
Tuberville is all about lawn and order. That’s why he tried to downplay a mob of republicans beating down 160 cops resulting in several deaths. Saying that was “tourism” must mean that someone sticking up a liquor store is just “a customer giving feedback.”
A passage from a 15th-century Norse manuscript describing an incident from the 11th or 12th century when the Norse first encountered Greenland natives, either Dorset or Inuit:
Travel across the ocean to a new land, meet new people, and the first thing you do is a little experiment in which you stab them to see how they bleed.
Yeah, we can try to be better people. There is certainly room for improvement.
The Spanish royals were no strangers to atrocities.
When even they had enough of Columbus’ treatment of the indians, that should tell you something.
HULK SMASH!
The UN organ for human rights voted against criticising China for the treatment of the Uighurs. The muslim countries were bribed ro vote against and criticism.
My point is, corruption and murder are the oldest professions. I look forward to the AIs taking over.
Poster #1 has it almost right; Columbus was a religious fanatic, in a time when Christian Spain and the Sunni Ottomans were bitterly fighting. And like many Spaniards who followed him to the New World, Columbus believed the people there were Muslim, not a new civilization. It was common Christian practice at the time to enslave and slaughter Muslims, so of course Columbus’ crew was equally brutal to the ‘Muslims’ they found.
Ref: “God’s Shadow”, a biography of Ottoman Sultan Selim by Alan Mikhail (head of Yale’s history department). An illuminating read – the religious fanaticism/opportunism of Selim and other rulers of the time set the foundations for many of the problems that still plague us today.
Thank you PZ for your recognition of this day. As I wrote in 2016, humans have always been ‘homo sentients’, but few are ‘homo sapiens’. Most are sentient (self-aware and self-centered) few are sapient (wise). We honor the members of our organization who are the Hopi and Apache. As most Native Americans would say, “We were never ‘discovered’, we were pillaged, murdered and plundered”.
I just learned about a skull found in the mountains of Taiwan. I assume there has been a paleo-DNA analyse, as it is claimed to be related to the negritos in the Philippines, and predates all groups now living in Taiwan.
There are several legends about dark-skinned people once living in the mountains of the island. One group also has a legend about killing the last of them.
@Raven #4
My kids used to play in that playground. I’m going to start digging around for old lamps so that I can get a djinn to do unspeakable things to Putin and his cronies.
Columbus was a monomaniacal nut-case.
Pissed of his crew sufficiently that they marooned him on one of his later voyages. Considering that european ship traffic was very sporadic back then, amazing that he got rescued.
Claimed to his dying day that he’d found the route to “India”, and those hot-spicy plants? Peppers! Natives? Indians!
The Norse would have gotten credit for discovering The New World, but for their dawdling around getting their manuscript in, and it was to an obscure journal also, too.
If today is Indigenous People’s Day, then last Friday was Leif Eriksson’s Day.
I’ve had the good fortune to (occasionally) be placed in charge of other people–my mantra is “I’m not really a good manager, but I do know what a good manager does/would do”
So that’s what I do.
It has carried over into my personal life as well.
I’m not really a good person, but I do know what a good person would do – and that’s what I strive to do.
And you know? Bit by bit, I do believe that I may be becoming a better person.
rx808 @ 17
I think I am a bit less shallow than I was a decade ago. Ditto the previous decade, and so on.
Now retirement is only a few years away and I fell like a right *☆₩@ for not growing up properly earlier.
In Sweden we did not wipe out the Sami (although we grabbed all land fit for agriculture).
We were too busy fighting wars with neighbors, persecuting the Rom and burning withches.
Also there was that 30-year war in the 17th century about which sect of Cristianity was the right one.
BTW we now have a conflict between Sami and Finn-speaking minorities up north about who is the mostest indigenous of all. Because human nature.
(PS If the election goes bad, head for Norway. They have the best nature and the best economy of Scandinavia)
More about human nature and moral reasoning (when not greed, politics or religion twist our minds).
“Researchers demonstrate human cognitive system designed to enable moral tradeoff decisions”
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-human-cognitive-enable-moral-tradeoff.html
6000-year old skull found in cave in Taiwan possibly confirms legend of indigenous tribe
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-year-old-skull-cave-taiwan-possibly.html
…and then there were none.
in 1492 an intelligent man made a long, difficult journey from Europe to the Caribbean, where he met the Taíno people and their sophisticated culture, and he decided that the appropriate thing to do was to use guns and swords to enslave, rape, mutilate, and murder people
He was out for the money. A bit of murder and mayhem on foreigners was no problem. He was not an explorer.
(Just caught up with news)
Please don’t be Kanye West.
I just spent a fruitless search of my browsing history trying to find the comment thread i was reading the other day and did not add anything myself. What got me finally to just leave was comments about the past and how all the native americans were just the same and were violent and cruel and don’t judge the past by today’s standards those kinds of defenses are so open ended as to be apologetics for the inquisition the crusades , the holocaust” and chattel slavery
. Thankfully I have not read any of that here I would not have expected to either.
the question is not one about how cruel or not were the inhabitants in the western hemisphere were. The europeans have had an extremely long and bloody history well before they “discovered ” “the new world” with centuries of exploitation of there own populations.
the question is much simpler. it was not an exploration it was an invasion and subjugation plain and simple of “new land” for king and country in gods name. it was for riches for investors it was for empire and manifest destiny all backed by force of arms.
it is the history were are left with none of it can be changed but we can do something different we can strive to do things differently now
“Can we try being better people?”
Nazis will nazi.
They must be pushed back. After 40 years of obseqiuous BS democrats are finally getting that you cannot keep handing over Czechoslovakia in the name of politeness.
If brownshirts are claiming the streets you have to reclaim it from them.
THEN we can start being polite to each other.
We are not natural assholes.
We are not natural anything, we are the definition of non-natural.
We are the product of a society that is content with letting the worst of us take over.
Yes, people who are greedy for power have a natural advantage in gaining power, but it’s not a necessity that they actually get to power.
We can build a culture that is distrustful of power, that sees it as a problem.
There are examples of societies that did and still do it, we can do it.
Marcus @ 6
It was called the Doctrine of Discovery. In it’s most simplified form it meant that any lands not occupied by xians were considered unoccupied and were therefore ‘discovered’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_doctrine
The doctrine was later adopted by the US government as part of it’s justification for it’s own domestic genocide.
Sorry, but I fucking hate xianity. Or is ‘hate’ too strong a word?