Was Christopher Columbus a hero or a villain?
I could either have the future pass me or l could create it.
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin So flat Earthers, man-made climate change deniers, and just science deniers.
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He was a villain and a terrible person.
He was not the first person to know the Earth was not flat. Educated people knew it was not flat since the time of Aristotle. He just thought it was a small little pair shape.
He did not discover anything at all, people were living here for millennia. He also was not even the first European. The Norse landing here almost 500 years before him.
Because of him, hundreds of thousands of natives are not here today (the ones he killed, not by disease). He took the very first natives he met, prisoner. He forced so many into slavery. He wrote in his journals, how easily he could conquer and enslave them.
This man caused so much suffering that the natives' descendants still suffer from poverty and discrimination.
Some would say that you can not judge him by modern standards. However, he was still pretty bad by 16th century standards.
He tortured and mutilated natives who did not bring him enough gold while governing Hispaniola. He sold girls as young as 9 into sexual slavery. He was even brutal to the other colonists (white people) that were there.
This was so bad, that he was removed from power and thrown in jail.
When Bartolome de las Casas visited the island, he wrote, "From 1494 to 1508, over 3,000,000 people had perished from war, slaver;y, and the mines".
I have one question for all the people that think he was a hero.
How do you make a hero out of a man who caused so much suffering?
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin So flat Earthers, man-made climate change deniers, and just science deniers.
I friended myself!
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p6M-VgXHwwdpJarhyQYapBz-kRc6FrgdOLFAd3IfYz8/edit
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He tortured and mutilated natives who did not bring him enough gold while governing Hispaniola. He sold girls as young as 9 into sexual slavery. He was even brutal to the other colonists (white people) that were there.
This was so bad, that he was removed from power and thrown in jail.
When Bartolome de las Casas visited the island, he wrote, "From 1494 to 1508, over 3,000,000 people had perished from war, slaver;y, and the mines"."
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin So flat Earthers, man-made climate change deniers, and just science deniers.
I friended myself!
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"Now one can understand why he was sacked and we can see that there were good reasons for doing so.
"The monarchs wanted someone who did not give them problems. Columbus did not solve problems, he created them."
The issue was not that he was violent and barbarous, it was that his violence and barbarism was ineffective and was too problematic for the crown. If he'd managed to keep the colonists in line with this violence there would have been little issue - with little cared about violence towards natives either way. The same monarch that ordered a royal official to arrest him in turn ordered him freed, his titles and fortune returned and gave him funds for a new voyage, they simple did not allow him to have a position of governance again.
lastly Bartolome de las Casas wrote that decades after Colmobus's death..
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Hundreds years from now, some of our customs will look barbaric and disgusting in the eyes of the futuristic society. Evaluation of historical elements is curious in this regard: it is highly dependent on the present state of the society and changes significantly (usually for the more critical one) over time.
So, to summarize and to answer your question, I would say that Columbus was both a hero and a villain, depending a) on what side of his personality (exploratory nature and courage vs prejudice and brutality) you focus your attention, and b) on which society is judging him.
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