So a great friend of mine posted a meme last night that got me thinking and sparked a small debate. Ive seen many anti- Columbus posts and memes this week labeling him as everything from mass murderer to father of the slave trade. Although her particular post was in good humor, Ive seen some others that were quite slanderous. I just think it prudent to know facts before we jump on the hate train. Heres a sample of one of my comments... thoughts? My intent wasnt necessarily to defend Columbus as much as it was to question some of the people (again, NOT ***** because I dont consider this one nearly as historically egregious as some Ive seen) that create or share some of the memes Ive seen that take one piece or view on history and apply it to a completely separate event. The way the native Americans were treated from the 16th-19th century is an inexcusable atrocity. However, to blame Columbus for things that happened 200 years after his death is a bit of a stretch to me. I figure that should have been enough time for humanity to straighten itself out. I probably would have just laughed and gone on about my day had the creator of this meme used a representation of an indian more accurate to those indigenous to the lands that Columbus settled, instead of the CLEARLY North American indian pictured above. In regards to your link, history books, as Im sure you know, are usually written by the ones with the bigger guns. A title A Peoples History insinuates to me a possibly less historically verifiable, yet more centrally rooted version of the truth. My guess would be that reality probably falls somewhere in the middle from this authors take and what we learned in history clsss. As far as Columbus setting up the African slave trade, I dont know about that....I know the Portuguese were the first to officially connect the different posts of the Atlantic slave trade so I dont know what role Columbus played in that, and I certainly have difficulty blaming him for what English settlers did 100 years later and thousands of miles north of any lands he himself ever settled. And lets not forget this: The Atlantic slave traders, ordered by trade volume, were: the Portuguese, the British, theFrench, the Spanish, the Dutch Empire, and the United States. They had established outposts on the African coast where THEY PURCHASED SLAVES FROM LOCAL AFRICAN LEADERS. (Wikipedia) That alone, in my humble opinion, crushes any idea or meme that attempts to blame Columbus as the sole patriarch of the African slave trade, as i have seen on Facebook this week. Is the man innocent? CERTAINLY NOT. There is definitely blood on his hands. But to compare him to Hitler, Stalin, or any other mass anhialator of humans is a label Im not ready to administer.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 13:17:24 +0000
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