Is Christopher Colombus a victim of Cancel Culture?

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

Since BRTD bitches about him and his day every year, and the day is this Monday, why not?

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Option 3

[Ferguson97]

Option 3

Why doesn't a genocidal maniac deserve to be cancelled? 

[Aurelius]

Option 3

Why doesn't a genocidal maniac deserve to be cancelled?  

For all the same reasons Mongolians continue to celebrate Genghis Khan.

He discovered America, launching the modern era and changing the course of history. We owe our existence as a nation to him.

I do not favor replacing that with something that sounds like a perpetually offended HR bureaucrat came up with.

And no, this isn't just an American thing. Anyone want to take a guess who Genova's airport is named for?

[Progressive Pessimist]

I prefer the term "historically re-contextualized."

"Cancelled" is as meaningless and overused of a term as "woke" now.

[dead0man]

Option 3

Why doesn't a genocidal maniac deserve to be cancelled?  

For all the same reasons Mongolians continue to celebrate Genghis Khan.

He discovered America, launching the modern era and changing the course of history. We owe our existence as a nation to him.

but:
1.he died thinking he wasn't in America but Asia
2.because he was very very very wrong about the size of the world
3.because everyone knew the world was round in 1492 and how big it was, they were right, he was not
4.nevermind the whole "he was bad even for his day" which is saying a lot


If he was just wrong and an otherwise nice guy, sure, celebrate him as one of the great accidents of history, still wouldn't deserve a Federal holiday.  But the fact that he was amazingly dumb and cruel for his day makes celebrating him very wrong.  And it's not like someone else wouldn't have tried to go west eventually, and probably sooner than later.

[Orwell]

I prefer the term "historically re-contextualized."

"Cancelled" is as meaningless and overused of a term as "woke" now.

Did your wife's boyfriend give you permission to post this are you being naughty?

[HillGoose]

no, wasnt he like a serial killer or something ? and did bad stuff to manatees ?

iirc i remember reading he was "cancelled" even back in the olden days when he was still alive bcuz ppl thought he was insane

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Voted for Option 3, but I'm far from comfortable labelling it "cancel culture" in this instance.

[Devout Centrist]

I get Columbus Day off. All that matters

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

Option 3

Why doesn't a genocidal maniac deserve to be cancelled? 

For all the same reasons Mongolians continue to celebrate Genghis Khan.

He discovered America, launching the modern era and changing the course of history. We owe our existence as a nation to him.

but:
1.he died thinking he wasn't in America but Asia
2.because he was very very very wrong about the size of the world
3.because everyone knew the world was round in 1492 and how big it was, they were right, he was not
4.nevermind the whole "he was bad even for his day" which is saying a lot


If he was just wrong and an otherwise nice guy, sure, celebrate him as one of the great accidents history, still wouldn't deserve a Federal holiday.  But the fact that he was amazingly dumb and cruel for his day makes celebrating him very wrong.  And it's not like someone else wouldn't have tried to go west eventually, and probably sooner than later.

Leif Erikson became the first European to discover America half a millennium before Columbus did, and he didn't become a brutal dictator. Leif Erikson Day is on the 9th of October, one day before Columbus Day, but most people only heard about it from Spongebob.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Option 1.

He literally deserves a day just as much as Pol Pot and frankly the two are actually pretty comparable.

[Blow by blow, the passion dies]

He was a genocidal maniac, but a man of his time as well.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

Really wish this was just a simple Yes/No/IDK instead of the slightly-editorialized options (Especially cause the poll is laid out Yes/No/Yes/No)

[Ferguson97]

For all the same reasons Mongolians continue to celebrate Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan should not be celebrated either.

I'm not sure why you think other cultures celebrating awful people in their country's history means that we should too. How is this any different from celebrating Hitler or Pol Pot?

He discovered America, launching the modern era and changing the course of history. We owe our existence as a nation to him.

He did not discover America. Stop getting your history lessons from Charlie Brown specials.

I do not favor replacing that with something that sounds like a perpetually offended HR bureaucrat came up with.

So you would say that you feel very strongly that we shouldn't rename Columbus Day. And you would consider it to be an affront to your own beliefs and your country's history to even suggest that we should make this change.

In other words, you're offended.

[John Dule]

I will never understand the desire to brand Columbus as "genocidal." It is possible for someone to be a massive historical villain without slapping the word "genocide" on their actions, and the term simply doesn't apply to Columbus. Why bother piling that adjective on top of everything else? The man was a slaver and a brutal oppressor of native peoples; his crimes were so extreme that even at the time the Spaniards were shocked to hear of them. Despite being perhaps the best-remembered navigator in history, he was too stupid to know the correct circumference of the Earth and he went to the grave believing he'd found a western passage to India.

What he did not do (to my knowledge) is deliberately try to exterminate the natives. Columbus viewed them essentially as pack animals with whom he could do as he pleased; he wrote of them using paternalistic language and hoped to convert them to Catholicism. His treatment of them included forced backbreaking manual labor, as well as letting his men rape the native women. It did not, however, include death camps. The native people Columbus interacted with largely died of disease and as a result of his obscene brutality, but their deaths were merely side effects of his goals.

Columbus is one of the great historical villains, and his voyage set the tone for centuries of native enslavement and butchery. That doesn't mean he had the same goals or methods as someone like Hitler. But honestly, that doesn't make him any better. People need to realize that there are multiple types of barbarians and monsters out there, and trying to analyze who was "more evil" is just a waste of everyone's time. Hitler viewed the suffering of the Jews as his end goal. Columbus viewed the suffering of the natives with complete indifference, and did not care how much misery he had to cause to achieve his other goals. Both of these mindsets are reprehensible, on the same level as someone like Albert Fish or Jeffrey Dahmer.

[Aurelius]

For all the same reasons Mongolians continue to celebrate Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan should not be celebrated either.

I'm not sure why you think other cultures celebrating awful people in their country's history means that we should too. How is this any different from celebrating Hitler or Pol Pot?

He discovered America, launching the modern era and changing the course of history. We owe our existence as a nation to him.

He did not discover America. Stop getting your history lessons from Charlie Brown specials.

I do not favor replacing that with something that sounds like a perpetually offended HR bureaucrat came up with.

So you would say that you feel very strongly that we shouldn't rename Columbus Day. And you would consider it to be an affront to your own beliefs and your country's history to even suggest that we should make this change.

In other words, you're offended.

Yes, I know about the Vikings in Vinland. But that had no effect on European society.

[Ferguson97]

Yes, I know about the Vikings in Vinland. But that had no effect on European society.

I never mentioned any Vikings, did you mean to reply to Scott?

[dead0man]

Option 3

Why doesn't a genocidal maniac deserve to be cancelled? 

For all the same reasons Mongolians continue to celebrate Genghis Khan.

He discovered America, launching the modern era and changing the course of history. We owe our existence as a nation to him.

but:
1.he died thinking he wasn't in America but Asia
2.because he was very very very wrong about the size of the world
3.because everyone knew the world was round in 1492 and how big it was, they were right, he was not
4.nevermind the whole "he was bad even for his day" which is saying a lot


If he was just wrong and an otherwise nice guy, sure, celebrate him as one of the great accidents history, still wouldn't deserve a Federal holiday.  But the fact that he was amazingly dumb and cruel for his day makes celebrating him very wrong.  And it's not like someone else wouldn't have tried to go west eventually, and probably sooner than later.

Leif Erikson became the first European to discover America half a millennium before Columbus did, and he didn't become a brutal dictator.

sure, but nothing came of it so I don't think it should be an important part of the already good arguments against Columbus being a historical "hero".  He was a piece of sh**t and he was wrong, he "proved" nothing and only accidentally discovered a continent, and he didn't even believe that he did.

[It’s so Joever]

I will never understand the desire to brand Columbus as "genocidal." It is possible for someone to be a massive historical villain without slapping the word "genocide" on their actions, and the term simply doesn't apply to Columbus. Why bother piling that adjective on top of everything else? The man was a slaver and a brutal oppressor of native peoples; his crimes were so extreme that even at the time the Spaniards were shocked to hear of them. Despite being perhaps the best-remembered navigator in history, he was too stupid to know the correct circumference of the Earth and he went to the grave believing he'd found a western passage to India.

What he did not do (to my knowledge) is deliberately try to exterminate the natives. Columbus viewed them essentially as pack animals with whom he could do as he pleased; he wrote of them using paternalistic language and hoped to convert them to Catholicism. His treatment of them included forced backbreaking manual labor, as well as letting his men rape the native women. It did not, however, include death camps. The native people Columbus interacted with largely died of disease and as a result of his obscene brutality, but their deaths were merely side effects of his goals.

Columbus is one of the great historical villains, and his voyage set the tone for centuries of native enslavement and butchery. That doesn't mean he had the same goals or methods as someone like Hitler. But honestly, that doesn't make him any better. People need to realize that there are multiple types of barbarians and monsters out there, and trying to analyze who was "more evil" is just a waste of everyone's time. Hitler viewed the suffering of the Jews as his end goal. Columbus viewed the suffering of the natives with complete indifference, and did not care how much misery he had to cause to achieve his other goals. Both of these mindsets are reprehensible, on the same level as someone like Albert Fish or Jeffrey Dahmer.

Tbf genocide doesnt just mean Holocaust level. Official genocide definitions are a lot more broad. Otherwise you may as well argue the Uyghur genocide isn’t a “genocide” because the goal isn’t to kill them all, just to completly forcibly erase their culture as a people.

[Senator Incitatus]

Christopher Columbus was a tool in the most literal sense. If he was a victim of anything after his death, it was an inflated reputation in the United States from politicians attempting awkward appeals to ethnic Italians. For much of our history we understood that while Columbus played a pivotal role in exploring the continent, the English colonists deserved the credit for actually delivering civilization to much of this continent. The current anti-Columbus fervor is an abrupt regression toward the historical mean.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Columbus was mainly in it for the money and the power.

He was even hesistant to baptize indigenous peoples, because this would have limited his opportunities to exploit and enslave them for his own gain - something that was met with criticism at the time.

Sure he (accidentally) discovered America... just like the Nazis' WWII rocket program formed the cornerstone for the later moon landings.

As such, Columbus was probably more the Werher von Braun of his times rather than a Neil Armstrong (and in another parallel, there was and is a tendency in Germany to rename "Von Braun" schools and streets due to his involvement in the use of concentration camp inmates as slave labour to build rockets).

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

That's because the Ds want to make Eday a Holiday and cancel Columbus Day and Sinema Filibuster stopped it

There is no difference between now and when we were kids growing up in school that Columbus is celebrated in October and Indigenous Day is celebrated on Thanksgiving and NHL uses Blackhawks there is no pressure on NHL to change the Blackhawks but we changed the Indians and Redskins but kept Chiefs and Braves

[DaleCooper]

I wonder how many Americans think Christopher Columbus was a US President.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

As I previously said that Columbus at has always been celebrated we got rid of the team offensive names of Indian people, Christopher Columbus wasnt the only white man to treat people of color bad he was Italian and English history is I  intertwined with Rome, not just the Catholic Church which England was part of til Henry VIII, when he made the Anglican Church to get a Divorce but Romans were there in England and paid Celtics Knights to Ward off the Vikings, with King Arthur and his Celtic Knights

Columbus Day is celebrated because Italian History too, and the Roman Catholic Church is Italian

So, until Eday is made a Fed Holiday and we get rid of Columbus Day, we are gonna keep Columbus, every culture invaded England anyways Vikings, French Celtics, and Italian due to the Roman Empire was so large 43 /450 AD

I am not Italian but I know that England was part of the Roman Empire and we celebrate Jewish Holiday of Rosh Hashanah and Hanakah , and Romans didn't just kill Jesus they killed off Viking invaders as long as they could