The Church embraces Columbus

thanks a lot ed, just today everyone in my class was condemming Columbus as a genocide and rapist, it is just sad how ignorant people can be. Your post came right on time. Good job professor

There is so much hatred for Christopher Columbus, it's unreal. 

That's because, to a lot of people, he isn't a person so much as an Emmanuel Goldstein type "figurehead for all of the injustices of colonialism put together", even though he himself was guilty of basically none of those. It also doesn't help that they've been taught to regard those injustices as uniquely evil, the worst things ever done in the sordid history of mankind. To a lot of the left wing, Columbus is regarded something like how Christians regard Satan.

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History is always a mixed bag. The woke only see what they want to see and conveniently overlook any contrary evidence. Many evils have been done in the name of colonization, but much good has happened as well: when "indigenous people" get sick, do they go to a tribal medicine man, or a modern hospital given to us by those supposedly evil racists and their scientific method?

Wow. Nice to downplay genocide.

No good came out of colonialism. It was based on exploitation, rape, pillage, slavery, and genocide. It only benefited white people. You think Indigenous people think:

"Wow, sure those colonizers enslaved us, nearly wiped out our culture, language, raped our women, stole our land, made us second class citizens, sexually and physically abused our children while separating us from them, mutilated our bodies but they gave us modern hospitals from their scientific method (as if white people were the only ones who did science which isn't true at all BTW and Indigenous medicine which I'm sure you haven't even research at all besides stereotypes isn't all useless and outdated and can offer unique perspectives in how we socially treat those with illness and in terms of mental and community support, so thanks for relying on stereotypes that paint Indigenous people as uneducated savages when they were anything but, and also for promoting the whole saviour myth. Not to mention how colonizers introduced diseases which wiped out Indigenous people in the first place) so it's okay."

I guess you would say during the rise of Nazi Germany, well the Holocaust was bad but it revived Germany's economy and united the nation so it was a mixed bad.

Wow, nice way to mis-use the term "genocide". Europeans came over carrying germs that they had immunities to, and so landing in the Americas - even if they had meant to do nothing but engage in commerce and then go home - would have been an act of "genocide". Even though neither the Europeans nor the Native Americans had any notion of germ theory at the time, it was still "genocide".

It is so ridiculous and idiotic a ploy that it is difficult to even read the rest of the argument to see if it has any merit.  

I read it, it has no merit as far as I can see. It's pretty fantastical.

 AtnoOctober 14, 2020 at 8:37 PM

"No good came out of colonialism"

Yes, it did. The opportunity of treating such people with Western medicine (which, yes, was far more advanced and is way more useful); defenses of certain basic human rights which were regularly violated by different colonized peoples; their exposure to higher philosophy, mathematics, science, more advanced technology, etc.

Now, colonialism wasn't the way to go, and you may argue that the goods don't outweigh or justify the evils. But to say it brought no goods whatsoever is a lie. We need subtlety. 

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The liberal interpretation of Spanish settlement portrays it as some kind of bloody conquest lasting three hundred years.

I think, Miguel, that the liberal portrayal is of a bloody conquest followed by centuries of oppressive slavery that involved, significantly, ongoing atrocities, even if not on a coordinated continent-wide scale like the conquest. The exact degree to which the actual facts match the notion of "slavery" proper (and not, say, feudal relationships) may be debated and may have varied over time and location, but that there were atrocities, and conditions aligning quite well with "slavery" in SOME cases, would be much easier to establish.  

I had in mind the usual summary of Spanish presence in the Americas: brutal conquest,immediately followed by "liberation".
It would be far-fetched to describe the condition of the Indians as slavery, or even feudalism. The encomienda and repartimiento systems may have seemed like the old corvee, but were a continuation of the indigenous mita of the Incas and other practices elsewhere. This government requirement of a certain number of labourers per community within given periods of time still left indigenous peoples on their own lands and self-governing.

In the Americas and the Philippines, the indigenous population was settled in reducciones, model towns which established a new sacred geography and helped to break links to the pagan past. They encouraged the growth of local self-government and corporate economic activity. This was Catholic "social engineering", and very successful. The eight million indians (the population remaining after the diseases and social disorganisation of the conquest period) became fully fledged members of the new civilisation. What happened to those West Africans transported to the colonies of other empires bears no relation to this.

Slaves running away from the British colonies in the 17th. and 18th centuries were allowed to found the town and fortress of Santa Teresa in Florida as free men, the only conditions being the embrace of the Faith and loyalty to the king. They formed units within the Spanish forces to drive away attacks by the English army and colonists from Georgia. The defects of the Spanish system were outweighed by its progressive laws,(not always observed) and the results obtained.