(October 11, 2012 at 8:42 am)Chuck Wrote: No, even if he is valued for absolutely nothing else, he should still be valued for precisely the much maligned "invasion". Putting America on the map doesn't mean jack shit without the invasion. The invasion of America by Europe is the seminal event in human history that made modernity possible.
You can't make omelets without breaking eggs. Thanks to columbus, the world had the opportunity to break the eggs. So we now have omelets.
The alternative inevitably meant by the course dear to revisionists is it is good to have useless knowledge that a few, theoretically nice in some head in cloud romantic sense but essentially untouchable, eggs exist, while the world, figuratively speaking, starves.
The essential fact is Columbus was a skilled seat of the pants navigator but hopeless cartographer. If he had good cartographic skills he would not have made the huge mistake in his estimate of the size of the earth to start with. So were it not for this cartographic ineptitude, he wouldn't have ever embarked on his voyages of discover. China would have been seen, entirely correctly, to lie way too far to the west to be reached by sailing ships of the era.
Bullshit. Even on an individal level, individuals in their collective entire lives are neither all good or all bad. Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things.
Back then when the land was being taken from the people that lived there, you would not be able to convince them that Europeans had that right to do that, or the right to murder the natives and steal their resources.
No one today can say they should make amends for that, but we shouldn't sugar coat reality either.
Tomas Jefferson owned slaves. Just because we have a nation now never made slavery good.
Colubus was a map maker and I refuse to ignore the harm that came because of that. You have to take the good and bad in human history objectively, otherwise the very things we do to harm each other WILL be repeated in the future.
Eienstien as well, we have lots of good technology now stemming from his formula. But it does not change that BOMBS were used to murder unarmed people. EVEN the people in the manhatten project hated what they had created and were aware of the future implications of it, which we are still dealing with today.
