On Columbus Continued

Christopher Columbus was shaped by a culture and time period that was characterized largely by a) conquest, b) religious superstition, c) religious intolerance, d) ignorance and a lack of enlightenment, e) slavery, f) slavery as a by-product of conquest, g) the conversion of primitive peoples to Christianity, h) a belief that naked people represented an age that was prior to and distinct from that of Europe, and that these same people could reap the benefit of European "civilization", and i) a markedly different conceptualization of childhood than we presently have (children were often seen as expendable, chattel, and frequently married off early). To think that this one man, Christopher Columbus, could have conceivably transcended ALL of this and somehow emerge as a sort of 15th Century version of Mahatma Gandhi nearly FOUR HUNDRED YEARS prior to the abolition of slavery in America is ludicrous......................................................................................................Look, folks, I'll admit it, what happened to the Native-Americans was a tragedy (and, yes, I went through a Native-American/white European guilt phase, too - "The Long Death", "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", "The Life and Death of Crazy Horse", "Bloodlines", "Black Elk Speaks", "Killing Custer", basically whatever I could get my hands on). But it was also an inevitability. This, in that, even if Christopher Columbus had never frigging existed, another European would have eventually reached America. And, yes, me-buckos, that European would have brought with him the same diseases, the same superstitions, the same bellicosity, etc.. And, besides, it's not like the end result was totally bad. I mean, just think about it here. If it wasn't for the United States and Canada, we all would probably be over in Europe heil Hitlering for the third or fourth generation.....waiting on Montezuma and company to come and rescue us.......................................................................................................P.S. And, yes, the use of the term, "genocide", here is exceedingly inaccurate. One, it blames Christopher Columbus for ALL of the Native-American deaths - even those that happened some 300 plus years after the fellow's death. And, two, it's just a flat-out inappropriate utilization of the term. Genocide, people, is the INTENTIONAL attempt toward the eradicating of a population. Columbus didn't set out to annihilate the the indigenous population of the Caribbean. On the contrary here, he wanted to convert them to Christianity. Yes, he did in fact enslave some of them, too. But it wasn't the slavery that ended up killed them, IT WAS DISEASE (conservative estimates on the percentage of Native- Americans killed off via disease - as opposed to those that were killed off via violence - is 80%, EIGHTY PERCENT!). Now, this isn't to say that there weren't atrocities. There obviously were. But there's indeed a big difference between atrocities and genocide. A humongous one.....................................................................................................P.S. 2 Here's another way to look at it. Let's just say that the Europeans had come to America with the very BEST of intentions (they obviously didn't but just for the sake of argument here), had treated the Native-Americans as if they were Gods and Goddesses, etc., there STILL would have been a massive number of deaths as a result, simply because of the staggering lack of resistance to European diseases....AND what if one of the more advanced Native-American peoples, such as the Incas, had made it to Europe prior to the Europeans ever having made it to America? Those Native-Americans would THEN have brought the European diseases back to America with them and caused a major killing off of natives THAT way - this, folks, without a single European person ever having set foot on America! I think that we just have to call a spade a damn spade here. A lot of this "the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction" stuff is simply the result of radical college professors doing yet another hit-job on anything that's white, European, and/or Christian. The way that I see it here, Christopher Columbus wasn't any more a Hitler than the dude was a hero. He was, as most of us plainly are, somewhere in between.