Before i quote some Wikipedia about that matter, let me ask you one question Whirlfind. Are you a politician? I'm really curious, because you manage so passionately to say much without answering the point of the question and instead leading clever away from it, hide behind the filibuster-technique of blah, blah, blah...but still you're entertaining enough to keep people listening.
About Columbus:
Since the late 20th century, historians have criticized Columbus for initiating colonization and for abuse of natives.
Among reasons for this criticism is the poor treatment of the native Taíno people of Hispaniola, whose population declined rapidly after contact with the Spanish.
Columbus required the natives to pay tribute in gold and cotton.[134] Modern estimates for the pre-Columbian population of Hispaniola are around 250,000–300,000.[citation needed] According to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, by 1548, 56 years after Columbus landed, and 42 years after he died, fewer than 500 Taíno were living on the island.[135]
The indigenous population declined rapidly, due primarily to the first pandemic of European endemic diseases, which struck Hispaniola after 1519. The natives had no acquired immunity to these new diseases and suffered high fatalities. There is also documentation that they were overworked.[136][137][138] Historian Andrés Reséndez of University of California, Davis, pushes back against this narrative, and says the available evidence suggests
"slavery has emerged as major killer" of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean between 1492 and 1550 more so than diseases such as smallpox, influenza and malaria.[139] He says that indigenous populations did not experience a rebound like European populations did following the Black Death because unlike the latter, the former were subjected to deadly forced labor in gold and silver mines on a massive scale.[140]
Slavery and serfdomThe natives of the island were systematically subjugated via the encomienda system implemented by Columbus.[141] Adapted to the New World from Spain, it resembled the feudal system in Medieval Europe, as it was based on a lord offering "protection" to a class of people who owed labor.[142]
In addition, Spanish colonists under his rule began to buy and sell natives as slaves, including children.[143]
When natives on Hispaniola began fighting back against their oppressors in 1495, Columbus's men captured 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children in a single raid. The strongest were transported to Spain to be sold as slaves;[144] 40 percent of the 500 shipped died en route.[53] Historian James W. Loewen asserts that
"Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves—about five thousand—than any other individual."[145]
According to Spanish colonist and Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas's contemporary A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, when slaves held in captivity began to die at high rates,
Columbus ordered all natives over the age of thirteen to pay a hawk's bell full of gold powder every three months. Natives who brought this amount to the Spanish were given a copper token to hang around their necks. The Spanish cut off the hands of those without tokens, and left them to bleed to death.[53][146] Thousands of natives committed suicide by poison to escape their persecution.[144]
Columbus' s forced labor system was also described by his son, Ferdinand: "In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of fourteen years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay twenty-five pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment; any Indian found without such a token was to be punished." [147]
Violence towards Natives and Spanish colonistsDuring his brief reign, Columbus executed Spanish colonists for minor crimes, and used dismemberment as another form of punishment.[148]
Columbus's soldiers killed and enslaved with impunity at every landing. When Columbus fell ill in 1495, "what little restraint he had maintained over his men disappeared as he went through a lengthy period of recuperation. The troops went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives, trying to force them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined treasure-houses of gold."[149] According to Las Casas, 50,000 natives perished during this period.
Upon his recovery, Columbus organized his troops' efforts, forming a squadron of several hundred heavily armed men and more than twenty attack dogs. Dogs were used to hunt down natives who attempted to flee.[144] Columbus's men tore across the land, killing thousands of sick and unarmed natives. Soldiers would use their captives for sword practice, attempting to decapitate them or cut them in half with a single blow.[150]
The Arawaks attempted to fight back against Columbus's men but lacked their armor, guns, swords, and horses. When taken prisoner, they were hanged or burned to death. Desperation led to mass suicides and infanticide among the natives.
In just two years under Columbus's governorship, over 125,000 of the 250,000–300,000 natives in Haiti were dead,[53] many died from lethal forced labor in the mines, in which a third of workers died every six months.[151] Within three decades, the surviving Arawak population numbered only in the hundreds.[151] "Virtually every member of the gentle race ... had been wiped out."[144] Disease, warfare and harsh enslavement contributed to the depopulation.[152][153][154]
Within indigenous circles, Columbus is often viewed as a key agent of genocide.[155] Samuel Eliot Morison, a Harvard historian and author of a multivolume biography on Columbus writes, "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide."[156] Loewen laments that while
"Haiti under the Spanish is one of the primary instances of genocide in all human history", only one major history text he reviewed mentions Columbus's role in it.[157]
By the end of 1494, disease and famine had claimed two-thirds of the Spanish settlers.[137][165] A native Nahuatl account depicted the social breakdown that accompanied the pandemics: "A great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds."[166] When the pandemic finally struck in 1519 it wiped out much of the remaining native population.[167][168] Charles C. Mann wrote "It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades."[169]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Criticism_and_defense_in_modern_scholarshipSo you can enjoy your Columbus Day, celebrate it, but in my opinion Public Enemy have stated some good points about that history.
Why America? At the moment i find one thing very cool about America, and that is that 11 states have legalized cannabis!
That's a forward move, and better just seen without the historic facts, that the war on drugs and the restrictive politics about harmless drugs were implemented at first by America.
United States of Whatever
