Monday, October 8, 2012

ReThink Columbus Day!

Today is Columbus Day and its still a shame we recognize this horrendous man with a national holiday!

From Our friends at transformcolumbusday.org:
Before Columbus sailed the Atlantic, he was a slave trader for the Portuguese, transporting West African people to Portugal to be sold as slaves. The Columbus legacy is steeped in blood, violence, and death.



More information on Columbus day, here and here!
While Columbus once referred to the Taino Indians as cannibals, a story made up by Columbus - which is to this day still taught in some US schools - to help justify his slaughter and enslavement of these people. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: "It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell�Here there are so many of these slaves, and also brazilwood, that although they are living things they are as good as gold�"

Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was a common reward for Columbus' men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand."
By the way the whole "columbus discovered that the world was round" is also false!
Contrary to popular legend, Columbus did not prove that the world was round; educated people had known that for centuries. The Egyptian-Greek scientist Erastosthenes, working for Alexandria and Aswan, already had measured the circumference and diameter of the world in the third century B.C. Arab scientists had developed a whole discipline of geography and measurement, and in the tenth century A.D., Al Maqdisi described the earth with 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude. The Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai still has an icon that was painted 500 years before Columbus and which shows Jesus ruling over a spherical earth.


During Columbus time in Haiti, he and his men hunted the Taino Indians for sport, beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs.

2 comments:

  1. For in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and the whole of Europe was enlightened, the western hemisphere modernized and global trade born. That's all us Republicans need to say about it.

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    Replies
    1. and to this day, the republicans are still slave traders, profiting on the exploitation of those that are unable to fight back or unaware of the true nature of the beast they face.

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