big kahuna wrote:
windywave wrote:
veganerd wrote:
Fuck columbus
Why? If he hadn't "found" America you think no one else would have?
Leaving aside the white guilt-filled exclamation of our friend ( ;-) ), I personally believe John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) was the Italian explorer whose journey, to Newfoundland, was probably more important in terms of what would become English-speaking North America (Canada and the US).
It was his discoveries that set a spark to the massive stream of human migration to what became the English-speaking New World. Sooner or later, British (English) expansion would have recreated the Vikings' own efforts at exploration of that region of the North Atlantic, for sure. Cabot was in the right place and the right time, after Columbus' signal journeys to the Caribbean brought life to what would become the Spanish-speaking New World known as Latin America, to take advantage of the newfound desire by Western Europeans to explore.
And Giovanni Caboto (who'd moved to England and adopted the Anglicized version of his name) was himself the progenitor -- the Godfather, so to speak LOL! -- that gave birth to the phenomenon of millions of Italian immigrants who would eventually cross the Atlantic to North America and become part of the English-speaking world. How great is that? :-)
As to the anti-occidental prejudices that seem to be
de rigeur nowadays among the enlightened few, it would be well to remember that slavery, cannibalism, warfare and human sacrifice all existed in the Americas before Columbus even thought of navigating a trio of small, leaky caravels across the vast expanse of the Atlantic.
Understanding that this was so, I'm not so quick to point fingers Columbus's (and Cabot's) way.
Yeah... Columbus was a good guy. All he did was sail 3 leaky boats across the Atlantic. Nice selective history.