Being Australian I don’t know much about the history?
In: Other
Because cops are racist. What’s so difficult to understand?
Somebody else asked the same question. Here was my response there:
He was the first imperial European to discover America. Once there, he proceded to colonise. His methods included enslaving the locals, kidnapping the locals and shipping them back to Europe for the slave trade there, dismembering them as punishment for failing to mine enough gold, and one or two casual genocides. All of this he proudly documented in his own journals.
He is celebrated because he is considered the founder of modern America and that must be a great thing. However, since growing as a culture and coming to globally accept that slavery, dismembering, and murder are wrong, he’s been seen more and more as the monster he was. The trouble is that his monstrous deeds cast America’s origins in a bad light, so they don’t appear too often in 4th grade texbooks.
People are becoming more aware of their history and less accepting of the “America is the beacon of freedom and goodness” narrative so they’re taking action against the celebration of monsters.
The criticism against Columbus is mostly because of his involvement in the transatlantic slave trade after establishing European contact with the western hemisphere.
Why are the statues being destroyed? Just another casualty of the never-ending outrage mob society we live in now unfortunately.
Because he was a shitty person who did shitty things to the indigenous people he thought were “Indians” because his dumb ass thought he had sailed to India. He’s also inaccurately accredited with “discovering” North America, even though he didn’t.
Here’s the nutshell version.
A lot of Americans are very unhappy, right now, for a *lot* of different reasons. So, they are lashing out. But their anger is unfocused, because they don’t know how to properly direct it, so they are kind of lashing out at anything and everything. They don’t have a clear enemy, because the real enemy is, well–everyone. It is an entire society collapsing, because America is a quasi-democracy, but American society is currently not particularly capable of making wise decisions for itself.
In the case of the Columbus statues, the anger is primarily directed toward him because he allegedly engaged in slavery, and slavery was what brought a lot of black people from Africa to America, which naturally caused great suffering to those black people. Black Americans are tired of a lot of racism and abuse they currently suffer (and have suffered for many years), so they are lashing out. Columbus statues are just falling victim to that, because they see Columbus as a symbol of those who abused black people.
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