Northam replaces Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day
So, why not Whig Party Day, or Eugenics Society Day? Natural Selection applies to cultures every bit as much as it does to species. Amerindians migrated to North America during the last Ice Age, when low sea levels exposed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. (There are some theories that other groups also migrated here by other means) But, like their counterparts in Asia and Europe, they were a Stone Age culture.
11,000 years later, when Columbus and others arrived from Europe, they were still a Stone Age culture living pretty much as they had when they arrived. Europe and Asia had made great cultural and scientific strides, smelting iron and building cathedrals while Amerindians remained, for the most part, nomadic hunter gatherers. On the richest continent in the world, there were never more than 4 million Amerindians in the continental United States, and they lived on the edge of starvation and in an almost constant state of warfare with their competing tribes.
In short, they were a failed culture, squandering the potential of North America, Their culture was doomed the moment their isolation was broken. If the more efficient Europeans had not displaced them from the east, the Russians would have from the west.
Columbus did not bring slavery to North America, it was already here, and in its most brutal form among Amerindians in Mexico and Central America, where human sacrifice was practiced on an industrial scale.
In less than 500 years of Columbus’s arrival, the continent that for 11,000 years had lain wasted was feeding the world and leading in science and political thought.
Amerindians are every bit as smart and capable as Europeans, but their culture was an abject failure, so why are we celebrating it?
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“ …and they lived on the edge of starvation and in an almost constant state of warfare with their competing tribes.”
Sounds like much of the rest of the world. Europe had continuous wars and the lives of the peasants were often on the edge of starvation depending upon the whims and policies of royalty.
The cities and cultures of the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Toltec, the Incas predated Europe in many ways.
Firearms and disease (and horses probably) were the main reasons Europeans prevailed early on, setting the tone for treatment in centuries to come.
Columbus Day was official in 1937 after intense lobbying by the Knights of Columbus.
The more we learn about our past, good or not so good, it is not wrong to make corrections.
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And the cities of the Aztecs, Mayans and Toltec were built on conquest and slave labor, and celebrated with human sacrifice.
But it is not a question of which culture held the moral high ground, it was a matter of efficiency. The Amerindians made poor use of the resources of the continent, and the Europeans simply had a more efficient culture.
Natural selection is not a moral code. It’s just what works and what doesn’t. Would the world be a better place had the Europeans had Star Trek’s Prime Directive and had simply observed the Amerindian culture while letting the continent go to waste?
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“And the cities of the Aztecs, Mayans and Toltec were built on conquest and slave labor, and celebrated with human sacrifice.”
And how do you think Rome was built? As a reminder, Roman civilization is the core of what we now call Western civilization.
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Certainly Rome was built on brutality.
But the point is that in a few hundred years that was extinguished, while it continued in Central America. European culture evolved rapidly to reward effort and talent, Amerindian culture did not.
And again, that is not a difference in people, it is a difference in culture. Inefficient cultures are displaced by those more efficient. Amerindian culture did not evolve because of its isolation from competition.
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Uh, no. Wrong answer.
The correct answer : Rome was “built on conquest and slave labor, and celebrated with human sacrifice.”
Exactly the way you chose to pooh pooh Western Hemisphere civilizations.
“But the point is that in a few hundred years that was extinguished, while it continued in Central America. European culture evolved rapidly to reward effort and talent, Amerindian culture did not.”
More nonsense. European culture – even at the time of Columbus – was STILL built on de fact slavery. Most people were serfs and had no way to get any special reward for effort and talent. And clearly, you know absolutely nothing about what “Amerindian culture” rewarded or didn’t reward. In fact, it is Archie Bunkerish nonsense since there were many, many different cultures with different mores and values.
In case you are unaware, your “testimony” about the superiority of European civilization is pretty strong evidence of the attitude of White Supremacy that is at the hard core of Trumpism. Your talking about the superiority of European “culture” rather than European people softens it only slightly.
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Superiority =/= efficiency, at least not necessarily.
And the fact that European culture is more efficient is established by the fact that we’re here, and their culture is not, though Amerindians who have assimilated into Western culture have done quite well, where those who live on reservations where attempt are made to preserve that culture do not.
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Keep digging that hole you are in.
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Wow! So lets continue to celebrate genocide? Columbus’s first act when he set foot in the Americas was to murder and enslave the friendly people who greeted him. And that was just the beginning.
Further, it is hard to take your opinions seriously when you write and apparently believe something like this . . .
“11,000 years later, when Columbus and others arrived from Europe, they were still a Stone Age culture living pretty much as they had when they arrived.”
If you have ever visited places such as Tenochtitlan or Chichen Itza maybe you would not justify genocide based on such ignorant observations. Or maybe you have visited such places but did not understand what you were looking at?
As a matter of fact, the civilizations of the Americas were the equal of or well in advance of Europeans in many areas in 1492. Mathematics, astronomy, agriculture for example, and they had massive libraries of written documents wantonly destroyed by homicidal Europeans. Those were NOT “stone age civilizations.” What they did not have was gunpowder and firearms – inventions that came to Europe from yet another advanced culture that you would likely denigrate.
Your attributing the economic development of North America to the superiority of European culture is Archie Bunkerish in the extreme.
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RE: “Amerindians are every bit as smart and capable as Europeans, but their culture was an abject failure, so why are we celebrating it?”
It’s a “states rights” thing.
On the issue of cultural natural selection, I’d suggest the colonists who migrated to this continent had already differentiated into two cultural species, one predator, one prey. The wolves among them drove the migration, but the rabbits were certain to proliferate, given the relative safety and ease of the new world.
Today our wolves are few and memory of them is fading. In their place are the rabbit kings, like Northam, who shake their whiskers at history.
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Mr. Roberts, you have outdone yourself with this wolves and rabbits analogy. Sounds like you are yearning for a return of the “wolves.” Maybe you consider yourself a “wolf” and not a “rabbit?” I suppose Donald Trump is a “wolf” as well?
Sorry folks, you cannot make this stuff up.
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RE: “Sounds like you are yearning for a return of the ‘wolves.’ Maybe you consider yourself a ‘wolf’ and not a ‘rabbit?’ I suppose Donald Trump is a ‘wolf’ as well?”
If the fantasy pleases you, you are welcome to it. In fact I had in mind precisely the words I wrote.
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