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Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
i honestly don't know much about columbus... i know the conquistadors weren't too nice to the natives, but wasn't columbus's basic motive just exploring looking for riches? seems like a decent motive to me. i can't hate on that. kind of like donald trump.
but saying hitler did it out of love for his people/country is questionable. the guy would cunningly play even his closest allies against each other to compete for his love/adoration/respect. if you ask me, he was motivated by megalomania more than anything else. imo the nazi party was first and foremost a hitler cult, and secondly a nationalist movement geared on building a new empire.
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This might be true, I'm sure you know more about it than I do. I'm just using my basic understanding of his actions, and random things I've read about, like his reduction of unemployment and improving the German economy (without considering all the negative impacts it had on the jews and other people that he wanted to get rid of).
All I'm saying is Columbus was as much of a genocidal maniac as Hitler, just on a smaller scale. Hitler(as delusional as he was) was fighting for the things he thought were right, where as Columbus was acting purely out of greed. Like I said both were atrocious but if you can look past the sheer number and impact of Hitler's success I think his morality is comparable to Columbus.
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He was not just some innocent mariner: after his first voyage Columbus was appointed Viceroy and Governor of the Indies and directly ruled the territories from 1494 to 1500. He created work camps (where Indians were worked to death in as ghastly a manner as anyone in 20th century), led the troops, established slavery & mines
This is all a matter of record: 15th/16th century is not pre-history, and the Spaniards recorded all of this. Bartholome de las Casas was a monk who wrote it in detail.
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In just two years under Columbus Governorship through murder, mutilation, being worked to death or suicide more than half the 250,000 Indians in Haiiti were dead
- Howard Zinn
"Haiti under the Spanish is one of the primary instances of genocide in Human history"
"Columbus not only sent the first slaves acroiss the Atlantic, he sent more slaves than any other individual"
- James Loewen
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Bartlome de Las Casas says:
There were 60,000 people living on this island [in 1508], including both Spaniards & Indians. So that between 1494 and 1508 more than three million people died from war, slavery and the mines.
Who in future generations will believe this?
I myself as an eyewitness can scarce believe it
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Even if his figures were exaggerations (were there 3 million as he says, or only a million as some historians calculate, or as many as 8 million as some others now believe) it is undeniably true that Columbus over those 6 years was responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.
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