Everything You Know About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie
 

The Myth:

Columbus discovered America thanks to a daring journey across the Atlantic. His crew was about to throw him overboard when land was spotted. Even after he landed in America, Columbus didn't realize he'd discovered an entire continent because maps of America were far less reliable back then. In one of the great tragedies of history, Columbus went to his grave poor, believing he'd merely discovered India. Nobody really "got" America's potential until the pilgrims showed up and successfully settled the country for the first time. Nearly 150 years might seem like a long time between trips, but boats were really slow back in those days, and they'd just learned that the Atlantic Ocean went that far.

The Truth:

First of all, Columbus wasn't the first to cross the Atlantic. Nor were the vikings. Two Native Americans landed in Holland in 60 B.C. and were promptly not given a national holiday by anyone. Columbus didn't see the enormous significance of his ability to cross the Atlantic because it wasn't especially significant. His voyage wasn't particularly difficult. They enjoyed smooth sailing, and nobody was threatening to throw him overboard. Despite what history books tell kids (and the Internet apparently believes), Columbus died wealthy, and with a pretty good idea of what he'd found -- on his third voyage to America, he wrote in his journal, "I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown."

The myths surrounding him cover up the fact that Columbus was calculating, shrewd and as hungry for gold as the voice over guy in the Cash4Gold ads. When he couldn't find enough of the yellow stuff to make his voyage profitable, he focused on enslaving Native Americans for profit. That's how efficient Columbus was -- he discovered America and invented American slavery in the same 15-year span.

There were plenty of unsuccessful, mostly horrible attempts to settle America between Columbus' discovery and the pilgrims' arrival. We only hear these two "settling of America" stories because history books and movies aren't huge fans of what white people got up to between 1492 and 1620 in America -- mostly digging for gold and eating each other.

They also show us white Europeans being unable to easily defeat a native population that hadn't yet been ravaged by plague. It wasn't coincidence that the pilgrims settled America two years after New England was emptied of 96 percent of the Indians who lived there. According to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, that's generally how the settling process went: The plague acted as a lead blocker for white European settlers, clearing the land of all the natives. The Europeans had superior weapons, but they also had superior guns when they tried to colonize China, India, Africa and basically every other region on the planet. When you picture Chinese or Indian or African people today, they're not white because those lands were already inhabited when the Europeans showed up. And so was America.

American history goes to almost comical lengths to ignore that fact. For instance, if your reading comprehension was strong in middle school, you might remember the lost colony of Roanoke, where the people mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind only one cryptic clue: the word "Croatan" carved into the town post. As we've covered before, this is only a mystery if you are the worst detective ever. Croatan was the name of a nearby island populated by friendly Native Americans. In the years after the people of Roanoke "disappeared," genetically impossible Native Americans with gray eyes and an "astounding" familiarity with distinctly European customs began to pop up in the tribes that moved between Croatan and Roanoke islands.

Happy Columbus Day!!!

http://www.cracked.com/article_19864...merica_p2.html

he was a schwarter

winners write history, columbo must won something

Two Native Americans landed in Holland in 60 B.C.? Never heard of this. Great, they discovered... Holland. No one cares.

The netherlands are lower that why there are easier to discover than Merica that his higher :rasta

I will buy that for five dollars

Columbus was a murderer, slaver, and a rapist. But since whites got to write history, they made him a hero.

The deeper you dig on true history, the more you will be disgusted. You also learn, based on lie after lie after lie, war after war after war, not to believe anything touted as the official story. Everyone is lied to, all the time, even today. Americans, Chinese, Cubans, Koreans, you name it. Those lies help build national pride and indoctrinate future generations who will perpetuate the lies and continue nation building. That's how it works. It's even worse in places like China where their information is filtered and censored by the government.

What a crock of shit.

Going somewhere and seeing a bunch people already there ain't much of a discovery.

:1orglaugh

A lot of the American myth busting stuff on Cracked.com comes from this book http://www.amazon.ca/Lies-My-Teacher.../dp/0743296281 and there's another great American myth busting book that I forget the name of right now.

What to teach children is not that easy a problem, there are shades of gray that are beyond a kid's ability to understand so you teach simple stories with heroes that not surprisingly are of the same culture/color as the kids being taught. Kids should feel good about the country they've been born into and their ancestors. You can't lay guilt and shame on 7 year olds, not healthy. I do think by high school it's time to stop teaching a sanitized version of history. But put history into its temporal context, that what seems evil or bad today would not be considered the same way in the 1500's.

The native Indian tribes of America were no innocents when it came to war, inter tribal wars were common and customs included 'scalping' and cannibalism. But their wars were not on the scale of war that European wars were fought on, simply because native Indians weren't very mobile, until Europeans brought them to America, there were no horses here.

The true story on how the North American continent was stolen from the American Indians will never be told to our children.

The history is preserved, but it's hidden in the archives at the University of Oklahoma.

The indians were enslaved, confined to reservations, their women raped and murdered by the calvary so the could not reproduce further.

Their land was stolen.

That is a fact.

.

i'm going through that list of "myths", already the first one in that article is wrong. 2 native americans did not cross the atlantic to holland.

also, the term "native americans" is wrong, they were not native.

All history is just the winning version of events. Our brains are not wired for wasting time with unnecessary complexity. Our brains are specifically wired for simply distilling things down to the lowest common denominator and simplest answers , where it can then move on and not spend energy senselessly pondering things which have nothing to do with fulfilling it's purpose and mandate to survive and reproduce.

Btw on a side note, Alaska natives also get a hit irked when you shift the favorite narrative of a bunch of peace loving people who lived off the land to the reality of warring tribes, endless massacres between tribes, cannibalism, enslaving each other etc. etc etc.

the "native" americans burned all the forests on the entire northern and southern american continent, they brutalized each other, 98% were wiped out by european plague before the USA was the USA.

by the time the USA calvalry was there, there were only a few thousand indians left.

Ok ........

I found the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" to be really interesting. It talks about what the Americas looked like the year, and thousands of years, before Columbus arrived.

They have found settlements dating over 20000 years.

I know that side of the story, it's not a secret. To a 7 year old it is but we have the Internet and anyone interested in history of anything has every book and opinion available for the learning.

There's also the truth that 95% of native Indians died of diseases they had no immunity for which were brought UNINTENTIONALLY to North America. If not for those diseases America would have been settled differently, but with weaponry and technology on the side of the Europeans the story wouldn't have been much different for the native Indians. It just would have been a lot longer and a lot bloodier for the Europeans to gain control of what is now Canada and the United States.

The late 1800s brought an immense wave of racism, eugenics, ethnocentrism and accompanying historical revisionism that basically erased any memory of the nuanced and interesting history of this continent.

The really shitty thing is they're still basically sticking with the boring racist story in elementary school curriculums, when most history teachers know better from post-secondary training.

Mutt, I've actually read that the americans were far superior at battle compared to the europeans when they first arrived.

Ronald Reagan and Jesus discovered America.

How? Europeans had guns, cannons, horses. I don't care how good you are with sharp objects a gun is the superior weapon. Indians were probably much better in man to man combat.

Mutt: basically everything changed with these inventions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling#History
With this you can hit something at a higher distance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini%C3%A9_ball

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury(II)_fulminate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poudre_B
With this you can make cartbridge

and with cartbridges:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_rifle

It makes guns definitely superior than bows and arrows and everything is from 1830 to 1870... then guess what happens next ?

When the space aliens come in peace we are all going to die from unknown diseases.

The important question is about otters and fish. Did they know how to do the sexy wave dance before or after tasting fish for the first time?

If that is the case... How do you know about what happened to the Indians?

Here's more feel goodness about Columbus.

A priest who was part of his entourage describes the settling of Cuba:


"Endless testimonies . .. prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives?. But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy?

And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers? breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them head first against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, ?Boil there, you offspring of the devil!? Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim?s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. To others they attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw and set them afire. With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim?s neck, saying, ?Go now, carry the message,? meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them?."

More Columbus heroics here http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/f...the-right-way/

what happened after 1870?

Cristobal Colom was a Spanish Jew. Careful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washita_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marias_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre

I'd never heard that before. If what I am reading is true in part or whole then it seems like it's possible Columbus was a secret Jew. I also see there are other theories about his origins that are no less possible. There were converted Jews who travelled with him, that looks to be fact.

Dude everything from the past history is probably a lie!
"Winners wrote the history"
Remember that?:-)

i have no problem with Columbus or the Europeans that settled in America.
God Bless them all !!

Columbus and the Europeans were not the first ones to settle Americas.

Chinese made it to American continent, Russians had settlements on the West Coast.
But none of them were good enough to build this great continent or contribute much to the modern society.

I think the going theory these days is that there were 3 separate migrations from Asia in the past 20-30,000 years or possibly further back. In-between then and now there were some really advanced societies of the time in the americas.

Advanced farming techniques were invented; they believed they cultivated maize which is not believed to ever have been found in the wild.

That would only be accurate if - you knew what I know about Columbus.

"History is written...by those who would hang heroes."

- Braveheart

You really scraping the bottom of the barrel when you cite as the source a site that has Ed Schultz as a commentator. Whoever this Katie Halper is I suspect another bottom feeding scumbag just like Ed.
Next you will cite theonion as fact...

Guess that's why history was written in his favor :2 cents:

I actually think that all of those explorers were awesome. Magellan especially, even though he fucked up in the Philippines.

None if us know shit about what transpired.

So , take ur best guess and move on.

Moron.

The words describing the Spaniards actions were written by a priest who was an eye witness, who took part in the conquest of Cuba, and later had the balls to fight against the enslavement of the native Indians. So whoever Ed Schultz is is meaningless.

None of this is new information nor revisionist history. It was always there, just not taught in schools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolo...9_de_las_Casas

:2 cents::2 cents:

the mistake with this sort of history of columbus is looking back 500 years with a modern view and attitude. the key to good history is to explore it with a sense of the time the event happened.

for instance, the modern view of rape is no where near the view on it from Spain in the 15th century. so to call Columbus a rapist is not necc. accurate.

slavery, conquest, gold, sex, all need to be fully understood OF THE TIME prior to taking slices of events like this and looking at them from a 2014 north american moral viewpoint.

You're all wrong. Aliens discovered N America 1,972 years before Columbus, and 512 years before those mythical native N Americans supposedly hit the Netherlands (presumably in their birchbark canoe)

I know this because the aliens that abducted me back in 1981 told me.

Most of us know the gist of it, but these winners are basically saying we should be telling our 7 year olds a history filled with rape, torture, slavery and genocide... you know? for accuracy sake...

They will be much better off in the end learning all the horrible sides of everything, it wont breed psychos and damaged individuals in the least..

I didn't realize they could transfer all that info with an anal probing. :warning :winkwink:

no native americans landed in holland, furthermore, the native americans picked up scalping from the europeans

Now I'm bummed.

since we're moving away from a romanticized history of Columbus, we should do the same re: American Indians.

Myth
the truth

the truth isn't popuhalar!

edit: popular!

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh