The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[The Larch]

Yeah he thought the world was like 1/2 to 2/3 smaller then it was. Portugal (so it is said anyway) said no because his calculations sucked (and they might have already known brazil was there, so why pay for an expedition to somewhere you know is there).

On the other side, he made it back home, so he had to at least be a decent navigator lol

He was a pretty good dead reckoning navigator, according to Morison one of the best.

All the court advisors (including the Spanish) who said it could not be done, based on the more or less correct numbers, were also wrong.

The advisors were correct on their calculations, if America wasn't there Columbus' expedition would have failed, either disappearing at sea or via a successful mutiny. They simply didn't know that there was an additional continent in the world unaccounted for. 

[The Larch]

I don't see much case for memorialising Columbus, personally. But I could be wrong.

There are very few individuals who have had such an impact on world history.  There's a reason 1492 is such a watershed event.

Now yes, a lot of negatives came from that, and Columbus himself had a lot of negatives about him.  But even when you point out that a lot of Columbus memorials came from the late 19th-early 20th Century by Italian-Americans as a way of connecting themselves to their new country - that history is worth remembering too.

So tell those stories. Spread that history. Not the "Little Engine that Could" tale of the Great Explorer Columbus who refused to give up on his dream of proving the world is round.

In other words, stop making it about the man, and start making it about the impact. The entire impact, warts and all.

Funnily enough, the myth that Columbus proved that the world was round rather than flat comes from Washington Irving's 1828 "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus", which was massively successful in both Europe and America at that time, and in which real history and romantic fantasy get pretty mixed up.

Regarding making it about the impact rather than the man, that's how most historiography in the last few decades has analyzed the topic, at least over here.

Edit: Damn, 4 messages in a row, time to take a break. 

[Syt]

The claim that Columbus proved that the world was round always bothered me. Not just because a round Earth was accepted at the time. However, if the flat Earth idea had been the prevalent world view, his discovery of new lands in the west (which he still considered to be India) would only have shown that the disc might be larger than previous thought to account for the additional continent.

[derspiess]

In other words, stop making it about the man, and start making it about the impact. The entire impact, warts and all.

Yeah, heaven forbid we feel good about something every once in a while

[Eddie Teach]

All the court advisors (including the Spanish) who said it could not be done, based on the more or less correct numbers, were also wrong.

No, they were quite right.  Columbus's ships could never have reached China with anyone alive, even had they been able to pass by sea through the area that was actually occupied by the Americas.  China was something like 150 days away, and they didn't have water for more than about 100 days max.

Have you ever been at sea? Do you know what it's made of?

Water, water everywhere
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.

[The Brain]

All the court advisors (including the Spanish) who said it could not be done, based on the more or less correct numbers, were also wrong.

No, they were quite right.  Columbus's ships could never have reached China with anyone alive, even had they been able to pass by sea through the area that was actually occupied by the Americas.  China was something like 150 days away, and they didn't have water for more than about 100 days max.

Have you ever been at sea? Do you know what it's made of?

Water, water everywhere
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all

[PDH]

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

[The Brain]

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Is this from one of the later versions? It was precisely the number of different versions that made me not memorize the entire thing.

[PDH]

Way later version

[Maladict]

A statue of Leopold II was removed in a Belgian town. Asked for comment, a passerby said "everybody makes mistakes". 

[Sheilbh]

A statue of Leopold II was removed in a Belgian town. Asked for comment, a passerby said "everybody makes mistakes". 

"We've colonised the Congo by mistake."

[Duque de Bragança]

There is still a Léopold II avenue in Paris. OTOH, there is a rue Saint-Just ending in a dead-end (LULZ) parallel to a cemetery. Coincidence? 
No rue Robespierre before Valmy asks.

PS: some communal "association" called Black African Defense League (sic) called for removing Colbert statues. He is responsible for the Black Code, regulating the status of slaves, and is also the spiritual father of dirigisme , popular among French conservatives.

[Kaeso]

Le Temps (Francophone Swiss Newspaper) mentionned this article from La Libre Belgique :

Destruction of statues from the past: we must differentiate ourselves from the iconoclastic rage of the barbarians of Daesh

Posted on 09-06-2020 at 9:35 a.m. - Updated on 10-06-2020 at 12:30 p.m.

An opinion of Marco Gombacci, Italian journalist and political analyst, contributor to the newspaper "Il Giornale" and founder of "The European Post", special envoy to Iraq in 2016 and then to Syria in 2017 and 2018.

Iconoclastic fury must worry us. Let us differentiate a fair recognition of the faults of the past from the cancellation of all that has been its national history. Including with Léopold II.

The Black Lives Matter events have also been invited to Europe. Sadly, clashes and looting took place alongside thousands of peaceful demonstrators. The horrific assassination of George Floyd by the Minnesota police led to very justified protests, which however gave way to physical violence, as if one could think that racism could be combated by stealing Rolexes.

But there is another drift from these demonstrations that should worry us: iconoclastic fury. In Bristol, England, protesters shot the statue of Edward Colston (an 18th-century slave trader, editor's note) and threw it into the sea without police intervention. If the citizens of Bristol had wanted to remove the statue, they should have done so democratically and not by acts of vandalism which will go unpunished.

Also in the United Kingdom, the statue of Winston Churchill was covered with the inscription "racist". Perhaps the perpetrators of this massacre did not know that Sir Winston was the one who had fought and defeated Hitler and the Nazis, thereby restoring freedom to Europe. This same freedom thanks to which they can afford to demonstrate and vandalize the statues.

Belgium was also affected by the iconoclastic revolts: a group of demonstrators gathered around the statue of Leopold II in Brussels. The risk in Belgium is that anyone who tries to open a discussion on this subject risks being treated as racist or nostalgic for the colonial period of the end of the 19th century. While there are many Belgians who support the idea of ​​removing statues, there are just as many who recognize that Belgium's status among the more developed European nations also stems from its colonial past. Because it is always necessary to differentiate a right recognition of the faults of the past, of the cancellation of all that has been its national history.

This was unfortunately noted in the United States when it became fashionable to propose the removal of the statues of Christopher Columbus, guilty of having triggered the extermination of local populations, or of General Lee, commander-in-chief of the southern army during the American Civil War. The statue of Abraham Lincoln, the one who abolished slavery in 1863, was also vandalized by people who probably did not know who he was.

If we continue this historic exercise

Revising history is likely to be a dangerous exercise. If we were to take the analysis any further, we would have to take away the statues and honors of the Democratic President of the United States of America Woodrow Wilson, while he was blocking the enrollment of African Americans in the military. If we continue this historic exercise, we can see how the founder of Planned Parenthhood's abortion clinics, Margaret Sanger, was not a feminist but rather a promoter of abortion to reduce the black population in the United States. Continuing along this path could lead to the removal of the buildings erected during fascism in Italy. And why not break the Colosseum because we forced slaves to fight there, or destroy the pyramids because they were erected by these tyrants of pharaohs?

Recently, Islamic State jihadist fundamentalists have even been able to destroy the Roman temple of Palmyra in Syria, all the archaeological finds from Raqqa or Mosul, and countless churches they encountered on their path of destruction in order to erase the previous history of these lands. The heroes of the world today must not be footballers or influencers, but we must remember much more than Khaled al-Assad, the archaeologist of Palmyra decapitated by "black flags" who, although threatened with dead, did not reveal the location of some priceless objects, not from an economic point of view, but from a historical and cultural point of view for the whole world.

In memory of this great man and to differentiate us from those barbarians of Daesh who had as their primary goal to destroy all historic monuments in order to start a new propaganda story, we must remember how important it is not to erase history and what represents it, but keep it and study it thoroughly. It is the only way to face our past without ideological or even obscurantist debate. Even in the case of Leopold II.

(Marco Gombacci)In Iraq during the Mosul offensive in 2016, in Syria during the Battle of Raqqa in 2017 and in 2018 during the last battle at Deir Ezzor.

[The Larch]

You have to be slightly obtuse to mix up the destruction of priceless heritage from ancient times and the removal of stuffy statues from, mostly, late XIXth, early XXth centuries with little artistic value by themselves.

[Tonitrus]

If we destroy all of the stuffy XIXth and XXth statues of the recent past, how will they ever become the stuffy ancient priceless heritage for future generations several hundred years from now.