Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Historical what-if questions are fun enough.

My favorite is what would have happened if the English pirate [1] Francis Drake had captured Cartagena Columbia. He had several ships and about 5000 marines for his third attempt and almost captured the city. Imagine if England and not Spain had the gold and jewels flowing from Central and South America. History would have been very different - and that last battle could have gone either way.

[1] Both times I have been in Cartagena, I heard someone refer to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Personally, I have nothing against the guy :-)

View on HN

He was certainly a privateer, but I'm not aware of any out-and-out piracy.

And if anyone's looking for something against the guy, his involvement in the (very early) African slave trade is probably a better choice.

> He was certainly a privateer, but I'm not aware of any out-and-out piracy

To the English he was a privateer. To the Spanish he was a pirate. =P

And Francis Drake also oversaw the massacre of 600 surrendered Irish rebels and civilians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathlin_Island_Massacre

So yeah, there's plenty of dirt on this guy.

*Colombia (not Columbia, which is a NY County among other things but not the nation)

> not Columbia, which is a NY County

And, ahem, the capital city of one of the 50 United States.

He was a slaver. That's at least one thing to hold against him, to say the least. Everything named after him should be renamed, all statues of him in public places should be toppled.

Why not re-write all history books in the name of today's political correctness? If we don't like something just erase it.

I don't want to erase slavers from history books, only from positions of honor. Stalin and Hitler should be remembered accurately, not honored. Same for other slavers.

I'm no fan of slavery, but far too many things are named after Columbus, Washington, Caesar, Alexander and the others in history who have taken and held slaves.

1 thing is 1 too many. All should be renamed. Yes, that's a lot of things.

Nothing can ever be named after anyone then, because all humans are flawed.

A silly straw man. No one said things should only be named after flawless humans.

Indeed. I would not mind if naming things after individual humans was seen as profane and never done. But I have a far, far lesser goal: ending the naming of things after humans who have claimed to own other human beings.

Where does one draw the line then? Clinton has done plenty of awful stuff; I can totally imagine that in the future plenty of people will name stuff after her if she has a decent presidential term.

No, because a while back we passed a law that all things must be named after Reagan. I'm just waiting for the Ronald Reagan Memorial Lavatory to show up at a highway rest stop...

One draws the line wherever one draws the line. You have your own line, no doubt. mlinksva is stating his/hers. Intelligent people can disagree. It's completely subjective.

I think the objection being implicitly raised by GP here was rather of the problem of 'at what human flaw should we stop toppling statues and celebrations as we update our morals over time? '.

It appears to be a valid question, in that slippery slope is not always a fallacy.

An interesting modern trend is deconstructing heroes of the past - Jefferson, Edison, the Wright Bros, etc., and elevating forgotten figures to heroic status - Tesla, Sacajawea, Gustav Whitehead, etc.

I don't think there's really a right and wrong here, it's just the fashion of the times. Who knows who will be rehabilitated 100 years from now and who will be stricken from the monuments :-)

If you hold all the personalities of previous eras to today's moral standards, whom will you be left with?

Let me explain my idea on another, more clear cut example. Ancient Greece and Rome have been built on slavery. Almost all powerful and even educated men of that time used slave labour. Should we remove them from philosophy books and rename the months?

Should we just proclaim that everyone who lived then was evil, except the poor and the slaves themselves? But even they didn't hold some higher moral values, they just didn't have the means to enslave other people. So, we probably should say that everyone in ancient world was evil, period.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com