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Comment by aksss | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t understand boners

Well, he literally got into a 70-ft wooden sailboat and crossed the Atlantic ocean with no certainty of landfall, basically sailing on spec, and because of that voyage, opened up a new hemisphere of the planet to development, and (with unfortunate but inevitable awful consequence) brought humanity together again after a substantial period of isolation.

We admire the Pacific Islanders for similar navigation feats as they travelled eastward, and the Vikings for traveling westward to Greenland and America, but neither of those efforts had so profound an effect as what Columbus pulled off.

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> brought humanity together again

This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago

GP quite literally acknowledged the injustices that happened in the sentence before the one you quoted.

Saying the Columbus' expedition brought humanity together is a descriptive statement because it did in fact permanently connect groups of humans who had lived separately for thousands of years.

Also if you think it's culturally insensitive to describe the effects of European colonization (positive and negative), then I think you'll find it hard to discuss almost any historical events because cruelty has existed everywhere. This isn't whataboutism btw, my point is that sensitivity should not be a primary concern in a rational discussion about history because history is harsh subject.

You don't acknowledge continent-scale cultural and human destruction by calling it "injustice" or "inevitable awful consequence". Do you imagine someone saying that about the current situation in Crimea? Millions of people died. It is not just an "injustice". An injustice is a state official forging evidence for nefarious purposes not destroying a country and unaliving its people let alone a whole continent. It really downplays the role of the invaders even more than it already is.

Who exactly was brought together? The natives were virtually or/and culturally wiped out (in case you didn't notice) and the consequences can still be seen today. When you look at the US today, do you see two groups together? How so, when the actual natives have virtually no land have been systemically attacked since their world was destroyed.

Thinking about it in positive terms is no different than doing the same with the situation in Crimea or with any of the world wars.

It is fine to discuss stuff but the idea of bringing two groups together when one of them has been virtually wiped out speaks of severe cognitive dissonance.

There is no whataboutism here because no other continent has experienced what the American continent has. There is no equivalent in written history for the scale of suffering and destruction unleashed upon it.

And you having a problem with me criticising the vast destruction (rather than a generic injustice) of a continent by saying that cruelty exists together (tell me what other continent in the last 2 thousand years got culturally destroyed and had millions of deaths as a result of foreign invaders) says a lot about your opinion about the deaths of tens millions of people (at the very least) the descendants of which still suffer all sorts of challenges. Including the continuous dismissal of the scale of their suffering by people like you ever since the invasions began.

First off, it is factually correct to say 1) Columbus' expeditions connected (for better or worse) groups of people that never had had contact before and 2) the Native Americans specifically killed by disease (which was roughly 80 to 90% of the population) was an inevitable result of travel and trade with the Americas.

You can use whatever moralizing language or comparisons to modern day conflicts you want to analyze these events because that's not what I took issue with. As I stated before, my problem with your comment was that you wrongly tried to label a descriptive statement about history as "culturally insensitive".

1. User said "bringing together" which has different connotations to "connect". One is positive (and culturally insensitive) and the second one is neutral (and more correct). If you want to be descriptive, be neutral at the very least, but you can't expect to introduce moral viewpoints on historical events and not expected to be challenged on the ethics of those viewpoints. Because the event is in the past but your opinion is in the present and that opinion is what is being challenged here not the actual event.

2. You are purposely ignoring that: A) lots of them were unalived by the invaders and this has been going on on a more quieter manner until about 40-30 years ago which is not that long ago B)Columbus himself had to be arrested because even his resource-loving managers were horrified of the things he did there C) whole nations, tribes and cultures were wiped by the invaders D) the remaining natives in the northern bits lost of most of their lands and autonomy

None of this can be considered to be an inevitable result of trade. You can trade with a country without doing any of the above as can be seen by all the other countries that engaged in trade at that time. There is a moral element to all this that you are accidentally or purposefully ignoring. There is no need to compare it to any modern day conflict because even by today standards it was really evil and not all "inevitable".

Permanent contact between the Americas and Eurasia was inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Europeans coming here, it could have been the Chinese.

Whether it was a Columbus or a Chan, the introduction of diseases which the Eurasians had been swimming in for eons would have still slammed into the Americas like an apocalypse.

Even if you gave it another 300 years (after vaccines were invented) there’s no way a distribution strategy could have effectively blunted the impact. You’d need to give an additional 200 years for that to be conceivable. The odds of the Americas staying isolated for another 500 years after Columbus are nil.

My comment has nothing to do with the cultural expressions of the various groups at that moment in time. A group of Homo sapiens were cut off from the rest for tens of thousands of years for better and worse. The ‘worse’ part is that they were ferociously vulnerable to the viruses in the other population group.

“Brought together” wasn’t a phrase meant to convey happiness or agreement, it was a very literal description of two groups making permanent contact after being separated for so long. There’s not an event like that in memorable history to compare it to, as far as I know. Certainly not at that scale of isolation.

You seem to be missing my point. There is no argument about one group finding about each other or about the fatal effect of bringing new diseases into the continent.

My point was that your use of "bringing together" in the context of putting it as Columbus achievement when we all know what happened and what he did when he got there was insensitive. You realise that there are people still living under the consequences of that? People have been still been dying because of it in the 90s. It is not some small event that happened a while ago but a huge continent scale massive event that is still reverberating nowadays. In deference to people who are still alive and affected by it, "Connecting" is a neutral term that better conveys what happened without having to add your own moral viewpoint on whether what he did was good.

It was horrific and it would be nice if you acknowledged that the same way you acknowledge the systematic horrors that certain countries did in a certain large scale war the previous century even if science and lots of countries progressed socially, ethical and technologically as a result of it.

This moment of which we speak (500 years ago) has many significant aspects that can be discussed, but recognize a claim is also made on the moment by a story whose scope is measured in tens of thousands of years and whose theater is planetary in scale.

This is the migration of Homo sapiens, their separation and their ultimate reunion. It is difficult to fathom the planetary conditions and durations involved in ever recreating it. For all intents and purposes, it’s not happening again, and its closure happened less than 1000 years ago.

The observation that Columbus is part of that profound story is undoubtedly one thing that makes him very, very remarkable.

There is a difference between observations made irrespective of culture (such as this one), and being disrespectful or insensitive to culture. That’s an important distinction you should take away from this exchange. It is possible to reflect on certain dimensions of an issue without being obligated to repeat safe harbor statements about unrelated dimensions, as we are not children, or repeating acknowledgements of unrelated dimensions like mantras to ward off bad vibes as if we were superstitious. I think we/you are better than that. Read words carefully and take them as they are given without projecting some bad faith meaning into them. And don’t be anxious about what may or may not be in other peoples’ heads. You’ll drive yourself nuts and be seen as very annoying to others.

What do you consider ironic about two groups of long-isolated (from each other) humans making contact and there being conflict?

There are no similar events at this scale to compare to (what is your context for irony?).

Looking at the smaller-scale examples, the presence of conflict seems entirely consistent, and hardly ironic.

I’m guessing you’re reading “brought together” as some sort of idiom for happiness and mutual understanding. That would be an incorrect reading, in which you are adding your own meaning and assumptions to what was written. Take it more literally.

I considered ironic that the user used a positive expression "humanity coming together" for what was one of the most destructive invasions in human history. I suggest you ask any native to America what they think about that term?

"humanity coming together" is definitely a positive expression. The cambridge dictionary says "to help people or groups to become friendly or to do something together, especially when they would not usually do this".

And if you look at the user's text the act of "bringing people together" is framed as something morally good/worthy. In this context, our explorer faced many challenges but achieved something good (i.e. bringing people together).

Imagine if we used that term for other horrifying events in history where a group of people unalived a country's worth of another group of people

No, you’re adding your own bias into this reading. You are putting your own thoughts into the head of another, projecting. You can’t burden another person with that. Read it literally.

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