#Columbus was just a genocidal monster

[13thpythagoras]

"Around 1000 CE, Leif Eriksson purchased a ship from a fellow Norseman, gathered a crew of 35 men, and set sail for the new lands. Much of what they first explored is believed to be part of present day northern Canada, although it is not known for sure."

Behold a white guy who went from Europe to America in the year 1000 AD:

(shame be upon Christopher Columbus who did nothing but genocide)

[sepublic]

The core to Belos’ character is that he’s everything wrong with the United States of America. Why else is he a Puritan, a group of racist settlers who helped found the U.S. and contributed to the genocide of the Native Americans? Why else does he dress up like a Founding Father when not in papal robes, with a ponytail resembling a powdered wig?

Luz thinking he’s a great explorer, only to find out Philip is just an entitled asshole who takes credit from others to make himself look better, is a play on people IRL finding out that people like Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison were assholes who stood on the shoulders of others. It’s a play on white mediocrity and how white guys do the bare minimum and expect to be praised.

Belos is a bigot whose entire motive and goals are based on genocide-level bigotry, and he refuses to unlearn any beliefs; Being a historical Puritan he is 100% racist and misogynistic and unlike Caleb, didn’t take the chance to grow out of it. He wants to believe he’s born special and better than everyone else, and that’s why he buys into white supremacy. The modern cop is the descendant of the witch hunter.

There is an explicit connection between the colonial genocide of Native Americans and Belos’ genocide of witches and demons, down to imposing a Christian misunderstanding of the local religion. He feels entitled to their magic but does none of the work to understand, nor does he cultivate a sustainable relationship with the land the way indigenous people do, hence consuming palismen.

He coined the term Savage Ages, with Savage having racist connotations. His fantasy is the Monster Hunter, the idea that it’s okay to dehumanize anything and even anyone that’s different to kill them. He believes in the Evil Races trope which is of course inherently racist. Belos treats Luz like his White Man’s Burden, a brown child who needs a White Savior to civilize (just as the U.S. kidnapped Native American children to assimilate), and then tries to kill Luz when she doesn’t go along instead of just. Leaving Luz alone or dragging her into the human realm with him anyway.

Belos makes exceptions to his religion when convenient, allowing himself to use magic but then demonizing those who do, just as homophobic Christians and Republicans do. Think of all the anti-gay politicians who are caught being gay; They’re not repressed victims, just hypocrites who think they’re entitled to special treatment. Philip didn’t rat on Caleb for hanging out with a witch for the reasons Pro-Lifers let loved ones have abortions; Caleb was important to him, and he’s not one of the witches Philip planned to murder. And even then he still killed Caleb for ‘crossing a line’!

The Puritans and other groups informed the Alt-Right in the U.S., as well as Evangelicals who rage about how something as innocuous as Pokemon is a Satanic influence (Yes this happened; The Conformatorium doesn’t seem so unrealistic after all, and remember that Dana’s father gave her a copy of Pokémon Red before he died that she latched onto). But like the Televangelist, Belos indulges in material wealth and glory via the glamour of Catholicism, because he’s not even consistent to Puritan values either.

He’s Trump, he’s Elon Musk, he’s Ron DeSantis. He’s the incel/mass shooter who fell down the pipeline, who feels cheated out of the promises of a white supremacist society and takes it out on minorities but not other white guys, because he thinks the system’s idea is fine it just isn’t working as it should, at least he’s better than those guys. He calls others NPCs because he wants to believe he’s born special and better and chosen.

Belos’ reaction to Caleb being with Evelyn was undeniably motivated by racial disgust at his brother for committing miscegenation and making Philip related to a savage in the process, it’s why he never brings it up because of the scandalous shame of it all. Belos hates those witches more than he ever loved Caleb, Caleb was never his priority or he’d have changed his mind; It had far less to do with ‘codependency’ and far more to do with white supremacy, perhaps Philip wouldn’t have minded Caleb settling with a human white woman. The issue being not Caleb leaving him but who Caleb left him for.

Belos thinks taming a wilderness and murdering its natives makes him a tough man because he’s insecure. He has a sniveling victim complex that can’t comprehend why minorities would dislike him, except that they’re mean. Belos epitomizes the U.S.’s racial and colonial violence, its white supremacy, and its global police narrative that decides the existence of another, independent world is an inherent threat to his own.

The conflict between Philip and Caleb was over racism, and so it’s black and white because racism is always wrong. Making it ‘nuanced’ would take away from the fact that the motives for real life racism are inherently nonsensical and insincere; Caleb wasn’t selfish for living with another culture on its terms, instead of staying in the racism village (The Gravesfield statues corroborate Philip being an adult when he arrived in the Demon Realm, according to the memory portraits; Caleb waited until Philip was an adult before leaving). Philip was not a weird kid, he was adhering to his social norms with games about how anyone different or actually weird should die, and he wanted to do this, he’s a Conformatorium prude like all the rest and let his fear of Evelyn justify and evolve into violence.

Even if he was weird, Belos isn’t telling other people they should fit in for their sake, he’s telling them they should just die (Unlike himself, because he’s ‘special’); It’s what he admits to the Collector in the finale about not bothering teaching them anything, just wiping them out. Belos uses magic only to kill magic and discards it out of disgust when he’s about to leave, but makes an exception for the life of the non-human he’s become.

And the choice for the villain to be a genuine Puritan makes sense, because this is a show about weirdoes, so who’s designating them as such and why? Luz has a conflict with the IRL system since the first scene and Belos symbolizes the system, his Puritan ideology marked the foundation for it and the U.S. Belos killing Caleb is just the cherry on top of his actual motives and what his character was always about, that’s why his death scene isn’t him lamenting about Caleb or how lonely he is, it’s him being racist and demanding special treatment for his race. A racist white man feels no guilt for the witches and demons he murdered, just his white brother and clones; He still keeps killing them too btw.

Deeming someone a lost cause and killing them instead of working to rehabilitate is un-Christian, because Belos is not secretly bound by his religion, he picks and chooses. His guilt is not Catholic, he is the Protestant belief in his own superiority. Belos isn’t just a Nazi, he’s an American racist, he’s the KKK; He’s a condemnation of American Values and Exceptionalism, and lowkey I think that’s part of the reason why Family-Friendly Disney canned TOH, because Belos is a condemnation of a major consumer base. Disney being more progressive than other companies means jackshit because it’s performative and the bar is in hell.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Why is "anthropophagy" considered a term that's no longer to be used? I wasn't aware of any issues with it (but that's because I don't know about this particular topic)

I'm sorry I fear my post was a bit unclear. I meant the term cannibalism was the problematic one. I'm going to use the term in this answer because otherwise it gets confusing. Also, nowadays cannibalism can be used for animals eating their own while anthropophagy is specifically for humans eating humans. So having two different terms is actually kinda practical. But it is problematic. And I wish we had a good alternative for it.

Cannibalism shares an etymology with Caribbean.

The word cannibalism exists because Christopher Columbus (and others who came with and after him) accused indigenous Caribbean people of eating humans.

In the (so-called) West, cannibalism is mostly taboo. It's a bit more complicated than that (which I had to explore in my essay) but generally you don't do it unless you have to for survival. Accusing others of cannibalism is then ideological because it's going "these people are uncivilized monsters who break this big universal taboo!"

Many of these accusations are unfounded, just like with the whole blood libel thing (medieval accusations of Jews using human blood to make matzah).

Some of them aren't. Because there are some cultures around the world who actually practice cannibalism. It's ritual cannibalism, including funeral rites or psychological warfare. In those cultures, it's simply not a taboo as long as it's done in accordance with these rituals.

We don't really know if different Caribbean people practiced cannibalism. Because of the whole genocide and colonialism and the way that many sources of the time are unreliable as hell. I saw an article recently claiming there's some new skeletal evidence for cannibalism. It's actually irrelevant though because the main issue is that cannibalism was used as an excuse to dehumanize these people and justify their death.

I found it inappropriate to use in an essay specifically examining monsters and alterity in the crusades and crusader cannibalism because 1) aforementioned reasons 2) the term cannibalism didn't even exist yet because no Europeans had colonized the Americas yet

[hbosscreations]

I just had an argument with my coworker over the Indigenous Peoples Day signs we've used for years at this point. I have never heard a complain beyond 'what's that?', and my other coworker has said that she has not heard any complaints, but suddenly I'm calling her a bad person for wanting to put up columbus day signs instead, and her compromise is to put up a hybrid sign.

There's just something weird to me about putting up a sign that says we're closed in honor of the native people of this country AND the man who was known at his time for being a genocidal monster.

[thehealingsystem]

it makes me so pissed off that indigenous people's day is now a nationally recognized holiday, and my school doesn't even celebrate columbus day anymore, but our school sports still celebrates it as a columbus day tournament. like let me get this straight, my school doesn't even call it that anymore, they seemingly disavowed the holiday, but they still refuse to change it to the "indigenous people's day tournament?"

and well I can imagine the argument being "well it'd be weird to celebrate this racial minority in a mostly white community for a tournament! some people may be upset by it!" but like. you're still willing to celebrate a genocidal monster than us? the people who've faced centuries of extermination just to form this country? you'd rather celebrate one deeply evil man than our community, because it'll upset a bunch of sports obsessed yankees who have to deal with, idk, maybe seeing us mentioned on a banner or a shirt?

but hey, guess I shouldn't expect much out of a school system that not even that long ago had their mascot be called a native american racial slur. they only really change things unless they're being yelled at for it

[nephewinthewild]

I once had an idea for a kind of monster/natural phenomenon on the american continent. maybe it lives underground and spreads like that giant fungus in oregon. anyway it works by a kind of psychic resonance I guess? relatively benign pre-columbus but following european contact the kind of large-scale, organised evils of colonisers, slavers, cult leaders and genociders turns this thing into a corrupting force that gradually poisons the mind of the people living on the land. just reflects and enhances the violence and greed of capitalism

I guess the thing about Godzilla is that it represents a massive national trauma which eviscerated nature and the human soul, but the USA versions fall somewhere on the spectrum between "vaguely about 9/11 or recent natural disaster" and "giant monster smashy smash." I think that stems from trying to conceptualize Godzilla as representing a particular and isolated instance of disaster and translate that into something of a similar nature in the USA.

But the real deep down soul death and national trauma in the USA isn't anything recent, you can't point out something uniquely bad like an atomic bomb. Really the kaiju for the USA needs to be symbolic of how this whole place is an infinite recursive system of devouring its population, starting from colonization and going right up through to the present day. The crucial difference is that if a kaiju was to represent the deep, unhealed, and still bleeding scar at the heart of the nation, it has to by definition be some ancient dead thing which rises on the anguish of everyone consumed in the name of this country and burns it into the ground. There's not an easy way to make a USAmerican kaiju because the only way to do so accurately means the kaiju has to be the protagonist, and ultimately has to show how much the people in the USA are unified when the hyperwealthy and our government are destroyed.

Who is gonna make that?

[awesomerextyphoon]

A Warrior’s Heart

Prologue 

Main Paring: Stucky x Black!OFC (Ifekerenma ‘Ife’)

Warning: Graphic Depictions of Violence, War Crimes, Corruption, Smut, Mentions of Anxiety, Depression, and possible Panic Attacks

Rating: 18+/Explicit

Word Count: 1,461

Summary: Ife didn’t mean to have her employers be the subject of a hostile takeover by Stark Industries. She just held up the city of Novi Grad long enough for the Avengers to defeat Ultron. So naturally, Tony finds and blackmails her into joining the team. No good deed goes unpunished, huh?

A/N: This is my first long form (12+ chapters) story. I’m including characters and/or aspects from Disney’s Atlantis: the Lost Empire, Lilo & Stitch, Big Hero 6, Gargoyles, Inuyasha, and Toriko. Furthermore, I will be including elements of Netflix MCU and Agent Carter as well. Special thanks goes to @jtargaryen18​ for the title. Reposting on any site without my permission is strictly forbidden. Reblogs are welcomed! 😊

Series Masterlist 

Main Masterlist

Just keep the lie going.

That’s the line many of us have to repeat every day, and by us, I mean Non-Humans. Throughout history, humans have created myths and legends about us; some are true, others complete nonsense, but most are somewhere in between.

Let’s rewind a bit, okay?

Life on Earth lines up with most of what the textbooks say until about 5M BCE. Beings that would later be called gods and goddesses start to form with Mother Earth (the Amazing Gaea) as the focal point with other beings such as dragons, elves, and giants start to show two million years later.

The Celestials (sanctimonious assholes) came to Earth to see what’s happening after hearing about various fantastical anomalies (or that they were just bored). Gaea encouraged some (about 30K) of the human ancestors (Homo Erectus) to ‘the Space Gods’ direction. It took a few months, but they were able to create the species that later be known as Eternals. They also did some other shit but Gaea kicked them out when they wore out their welcome.

Around 200KBCE, the Kree (galactic genocidal nationalistic maniacs) happened upon a group of Eternals living on Uranus and traveled to Earth to ascertain whether other beings had similar potential. They experimented on a good number of early humans (about 150K survived) thus creating the first Inhumans (Inhomo Supremis). Several members of the Kree expedition tried to turn the Inhumans into weapons of the Kree Empire but were kicked off the planet by remaining Eternals and Non-Human factions.

Ten thousand years later (190KBCE), other early humans congregated around ‘magical hotspots’ which led to the births of the Homo Magi, Homo Superius, and Homo Animalis sub-species.

Soon after (okay, 15,000yrs later. Leave me alone.), the Mother Crystal (a semi-sentient comet, or Matag Yob) descended onto the island continent of Atlantis, imbuing the human inhabitants with longevity, knowledge, prosperity, and protection. At its height (around 55KBCE), Atlantis became the technological/cultural center on Earth (besides the Eternals).

It didn’t last long, though.

Five thousand years later (50KBCE), the first (and hopefully only) Pantheon War broke out. What exactly happened is lost to history (none of the people involved will fess up.), but what we do know is that shit went down.

Hard.

All that is known (admitted) is that almost all of the pantheons got into a Pantheon War (probably over some dumbass reason), a failed invasion by the Kree (really?), and the whole continent of Atlantis ‘sank’ into the sea in the span of three years (though some escaped).

Neat.

Fast-forward about 38K years (yeah, we’re making some jumps here) to the beginnings of the three most technologically advanced human nations of Earth: Wakanda, Sypavê, and Fetuilelagi; each with their own extraterrestrial metals/minerals.

Earth was pretty quiet until the ‘Christianity Dilemma’. So around 90CE, several ‘deities’ from the Greco-Roman, Norse, Germanic, and Celtic pantheons called for a Council of the Godheads’ to discuss ‘the ‘threat’ with Archangel Michael. It worked out well enough (no one wanted another Pantheon War).

Most of the world was in a pretty good state with a few ‘hiccups’ until the Bubonic Plague aka ‘The Black Death’ hit in 1346/7. It ravaged Eurasia and North Africa killing at least ½ the population and was seen as the start of non-belief in Europe. Worse, it was the beginning of Non-Human persecution and discrimination. You see, while the Black Death took out humans left and right, the worse a Non-Human got was a two-day flu. Many started to return to their respective realms once the Plague subsided and their once friendly neighbors started to accuse and persecute them.

The feeling of unease did not end but rather subsided. A tip from a Non-Human in Queen Isabella’s court alerted several groups in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Genocidal rapist, sex-trafficker, and all-around monster, Christopher Columbus does make it to the ‘New World’ (people were already there, dumbass) and devastated the indigenous population for centuries to come. By the time Columbus was executed in 1498, it was too late.

As many as 40 – 70% of the indigenous population was wiped out due to ‘virgin soil epidemics’ such as smallpox and influenza. Pantheons from negatively impacted areas called for a Council of the Godheads and demanded the ‘deities’ of the colonizers take action.

It went about as well as you’d think.

Earth was about to be embroiled in another Pantheon War until a few ‘level-headed’ individuals struck a bargain. No one was to interfere with human affairs whether it be good or ill. It was later amended to not have any ‘divine’ intervention (Sure). So by 1593, they had ‘bowed out’ of Earth affairs outside of their respective demi realms.

Outside of the matters of the ‘gods’, the rest of the world was dealing with its own problems. Tensions between humans and non-humans grew since the immediate aftermath of the Black Death. The Age of Enlightenment had started to pop up in intellectual circles across Europe around 1647. It focused on reason and free-thinking (Neat), but it also stoked up fear and anxiety towards Non-Humans (Boo!). Things came to a head in the 1670s. It got so bad that the Inter-Realm Parliament ordered all Non-Humans that weren’t exiled to return. They later founded the Bureau of Non-Human Affairs, BNA, in 1692 to deal with such matters in the future.

Two white-passing Non-Humans, Marcus Ashton and Jakob Schwartz founded Ashton & Schwartz Inc in 1809 along with a private partner. The company made waves in biomedical, chemical, agricultural, and climate science (they had to explain it to the populace) as well as pollution cleanup/prevention. One of their biggest inventions was a truly biodegradable plastic-like substance called biokivó̱tio or biokivo for short. The company made an even bigger impact with Non-Humans by solving issues pertaining to agriculture, large scale portal creation, and maintenance.

When the founders’ private partner decided to shut down the company in 1928, Ashton & Schwartz were a household name (especially since all major fossil fuel investments ended in 1900).

Barely ten years later and the threat of World War II rocked the planet to its core, especially the dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war Council went behind current President Henry Wallace’s back and had them done on the same day,  August 7, 1945.

Well, that got everyone’s attention.

The Inter-Realm Parliament issued an edict that every one of ‘age’ (biologically 18+) would have to spend at least five consecutive years amongst the humans. It didn’t take long for BNA to lay the groundwork.

Wakanda, Sypavê, and Fetuilelagi (who will now be known as The Unconquered Alliance or UA.) saw this as a ‘we need to end this’ type of situation. Within three weeks of the bomb dropping, they formulated a plan and got to work kicking the colonizers out of Africa, starting with Belgian-colonized Congo (80% of the uranium used in the bombs were mined from there). They also made a deal with British-colonized India.

Once they were successful in their test run, The U.A. moved forward with similar models until they were to liberate the continent in 1955. Meanwhile, Sypavian forces kicked out most of the Nazis that fled to South America and ended US/European influence in Central and South America.

The United States tried to play it neutral until The UA (mainly Fetuilelagi) freed Hawai’i from US occupation in 1951. The war was sold as “We must fight to preserve our freedom!” (Keep telling yourselves that).

Once both South/Central America and Africa were liberated, other colonized nations asked for their aid. UA agents/dignitaries offered to relocate Black people from the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. As many as five million African-Americans took the offer, including former Howling Commando, Gabe Jones. By then the US was clamping down domestically through the FBI and local/state police.

Irked by the knowledge that the UA had satellites, the US jumpstarted the Space Race (they had more than a few satellites, but good for you).

As with most wars, both sides partook in some ‘questionable actions’ (i.e. Syria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Cambodia, and Laos).

The war climaxed in 1977 when a UA (Sypavian) agent discovered plans for a super-weapon in the US. A Special Ops team led by N’Jobu realized that the weapon was a mega bomb that would’ve wiped out the African Continent.

After weighing their options, The UA came to an agreement with BNA: BNA would gather their most powerful Homo Magi and cast a spell to erase the memory and evidence of the war from every human outside of the UA in exchange for letting some Non-Humans live openly in UA borders.

They shook on it, unaware of the chaos that would follow.

Next>>

---------

Taglist:@opheliadawnwalker3​ @sherrybaby14​ @stargazingfangirl18​ ​ @hevans-angel​ @threeminutesoflife​ ​ @cockslut-padalecki​ @golden-ariess​  @sapphirescrolls​ @holylulusworld 

[siryouarebeingmocked]

bacchanalium

Some dude in 2020: You should not judge a historical figure, a man from the past, by the modern ethics! He was a product of his time. 500 years ago his actions were completely normal! It’s present-ism, we can’t judge… bla-bla-bla…

People from 500 years ago: Oh my, this guy is such a bastard, a genocidal butcher, a total piece of garbage. Let’s keep records of this douche so people from the future shall hate him too.

explorerrowan:

Columbus’s crew were writing about what a genocidal monster he was. There were mutinies and uprisings by his crews and colonists constantly. If his contemporaries were willing to risk the ire of the queen of Spain to oppose him, we have every right to call him out on it too.

booksandpetrichor:

My fave professor always says “there have always been antiracist people doing antiracist work”. So yeah, I can hold historical peeps to a higher standard because there were good, ethical people who knew better

I just want to pause and point out the irony. People who use the label “anti-racist” often act like you can only oppose racism if you call yourself “anti-racist” and/or are Woke.

But this person is using the literal meaning so they can take credit for anyone else who opposed racism (cf “Antifa”).

Also, self-proclaimed “anti-racists” often express racist views. 

odinsblog:

Saying “you can’t judge the founding fathers on slavery” because “they didn’t know any better” or “that’s just how it was back then” is a cop out. It’s a standard whitewash that is still used to excuse racists today.

And I can promise you that there absolutely positively were people back then who knew slavery was wrong, and voiced their opinion that slavery was evil. Starting with the slaves themselves.

And if the words of the slaves somehow isn’t good enough, then listen to what one of the founding fathers had to say about the evils of slavery: (x)

Saying people didn’t know any better is whitewashing history, and perpetuating a false image of white purity and innocence. Slavers knew exactly what they were doing. All in the name of free labor and profit. The exploitive nature of capitalism hasn’t changed very much. I’ll bet 100 years from now people will argue that Jeff Bezos didn’t know he was risking the lives of his employees in the middle of a pandemic. Because “times were different back then.”

So yeah, people who insist that “times were just different back then” are racism apologists, whether they realize it or not. That worn out excuse is as old as slavery itself. Call those fuckers out.

funereal-disease:

There have always been people working for the rights and dignity of the marginalized, yes. It’s important to remember that historical people are not a monolith of evil. But that’s not a rebuttal to “they were a product of their time”, because the “product of their time” line is about the Overton window of practices at any given time, not about whether every single individual practiced any given thing.

For example, while in 2020 there are many people aware of the abuses in sweatshops, and many brands that make a conscious effort to avoid sweatshop manufacturing, it’s still socially acceptable to support brands known to use sweatshop labor. Wearing a shirt with with a “made in Vietnam” tag won’t get you booed and shunned. This is what “product of their time” means: not that there weren’t people opposing any given atrocity, but that said atrocity was normalized to an extent that it became background noise.

When your social milieu – not activists, but the actual people and institutions you engage with on a daily basis – doesn’t recognize something as wrong, it’s extremely difficult to transcend that. You’re a fish in water. Every single one of us reading this in 2020 is doing something that future generations will consider abhorrent. Dismissing the idea of being a product of your time means that you’ll be less capable of recognizing that. Historical people are not fundamentally different from any of us.

ferventfox:

> Every single one of us reading this in 2020 is doing something that future generations will consider abhorrent.

It bothers me so much that people don’t see this. I’m under thirty and I still can look back at moments during my own  lifetime and think “well that’s just how it was back then. People didn’t think about things the same way.” Like do people honestly think they’ve reached the pinnacle of wokeness? Extend the same understanding to people of the past that you’d want your descendants to have for you.

Bold of you to assume these folks will reproduce, @ferventfox​. 

Jokes aside, there’s often lots of people condemning Wokesters NOW, and they just double down. They are literally doing it in this thread. Ignoring the actual point about normalization.

Heck, even if people were condemning Bad Folks at the time, that doesn’t mean they did it to their faces, or they were even noticed, or they were actually good at making their arguments.

It's also interesting how the kind people who regularly say Western societies were systemically biased and it’s hard for (white, male, cishet, etc) people to notice their own bias suddenly act like resistance to the flow of history and culture would've been easy, that a few voices couldn't easily be lost in the tummult.

Not to mention ignoring how people take stances for a variety of reasons, like spite, or political convenience. Funny how they're equating their hashtags to people who took their lives and livelihoods and reputations on the line, when the Woke folks are the ones who try to take all that away from people for going against the Party.

And often succeed.

A mob of petty tyrants, convinced they're the plucky rebels.

Also, given >what I've seen of Odinsblog's stupidity in the past<, I'm not surprised to see them take Some AZQuote and Some Guy's Tweet as ironclad proof. I'd bet money they didn't even make sure it was real, much less look up the contexts.

[toshootforthestars]

Via Caitlin Schneider, posted 12 Oct 2020:

Columbus Day sucks. Christopher Columbus sucked.

We all know this, and we need not spend a ton of time talking about why he sucked. But for the sake of formality, let’s cover some quick facts.

Christopher Columbus was a brutal, greedy, racist, tyrannical monster who murdered countless people, facilitated rape and sex slavery, and was a key player in the origin of both the Atlantic slave trade and Native American genocide. He was a power-hungry, self-serving colonizer whose actions were inarguably influential, but only in that he greatly contributed to the near annihilation of vast numbers of both people and cultures, the trauma of which is still palpable and ongoing to this day.

Let’s not just rely on the history books though, because Columbus is able to make the argument that he is one of history’s greatest monsters all on his own.

[...]

Beyond the abject evil, Columbus also wasn’t nearly the first foreigner to land in the Americas. Most notably, Leif Erikson and the Vikings beat him by about 500 years (and as long as we’re tracking the numbers, Indigenous people had occupied the land for about 15,000 years when Columbus arrived).

Also, let’s not forget that the dude landed in the wrong fucking place! He was looking for Asia, which is why he completely misidentified Native Americans, calling them Indians. He sounds like the worst kind of proud dullard you could imagine, and I would say that’s actually quite American of him, but he wasn’t American, which brings me to my next point: he was an Italian working for Spain! Our adolescent country was (and is) so desperate for the instant gratification of a heroic origin story that we pinned an entire holiday on a wobbly, grotesque, and only sort of apt figure. But his legacy is our legacy now—as American as apple pie or unfortunately, the Fourth of July.

Of course, the distinction between Columbus and someone like Erikson isn’t really about “discovery” at all—it’s about honoring the person who colonized the territory. We don’t remember Columbus because he was an explorer or adventurer. We remember him because he was a settler and a conqueror who successfully achieved European occupation with brute force, an unimaginable sense of superiority, and utter disdain for human life outside his race.

While we should have left Columbus Day behind long, long ago (people have apparently been writing into The New York Times about it since at least freaking 1989), we’ve never had a better opportunity to break free from this bizarre loyalty than in 2020.

[...]

Perhaps the best argument for the abolition of Columbus Day is that you already know all of this. It is widely understood at this point that he was a bad person who represented parts of our history we now recognize as shameful. Proposing that we cancel Columbus Day is not a radical idea and the only reason it still exists is because of people like T*cker C*rlson and some sincerely misguided Italian Americans.

[...]

This year, coronavirus has devastated many tribes, including the Navajo Nation, which has had some of the highest infection rates in the country and lacks many of the basic resources, like clean water and government aid, to help contain it. This on top of the now “regular” strains of climate change, racism, centuries of cultural appropriation and erasure, continual encroachment on Native land, and America’s total failure to meaningfully address the atrocities of the past or present.

[dwollsadventures]

TDG Prologue 1 - Coins

Here it is. The revised introduction to the TDG's world. I've been fretting over it for about a week now, but I'm going on a camping trip without the internet for a few days. So, I thought now would be a good time to put it up here, before I can worry about it even more. I have a real problem in that I tend to overthink and over-edit my own work. Chances are I may do that again, or just choose not to read it anymore and hope for the best. Either way, more is to come. After the camping trip though.

In the year 1961 Stan Freberg released his musical comedy album Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years. In one scene the crew of Christopher Columbus argued with their captain over the shape of the earth. They believed it was a flat sort of disc, to which Columbus disagreed. Their argument occurred in musical act titled “It’s a Round, Round World”.

Little did Mr. Freberg (nor Christopher Columbus) know, there were people who whole-heartedly sided with the crew of Santa Maria. The Flat-Earth movement posits that certain models of Earth’s shape, making it like a flat disc with a defined edge, are correct and everything that came after was designed to suppress the intellectual minds of the modern era. At least, some do. Others believe in a more cylindrical shape, or a half-sphere, or a spherical snowball on which the flat disc of earth lies atop. Flat-Earthers have always been splintered and argumentative.

They are also wrong.

Almost anyone can tell you the facts; that very few people from the past really believed in a flat-earth; that the Egyptians accounted for the curvature of the earth in their architecture; that Columbus was not worried about falling off the edge and simply looking for India and that incidentally he was not the first European to discover the Americas and was also a genocidal slave-owner.

Almost no-one talks about the chilling hypothetical of living on a flat planet. That if the earth really were a flat disc, it would be the same shape as a coin. Meaning, if some enormous cosmic hand were to be about the place, it would not be able to resist picking Earth up and flipping it, to see which side it lands on.

Would the Earth make that same, satisfyingly metal sound a coin does as it flies through the air?

Flip, flip, flip.

The one thing the flat-earthers got right was that, regardless of shape, the Earth is like a coin. Like all coins it has two sides and an edge.

On one side we have the world we’re all familiar with. The one we live in, where people go places and do things all the time with no rhyme or reason. Atoms spin around each other and molecules react to one another. The earth is just one tiny dot in the middle of a huge, mostly empty universe. Despite this, money and religion rule it, both fueling the fires of complex political dramas across the world. It’s the world that appears in textbooks, news articles, scientific journals, and before your very eyes.

Then there’s the other side. Other is a good word for it, as some have called it the Otherworld. It bears a resemblance to the one above but is exaggerated: the shadows are darker, the seas are deeper, the earth is older. One might be mistaken and say it is a world of religion; in actuality it is the world where the subjects and objects of religion dwell. The beings that live here are part of the world itself. Most gods are after all anthropomorphic representations of nature. Whereas on the other side humans are insignificant because of its grandness, here humans are simultaneously powerful and powerless. It’s a world of converse realities, where someone can be in two places at the same time or be two different people and one again. Here the rules of physics and reason take a backseat to narrative. If there is a monster (and this world is full of monsters) there will inevitably be a hero to slay it. It is the world of myth and mystery which appears in holy books and ancient poems.

Separation is a part of their nature. No hunter has ever killed a unicorn. No story alone has ever built an empire. The first side is far too complicated. The second is much too unrealistic.

This separation does not define them, however. Neither would exist without the other.

Just as you cannot have a coin with one side, you cannot have thunder without Thor, or Thor without thunder. Were you to isolate either of those sides into a world of its own, it would be a world stripped of meaning.

Why should anyone care about a god of thunder had not thunder existed? Why should anyone care about the concussive sound wave produced by the rushing in of air into a channel at high speeds? No one could live in such a world. Symbols without meaning are just scribbles on rock. Atoms and molecules cannot sustain a world alone. The other world is a reflection of the first; there can’t be an other without an us. The real world can’t exist without the unreal. Or rather, it can, but it would be a world devoid of laws and language, mercy and justice, inspiration and innovation, right and wrong.

Humans may have created the gods, but it was the gods that made them human.

There was a time when these two worlds were as one. It was a vague, ephemeral time. It didn’t exist in the same way, say, the Jurassic Period existed. The Greeks called it the Heroic Age, when gods and heroes walked the earth. The Australians called it the Dreamtime. Other, less concrete timeframes, such as the vague Creation of many stories, or the period in time where Adam and Eve inhabited the Garden of Eden also call back to this time. It was a time when gods and mortals freely communicated. There was no separation of the two. People could go to the otherworld (or the underworld) as they pleased so long as they obeyed the rules. The two sides intermingled and, sometimes, intermarried.

Then, something happened. The two sides became separated by the coin’s edge. This new edge was only as thick as strength of one’s belief. For many it was good enough. For some it was too much. In an age when gods could not be seen, heard, felt, or fought, it was as if they never existed at all.

For all of those on the other side, it was as if a one-sided window was placed between them. They did as they always did, pulling around the sun, visiting vengeance upon neighbors, answering questions and plights, etc., etc. There just wasn’t any response back. So, they worked back into a cycle, as the supernatural is wont to do. Waiting. Some waited for a very long time. Their names were no longer spoken and their people were scattered into the dust. Things from that world never die, not in the way the real world can. All they can do is sleeplessly drift off into an unconscious state and perform the duties they’ve always done. Waiting for the time to wake up.

The two sides drifted farther and farther apart for many years. In some places people never really left their gods and their spirits and demons. With time, they became a very small minority. Now priests can preach their sermons every Sunday comfortably far away from the floods of Noah and Sodom’s fires. Fairytale books are printed en masse in factories free of rickets-infested changelings and worrying encounters deep in the night. A thousand knights slay a thousand dragons on a thousand screens while the audience never loses a wink of sleep over crops turning to black mush, or poison running deep into the wells beneath their feet.

For most the other side is as real as a myth. Which is exactly what it is.

Until it isn’t. As the laws of probability will tell you, given enough time, every coin will come up the wrong side. And so, we get to the end of the world.

Apocalypse narratives aren’t as common as one might think. The ones that did get them got them right though. In beliefs of Judgement Day, according to the Christians, the unbelievers will be thrown together and judged with scrutiny. Ragnarök says that after a final war between humans, the divine war will kill the survivors and destroy the world. A hole in a coin obscures both sides.

The edge is ripped off. Without it, the two sides become one. No longer is there any distance between them, belief no longer determines whether or not the other are real or unreal, they exist regardless. Those few left alive after the war will perish after this final revelation.

[fuckblizzardbearlover]

One of the main reasons for warcraft discourse is the "progressives" getting their victimhood mixed up

Admitedly it stems from the intrinsic prejudices of gamer culture and american culture. Do to racism and the popular idea to make victims of abuse into literal monsters the bad guys of warcraft became the tribal "natives" and the murdered forsaken.

But even if the origin of this problem is problematic the fact is the orcs and forsaken ARENT the victims. Its common these days to draw real world parallels and since the forsaken are victims of violence and orcs are EXTREMELY losely based on tribal culture that we want to treat them as the good guys.

But WITHIN the narrative that couldnt be more wrong. Orcs for decades have justified mass murder and genocide based on the idea other cultures are weak and inferior. Old Soldier and A Good War were NOT meant to show the Horde is noble. It was meant to show how evil the horde was being. How Saurfang and ppl like him are willing to commit evil if it makes them feel good. Saurfang and his soldiers GLEEFULLY killed Alliance for "being alliance". Thats called Genocide Samantha! The ending of the story had saurfang realuze that Sylvannas used his bloodlust and willingness to commit murder if it was a Fair Fight in order to slaughter innocents. "A good war" is ironic because the point of the story is to show there IS no good war.

Similarly the forsaken have been trained by sylvanas to resent the living. The plague was meant to kill living and undead. Ive seen many quote her from cata saying they NEED to make more forsaken...yet no reason why the forsaken as a culture deserves to exist. They are just humans with a condition.

The alliance as a group ISNT prejudiced. Stormwind, lordearon and quelthalas were ALL destroyed by orcs and undead. Ppl want to point at the dead forsaken emissaries as proof but if this were The Walking Dead no one would question killing an undead that showed up when literally 3 kingdoms were destroyed by them.

Sylvanas's "we have to murder ppl to preserve our own" is the "white genocide "rhetoric.

Orcs arent tribal natives victims of colonialism. They ARE the colonizers. Guldan is christopher columbus and the orcs are the european scourge.

Bias against people who want to wipe out your civilization is NOT prejudice. Its reason

And its blatantly obvious. Via Before the Storm, baine and saurfangs story and other bits that this dxpansion is going to be when the horde casts off its evil elements and becomes actual heroed

[propshophannah]

I have a really strong feeling that kingdom of Ash means Sollemere the place Lorcan and Rowan destroyed. Maeve will bring Aelin there and Rowan and Lorcan will have to face their demons

You know I randomly think about the line about that kingdom because it was so striking to me. The idea that you could live long enough to realize/regret that you wiped an entire civilization off the map. That BLOWS my mind when I think about it. And it’s honestly something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Half my family is Puerto Rican and the indigenous civilizations that lived on the island and the surrounding islands (Carib, Taino, Arawak) were the victims of an unsystematic genocide/they were slaughtered by Christopher Columbus. So little of the culture remains it’s WILD to me. To think what kinda traditions we would have on my father’s side had the Spanish not invaded—or at least not slaughtered and enslaved everyone.Like. I learned the other day that the word iguana is from the Taino word iwana. It started me down this whole path of “what of my ancestors did survive?”So this idea that you could live long enough to see the ramifications of your own destruction is WILD to me. Like, if Columbia were immortal/long lived, would he be a professor specializing in effects of genocide/war/colonization? Would he regret what he did? Would he not care? Or would he forget...? Would he justify his atrocities with lines like “we didn’t know much back then,” “we were early explorers with a narrow world view, how could we have known?” Or any number of minimizing approaches. WILD. But back to your question. Honestly, anything is possible! I don’t know what we will get a real “look at the error of your ways” character building because it’s just one book (and how do you get over that kind of thing in one book?). But if this does happen I think it could be along the lines of “Look what she made us do, Rowan?! She made us into monsters and we let her! We have to stop her. For all the people who’ll never live, who’ll never know their ancestors, we have to stop her.” The monsters thing could 100% comeback. We know it’s coming back for Manon. She still have to finish her arc and defeat her greatest demon (her grandmother/herself as the “White Demon”). But the monsters made vs born thing applies to everyone in this series, not just Manon. (I was actually talking about this with @itach-i and @rufousnmacska the other day). Manon is the biggest and most obvious example of the struggle between being born or made and for the most part, she is the only one who ever truly believed she was a monster so this is LARGELY her thing. But that’s not to say Lorcan and Rowan (who have not given us indication that they honestly/truly thought they, themselves, were monsters) can’t experience this idea on a smaller scale. They are good guys who have done monsterous things in the name of a “cause” or for a country. I wouldn’t get my hopes up for lots of angst and 3 dimensional character views tho. Maas tends to show and not tell. She lets us decide what to think. So yeah. I hope that answers your question!

[anonymous-ivplay]

"Columbus was not just a genocidal monster, he was also like the dumbest bitch alive"

Truer words have never been spoken

having regrets because I’m trying to write a paper on one of the books I read for my history course and instead of highlighting important things i mostly just highlighted things that I thought were cool

[monumentremovalbrigade-blog]

Prelude to the Removal of a Monument

Prelude to the Removal of a Monument

Now the statue is bleeding. We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.

This is not an act of vandalism. It is a work of public art and an act of applied art criticism.

We have no intent to damage a mere statue.

The true damage lies with patriarchy, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism embodied by the statue.

It is these forms of oppression that must be damaged again and again...until they are damaged out of existence.

This work of public art is in solidarity with the Second Annual Anti-Columbus Tour that took place on October 9th. Without any disrespect for those organizers, our tactics must be different.

A thousand people assembled at the museum on that day, and amplified the following demands, originally issued at the first Anti-Columbus Day Tour the year before. 1) The museum should re-think its cultural halls regarding the colonial mentality behind them. 2) The City Council should follow the the lead of cities around the country and replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day (a related petition has garnered 18,000 signatures since October 9th, 2017) 3) Finally, it called upon the city to remove the monument to Theodore Roosevelt that frames the entrance to the Museum.

In that monument, Roosevelt is pictured on horseback, reaching for his pistol as he gazes onto the horizon. He is flanked subserviently by a shirtless Black man and an "Indian chief." They are both holding rifles, willing foot soldiers in the expansion of American Empire. A former NYC Police Commissioner and proud descendent of Dutch settler-colonists who first expropriated Manhattan from the Lenape, Roosevelt rose to fame for his role in the the Spanish American war, which involved the colonization of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Cuba. Roosevelt was also a staunch endorser of Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific movement whose calls for sterilization, population control, and racial purification would directly inspire the Nazis. Roosevelt was an open white supremacist and imperialist who is still lionized by the museum and the city plaza standing in front of it.

In statements to the media, the Museum has claimed that the statue is the city's problem, since legally it sits on public land (which is also to say, stolen Lenape land, like the rest of the city). To separate the statue and the museum is a technicality. The museum itself is an expanded monument to Roosevelt's world-view, and the statue is what visitors first see upon approaching the institution. Millions of schoolchildren pass under this oppressive image every year as they visit the museum, where they are in turn exposed to grotesque, dehumanizing displays.

This damage is being done as we speak. In response, we choose to act immediately with the means at our disposal: artistic expression. Against an artwork that does real damage--the Roosevelt monument--we offer a counter-monumental gesture that does symbolic damage to the values it represents: genocide, dispossession, displacement, enslavement, and state terror.

The monument not only embodies the violent historical foundation of the United States, but also the underlying dynamics of oppression in our contemporary world. In highlighting the bloody foundations of the monument, we salute those movements struggling against the values epitomized by Roosevelt: past, present, and future. From the uprisings of Ferguson and Standing Rock, to popular self-defense at the frontiers of gentrification in the Bronx, in the ground zero of climate crisis in Puerto Rico, or in the crosshairs of ICE raids terrorizing immigrant communities. We also salute the history of artistic actions undertaken against the monument, especially the six Indigenous activists who temporarily marked it 1971 in solidarity with the occupation of Alcatraz Island by The American Indian Movement (AIM). On the base of the monument they inscribed: "Return Alcatraz" and "Fascist Killer." Decolonization and Anti-Fascism remain the horizons of our time.

After Charlottesville, Trump tweeted: "Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments...Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson?"

A venerated U.S. president on the chopping block? Trump was on to something. The onus of decolonial and anti-fascist action falls to New York City, from whence the current president hails. Mayor Bill De Blasio has set up an advisory commission to investigate "hate symbols" accross the city, but it will have no binding authority. The commission will at some point seek public input to identify eligible monuments and statues. We taek matters into our own hands now to kickstart the removal process.

With this public artwork we are sparing the museum. We hope the museum will recognize the liability that the statue represents for its stated claims to be moving in the right direction, and use the leverage that it undoubtedly has with the City.

At this year's Anti-Columbus Day Tour, the NYPD made a massive show of force to defend the monument, with barricades, handcuffs, cops of every rank deployed--including two officers of color ordered to stand on the base of the statue itself just under the Black and Indian foot soldiers flanking Roosevelt himself.

We imagine a day when the monument--and the museum standing behind it--will not have to be barricaded and protected by force of arms. We imagine Roosevelt instead moldering away as a ruin in the trash-heap of history alongside his brothers-in-arms: towering figures like Lee and Columbus, lesser-known monsters like J. Marion Sims and Henry Osborn, and so many others. The empty pedestals left behind at places like the museum would in turn clear space for new visions of reparation, freedom, and justice. In the meantime, while the Mayor's Commission trudges forward, the Monument Removal Brigade hereby announces itself. Our membership is already legion, from Charlottesville to Durham to New York and beyond.

--Monument Removal Brigade (MRB) October 26, 2017

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[optimisticaudience]

Andrew Jackson, or the place between Hitler and Columbus.

Andrew Jackson was a monster. He personally ordered a mass exodus of indigenous people to an unsettled territory on foot in winter, to say nothing of his endorsement of genocide of those same people. When I was in 6th grade, knowing what I knew from some relatives that didn’t carry 20 dollar bills, I asked my social studies teacher why the U.S. would put Jackson on their money, after all the horrible things he did.

“Because up until recently a majority of people in the U.S. thought it was a good thing,” my teacher said. He wasn’t a fan of Jackson, and on some level he actually made me feel comfortable in his social studies class by being open about his outright hatred of someone he had to cover because the state said so. I always remember what he said there.

I’ve gotten into arguments about Jackson plenty of times, but it is awfully hard to argue against a person who used similar tactics to Hitler with Jewish, Roma, LGBTQ, and many others. I have actually won people over to my side with evidence.

The thing is, i still have yet to win an argument when I talk about Christopher Columbus in the same way. I’ve read the man’s own logs, and can cite where he cuts the ears off of people who saved a crew from drowning, or how he was arrested by the Spanish government for atrocities. The key with him is that people in my area still protest that Columbus’s journal is part of AP history texts, saying it has a “liberal bias” or is “anti-american.” They are mad that people will read Columbus’s journal and see his brutality. They think acknowledging history is revisionism, and above all: “well that was just the time he lived in.”

Thank you for bearing with this post. I apologize for the meandering, but here’s my point: When is “just the time he lived in”’s dividing line? Folks get salty at me and others for pointing out how awful something is, even though we both agree that a more recent person like Hitler or Jackson are monsters. I’m not a moral absolutist, but apparently that dividing line for Jackson was “recently.” I was taught that genocide is bad, but apparently there is a dividing line where monsters become explorers or “American Lions.” I was raised knowing about the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Jackson, and many others, but people I otherwise would respect tell me I’m being too hard for complaining about Columbus’s own atrocities. 

I’m scared about how people in the future might try to justify awful things as “just part of the times.”

[cripplepunk-sylveon]

If future generations came to, from a place of good faith and public opinion, interpret the views you currently share with today's wider society to bw unforgivably bigoted...How would you want that aspect of your legacy handled? Assuming you were a figure of note. I guess it being a bigotry I am currently oblivious to makes it a weird thought experiment for me.

Good faith and public opinion aren’t statistics and facts. They’re just that, good faith and opinion. HOWEVER, opinions can and do change based on actual facts all the time- so for the sake of this question I’m gonna say that that’s the case and work from there.

For one? Good on future generations for recognizing that the shit I thought and did was wrong! Just because it’s me personally doesn’t mean I can’t applaud folks for learning past where I did in my lifetime. I have no doubt more information that I don’t have in said lifetime will become available and hey, who knows, maybe the activism I do today for the queer, Indigenous, and non-white communities will prove to be harmful in the long run. I can’t know that. I can only work with what information I have now and the information I have now says shit’s fucked unless my generation steps up and changes the system from the ground up. 

If future generations of folks I won’t live to see end up discovering I was an asshole- like, Sir John A. McDonald level of asshole- by their standards, then yeah, they’re allowed to call my shit out posthumously. If a statue of me got yote in the river I wouldn’t even be offended, I’d probably be like “rip in piss metal me lol”. Because that means people have learned and changed for the better!! And I’ll probably be long dead at that point anyway! So it wouldn’t even hurt or offend me to be considered unforgivably wrong because I probably was and didn’t know better.

THAT BEING SAID. 

The reason I brought up John A. McDonald is because a lot of the whitewashing of his image and propping up of his few good traits only happened after he was dead. It was well-accepted while he was alive that he was a genocidal racist monster, even according to the public’s views of race and colonialism of the time... which weren’t great. But generations after him until just recently, mostly white generations, were all like “HE WAS OUR FIRST PRIME MINISTER ISN’T HE GREAT?” and just swept all of his crimes and atrocities under the rug. (And for the record, a lot of Canadians are still embarrassingly racist thanks to propaganda like this.)

For a more American example- Christopher Columbus. His holiday is celebrated because “he was the first man to land in America” and “he proved the Earth is round”- neither of which are historically true!! At all!! Those facts about him were made up after he died a failure and a pariah who completely botched his mission to prove the Earth was NOT round and befriend the people he ended up slaughtering... and not even because people wanted to remember him specifically. They were literally myths made up so early (and also racist) Americans would accept Italian immigrants, because Christopher himself was Italian. But it became common ‘knowledge’ that these things were true and boom! Columbus Day!

This is all to say that human memory is weird and people are complicated. Very little of the human experience fits neatly into boxes of right and wrong, and the definition of those two boxes is constantly changing. If my definition proves to be ‘wrong’ at some point in the future, then that’s fine! I want shit to get better and if that means I, as a hypothetical historical figure of note, am scorned for what I did- then great! I don’t mind! You’re doing amazing kids, you show me what for.

tl;dr: If future generations of people found me to be an unforgivable bigot, I would gladly hold that L and take that hit to whatever reputation I had. Human memory and tradition are prone to evolution and change and that’s a wonderful thing!