this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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But this is accurate. Columbus was an explorer, that was his mission. I've read his letters to Spain and he wanted to find bounty for the Spanish crown to convince them to give him more money. He murdered, tortured, enslaved kidnapped, interrogated, and raped people to find even more bounty. But he was an explorer, not a conquistador or conqueror. Those were military positions.
This post is ignorant.
Do you think Native Americans would agree to define him as an explorer too, then?
And Adolf Hitler was a politician. That was his “mission”. We don’t define Hitler by his career though.
I guess he went above and beyond on that mission, yeah? By your definition he seems more like a bounty-hunter/privateer and not an explorer, but worse in every way. (And how is rape supposed to tie into this narrative about his goal of securing more funding anyway?)
So by your logic, not having a military position pardons any atrocities he committed and waives the reason to call him anything other than “explorer”? He was a butcher and a rapist. That’s a fact.
You don’t need a rank and a hat to become a sanctioned piece of shit. That can happen sans the hat.
Is this your opinion, or an “accurate” fact too?
Your defensiveness betrays your ignorance. That's my opinion.
No body is pardoning anything, and insinuating that I am invalidates everything you just wrote, embarrasses you, and removes all my interest in talking to you further.
Wait, were you not being sarcastic with your comment? No one takes the justifications of history's monsters as fact. Like, I get Christopher Columbus thought he was an explorer who discovered things. It doesn't change the fact he murdered people and found things that were already discovered. I'm sure most of the people who committed atrocities in history have cute alternative names they would prefer were used to cover up what they did. We separate the historical fiction that historical figures would impose on us from the historical facts of what they actually did.
"Look, I get it, everyone has a story and contains multitudes and all, but the paperwork from the children's hospital clearly says he was officially contracted as an "Entertainer and Humorist," so that's the title we need to refer to this John Wayne Gacy with. It's just basic professionalism."
It's funny cause yeah, John Wayne Gacy was a clown, and if you ask something or someone to describe him in one word, you might get clown with no other context.
When you see Gacy described in books, movies, videos, etc. they usually list both clown and serial killer in the title and show a picture of him as a clown.
How many words do I need to ask for before I get murderer added to Christopher Columbus, or genocide with Ghengis Khan. Like the opinion on Christopher Columbus only really changed starting in 2005ish, before that they were singing kids songs about that sociopath since the 40's. That's a lot of history of "explorer".
Like one word removes context no matter what, who would they be a yard stick used in any sense?
But not a conquerer. Genghis Khan was a butcher and rapist too.
Idk dude. Everything you said was right, but I still think you're wrong. Columbus, like it or not, is what brought attention to mainland Europe of North America. Yes we can go on about Leif Erikson but that's just not hiw history is generally written.
Khan didn't bring news of China to his lands. Hitler didn't happen upon Poland. Columbus "found" America, therefore explorer
Man, you gotta know if ChatGPT returned Hitler as "interested in ancestry and hotel art" it wouldn't be good no matter how pedantically true it is
I would think he should be called "Dictator" or are we straying from the one word examples? It is not pedantic to call Columbus an explorer. It wouldn't be unreasonable to use other single words, maybe "Colonizer" but he wasn't really that either. Most of what people are suggesting are highly colored by emotion. I'm not seeing the controversy in "Explorer" unless you have a very childish/naive connotation with that word to mean only fun, exciting, and adventurous. Exploring can be evil.