CELEBRATE COLUMBUS DAY! - DEFEND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Chinese explorer Zheng He may have discovered America before Columbus, according to new book

Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News 7 hours ago

`Does a 600-year-old Chinese map prove that Christopher Columbus was not the first explorer to navigate the New World?
In his book “Who Discovered America?,” published Tuesday, author Gavin Menzies says the settling of North America by nonnative peoples is more complex than previously thought.
‘The traditional story of Columbus discovering the New World is absolute fantasy, it’s fairy tales,” Menzies, 76, said in an interview with the Daily Mail....

My comment:

There is little doubt that Zheng He's fleet sailed to SE Asia, and even to East Africa.  But, the Chinese sailing to Europe and even the Mississippi River in America?  I doubt it.  In the 1990s someone discovered bones in the western state of Washington.  It appeared to be a murder, with an arrow in the man’s leg.  The sheriff looked and thought a white man had been killed by an arrow.  He sent the skeleton to scientists who judged it about 9,000 years old, the oldest full skeleton found in N. America (Kenniwick Man).                  Immediately, the Amerindians demanded the bones.  The hate-science Democratic Party prefers to appease the religious superstitions of Amerindians than explore science.  An outrageous law signed by Dem. Pres. Jimmy Carter was used to restrict the time the scientists could study the bones.  Dem. Pres. Clinton returned the "white" skeleton to the Amerindians for burial.  I suspect they buried these bones so no white man will ever see them again.  (Some of the absurd privileges granted to Amerindians today is bases on white guilt for killing so many of the savage Indians when Europeans came to North America.  If, whites were here before the Amerindians came, then they were the truly murderous group, and whites have no moral obligation to allow them to own casinos, a right often denied to whites.)  Democratic Pres. Clinton also destroyed the site where the bones were found.  The Democrats dare not disturb the cult of multi and its hate-whitey views.

   Chinese may well have sailed the Pacific to the west coast of the New World.  The Vikings clearly came across the Atlantic.  Some Olmec sculptures appear quite Negroid, so it is possible Africans also sailed to the New World.

   Still, the voyage of Columbus is the most important one.  The earlier discoverers of America resulted in short-term contact.  With Columbus, there would be continuous contact between Old World and New.  Columbus united the world as never before.  Like it or not, he began a new globalism.  It is Columbus, and the European sailors who followed him, who made the modern world.  We may recall Zheng He and Leif Erickson, but it is Columbus whose discovery created the modern world.

Slavery, disease, death: the dark side of the Christopher Columbus story

Jay Busbee 8 hours ago

On Monday, the United States will observe Columbus Day, schools and banks closing and parades marching in honor of the man who, as we all learned in school, discovered America in 1492.
And according to The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman, Columbus Day is a dangerous farce.
Inman contends in his current strip on The Oatmeal, a humor/political commentary website, that the legends we believe about Columbus are not only misleading but grossly unfair. He cites primary sources and journals recounted in Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and James Lowewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” to dispel the traditional narrative of Columbus as brave traveler who connected the Old World and the New.
Here are a few of The Oatmeal’s conclusions about Christopher Columbus:
• In 1492, no one actually thought the earth was flat. “Pretty much anyone with an education knew the earth was round. The Greeks had proved it 2,000 years before Columbus was born.”
• Columbus didn’t actually “discover” the New World. Not only were there natives living in the Americas for 14,000 years, Leif Ericson found the same territory 500 years before Columbus.
• Columbus wanted gold, and lots of it. His initial ideas for a new trade route to Asia fell by the wayside as he realized how much gold was available in the New World.
• The natives would provide little resistance. According to his own journal, Columbus believed the indigenous Lucayans would not be a significant challenge. “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men,” he wrote, “and govern them as I pleased.”
• For his second visit, Columbus armed for war. When Columbus returned to the New World, he brought 17 ships and 1,500 men.
• Columbus treated the natives brutally. Columbus demanded treasure, food and sex for his men, and when the Lucayans refused, he ordered their noses and ears cut off to serve as a warning.
• Columbus treated his conquered people harshly. When the Lucayans rebelled, Columbus crushed the rebellion and carted off 500 Lucayans to be sold into slavery in Europe.
• Columbus disrupted the entire economy of three continents. Post-Columbian disease and starvation killed three to five million people over the next fifty years. And the influx of gold disrupted the global economy to the point that African slaves became a dominant commodity.
…MY COMMENT

   The hate-the-West crowd is at it again.  Educated men in Europe may have believed the earth to be round, but they opposed the voyage of Columbus because they believed it far too large, and the one huge ocean far too long to reach land (imagine the earth with no New World, and a watery journey from Spain to Asia).  The learned in Spain opposed Columbus because they thought the sailors would not survive such a lengthy voyage.  It would be like sending a manned voyage to Mars today - in effect beyond the technology of the times.  Columbus was wrong in that the earth was much larger than he presumed; however, his mistake resulted in the “discovery” of the New World.

    The most developed of the Amerindians, the Aztecs practiced mass murder that makes the conquest by Europeans seem mild.  Indeed, it was often only with the help of the oppressed Amerindians that the vastly outnumbered Europeans were able to topple the empires of the Aztecs and Incas so quickly.

   Others surely discovered the New World before Columbus.  But there discoveries remained cut off from their lands of origins.  Only with Columbus' discovery, would the world become united, a global economy that would allow all people to flourish.  Only with Western Civilization would the stone-age Amerindians grow to their numbers of today.  Only with Western Civilization would all, including the descendants of African slaves, multiply and prosper (and have far more modern lives than those left behind in Africa.)  It is Western Civ., with its rejection of superstition and its embrace of science, that has wiped out and curtailed so many diseases.

   Hooray for Columbus.  He made the modern world.  Celebrate Columbus Day!