[Libloather]

Guns were an advantage for sure, but viruses made the difference.

Happy Columbus Day!

[mrsmith]

Amazing how much work she puts into avoiding the conclusion that Europeans were cultually and genetically superior.

Heck, a darwinian should be eager to embrace the superior genetics of the Europeans. It was gained at the cost of millions of lives lost to diseases.

[aruanan]

The mixed legacy of 1492 (European viruses wipe out population)

But how many have they killed with tobacco?

[Boogieman]

Sure, we gave them smallpox, but they gave us syphillis, so I’d say we’re about even.

Now the gay African monkeyphile that gave us AIDS still has some explaining to do...

[davisfh]

"The mixed legacy of 1492 (European viruses wipe out population)"

I've become convinced over the years that this is just a bunch of hogwash. I don't understand why anyone would want to propagate such an idea. Perhaps it's some sort of self-loathing on the part of some European descendants who want to lay a guilt trip on everyone else.

[Billthedrill]

This is hardly a revelation, although the linkage between the Plague, the Reconquista, cultural racial superiority, and a lynching noose is tenuous at best - grotesque might be more accurate - it is not a feature of any sensible historical narrative wrapped around facts but of a relentless anti-colonial ideology looking for a victim and finding the usual suspect in Europe. The actual mortality was often greater - estimated up to 90% for measles - among Native American populations than the 30% or thereabout mortality for the Plague in Europe. No one has forgotten or ignored that; ideologues such as Carroll would like to accuse of us of it, however. His slant is fairly obvious, and is not immune (pardon the pun) to the failings of the history he attempts to criticize.

In exchange, in addition to viruses, the native peoples of America received, to take another bitter example, horses, which served mainly as military machines in contests they lost.

Well, no. They also served as one of the central features of Plains Indian cultures, notably the ability of horsemen to hunt bison. One senses a rather condescending view of those cultures on the part of Mr. Carroll while he is upbraiding us for the identical sin.

It is, as well, another tired entry in the repackaging of history in a wrapper of guilt. Carroll tips his hand in the last sentence. It isn't actually about history at all, it's about semiotics.

Christopher Columbus represents the knot into which all these threads are tied. A past in which the threads were woven ultimately into lynching rope cannot be undone, but how it is remembered can and must be changed.

Changed, presumably, by right-thinkers on the topic, although it is highly doubtful if Carroll numbers among them. One hopes that one day historical revisionism through ideology will be viewed in the same shameful lens in which Carroll tries to cast the history he's attempting to revise.

[Senator John Blutarski]

James Carroll, A smug fellow with a political agenda to cast a pall over all of European civilization and its history - one of the reasons I haven’t read the Boston Globe in twenty five years or tuned into PBS before Masterpiece Theater.

What an ass.

[NavyCanDo]

No one could have anticipated what would happen when a modern culture came face to face with indigenous people who were still living in the stone age. That's right 5000 years after people in the old world began using the wheel and learned to use metals, the people in the America's had not even invented the wheel yet, and were still using stone tools.

[Wuli]

The man needs to be forced-sent to the Amazon jungle, to its remotest sections, so he can enjoy the “benevolence” and moral superiority of some of our remaining “native Americans” unblemished by European culture - for the rest of his life. Then, by his own standards, he can RIP.

[mas cerveza por favor]

The racist myth of European superiority still shapes the story of the colonial conquest

Boston.com is racist. Who besides Europeans would they ever refer to in this way.

[SamuraiScot]

1492, in addition to being the year of Christopher Columbus, was also the year of the Jews — their expulsion from Spain by the same Ferdinand and Isabella who sponsored the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. But the overlap of events

Arguing with a liberal is like taking candy from . . . a tree sloth. But I nevertheless have to point out that the author left out one more large event of 1492: the expulsion of the last Moslems from Spain with the fall of Granada. That's what allowed the monarchs to spend money on sponsoring Columbus.

In the process, the Sloth doesn't mention that the Spanish Jews—who were among my ancestors—were collaborators and high officials in the Moorish government. I can imagine that the Spanish Catholics, after a 700-year war, might have had a bone or two to pick with the pals of their oppressors.

[jim_trent]

> “the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere fell by about 90 per cent”

Why has no other plague in RECORDED history been this lethal? Perhaps because the people making up these numbers are biased and can make up whatever numbers they want to prove their point?

[wagglebee]

The reality is that eventually Europeans or north Africans were going to "bump into" the Americas eventually whether they were looking for new trade routes or not. The discovery that black tar on ships allowed them to sail greater distances made it inevitable.

WHEN the Americas were discovered all of Europe was going to find out and the Europeans were going to establish colonies for commercial purposes. And when large groups of Europeans came, they were going to bring diseases that would overwhelm the immune systems of the natives.

This was GOING TO HAPPEN whether it was the Spanish, English, Italians, Dutch, Portuguese or some other group. It might be PC to blame Columbus, but the truth is that the Europeans had NO WAY of knowing this would happen or preventing the spread of disease once it took hold.

[Cacique]

25 million in 1517, when Europeans first came there, to 1.5 million a century later.

How on earth do they know this? Were there any censuses? This is all estimates based on useless data. Also, we recently learned that syphilis for example, had arrived here before Columbus or the Vikings for that matter arrived on these shores. We know so because we have Inca tombs with pre-colombian cadavers that had syphilis. Granted it wasn't all roses, the coming of the pink man to these shores. But a great deal of all this stuff is mere propaganda and embellishment to justify a political outlook and judge our ancestors by twentieth century standards.

[wardaddy]

note how the author tosses in the bane of antisemitism as easily as his other preposterous garbage

ridiculous