We have to judge Christopher Columbus by the standards of his time? Okay! The Spanish royal court was horrified by his brutal, bloody cruelty, stripped him of power and position in full condemnation. Do you have any idea how hard it was to horrify early modern Spanish elites?
NO one expects the Spanish Inquisition…to be horrified by anything.
Also, by whose motherfucking standards? I'm sure that the native people he enslaved had standards opposing that enslavement.
If someone makes the argument about going back to the standards and values of the past, then we sure as hell get to judge those standards by today's.
The entire "Don't judge people for what they did or believed, but by what others thought of them back then!" is a horrible lesson of moral relativism... And kinda funny coming from conservatives that normally demand moral absolutism (black and white views of morality).
That’s fascinating. I didn’t know that about him!
The "better than being dead" argument is particularly horrible, because there were a massive number of suicides by the people he enslaved. People literally looked at enslavement and decided they'd rather be dead.
His contemporaries called him "The Pharaoh"!
Forget the court, the SPANISH INQUISITION thought he needed to slow his roll.
It would have been extremely hard to horrify the Spanish Royal Court. This highlights exactly how cruel and depraved that Christopher Columbus could have actually been, possibly even horrid things that we never hear about or even find out anymore.
Whenever I read that I have that Angry Goose Meme running through my head: "Who's standards? WHOSE'S STANDARDS, M'FER!?!?!?" Columbus's victims always knew they were victims.