World News

39155 readers

4325 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]

Recommendations

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

121

DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 month ago by MicroWave to c/world

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Scientists have ‘definitively’ proved identity of remains – with navigator’s precise origins to be revealed

Scientists in Spain claim to have solved the two lingering mysteries that cling to Christopher Columbus more than five centuries after the explorer died: are the much-travelled remains buried in a magnificent tomb in Seville Cathedral really his? And was the navigator who changed the course of world history really from Genoa – as history has long claimed – or was he actually Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Jewish or Portuguese?

The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second is … wait until Saturday.

The long-running and often competitive theorising has not been helped by his corpse’s posthumous voyages. Although Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506, he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, which is today divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795, and then brought to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba after the Spanish-American war.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Nastybutler 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Straight to Godwin, huh? Not to mention it's hardly a good comparison. Spain and Europe's empire expansion philosophy as a whole would have led to the same result once the New World was discovered. If you disagree with that, then I don't know how to talk to you about this topic. It's obviously a totally different case than what Hitler did.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not saying Columbus wasn't a terrible human being, just that even if he was a saint, the outcome for indigenous peoples on this continent would have been the same. If you want to focus your hatred on one man as the source of all the suffering and genocide here, I'd probably go with Cortez over Columbus, but it would still be misplaced hatred

[–] FlyingSquid 3 points 1 month ago

Cool. Another person who doesn't understand what Godwin's law was:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

Which is not what I was doing, I was explaining how you are absolving a monster because someone else would have done it eventually (ignoring the fact that his atrocities were so awful that the Spanish royals even told him to cut that shit out, literally bringing him back to Spain in chains).

Even Mike Godwin thinks you've missed the point:

My feeling was that the more people got into this habit, the less likely that people remembered the historical context of all this. And as you know, one of the injunctions of Holocaust historians is that we must never forget, we have to remember. And I just thought, Well, I’m going to do a little experiment and see if I could make people remember.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/03/godwins-law-mike-godwin-hitler-nazi-comparisons.html

I was literally putting something in historical context and literally talking about the actual Holocaust.

But the main thing is that Columbus was so bad that even people at the time said he was a monster:

Bobadilla collected the testimonies of 23 people who had seen or heard about the treatment meted out by Columbus and his brothers. "Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place," Ms Varela said.

Columbus and his brothers were forced to travel back to Spain. Columbus was in chains but, although he never recovered his titles, he was set free and allowed to sail back to the Caribbean.

"Columbus and his brothers come across in the text as tyrants," Ms Varela said. "Now one can understand why he was sacked and we can see that there were good reasons for doing so.

"The monarchs wanted someone who did not give them problems. Columbus did not solve problems, he created them."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/aug/07/books.spain

I'm sure you'll continue to try to do this silly "we can't vilify Columbus for starting off centuries of genocide and oppression because someone else just as bad could have come along," but hopefully everyone else will figure out that he was one of the greatest monsters in human history.