September 6, 2021
"A statue of divisive European explorer Christopher Columbus that was on prominent display in Mexico City will be replaced with a figure of an Indigenous woman..."
"The looming Columbus figure had stood tall on the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard for over 100 years, but on Sunday the mayor of the capital city, Claudia Sheinbaum, said it was time for a change of landscape and to make way for a monument that delivers 'social justice.'... Last month, [President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador asked the country’s Indigenous peoples for forgiveness for the abuses inflicted on them during the bloody 1521 Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. He has previously called on Spain’s royal family and Pope Francis to formally apologize for atrocities committed during the Spanish conquest at the beginning of the 16th century.... For Mónica Moreno Figueroa, a Mexican academic in the United Kingdom and co-founder of the Collective to Eliminate Racism in Mexico (COPERA), the removal of the Columbus statue is 'symbolically important.'... However, simply replacing Columbus with a possibly anonymous Indigenous woman, in a country that is home to at least 50 Indigenous groups, lacked nuance...."
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If it wasn’t for those divisive Spanish, the Aztecs would still be doing that human sacrifice thing.
I assume no mention of the many Indian allies of the Spanish in the overthrow of the bloody Aztec empire.
So it’s the Taliban Wing of the Mexican government. Our neighbors recognize the strong horse.
The statue must remain anonymous i.e. non-specific, lest the sins of whatever people be brought to light. Every group, indigenous or otherwise, has committed atrocities against other groups.
Maybe they should just put up a big sign that says, Perdóname and get on with their lives.
Last month, [President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador asked the country’s Indigenous peoples for forgiveness for the abuses inflicted on them during the bloody 1521 Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire.
I don't understand why we pull events from history to make us feel guilty today.
I blame newspapers, and hysterical women.
" a monument that delivers 'social justice.'."
A monument that delivers 'social justice'? WOW! monuments are much more powerful than i thought
i thought they were inaniment graven images... Little did i know, that they ARE deitys
'lacked nuance....'
Of course it lacked nuance. Everything lefties do lacks nuance. They are the hammer, and everything they see is a nail.
Cortez was one of the biggest bad-asses in military history. He sailed to what is now Mexico in 1519 with 600 men, and then proceeded to destroy his own ships.
After making alliances with indigenous tribes that hated the Aztecs, he wiped them out, along with their human sacrifices.
Btw, I love when lefties (especially Hispanic lefties) talk about cultural appropriation. Aren't they speaking the language of their conquerer? Why are they not speaking Aztec?
I'm just going to link to the part of Wikipedia that recounts the latter expansion of the Aztec Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_Empire#Later_years_of_expansion
Naw, going to link to their religious practices too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_religion#Human_sacrifice
Yes, we need to do more than just remove statues of Columbus. We should also educate people about the great civilizations the Spanish destroyed. Of course, teaching people about the Aztecs may lead them to bring back the Columbus statues.
The fact is that the Spanish actually brought human rights and civilization to the human sacrificing Aztecs.
There is "justice" and there is "social justice," two things that are close to opposites.
Modern Mexico has always been ruled by the ancestors of Europeans. Replacing a statue of Columbus with an indigenous woman is an empty gesture. The corrupt politicians, in the narco-state that is Mexico, should enact some “social justice” for the native Mexicans (which far out number the white Mexicans) with programs to educate, help feed, and house them. Taking down a statue isn’t going to help Mexicans who are begging in the street of Mexico City or waiting for money to be sent to them from family in the U.S. If Mexicans could work to support themselves and families, then they would not need to migrate illegally to the U.S. Don’t blame Columbus for the sins you are committing today.
As many will note, it's more clueful to remove any Hernan Cortes' honorifics in Mexico City. Columbus was more of a Caribbean-er.
Indigenous peoples: feel free to reject the technology of western civilization. Otherwise, you’re merely posturing.
The Spanish manage to conquer the Aztecs because the Aztecs were so horrible that everyone around them allied with the Spanish to bring them down. It's like apologizing to Germans for overthrowing the Nazis.
As for Columbus, the man is a hero to western civilization, and should be seen as an inspiration and a model. He was utterly wrong (he thought that the world was smaller than it was, and hence he could sail west to India), but was willing to risk himself to prove his theory, and despite being wrong that gamble turned out to result in world-changing discovery.
Social justice warriors are suicidal idiots. They fail to understand just how fragile it the civilization on which they rely, and how much western culture rests on the social and cultural foundations built up over two-thousand years of history. Eliminate those foundations, and they'll bring about collapse. The result won't be a progressive utopia, but a regression to the state of much of the rest of the world: brutal, oppressive, and unenlightened.
They should put a statue of Speedy Gonzales.
Last year I read the Conquest of New Spain by Diaz del Castillo and if one thing is clear, the Aztecs gave as good as they got. And plenty of rival tribes willingly allied with Cortez to take them down. But at first it was a peaceful takeover that was never going to fly for long with Monctesuma's internal foes.
The Aztecs were particularly vicious with their human sacrifices, worse than their predecessors, because you know if it still isn't working to end the drought then obviously you're not being vicious enough. Personally I'm glad they were defeated.
And who will tell these poor triggered dears about the thousands of other violent conquests that predate even the neolithic era? I mean people have always fought over resources.
What must they think of all living history?
Yet again another export of Leftist American garbage. There is no doubt the Spanish were cruel. However the Spanish with a relative number of Conquistadores would not have been able to conquer what they did if they weren't perceived as less evil than the indigenous rulers. Harsh though they were, the Spanish in a sense were liberators for many of the indigenous.
Will removal of the Columbus statue and "delivering social justice" include mass sacrifices every day on the top of Aztec pyramids using traditional Aztec methods?
"replacing Columbus with a [] anonymous Indigenous woman"
One advanced civilization; the other not so much.
Better off? The point is illustrated by the great African American boxer Muhammad Ali. In the early 1970s Muhammad Ali fought for the heavyweight title against George Foreman. The fight was held in the African nation of Zaire; it was insensitively called the "rumble in the jungle." Ali won the fight, and upon returning to the United States, he was asked by a reporter, "Champ, what did you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!" There is a characteristic mischievous pungency to Ali's remark, yet it also expresses a widely held sentiment. Ali recognizes that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom. The slaves were not better off — the boat Ali refers to brought the slaves through a horrific Middle Passage to a life of painful servitude — yet their descendants today, even if they won't admit it, are better off. Ali was honest enough to admit it.
— Dinesh D'Souza
Source,
https://quotepark.com/quotes/1761571-dinesh-dsouza-better-off-the-point-is-illustrated-by-the-great/
The use of the word divisive is divisive in itself. Usually the word ends up indicating what the writer wants the reader to believe is the bad side of a position or argument. And naturally there is going to be disagreement on which side is the bad or wrong side of an argument. If one were using an honest definition of the word, there wouldn't be a single president in living memory, that couldn't fairly be described as divisive. But if you want something to change getting it labeled divisive is a good first step. I think I will try to broaden my use of the word divisive. "Your idea of us eating out at that Thai place is divisive, we should get Italian instead."
What they need is a statue of an indigenous person ripping the still beating heart out of another indigenous person who was conquered as a slave.
https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion
When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.
Andrés de Tapia, a conquistador, described two rounded towers flanking the Templo Mayor made entirely of human skulls, and between them, a towering wooden rack displaying thousands more skulls with bored holes on either side to allow the skulls to slide onto the wooden poles.
Reading these accounts hundreds of years later, many historians dismissed the 16th-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda meant to justify the murder of Aztec emperor Moctezuma, the ruthless destruction of Tenochtitlán and the enslavement of its people. But in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts.
While it's true that the Spanish undoubtedly inflated their figures—Spanish historian Fray Diego de Durán reported that 80,400 men, women and children were sacrificed for the inauguration of the Templo Mayor under a previous Aztec emperor—evidence is mounting that the gruesome scenes illustrated in Spanish texts, and preserved in temple murals and stone carvings, are true. Why did they carry out such brutal ceremonies? John Verano, an anthropology professor at Tulane University, explains the practice held spiritual significance for the Aztecs...
The rationale for Aztec human sacrifice was, first and foremost, a matter of survival. According to Aztec cosmology, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was waging a constant war against darkness, and if the darkness won, the world would end. The keep the sun moving across the sky and preserve their very lives, the Aztecs had to feed Huitzilopochtli with human hearts and blood.
Human sacrifice also served another purpose in the expanding Aztec empire of the 15th and 16th century: intimidation. The ritual killing of war captives and the large-scale displaying of skulls were visceral reminders of the strength of the empire and the extent of its dominion. DNA tests of recovered victims from the Templo Mayor site show that the vast majority of those sacrificed were outsiders, likely enemy soldiers or slaves.
Verano says that across history and cultures, the rise of ritual human sacrifice often coincides with the emergence of complex societies and social stratification. It’s a particularly effective method of intimidating rivals and keeping your own people in line.
Meh. The French erected an imposing statue of Vercinggetorix on the site of Caesar's crushing victory over him.
Maybe the new statue should be of an Aztec high priest cutting the heart out of a human sacrifice. You know, to celebrate the good old days.
They seem to forget that the Spanish liberated many indigenous from the bloodthirsty tyranny of the Aztecs and did it with indigenous help.
The conquest was also a liberation: many indigenous people were grossly oppressed by other indigenous people. As mountains of skulls attest.
I don't understand how supplanting one historical figure with another solves the problem of how to reckon with a history that we may consider differently now from the way we did previously. Why not have both figures? Were not both part of history? Use the context of each - where it is, how big it is - to reflect current understanding of each person's (or symbolic person's, I guess) place in history. And maybe as that understanding changes - and it will - recontextualize.
This is what Houston did with its Confederate statues - moved them.
"Ramos also argued that Mexico’s history was more nuanced, including examples of Indigenous people who cooperated with European invaders."
Understatement.
The Aztecs were an imperialist empire which had many enemies. When Cortez landed with about 600 men near present-day Veracruz, he was able to quickly ally with the Totonacs, and then the Tlaxcalans: an army of over 6000, 90% indigenous. They entered Tenochtitlan and took it over by kidnapping Moctezuma, the Aztec ruler. Later, as tensions with the Aztecs rose, they fled. Smallpox broke out in the capital. The Spaniards and their allies returned.
(Wikipedia): "Cortés raised an army of Tlaxcalans, Texcocans, Totonacs, and others discontent with Aztec rule. With a combined army of up to 100,000 warriors,[47] the overwhelming majority of which were indigenous rather than Spanish, Cortés marched back into the Basin of Mexico."
So, someone please explain how Columbus fits into this story?
Well, without Columbus — and Cortez — the peaceful Aztec would presumably still be peacefully gathering up people from neighboring tribes and peacefully sacrificing them by the hundreds to Quetzalcóatl and other dieties. And the Caribs would still be collecting Taino natives from other islands as a food source. But that’s cool, right?
Commemorative human sacrifice soon to follow.
Will the descendants of the indigenous peoples who did ritual human sacrifices by ripping hearts out of chests apologize to the descendants of their indigenous victims? Can DNA tests sort it all out for us? 1/8th or more Aztec blood the right standard? It all gets so complicated apologizing for the acts of people from hundreds of years ago!
Just standard Marxism.
This is coming down from Mr. Carlos Slims himself.
can anyone explain to me why Mexico gets away with having Aztec symbols on their flag? That's the same thing as Israel using the swastika on their flag. The Aztecs warred on neighboring tribes, captured and enslaved their people, and then cut their still beating hearts from their chests. Modern Mexicans are not descended from Aztecs, they were wiped out. They're descended from the tribes that were preyed on by the Aztecs before the Spanish arrived.
They should put a statue of Speedy Gonzales.
While Speedy has been banned on English language TV, he is used to sell cars on Spanish language TV.
I love the support and justification of genocide. Please encourage your friends not to get vaccinated. Ivermectin is on sale at Billy Bob's tack and feed Labor Day only.
Those GOD Damned whites! it's like they are Aliens, they have No Conscience!
from Wiki...
"between 10,000 and 80,400 people" were sacrificed over the course of four days for the dedication of the Great Pyramid in 1487
WHY did we Ever Tolerate these whites?? What's that? It was the Aztecs that did the sacrifices?
Never Mind
gspencer said...
"replacing Columbus with a [] anonymous Indigenous woman"
One advanced civilization; the other not so much.
As i said on another post. Racism equals Prejudice plus Power
This means, that; as Long as ANY ONE has ANY Power, there will be Racism!
Only by COMPLETE POWERLESSNESS can Racism be stopped!
of course,
the State will Still need Bureaucrats... But they will only be exercising the State's power
They Will need (and receive) certain benefits, afterall; they're State workers
How about a statue of Malintzin. Malintzin, known in Spanish as Marina, was Cortes' translator. She was given to Cortes as a slave, but she adept at languages and soon became his interpreter.....She had been sold into slavery by her mother. Her mother did not wish Malintzin to share in her son's inheritance. Malintzin thus had every reason to feel alienated from the mores and morals of her society. Don't you just hate it when your mother sells you into slavery.....I've read that the Mexicans either consider her a traitor to her race or as some kind vixen who seduced Cortes. Maybe not. She seems to have been intelligent and adroit at diplomacy and languages. She had been sold into slavery and died in a palace. She certainly knew how to make the best of a bad situation....I don't know her position on abortion, but maybe the feminists here could make something of her saga.
Sheinbaum is Mexico City’s first woman and first Jewish mayor. James Lindsay was savaged on Twitter for pointing out that prominent lefty Jewish SJWs, who predominate among secular Jews, invite anti Semitic sentiment as a result of their anti-western attitude and opposition to traditional cultures in societies from old Europe to the new world. I think he’s right, though, and I imagine quite a few patriotic Mexicans are reacting badly to this stupid destruction of art and tradition.
The always goofy Howard says, "I love the support of genocide." Now, Howard, I can well imagine that you could use a course in remedial reading (along with logic and basic economics); but where do you see the love of genocide? Is it akin to your apparent love, or at least support, of Democide?
I suggest Xipe Totec, the flayed Aztec god, as a replacement for the Columbus statue. Good old Xipe Totec represents the best of precolumbian art and religion. His statues were covered with the flayed skins of human sacrifices, to make sure the god kept things like the seasons and crops working properly. A perfect representation of woke culture: Make others pay for an irrational belief that you have.
How about a statue of an Aztec priest cutting the living heart out of a slave. Absent Columbus, or any other European, they'd still be doing it. Indigenous culture and all, doncha know?
Well maybe she survived being hunted down for use in volcano/sharp knives sacrifice.
The Spanish Conquest of Mexico was no worse than the Roman Conquest of Spain and Gaul. It was perhaps kinder and gentler than the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe or the Mongol Conquest of Mesopotamia. Worse than Cromwell's Conquest of Ireland though....The genocidal aspect of the Spanish Conquest was not due to any of their cruelties but rather due to the diseases that they introduced. If the Spaniards had arrived in the New World and distributed Girl Scout Cookies, their effect on that world would have been no less devastating.
Of course, this whole thing leaves out the extent to which La Virgen de Guadalupe was really the one who defeated the Aztec empire.
Well, without Columbus — and Cortez — the peaceful Aztecs would presumably still be peacefully gathering up people from neighboring tribes and peacefully sacrificing them by the hundreds to Quetzalcóatl and other dieties.
Mostly peacefully.
"I love the support and justification of genocide."
No one is supporting and justifying any such thing. People are simply pointing out the contradictions inherent in substituting one symbol of imperial conquest with another. If you want to judge the Spanish (even though Columbus was actually an Italian who was working for the Spanish) for their cruelty, you should also be willing to judge the empire they replaced for theirs. No culture is innocent.
Statue of Columbus = Chamberlin Rock.
Result: "We're DOING SOMETHING about some past event and feel good about ourselves now"
In reality, no, you look trivial and simple.
Howard should read up on Ivermectin:
In 2015, William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discovery and applications. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Ivermectin is FDA-approved as an antiparasitic agent. In 2018, it was the 420th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than one hundred thousand prescriptions.
People who criticize Columbus and other European explorers are strongly implying that men and women should stay home and never emigrate to other countries.
Does the Open Borders crowd have an opinion here?
If you can't get past something that happened more than half a millennia ago, you just might be a Communist Progressive.
"Maybe they should just put up a big sign that says, Perdóname and get on with their lives."
No, the solution is for AI to create a Generic Oppressor Statue and put copies of them up everywhere. Rainbow-colored would be most appropriate.
"There is "justice" and there is "social justice," two things that are close to opposites."
Social Justice is just a euphemism for Socialism.
'Columbus was more of a Caribbean-er.'
Interesting...I didn't know he climbed.
Wimps. Taking down a statue - easy.
I am waiting for Seattle area SJWs to go after the Olmstead brothers. They designed the campus of the University of Washington. Given the kinds of things contemporary folks are cancelled over - like a dumb statement made decades ago as a teenager - how hard can it be to find racism or sexism in a pair of brothers born in the late 1800's?
Once the crimes of the Olmstead brothers are revealed - the entire campus will have to be torn up to revise the design conceived by these privileged white men! I mean, two (probably racist) white guys designed an axis that points people to a view of Mount Rainier. How triggering this must be for Native Americans! Gotta tear that shit up right now - every inch of the designed surface must go!
I'm sure this will bring social justice to Mexico
I look forward to the day when all statues celebrating people of merit are replaced by anonymous figures who've achieved nothing.
They will be the perfect symbol for modern man. Claudia Sheinbaum can run for president of Idiocracy.
"...divisive European explorer Christopher Columbus..."
I thought the man has been dead for near 500 years. He is still around causing trouble actively fomenting divisitude?
From the post: "Last month, [President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador asked the country’s Indigenous peoples for forgiveness for the abuses inflicted on them during the bloody 1521 Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire."
And just like that, the situation of Mexico's indigenous peoples was made right.
Now, how's that war against the cartels going?
@Bunkypotatohead at 6:40pm
That is a great point. You many not like what they did, but when they did the things that made them famous they were great things. Like leading armies or exploring a then unknown world at great and often mortal danger to themselves.
I suppose now they'd be Tik Tok starts or Kardashians.
But at least they did something.
Tik Tok stars...
However, simply replacing Columbus with a possibly anonymous Indigenous woman, in a country that is home to at least 50 Indigenous groups, lacked nuance...."
Even if you erected 50 statues, one to represent each "indigenous group," it wouldn't satisfy the woke mob, who would gripe about other tribes that had been made extinct and weren't represented.
Of course the various indigenous groups in the Americas had their own oppressive empires, and the groups we know about tended to be the empires that displaced earlier ones and oppressed or pushed out other peoples. Celebration of the Aztecs, the Inca, or the Sioux is at the expense of other native peoples that couldn't successfully compete or defend themselves
*
We gave this PC cancel culture to Mexico. Or maybe they gave some of it to us. Mexico's ruling class have identified with the Aztecs for quite some time in order to deflect resentment away from their own privileges, when in fact they are comparable to the Spaniards, and in many cases directly descended from them (well, supposedly almost everyone in Latin America goes back in the unbroken male line to a Spaniard and in the unbroken female line to an Indian, but the masses are more Indian in ancestry and the elites are more European in ancestry). Our corporations now put themselves at the forefront of the racial equity movement to disguise their own privileges, so maybe they learned from our neighbors to the south.
The replacement of Columbus' statue was announced in Spanish. Ding-dong.
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