I mean, what Columbus did with America was legal at the time? It wasn’t like the New Continent was empty, or something. And he wasn’t even looking for America, to begin with! Can you just find some, uh, semi-desert island, plant a banner there and claim it for your country? I was more logical for the US of A to claim the Moon!
No, it wasn’t legal. Go ahead - sue him.
Might makes right.
If you have better weapons, more advanced technology, a strong political organization, and a method of introducing successively more of “you,” it isn’t hard, at all. It helps if you have a goodly number of diseases to which they have poor or no immunity, as well. (It isn’t the right thing to do, of course, but that is how one does it.)
Up until the late 20th century, it was the standard way for most people to acquire real estate. (Judging by the Balkans, it is still a method that meets with approval in certain regions.) The 20th century was, in fact, the first time in human history when that method of acquisition was ever challenged as morally wrong by large numbers of people. Whether we have advanced as a species or simply gotten more fearful that someone bigger than we will choose to do the same to us I leave to your speculation.
Hmmm, good idea. I’m sorta kinda short of money anyway. Who has the number of O.J.'s lawyer?
Legal,shmegal!!
Or to put it another way “might makes right”
Basically, the use of force supercedes any claim as to legality when there is no basis/structure for sanctions or repercussions.
Columbus (and more correctly the following Spanish armies) were able to exert control through violent overthrow of the existing poiltical structure. Whether they were “allowed” to do this is irrelevant. It was done and there was no one in a postion to challenge their actions so it became defacto Spanish territory.
::anticipating the real reason for the question::
It most likely would not happen again due to extra governmental pressures and a relatively stable set of borders. All bets are off where there is political instability though.
And I’m not touching the whole Israel/Palestine thing with a thirty nine and a half foot pole. 
Rumor has it that Columbus died in debtor’s prison. I doubt you’d get much.
Cook did that with the Sandwich Islands (er Hawaii) but they killed him.
It’s happened the world over throughout history.
There was a case of a native Australian Aboriginy sailed to the UK the same year Australia celebrated 200 hears since they became a British Colony. He planted a flag in the sand on the beach and claimed it for his tribe.
I think Might is Right about figs!
Being its Thanksgiving, be a pilgrim & invite some Indians to dinner. hint
Enaging post pad mode…NOW!
“But we live here!”
“But you don’t have a flag!”
I mean, what Columbus did with America
What did he do? He discovered America. We know about her existence now, but it was unknown to people where he came from, at the time. By itself it is legal, it was legal in his time (1492).
was legal at the time?
to claim land for the crown, even discovered by chance, was not only legal, but very honorable.
America did not claim the Moon for a host of entirely different reasons, one of them being huge tax liability (the gravity on the Moon is less than here, but real estate taxes are high).
The real problem was that not one astronaut could be convinced to go back and be the Governor of the State of The Moon. Who can blame them? The golf courses up there really suck 
Do Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving?
[Matrix quote]
-What do you need?
-Guns. Lots of guns.
[/Matrix quote]
Well, like most questions regarding what people do,
that depends.
Thanksgiving does not (deliberately) celebrate the domination of North America by Europeans. It is a day set aside to give thanks for whatever good things have occurred over the past year (particularly those big things that have allowed us to survive, such as a good harvest).
In this tradition, it is roughly equivalent to various “thanksgiving” and “harvest festival” celebrations that are held in many cultures throughout the world.
The idea that the Pilgrims celebrated the “first” Thansgiving inviting the Indians who had helped them survive is basically a bit of American myth-making. The Pilgrims did, indeed, celebrate after a successful harvest ensured that they would be more likely to survive the upcoming winter, but it did not become an annual feast that has been handed down to us, today. The “first” Thanksgiving was not their last or only such celebration, but the event never became an actual culturally-embedded tradition. (It would not surprise me to discover that as Puritan influence increased in the Massachusetts Colony, the events were suppressed as too pagan–but I do not know that that actually happened.)
Rather, after Lincoln declared the first nationally proclaimed day of Thanksgiving, various writers went back, dug up the stories of the Pilgrim feast, and announced that Lincoln’s holiday was carrying on that (non-existent) tradition.
How about the indians? Well, most indian nations that depended on agriculture had harvest festivals just as the Europeans did. Since the fourth Thursday of November is the day set aside for that event in the U.S. (and since most indians are not specifically in agricultural “cultures” any more), most of them celebrate with all the other U.S. citizens. A few who have held to their own traditions and a few who have been offended by the mythological linkage between the Pilgrim feast and Lincoln’s holiday ignore the national event and either hold their own feasts at their own time or ignore the event altogether.
As I said, it depends.
I’m sorry, this is a tad off-topic. Either I’ve had too much coffee this morning, or I didn’t get enough sleep last night.
Two times I read that line and read ‘was it legal at the time? to claim the land for the clown’.
I don’t know, pretty stupid, but seeing as it’s Thanksgiving here today, I thought my reading gaff was kinda funny.