As we speak the US government is dropping bombs all over Syria. Yet when I bomb my neighbor’s house everyone gets upset! Which is it, America?
Is your point that bomber pilots are as bad as Columbus or something? Equating military action in Syria to the conquest of the Americas? Honestly, I have no idea what you’re trying to say here.
The point isn’t that the Spanish crown lacked hypocrisy or cruelty to natives - it is that, in spite of these things, they did acknowledge standards of what, “at the time”, were considered right and wrong.
CC transgressed against those standards. If he had not, there would have been no point in the “politics” - you can’t defame someone by claiming they did stuff that was virtuous or neutral “by the standards of the time”.
Certainly, in the modern day, CC ought to have been punished more severely than simply removed from governorship. But that was, nonetheless, a punishment- for what was seen at the time as his bad behaviour.
In short, even by the relatively cruel and rough standards of his day, he was castigated for his cruelty.
He received a slap on the wrist (removed from governing after telling the crown he was unable to govern alone) and was given funding for another expedition by the same people supposedly “castigating” him. That barely merits a -1 on the scale.
Where on the scale would you put the Shah of Iran? Or Pinochet of Chile? Because both of those men were brutal dictators that were supported by the US government, despite them committing acts that would be deemed atrocities by virtually every single citizen of the United States.
People have always been pretty content to look the other way when agents of their government betrayed their values, so long as it was happening somewhere else. That’s as true today as it was in the 15th century.
If the keystone to the argument that Columbus was considered exceptionally terrible is his arrest then the extremely lax punishment following that arrest is of equal importance. We have considerably more data by which to judge opinions on modern figures.
I don’t agree. He had what amounted to a royal commission investigating his actions, the complaints against him were substantiated, he was arrested and hauled back to Spain in chains. Yes, he was later released, but he was stripped of his governorship.
It is true that this was hardly condign punishment, but that’s not the point. The point is whether his actions were of the sort that offended against the morality “of his day” or not. None of the above would have been possible - even as a “political gesture” - if his actions were approved by the morality “of his day”.
Lots of people who committed acknowledged crimes, even today, ‘get off’ with relatively mild punishments, where those crimes were committed in the name of the state; look for example at the fate of the Nazis after WW2- no-one could possibly claim that the Western Allies though what the Nazis did was “okay” by the standards of the day, but the majority of them who were tried at Nuremburg and after received light sentences - only a few were actually hanged; ones useful to the various states tended to end up … working for them. For Chris Columbus, think Wernher von Braun - another pioneering fellow who was funded to explore new worlds even after everyone knew he had been complicit in terrible atrocities. 
He was released, had his wealth restored and was given financing for another voyage. The guy who supposedly horrified the crown with his actions was released and sent on another voyage for the crown. And, again, he was “stripped” of a governorship he had told the crown he was unable to manage due to health concerns and too much stuff going on. Francisco de Bobadilla was sent to take Columbus’s job after Columbus said he needed help doing it. Now, granted, Columbus getting fired probably wasn’t what ole Chris wanted but he seemed to be a fairly inept administrator regardless of any moral failings and any reason to get him out was a good enough excuse. Bobadilla’s report was written under the cloud of Bobadilla essentially saying “This is why I should totally keep this awesome job that Columbus used to have”. Is it 100% fabricated? Probably not. Is it ever exaggerated to help Bobadilla’s position? That wouldn’t be surprising at all.
Being bad enough to drum up charges for the initial (political) arrest puts him below the zero mark. The fact that the crown didn’t actually give a shit and sent him right back out to do his thing means he’s not very far below that zero mark. Not a great guy, not even an average guy but not history’s greatest monster either. Certainly not by the standards of the era.
Sure, and Jesus was supposedly arrested and then executed by the Roman government for his crimes. History’s Greatest Monster! 
My point being that, without context, “he was arrested” may sound more damning than it actually is. Aside from that, it seems to be the same points going around in circles so I’ll leave it at that. If you want to rate Columbus as a -25 on a scale from 1-10, it’s not much skin off my nose.
By the same token, the Americans employing Dr. Braun to work on the Apollo mission means that, by the standards of the day, the Americans “didn’t actually give a shit” about his use of slave labour worked to death to build rockets in underground death factories? That by the “standards to Americans of the day”, working Jews, Slavs and other ‘underpersons’ to death as slaves was, essentially, okay?
I don’t think so - rather, I think that governments have an immense capacity for looking-the-other-way hypocrisy in matters moral, when they think someone can do them a significant service.
Chris, like Dr. Braun, had what appeared at the time an extremely valuable technical skill - useful for exploring “new worlds” (even if in Chris’s case, it was mostly mere luck - the state could be forgiven for not knowing that). The state could, at one and the same time, abhor their excesses, and while holding their collective noses, employ them in what they were good at - exploration (or rocket design). The latter does not undermine the former; rather, it simply underlines the states’ self-serving hypocrisy. Something that, alas, has not changed much over the centuries: that states will put their self-interest above moral considerations.
That’s actually my point–as I’ve said, I have a very dim, Hobbesian view on humanity. I think the further back you go, the worse we were, because civilization requires lots of time, science, economic growth, technological advancement and political advancement. It is in fact my belief that the vast majority of people alive in Columbus’s day either did things that were gravely immoral by the standards of our time or held opinions that were gravely immoral. We have to remember that until modern time agriculture (depending on time/place) could take up anywhere between 60-90% of the population’s time and efforts. Peasant farmers don’t have the opportunities for mayhem that Genghis Khan, Henry VIII or Columbus did, but as people in those societies they probably were raised under a system of beliefs and behaviors that would mean if you transported them to the modern age they’d hold opinions that would be deeply objectionable by modern standards.
But this raises my core question–why are we singling out Columbus? My belief is he was not much worse than the norm of his time (I can name individuals I think were), the Native Americans he victimized would also be considered monsters by the modern standards. So too the great Native Empires later Spanish conquistadores destroyed, so too the conquistadores themselves.
Eh, based on the large history about colonialism I think you’re grasping at straws when you suggest Columbus got in trouble for his cruelty. I think he got in trouble for his incompetence and the fact the Spaniards living under his rule disliked him. The crown almost certainly didn’t care about much of his other behavior, especially since agents of European countries did that and worse over the next 450 years of colonialism and Imperialism with full impunity. Governments of the day disliked incompetence, but there is little evidence they cared about cruelty when it was done by a competent viceroy.
I agree with Tamerlane, and as I said, I rate Columbus -1 relative to his time. But I also do not believe his behaviors would give him the reputation that say, the leader of ISIS or Joseph Kony have today, or that Saddam Hussein had before he was killed etc. Those guys are all/were all seen as terrible monsters, the very worst of humanity. Columbus wasn’t seen that way.
Well -5 is how we view Hitler; so the Shah may be a -3, Pinochet a -2. Pinochet was a bad guy that killed several thousand people, especially earlier in his reign, to solidify his rule. But he ruled for a long time, and later on he oversaw economic prosperity and somewhat similar to the Castro brothers he didn’t have to actively maintain a “reign of terror”, he certainly oversaw one at one point, but it wasn’t persistent. Like I said, bad guy, still a -2, but I’m putting things in context. Pinochet also peacefully transitioned out of power (albeit with a golden parachute of legal immunity), which has to count for something.
The Shah I rate -3 because his secret police and general terrorizing of his people persisted throughout his rule, and he did not oversee a peaceful transition out of power.
That’s true, but conversely, “he was released with a slap on the wrist” may also sound more exculpatory than it actually was. Modern governments routinely excuse behavior in people acting on their behalf that is, by modern moral standards, totally unacceptable. I expect renaissance governments did the same.
So the children he sold into sexual slavery were monsters by modern standards? I haven’t heard that one. Or do you mean that if a group did monstrous things, that means it’s not as bad to do terrible things to individuals (and children) that are part of that group?
I don’t seriously think you believe this stuff – but I framed a response this way to point out how bad an argument it is, in my opinion.
We generally give young children a pass on ethical misbehavior, but I’d assume most of the ones who survived to adulthood were probably not people we’d consider moral by modern standards, no.
I never said that the Natives being evil barbarians justifies Columbus (also an evil barbarian) doing things to them. I’m saying by the standards of his time it was expected and common place–slavery was uncontroversial at this time in history. I’m saying people broadly speaking human beings in general were evil barbarians in the 15th and 16th centuries. I think you can certainly cherry pick a small minority of people who may not have been, but even they probably held gravely immoral views.
This is all about Columbus and the standards of his time, it’s not about “trying to shock modern sensibilities” with what Columbus did. Yes, Columbus slaved. Slavery is intrinsically linked to physical and sexual abuse of the slaves, it’s a universal aspect of slavery. Columbus stole from weaker people. Columbus killed weaker people. This was all common place and not seen as grotesquely evil by the standards of the time. Charlemagne was a celebrated figure in Columbus’s age, the great Christian vanquisher of the evil Pagan peoples of continental Europe. He did so through genocide.
Columbus was a product of his time, not an aberration like Hitler or Stalin.
I think you are going too far in the direction of seeing the issue through the lens of “colonialism” (that is, concentrating on the relations between the Spanish and the local natives). You forget that, if you actually read the account, one of the primary reasons the “Spaniards living under his rule disliked him” was that he was cruel … to them.
Sure, if the question is the narrow one of “did the Spaniards punish him for being cruel *to the local native Americans living in the islands where he arrived”? The answer would probably be “if Columbus had confined his cruelty to them, it may well have been tolerated”.
But he didn’t, and the narrow question isn’t the whole of the answer: that hypothetical cannot be now explored, for the simple reason that Columbus (and his brothers) exercised his cruelty more widely - allegedly inflicting terrible punishments on the colonials (as well as on the local natives). The former was, naturally, considered by the Spanish ‘of his day’ as of far greater consequence than the latter.
I fully agree Columbus would not have been given the reputation, in his day, of a terrible monster. He’s no Elizabeth Bathory, or de Rais. But I think it is inaccurate to claim he did not have a bad reputation, specifically for cruelty, under the standards ‘of his day’. This cannot be disentangled from his reputation for incompetent leadership (part of that cruel reputation was because he was allowing or approving the nepotistic infliction of terrible punishments by his brothers to ‘uphold the family honour’ - the Crown could well wonder what that had to do with the orderly and profitable running of a colony).
Indeed, the particular form his cruelty and incompetence took - nepotism, exaggerated notions of personal and familial ‘honour’, etc. - would have been very familiar to the Spanish of his time - it was a natural outgrowth of the culture. That didn’t mean his contemporary reputation did not suffer.
For all we know, they may have exceeded our standards of moral conduct. We actually have more evidence for that than the opposite. Columbus himself remarked that the people they encountered were very kind, generous, and peaceful. That suggests an exceptional tolerance for difference. As it is with all people, they probably weren’t angelic, but to assume out of hand that they were less moral that people today doesn’t make sense me. Especially since today’s people are a diverse lot ranging from homicidal nutjobs and hedonistic moguls to penniless monks and humble philanthropists.
For the vast majority of human existence, people have lived in relatively small, meager communities that relied heavily upon interdependent relationships and collectivism for survival. Morality standards are really nothing but rules that community members are expected to follow to keep things peaceful and orderly. Murder, theft, rape, dishonesty, etc are almost universally reviled mainly because they undermine community health and stability. Same goes for cruelty for small offenses and unfairness.
Bad behavior may be practiced among certain subsets of the population (like the rich and powerful), but that doesn’t mean the community at large condones bad behavior. To argue that morality standards have significantly changed over time, you need to put forth evidence that the most basic rules governing our social interactions are radically different in the 21 century.
If Columbus gets a pass from judgment because of the assumption that he was operating under the mistaken belief that native lives were of less value that Europeans, then what’s preventing us from saying the same thing about anyone who inflicts suffering on others? The people in ISIS who are killing people left, right, and center probably think infidels deserve all the punishment they get. Does this ignorance lessen their moral culpability or do we expect them to know better simply because its 2015?