Michael Ramirez for October 10, 2021

Yes, religion is often a curse…

I visited the Copan Ruins once in Honduras. No point just wanted to work it in.

No seriously, very cool place of ancient historical value. I do recommend visiting any of the dozens of Mayan ruins throughout Central America.

No surprise that Ramirez is trying to play to the people who think that by overthrowing their culture and displacing them with Europeans was a good thing for the natives. Maybe so, maybe no, maybe some of both… but lets not forget that it DID actually happen.

This is so completely inappropriate NTM irrelevant to U.S. history.

Wonder if Ramirez has read the Iliad. Or, for that matter, if he remembers Jephthah’s rash oath. Conservaties only read history with rose colored glasses.

This is disgusting. Is Ramirez not intelligent enough to understand that European peoples practiced ritual sacrifice. And let’s not forget genocide. They were really good at genocide.

Hey Micheal, the Libs only want to hear the “Woke” side of the story!

No problem with burning “witches” at the stake.

I’ll think about this when I watch Christians celebrate their holy days and remember the millions they’ve killed in the name of their god.

Yeah only 15 Million Aztecs died from the civilized Christian Spaniards. Much better than those pagan sacrifices. I also read that wearing clothes forced by Missionaries accounted for thousands more due to wearing wet clothes in South America.

What history is being sacrificed Michael? Everyone is well familiar with Columbus. Cortez, Pizarro, de Soto, Balboa and all the other murderous, genocidal colonials sent to the New World.

Republicans have been promoting human sacrifice by opposing COVID vaccination, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths of your fellow Americans in addition to untold suffering.

Yes Michael, I agree some of the practices from those ancient cultures are considered barbaric and shocking to us now-a-days, but we are doing the same thing when we accidentally strike countless of innocent people with drones in the Middle-East! There is blood on every culture even today if you think about it. What’s that? I ruin your Sunday? Oh I’m sorry! =/

In this country, the indigenous are the flock who follow the animal who unleashed violence and terror in America…in 2015

I See Ramirez is White-washing history by depicting all Indigenous People as blood-thirsty Aztecs.

Is this a statement against the religion of the indigenous people, or is it about taking a Holiday from a white man? The trouble is Columbus never found North America. There is some that think that North America had other long before Columbus. The only different is that started the conquest of the Americas.

This just proves how white remirez is

A very bad cartoon, one sided and very inappropriate. Indigenous peoples of the America’s had there own customs and beliefs as did Europeans. Columbus did not discover America it was all ready here. He enslaved the people of what now is Haiti. From all accounts he was not a man that should be revered by our country. This cartoon is revolting in its depiction of the America’s indigenous peoples. I do not believe in altering our history but Columbus Day should be renamed or at least not celebrated as such. I feel that a name that better fits this days celebration should be found. For example “The America’s Day” or “New World Day”. Something that fits both our European and Indigenous heritage. And how about renaming the District of Columbia also maybe “The District of the America’s”.

Still too bad can’t flag a comic at GoComics. Don’t try complaining to them, they send a totally inane response not addressing the issue at all.

They didn’t overthrow the Aztecs, they destroyed the Pueblo and many other indigenous people that did not practice human sacrifice. Christians have done so much harm in the name of evangelism. Ask Canadian 1st nation members.

One of Ramirez’s most hideous cartoons.

Looks like the republicans polices after Trump is elected again.

Now that is just straight up racist.

Ever hear of the Iroquois Confederacy?

Was genocide of Native Americans by Europeans any better?

American Pie claims this demonstrates Ramirez’s “genius” which is way over the top praise for a talented illustrator.

However, the toon has merit. It is all too common to romanticize and fetishize aboriginal Americans. There is much to learn from these cultures, both good and bad, but they had some pretty gruesome practices as part of their magically- inspired spiritual beliefs. Slavery was common, and women were often considered lesser beings. Yet, the warfare was sometimes ceremonial (e.g. counting coup). However, unlike our Killing Department, the indigenous people don’t appear to have sought ever more effective ways of killing others.

These cultures were quite varied, but shared a common trait. As pre-literate cultures, they had to pass along intergenerational knowledge orally, which greatly reduced their ability to learn and adapt to changing circumstances. They were still able to adapt to slower moving change, and were able to develop ingenious and insightful ways to cope with the realities of their world.

The American culture also has good and bad. And we must not be seduced into the false equivalence between a gory spiritual practice by some indigenous Americans and, for example, the embedded structural racism in America. The former sometimes used violent sacrifice to “appease” the higher powers. The latter combines fear and hatred in a myriad of hard and soft ways.

The Aboriginal Americans were humans, just like us. They naively trusted the European invaders to keep our word, which we often did not. In the final analysis, they were subjected to genocide, which is not in any way equivalent to a gory spiritual practice.

Yes, teach children about the Aztec spiritual practices, but place it in its correct spiritual context, which Ramirez does not do.And it’s fine to celebrate American aspirational beliefs. But don’t fetishize or romanticize them either. I’m looking at you, Pie.

Interesting take from Mr. Ramirez. From Wikipedia: “Ramirez was born in Tokyo, Japan, to a Mexican American father and Japanese American mother.”

Is this where the conservative cartoonists coined the phrase “Bleeding Heart Liberals” . . . ?

Yes, the Aztecs were cruel masters to the subservient tribes around them, but they were overthrown by Spanish conquistadors with major help from those tribes. Focusing on their cruelty does not deter from the genocidal impact of European colonization of the New World, even if much of that genocide was unintended (e.g., introducing smallpox and other deadly diseases to the natives on continents that had been free from them).

Flagged for being racist

The truth hurts, can not change history.

A short video on Cortes and his conquest of the Aztec.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hK0hMvN_5E

Yet, most of those practices had long been given up before the Conquistadors arrived in most of the Americas. There were and are far more indigenous societies in what we call the Americas that did not perform human sacrifices.

As twisted as this is, it’s still a fact

Ah, I see. This is why Ramirez became a cartoonist. He’s never read a book.

Now do Christopher Columbus torturing, enslaving, and murdering the Taino Indians in search of nonexistent gold, until the Taino were completely wiped out.

Columbus just cut off their hands, and other parts, to induce them to accept Christianity. Then we introduced them to our plagues.

Paul Colabufo

October 8, 2018

There’s lots of controversy around Columbus Day, and since I’m 100% Italian, I figure I should give my two cents.

You can’t have an opinion about Columbus Day without knowing something about Christopher Columbus himself, so lets take a quick look at his life …

He grew up in a time where the globe already existed, the existence of North America was already known in Europe, and people generally weren’t as stupid as we make them out to be.Columbus wanted to find a faster route to Asia, and his sales pitch was that Japan’s shore was only three thousand kilometers away to the West. In reality its about 20,000 kilometers away and there’s a little thing called North America in the way as well. Even back then people knew he was full of crap. Columbus was what we would call a science denier today.

Well, you can imagine how a science denier might be treated during the Renaissance in the country that birthed the Renaissance. He was basically laughed out of Italy. He was then laughed out of Portugal and England before Spain decided to finance him.

Columbus then sailed West, and he never found a fast rout to Asia, and he never discovered America. In fact, Columbus NEVER SET FOOT ON AMERICAN SOIL at any time in his life! He actually landed in what is today the Dominican Republic and found a peaceful people who lived in a society with no weapons.

Of course he decided to enslave them.

A few trips back and fourth to Spain and he worked out an agreement with the royals, he got to keep 10% of all the wealth he created for them.

His method of enslaving the natives was to come in with guns and weapons, capture hundreds of them, dismember them, and then march their dismembered body parts across the Island for everybody to see.

Yeah, he was that crazy. <pHis rule, as you might imagine, was no less gruesome. He was known for cutting off the body parts of people who displeased him and selling them into

Reich wingers sacrifice history with their suppression of Critical Race Theory lying about it and swiftly smearing it as they made it illegal to teach.

I’ll never feel guilty that the stronger tribe won.

Is that the Spanish Inquisition?

It’s not thrilling to cartoon a smallpox laced blanket is it, Michael?

The “noble savages” were often FAR less noble than some think.

Even what you portray is more humane and worthy of celebrating than what Columbus did to the Indigenous people of America.

Wow, not sure how to discern his point on this one.

Oh right! Because every other culture other than white Europeans where so enlightened, virtuous and on a completely higher metaphysical and moral plane