Re: [Marxism] Chinese seamen were first round the world

["Lüko Willms" <lueko.willms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 09:21:37 -0500, Louis Proyect wrote:

> THE brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are
> iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492;
> Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to
> circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with
> this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.
>
> It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered
> by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He,

  Well, the "Indians" of the "New World" didn't have to discover
themselves, they were there.

  The above is formulated as if no human being did know about the "Cape
of Good Hope" before either Europeans or Chinese discovered it _for
them._ Those who lived there, knew about it.

   The new thing is that those discoveries helped to bring the world
together, interconnnecting the more or less separated centres of human
civilization, even if this was done, especially in the case of the
Americas, in a distructive way.

   By reading the above I was reminded of the two plaques found on the
wall of the visitor center of the Niagara Falls, Canadian side. One
explained that the name comes from some Indian language, the other
praised a French missionary as the first human being to have seen the
falls...


Yours,
Lüko Willms
Frankfurt, Germany
--------------------------------
visit http://www.mlwerke.de Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotzki in German



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