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Comment by zdean | Hacker News Reader

“I believe that, treated in this way, the wreck has the potential to play a major role in helping to further develop Haiti’s tourism industry in the future,” he said.

Columbus was a genocidal maniac mis-credited generally for discovering the 'new world' that had been inhabited for thousands of years prior to his arrival:

http://boingboing.net/2013/10/10/christopher-colombus-raping...

I'm not sure I understand why someone would seek to make his historical impact a tourism draw.

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You're going to be so mad when you find out what they did to Auschwitz.

The last part of the parent comment was rantsy, but in my opinion did not deserve to be down-voted past oblivion.

Back to your comment, yes Auschwitz outrages us, deservingly so, but this state of affairs has a lot to do with the fact that the perpetrators of Auschwitz lost. We hear a lot less outrage when the perpetrators 'won'.

Tourism is not always about celebrating mankind's greatest achievements or breathtaking vistas.

Sometimes it is reflecting on human loss and depravity. And that's OK.

Case(s) in point: Dark Tourism (visits to "dark" sites, such as battlegrounds, scenes of horrific crimes or acts of genocide), Disaster tourism (the act of traveling to a disaster area as a matter of curiosity) and, slightly related, Doom Tourism (emerging trend involving traveling to places that are environmentally or otherwise threatened). Also, Slum Tourism...

From wikipedia....

> Columbus initiated the enduring relationship between the Earth's two major landmasses and their inhabitants. "Columbus' claim to fame isn't that he got there first," explains historian Martin Dugard, "it's that he stayed."

Well, you can't deny that he was historically significant. There are tourist sites at Auschwitz and Dachau, after all.

It's probably too much to hope that the Santa Maria attraction will be a sober memorial, though.

"But it is Columbus the discoverer and explorer whom we truly celebrate and honor, not Columbus the civil governor..."

– Warren H. Carroll, Ph.D. Honoring Christopher Columbus. Faith & Reason, Summer 1992.

http://www.ewtn.com/library/homelibr/columbus.htm

Can't say in my neck of the woods we celebrate him or consider him an explorer since the place he "found" was already inhabited. It is basically like someone sailing from North America and saying they discovered London.

Funny that a "spammer"'s URL link is highlighted and underlined when they utter an unpopular comment.

It's likely that at least Italians and Spaniards will want to go see it.

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