LogFAQs > #958932374

Mead posted...

he was a sadistic colonialist and shouldnt be celebrated as an individual

To be fair, there are very few people in history who should be celebrated as individuals. Even the people we tend to to think of as being above reproach.

Gandhi was apparently a bit of a creepy pervert. Mother Teresa was apparently kind of a racist. Most of the Founding Fathers either owned slaves, or were okay with the idea. MLK was apparently an adulterer, viewed by any of his own people in his own time as a bit of a demagogue and a sell-out, and it was mostly only his assassination/martyrdom and the fact that he was seen as the "safe" icon for the black rights movement that led to a lot of his flaws being sterilized.

Name a "great person" from history, and odds are you can come up with plenty of reasons why we shouldn't revere them at all. At best, they were "merely human", at worst, they were kind of monsters who just happened to do something that benefited future generations in some way.

Like it or not, regardless of whether Columbus "discovered" anything or how he treated the people he found, nearly every single facet of the modern world and our lives in it exist solely because of him. His expeditions are what spurred the Spanish exploration of the New World, which in turn spurred European exploration, development, and colonization in general. It's entirely possible to argue that there isn't a single human being who lived during the last 500 years (give or take an extra 30 years) who had as large an impact on the world as we know it as he did.

If you could travel back in time and murder him as a child, there's a very significant chance that everything we know and value in the modern world simply wouldn't exist. Sure, it's possible that someone else would have made an extremely similar expedition at precisely the right time when conditions were perfectly favorable to set the same events in motion, but it's just as likely (if not more so) that Europe would be a backwater science would be stunted, medicine wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced, and most people would still be struggling along in an agriculturally-focused mercantile world without industry, let alone technology.

And there wouldn't be any white people living in North America feeling guilty about any of this shit.

And we've come up with stupid holidays to celebrate far less meaningful things.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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