America celebrating Columbus Day is like having Iraq celebrate George W. Bush Day.
Seriously. Columbus was a real psychopathic son-of-a-bitch.
When Ferdinand and Isabella gave Columbus the money and ships and people to make his voyages to the New World, they also gave him some instructions. One of them was "Be nice to the indigenous peoples. Convert them to Christianity, but do so with love."
Did Columbus do that? No. He maybe tried to convert a few of them, at swordpoint. Most of them, he just enslaved, killing, and raping, and chopping pieces off at will.
He was a shitty governor who not only abused the indigenous peoples, but his own settlers. His colonies never had enough supplies, had to deal with slave revolts (gee, I wonder why...), and Columbus reacted to dissent by hanging people and quashing rebellions with force.
Things were so fucked up that Ferdinand and Isabella sent one of their troubleshooters to deal with the mess. They told Columbus "I know, we're fucking Spain. We're gonna be storming the New World bearing the sword and the cross, and bearing gifts of smallpox blankets, but what you did was FUCKED UP! All the raping, and chopping people's ears and noses off, and murder for shits and grins, and feeding their bodies to dogs? We only brought chains, but we forgot the Hannibal Lecter mask!" That was the end of Columbus's third voyage - return to Spain in shackles because he was too fucked up even for Spain.
And we have a holiday for him... Well, now you know why our continent isn't named North Columbia.
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