Having cities named after Columbus, along with a holiday honoring him, is a national disgrace.

[stevenleser]

57. I have a lot of conflicting thoughts...

First off, my dad is from Germany and a holocaust survivor. Mom was from Panama and was part native/aborigine.

The aboriginal perspective, and the perspective of a son of a genocide survivor is obviously that Columbus has to go.

However, I will note that in Panama, where it is said Columbus once landed (at least in nearby Islands on the Atlantic side) Columbus is still well thought and celebrated. Panama's 2nd largest city is named Colon, which is his name in Spanish. https://www.thoughtco.com/how-did-colon-become-columbus-3079508

It's also true that in the 15th century, the kind of atrocities that Columbus is accused of perpetrating were actually minor compared to common practice all over the globe. Someone up-thread said we were engaging in "presentism". I wonder if that isn't true. One of the things that made the Nazi genocide so horrible, besides the obvious, was that in the 20th century we thought we had all moved beyond that kind of evil, beyond mistreating fellow human beings thusly.

There is no such thought about the 15th century. The Spanish Inquisition had just begun 14 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. The Jews were expelled from Spain the same year (1492).

Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978)" where she wrote:

The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls.

So that's the century before Columbus sailed.

As late as 1789 the punishment for a woman killing her husband in England was to be burned alive. In the 15th century in England, there were 280 rape cases with zero convictions. You could essentially rape with impunity in England at the time Columbus sailed for the new world.

In short, this was the Medieval period and there is a reason that accusing a person or country of Medieval-ism has a negative connotation. That being said, I am still not sure where I come down on this issue.