Is Christopher Colombus a victim of Cancel Culture?

[John Dule]

I will never understand the desire to brand Columbus as "genocidal." It is possible for someone to be a massive historical villain without slapping the word "genocide" on their actions, and the term simply doesn't apply to Columbus. Why bother piling that adjective on top of everything else? The man was a slaver and a brutal oppressor of native peoples; his crimes were so extreme that even at the time the Spaniards were shocked to hear of them. Despite being perhaps the best-remembered navigator in history, he was too stupid to know the correct circumference of the Earth and he went to the grave believing he'd found a western passage to India.

What he did not do (to my knowledge) is deliberately try to exterminate the natives. Columbus viewed them essentially as pack animals with whom he could do as he pleased; he wrote of them using paternalistic language and hoped to convert them to Catholicism. His treatment of them included forced backbreaking manual labor, as well as letting his men rape the native women. It did not, however, include death camps. The native people Columbus interacted with largely died of disease and as a result of his obscene brutality, but their deaths were merely side effects of his goals.

Columbus is one of the great historical villains, and his voyage set the tone for centuries of native enslavement and butchery. That doesn't mean he had the same goals or methods as someone like Hitler. But honestly, that doesn't make him any better. People need to realize that there are multiple types of barbarians and monsters out there, and trying to analyze who was "more evil" is just a waste of everyone's time. Hitler viewed the suffering of the Jews as his end goal. Columbus viewed the suffering of the natives with complete indifference, and did not care how much misery he had to cause to achieve his other goals. Both of these mindsets are reprehensible, on the same level as someone like Albert Fish or Jeffrey Dahmer.