Today is the observation of a holiday known as Columbus Day in the United States, and in recent years, as people know, many have accused the holiday's existence of being insensitive to indigenous people's right and plight.
Some have used the brutality of Columbian rule to discredit the fact that Columbus DID discover the Western Hemisphere. It's been claimed the Vikings did or that the Chinese did, when in reality, the Vikings only discovered Greenland, not part of North America, and yes they briefly landed at Newfoundland but didn't stay very long. The Chinese discovered the Russian far East, not the New World.
But to make out Columbus as being the first example of "brutal, racist Western Imperialism" is a gross oversimplification and overzealousness of the noble cause of anti-racism.
The fact is that 523 years ago, all empires, be it Spanish, English, Chinese, Khanate, the Caliphate, the Mughals, various African empires, or even the Mayan, Incas, white or black, globally northern or southern, practiced racism, slavery, religious discrimination, and dictatorship/monarchy. Human rights were unheard of in any of these places, at least by today's standards, or even the standards of 100 or 200 years ago. In fact, back then, the Caliphate's was by far the largest and most extensive. The Caliphate practiced slavery until the 20th century.
By advocating for the end of Columbus Day as a means to an end, we make the progressive cause look like a joke. We should be fighting for recent, not distant past events. Without Columbus to establish the first permanent settlements in the New World, we would not be here. There would have been no major civilization to establish itself outside the orbit of Eurasian Rule.
In reality, the Western Hemisphere has generally been more progressive. Even for the two decades more it took for slavery to be formally abolished, it was the European powers that imported the slaves here. Modern representative democratic ideals began here, as did various human rights movements. We had a grassroots abolitionist movement and fought a Civil War to abolish it; their monarchs crowed at them to do so, and instead, they moved their operations to colonizing whole continents. They had pogroms, genocides all over the place even before the Nazis; minorities like the Jews did not face the same fate in this corner of the globe.
Indigenous societies had it rough here, but how did they have it elsewhere? How about the native Siberians? The Tibetans and non-Han groups of the Far East? The Mfecane vs. the Zulu Kingdom? The pre-Islamic Egyptians (the members of the group who look sub-Sarahan; Anwar Sadat got called racial slurs, you know.)
I could go on...
We could debate the wisdom of the origins of celebrating him, or establishing the holiday in the first place. But to get rid of it after the fact would be a huge mistake. As a poster pointed out, the right has a tendency to deify, the left at times has a tendency to purify. Both are wrong.
So in conclusion, without Christopher Columbus, the advances made by civilization's westward move to a land free of the orbit of constantly warring Eurasian would not have occurred. Yet the brutality that existed before it would still have existed, likely without a counter that was developed largely in this part of the world. Sometimes, you gotta celebrate the counterfactual. So Happy Columbus Day!