Fro me it is philosophical. If I beloved I possessed an absolute morality and judged all of history by that morality that would make me god. Which Inam not. I am inherently fallible.
Clearly. In fact, most don't need to have it explained that those who excuse genocide might be morally fallible. I challenge "philosophical" though, as this implies the application of reason.
The dnger today is the new progessives presuming to impose a verbal and thought morality enforced by public re idicule. The new thought police.
Your thoughts are your own. Public policy is another matter. No one has ever threatened coercion over this issue, so far as I have heard. Have you? In fact, removing national holiday status would do nothing to prevent people from celebrating Columbus day as a private holiday. Indeed, I'm quite certain that "identitarian" or Italian-American groups would respond to such an action by making Columbus Day a much more important holiday than it had been previously. And no one would make any move to stop them. That would be obviously illegal and immoral.
Certainly Columbus did things today in the west we consider unacceptable, but I have no way to go back and judge him personally. Using yhe word eveil is subjective and biased in the OP.
The OP says that Columbus
wasn't evil, actually.
You sound like a man on a moral mission to seek out and destroy those who do not share your exact views.
Patently absurd. Politely disagreeing with someone, and backing up your argument with fact, is not the same thing as attacking them, let alone fatally. Grow a pair.
Hitler we comfier evil, but he arose in the context of his times.
You betray your political sympathies by only considering one part of the German population as the "context" of Hitler's life. He himself did not claim to hold the same views as most people who grew up in the same world as he, most especially not those of his eventual victims, who at the start of his life were every bit as much his neighbors as any other German. You should read
Mein Kampf sometime; he knew perfectly well that his claims were counter-cultural.
Columbus is an easy target to display your moral outrage on. Cheep and risk free. It makes you feel good and personally empowered as a moral authority.
What "moral outrage" are you even talking about? I haven't said anything about Columbus as a person in this thread. Just that he is guilty of genocide, and of accessory to rape, and that he trafficked in slaves, both of which are incontrovertibly true and based on documentary evidence from many sources including
his own letters. That, for me, is a perfectly valid reason not to name a day of the year after the man. I never said he had no good qualities. I'm quite sure he was a very amusing teller of jokes, a deeply pious man who believed passionately in the holiness of his personal cause, and good with the ladies; all sources agree on these virtues. Just as Adolf Hitler was a passionate artist with an uncommon proficiency for analytical reasoning, and in later life deeply devoted to his adoptive political family. These things are true, they just aren't relevant. I wouldn't want a national holiday celebrating Hitler Day either, even though, like Columbus, he shares an ethnic heritage with many of our citizens, was a war hero, and his actions ultimately resulted in great benefit to my nation and a massive expansion of our boundaries and material wealth. There is a huge distance between "hating" someone and worshiping them. Most people who have ever lived, live quite comfortably within that distance. I certainly would not, personally, describe myself as "hating" Cristobal Colon. I never even met the man. His actions, though, we should not give official endorsement to.
So, why the obsession on Columbus who was actually a minor figure in colonization?
Because we're
obliged to talk about him once a year, as long as there's a public holiday that comes along, and all our kids are dressing up as him and singing hymns in praise of his voyage. You are socially obligated to either go along with this anti-historical, anti-scientific perspective, or to challenge it. If you want Columbus to retreat to dignified obscurity... join the campaign to nix the holiday. His legacy, whether good or ill, will probably still be around, but very few people will be regularly upset about it. He will join the quiet ranks of the various other explorers, conquerers, physicians, butchers and saints of Europe's New World, largely forgotten outside of history classes but not reviled either. Onate, Fremont, De Vaca. No one vents rage on such men, as there is no reason to.
