Goodbye, Columbus: Seattle Commission wants name stricken from holiday

[Moonwalk]

66. The problem is that what exploration really led to was the wholesale slaughter....

...of native peoples through violence, exploitation, slavery and foreign diseases, not to mention wholesale environmental destruction that we're still paying for to this day, including European injection of plants and animals into landscapes that couldn't support them, to the detriment of the native, evolutionary balance.

You should check out the David Igler's podcast: "Beyond the Wild West: Violence and Death in the Pacific Ocean" in the History Section of iTune-U. It's one of the "California and the West" lectures put out by the Huntington Library. The number of native peoples genocidally wiped out thanks to European exploration is staggering and sickening, and I, myself, am hard pressed to justify it even in the name of "learning more about our world."

I mean, I'm all for scientific and cultural exploration, especially if done by naturalists who are respectful of the environment and native peoples they're studying, but the percentage of that compared to some five-hundred years of ignorant, arrogant, narcissistic and bigoted exploration for riches, greed and power is so minuscule as to make the idea that "exploration leads us to learn more about the world..." a laughable statement at best. It's sad that should be true, but it is. Hence, I find nothing laudable in Columbus' voyage leading to more exploration. It only brought out the worst in humanity, to the detriment not only of whole tribes and cultures of other humans, but the extinction of so many valuable environments and creatures.