Yes, Christopher Columbus did some good, including:

• He introduced potatoes, tomatoes, avocados, corn, peanuts, tobacco and pumpkin to Europe. And he introduced apples, bananas, oranges, coffee, grapes, rice, smallpox, malaria and wheat to America. Leif Erikson didn't do that circa 1000. And if Columbus hadn't done it in the 1490's, it may have been several more years, perhaps decades, before Europeans tasted potatoes and tomatoes.

Like Columbus, Adolph Hitler also did some good, including:

• He supported the most powerful anti-smoking campaign in the world during the 1930s and early 1940s, which was far ahead of its time. He was also vegetarian (like his contemporaries Einstein and Gandhi) and advocated plant-based eating. Given that a recent (2018) University of Oxford study called such diet "the single biggest way to reduce our environmental impact," Hitler's plan to ban slaughterhouses would have been a godsend for our planet and human health.

The point is: All people have the potential to do both good AND bad. Yes, even the worst among us is capable of doing good as well. Which side we lean towards is ultimately a choice. But those who choose to commit crimes against humanity, like Hitler and Columbus, shouldn't get holidays named after them. That's why there isn't a Hitler Day, and there shouldn't be a Columbus Day.

Have you ever wondered why we call Native Americans "Indians"?

It's because according to Christopher Columbus's calculations (which his "heroic" voyage was based on), he believed the world to be much smaller than it actually is. So when he stumbled on a Caribbean island, he insisted that he was near India, and called the inhabitants "Indians."

Keep in mind that the Caribbean is on the complete opposite site of the world from India. You literally cannot be more lost than being on the opposite side of the world from where you think you are.

Regardless, Columbus's primary interest was gold, and his "heroic explorations" ended when he discovered that Caribbean "Indians" were "as good as gold" because they could be sold as slaves for gold, or enslaved to collect gold. Thus began the genocide of native cultures in this part of the world.



As for Columbus's accomplishments as an "explorer", keep in mind that Leif Erikson landed in North America (the actual continent) around 500 years before Columbus landed on that Caribbean island. There wasn't anything new about Columbus's ability to sail a boat, or anything heroic about his ability to get lost.

The words of Christopher Columbus:
"It is possible... to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell... Here there are so many of these slaves... that although they are living things they are as good as gold..."

From "A People's History of the United States"
"In the year 1495, [Columbus's men] went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred [native] men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale..."

Columbus's primary interest was gold, and he discovered that the Caribbean people were "as good as gold" because they could be sold for gold, or enslaved to collect gold.

From a letter written by Christopher Columbus:
"It is possible... to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell... Here there are so many of these slaves... that although they are living things they are as good as gold..."

From "A People's History of the United States":
"In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where [Columbus] and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death."

"In the year 1495, [Columbus's men] went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred [native] men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale..."

From "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542)"
"They tortured him... put burning tallow on his belly, pinned both his legs to poles with iron hoops and his neck with another and then, with two men holding his hands, proceeded to burn the soles of his feet. From time to time, the commander would look in and repeat that they would torture him to death slowly unless he produced more gold."

"Bobadilla [the governor who arrested Columbus and sent him back to Spain in chains] reported to Spain that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola. The 48-page report, found in 2006 in the national archive in the Spanish city of Simancas, contains testimonies from 23 people, including both enemies and supporters of Columbus, about the treatment of colonial subjects by Columbus and his brothers during his seven-year rule. According to the report, Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery... Testimony recorded in the report stated that Columbus congratulated his brother Bartolomeo on "defending the family" when the latter ordered a woman paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue cut out for suggesting that Columbus was of lowly birth."

More details of torture

Source

"As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape. On Haiti, sex slaves were one more perquisite that the Spaniards enjoyed. Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500, "A hundred castellanoes [a Spanish coin] are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten [years old] are now in demand."
– From "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James W. Loewen

"... I captured a very beautiful Carib [girl], whom [Columbus] gave to me, and with whom... I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it... I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears... we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of [whores]."
– From "American Holocaust" by David E. Stannard

• "A man would be invited to choose from among the fifty or a hundred young girls the one he most fancied and she would then be handed over in exchange for wine or oil or vinegar, or for a side of salt pork."
• "One Spaniard, who wished to satisfy his lust on a young girl, took out his dagger and cut off the hand of the girl's mother who was trying to wrench her from his grasp."
– From "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542)" by Bartolomé de las Casas

WATCH: "Happy Taino Genocide Day"

Historian Matthew Dennis:
"Within 50 years of 1492, the Greater Antilles and Bahamas saw their population reduced from an estimated million people to about 500."

Pulitzer Prize-winning, Harvard Historian Samuel Eliot Morison:
"The cruel policy initiated by Columbus... resulted in complete genocide."

From "Columbus: The Four Voyages":
"The Indians... plunged off cliffs, they poisoned themselves with roots, and they starved themselves to death. Oppressed by the impossible requirement to deliver tributes of gold, the Indians were no longer able to tend their fields, or care for their sick, children, and elderly. They had given up and committed mass suicide to avoid being killed or captured..."

Catholic Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas:

• "Indeed they invented so many new methods of murder that it would be quite impossible to set them all down on paper."

• "(In 1508) there were 60,000 people living on this island (Haiti and Dominican Republic)... So from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it."

• "After a day or two had gone by, several victims surfaced, soaked from head to foot in the blood of their fellows beneath whose bodies they had sheltered and, with tears in their eyes, pleaded for their lives, but the Spaniards showed them no mercy nor any compassion, and no sooner did they crawl out from under the pile of corpses than they were butchered. The Spanish commander gave orders that the leading citizens, who numbered over a hundred and were roped together, were to be tied to stakes set in the ground and burned alive."

From "A People's History of the United States":

"Among the Arawaks (Haiti natives), mass suicides began... Infants were killed to "save" them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the two hundred fifty thousand Indians on Haiti were dead... the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates... were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island."

"During the three or four months I was there, more than seven thousand children died of hunger, after their parents had been shipped off to the mines, and I saw many other horrors also. It was later decided to hunt down the natives who had fled into the mountains, and the subsequent hunting parties were responsible for carnage beyond belief."

"As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk... and in short time this land which was so great... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write..."

1) Human dismemberings

"I testify that I saw with my own eyes Spaniards cutting off the hands, noses, and ears of local people, both men and women, simply for the fun of it, and that this happened time and again in various places through the region. On several occasions I also saw them set dogs on the people, many being torn to pieces in this fashion, and they also burned down houses and even whole settlements, too numerous to count."

"With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim's neck, saying, "Go now, carry the message," meaning: Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains."

"Yet another member of [Columbus'] party galloped about cutting the legs off all the children as they lay sprawling on the ground."

"A Spaniard who was out hunting deer or rabbits realized that his dogs were hungry, and not finding anything they could hunt, took a little boy from his mother, cut his arms and legs into chunks with his knife and distributed them among his dogs."

2) Burning alive

"They made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their [life] would leave them."

"They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots... then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive."

"The Spaniards gathered a considerable number of local people and locked up as many of them as they could fit into three large buildings to which they set light, burning to death those inside even though they had done absolutely nothing whatever to merit such treatment."

3) Etc

"They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter..."

"One of his officers was responsible for the indiscriminate slaughter of many locals, hanging some, burning others alive, and throwing yet others to wild dogs, sometimes sawing off their hands and feet, sometimes pulling out their tongues or hacking off their heads. Even though the locals never raised a finger against the Spaniards, the distinguished commander knowingly allowed this spate of atrocities to continue unchecked..."

"One woman, who was indisposed at the time and so not able to make good her escape, determined that the dogs should not tear her to pieces as they has done her neighbors and, taking a rope, and tying her one-year-old child to her leg, hanged herself from a beam. Yet she was not in time to prevent the dogs from ripping the infant to pieces."

"They tore babes and sucklings from the mother's breast and played games with them, seeing who could throw them the farthest." "[Columbus's men] thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices of them to test the sharpness of their blades... two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."

There are first hand written accounts from horrified witnesses who were shocked by Columbus's brutal behavior. According to these accounts, his actions were by no means the way "things worked" back then. Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas wrote "Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it."

Standards of human decency have never included mass murder, rape, torture, infanticide, dismembering or burning peaceful people alive. There's very good reason why Columbus was eventually arrested, sent back to Europe in chains, and put in prison for what he'd been doing in the Caribbean. And even though he eventually engineered a "pardon" for his crimes, he was forbidden from governing anywhere ever again.

Related: Pope Paul III forbade enslavement of Indigenous people.

If Columbus had "discovered" the North American continent in 1492, the ethnic composition here today would almost certainly look more like Mexico (where Spaniards quickly "mixed" with natives) or Haiti (where native populations were quickly decimated by Spaniards and then completely replaced with African slaves).

Even without the head start that a 1492 Columbus landing would have given Spain, the United States still eventually had to fight the Spanish-American War (to remove Spain's influence from the Caribbean) AND the Mexican-American War (to remove Spanish influence from California/Texas).
Look at this map of what was happening even without the head start that a Columbus "discovery" would have provided Spain.

In other words, if Christopher Columbus had "discovered" the North American continent in 1492, there wouldn't be a "United States" today, and many (likely most) Americans of Northern European descent wouldn't even be here. So the "we wouldn't be here if it weren't for Columbus" argument for observing Columbus Day really doesn't make any sense.

The Knights of Columbus is a global Catholic fraternal service order, founded in 1882, that supports numerous social/political efforts.

Columbus Day was initially started in the late 1800's as a strategy to reduce discrimination against Italian immigrants by associating them with the heroic "discoverer of America." And that strategy was quite effective. Noting that effectiveness, the Knights of Columbus eventually persuaded President Roosevelt to proclaim Columbus Day a federal holiday in the 1930's, in exchange for Italian votes.

The full story is a bit longer and crazier, but that's the gist of how Columbus Day came to be.

Unfortunately, that whole effort was based on fake history. Real history reveals that Columbus Day never should have been a thing. Rather, it shows that the second Monday in October has always been Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Fortunately, discrimination against Italian Americans is no longer a significant issue in America. So while Columbus Day may have briefly served a useful purpose in this country, that ship has sailed. And with the truth behind the day now known, it's time to give the day back to those to whom it rightfully belongs. Doing so can be an honor.

Despite his use as a (non-British) mascot during America's war for independence from Britain (which got D.C. named after him), Christopher Columbus remained a rather unknown person to most people until a fiction writer in the 1820's fabricated heroic stories about him as a scheme to sell books. That storybook image of a heroic Italian discovering America actually proved useful in reducing discrimination against Italian immigrants in the late 1800's and early 1900's – yes, the myth temporarily did some good. Noting that initial benefit, lobbying by Italian special interests then persuaded President Roosevelt to enact the Columbus Day holiday in 1937 (in exchange for votes). Since very few people knew the truth about Columbus at that time, the holiday seemed like a fine idea to most.

But times have changed drastically. With more attention placed on Christopher Columbus by a national holiday, it's now well known that he was not at all a person to be proud of, nor someone we should be teaching children to honor. Rather, he symbolizes the beginning of one of the two darkest chapters in American history. And with the truth about Columbus now widely accessible, continuing to celebrate such a symbol of cultural intolerance and racist violence isn't going to benefit future Italian Americans, nor any Americans. Columbus Day's ship has definitely sailed.

Bartolomé de las Casas was a Catholic Bishop who had immigrated to Haiti with his father when he was about 18. Though he initially participated in the atrocities being committed against the "Indians," in 1515 he reformed his views and began advocating for them. Much of what we now know about real life under Columbus's reign of terror comes from his writings. Two of his books are excerpted below: • "They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords..."

• "They spared no one, erecting especially wide [gallows] on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burn them alive thirteen at a time."

• "Yet another member of [Columbus's] party galloped about cutting the legs off all the children as they lay sprawling on the ground."

• "Indeed they invented so many new methods of murder that it would be quite impossible to set them all down on paper."

• "[The natives] are also among the poorest people on the face of the Earth, they own next to nothing and have no urge to acquire material possessions. As a result they are neither ambitious nor greedy and are totally uninterested in worldly power."

• "All those who could do so took to the hills and mountains in order to escape the clutches of these merciless and inhuman butchers, these mortal enemies of human kind trained hunting dogs to track them down. Wild dogs who would savage a Native to death as soon as look at him, tearing him to shreds and devouring his flesh as though we were a pig."

• "A Spaniard who was out hunting deer or rabbits realized that his dogs were hungry and not finding anything they could hunt, took a little boy from his mother, cut his arms and legs into chunks with his knife and distributed them among his dogs."

• "After a day or two had gone by, several victims surfaced, soaked from head to foot in the blood of their fellows beneath whose bodies they had sheltered and, with tears in their eyes, pleaded for their lives, but the Spaniards showed them no mercy nor any compassion, and no sooner did they crawl out from under the pile of corpses than they were butchered. The Spanish commander gave orders that the leading citizens, who numbered over a hundred and were roped together, were to be tied to stakes set in the ground and burned alive."

• "One of his officers was responsible for the indiscriminate slaughter of many locals, hanging some, burning others alive, and throwing yet others to wild dogs, sometimes sawing off their hands and feet, sometimes pulling out their tongues or hacking off their heads. Even though the locals never raised a finger against the Spaniards, the distinguished commander knowingly allowed this spate of atrocities to continue unchecked, directed as it was to terrorizing the local people into doing his bidding and into bringing him gifts of gold or other precious objects."

• "A man would be invited to choose from among the fifty or a hundred young girls the one he most fancied and she would then be handed over in exchange for wine or oil or vinegar, or for a side of salt pork."

• "One woman, who was indisposed at the time and so not able to make good her escape, determined that the dogs should not tear her to pieces as they has done her neighbors and, taking a rope, and tying her one-year-old child to her leg, hanged herself from a beam. Yet she was not in time to prevent the dogs from ripping the infant to pieces."

• "I testify that I saw with my own eyes Spaniards cutting off the hands, noses, and ears of local people, both men and women, simply for the fun of it, and that this happened time and again in various places through the region. On several occasions I also saw them set dogs on the people, many being torn to pieces in this fashion, and they also burned down houses and even whole settlements, too numerous to count."

• "They tortured him with the strappado, put burning tallow on his belly, pinned both his legs to poles with iron hoops and his neck with another and then, with two men holding his hands, proceeded to burn the soles of his feet. From time to time, the commander would look in and repeat that they would torture him to death slowly unless he produced more gold." • "With my own eyes I saw Spaniards cut off the nose and ears of Indians, male and female, without provocation, merely because it pleased them to do it... Likewise, I saw how they summoned [the chief rulers] to come, assuring them safety, and when they peacefully came, they were taken captive and burned."

• "They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter..."

• "They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots... then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive."

• "With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim's neck, saying, "Go now, carry the message," meaning: Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains."

• "They made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their [life] would leave them."

• "The Indians were totally deprived of their freedom and were put into the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitude and captivity which no one who has not seen it can understand. Even beasts enjoy more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the field."

In his biography of Adolf Hitler, Pulitzer Prize winner John Toland describes how Hitler was inspired by America's Indian reservation system, and "often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages." America's genocidal policies regarding native people were well-studied by the Nazis, because, as The New Yorker put it, "America's knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated."

Strategies of ethnic cleansing used against Native Americans have included starvation, brutal death marches and massacres, as well as eradication of culture through boarding schools and religious suppression, forced land dispossession and economic conversion, and other cultural assimilation. Watch this short documentary. So the genocide of Native Americans and their cultures certainly didn't end with Christopher Columbus. However, Columbus is the major symbol of that genocide's beginning. It was a genocide that, like every other, was based on self-serving assumptions of superiority that we now know to be absurd. Renaming Columbus Day doesn't change that history – history can't be changed. Rather, renaming is a conscientious side effect of remembering true history. Such remembering can be uncomfortable, but as the saying goes: we must know our true history if we're to avoid the mistakes of our past. And we must stop glorifying the type of violent figures in our past that we don't want to be part of our future. We're all on a single family tree of life on this planet, and it's time for all to see that those who disregard the wellbeing of others in their search for personal wealth or power are eventually going to be remembered like Columbus: as lost a-holes.

For the same reason that there isn't a Hitler Day, there shouldn't be a Columbus Day.

Given that we've been unwittingly celebrating a holiday that symbolizes the beginning of Indigenous genocide in the Americas, the most logical way to rename the holiday is in a way that honors those whose genocide it symbolizes. Put another way, "The most important thing to do for those who have been treated unjustly is to treat them justly."

Why not "Native American Day"?

• "Indigenous Peoples' Day" aligns with a 1977 proposal by a delegation of indigenous nations to the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, and with Resolution #11-57 of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, representing 59 Tribes, to "Support to Change Columbus Day (2nd Monday of October) to Indigenous Peoples' Day."

• "Indigenous Peoples' Day" also aligns with what 100+ other cities, states, and universities have already done. Remaining consistent will make for a more efficient transition when this rename goes to the federal level.

• Indigenous people lived on this continent long before it was called "America" by Europeans, so there's inherent conflict in the term "Native American."

• The word "native" is often used to mean simply "born in a place." For example, everyone born in Colorado might say they're a Colorado native. There's no such confusion in meaning with the word Indigenous.

Having both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day on the same day would be like having simultaneous holidays for Adolph Hitler and Holocaust Remembrance. Even if it's renamed to Italian Heritage Day, that's like having a German Heritage Day on the day Hitler started exterminating Jews – it makes no sense, and would remain offensive to many on both sides.

The actual priority here is to rename (i.e. replace) Columbus Day – to stop celebrating the man who initiated Indigenous exploitation and genocide. While establishing an Italian Heritage Day is a great idea, it must not be on the day that marks the beginning of centuries of Native American oppression. If such a celebration is not about Christopher Columbus, then there shouldn't be any problem with having the celebration on a different day.

Note that we do already have Valentine's Day on February 14, and Saint Valentine was Italian. Coincidentally, Galileo Galilei (the Italian father of modern science who risked a prison sentence to give the world scientific truth) has a birthday on February 15th. How about an Italian Heritage Week? Isn't Italian culture more appropriately associated with love and knowledge, than greed and genocide?

Also, let's not forget that our entire continent and country are named after an Italian: Amerigo Vespucci (the cartographer who discovered the truth that this continent is not India). Some would call that an honor.

What, Saint Valentine, Galileo and Vespucci weren't Americans? Neither was Columbus. Columbus was a pillager of America.

Given what we now know, saying that "Indigenous People deserve to have their own day" on a "non-Columbus Day" is manipulative. Given what we now know, Columbus's landing in the Bahamas in 1492 has very, very little to do with Italian American history. Rather, that day in 1492 has everything to do with Native American history. It was an event that has rippled through Native American lives in devastating ways for centuries.

In short, the second Monday in October has always been Indigenous Peoples' Day. Those who have suffered genocide, mass exploitation, mass rape, and oppression for centuries since Columbus's landing are the ones for whom the day has true significance.

We all understand that Italian Americans suffered discrimination during a period of American history, and that celebrating Columbus and Columbus Day provided benefit in reducing that discrimination and suffering, which is great. But any additional benefit, along with Columbus's myth, is now gone. And it's time to give the day back to those to whom it belongs. Doing so can be an honor.

All races, ethnicities and cultures deserve to be honored – all have contributed to what this country is, all have made sacrifices, and all have suffered in this country at times. However, how many have been assigned a federal holiday? The Chinese helped build much of the Transcontinental Railroad, but they weren't given a federal holiday to honor that contribution. The Japanese were held in internment/concentration camps during WWII, but their plight wasn't commemorated with a national day of recognition. Can you imagine our health care system, or our food and agriculture industries, without the contributions of Mexican Americans and other Latinos? And recent generations may not remember, but the Irish and Germans experienced discrimination during periods of immigration, just as Italians did. Yet none of these groups are recognized by federal holidays.

Sure, we enjoy St. Patrick's Day and Oktoberfest, Cinco de Mayo festivals and Chinese New Year parades. And it would be great for Italian Americans to establish a cultural heritage day to honor their significant contributions to American history. But in light of what we now know about Columbus initiating genocide, honoring Italian Americans by celebrating Columbus is similar to honoring German Americans by celebrating Adolph Hitler. Some Americans may choose to celebrate such men privately, but they're not men that all Americans should be obligated to celebrate. *Besides Italians, there is one other ethnicity/race that might be said to have a federal holiday, which is African Americans who are honored with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. However, most of us would agree that African Americans experienced a uniquely difficult "immigration experience" in America. And unlike Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader who stood for change that reformed the mindset of the American people, and serves as an excellent role model for all of us. Also unlike Columbus, MLK Jr. set foot on this continent.

**There's only one other ethnic group whose mass-mistreatment on this continent approximates the mistreatment of African Americans, and that's Native Americans. The difference is that natives were more likely to be exterminated as externalities than bred as commodities – so there are fewer left to tell their tale. All the more reason for a day of remembrance.

In his book "Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography" (ISBN 9780385420532) Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer John Toland explains that Hitler was inspired by America's Indian reservation system and "often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages..."

Mass grave for slaughtered Native Americans (including 200 women and children):


More:
NewYorker.com
St. John's Law Review

*Although there continue to be deniers of both the Jewish and Native American genocides, the evidence that both took place is overwhelming.

While any decision about an Italian Heritage Day should be made by Italian Americans, there are definitely many Italians more worthy of celebration than Columbus. Here are a few names you may recognize:

1) Galileo Galilei: Risked a prison sentence in order to give the world the scientific truth that the Earth revolves around the sun. Note that Galileo's birthday is February 15, the day after Valentine's Day. And Saint Valentine was from Rome, the capital of Italy. How about an Italian heritage week? Isn't Italian culture more appropriately associated with love and knowledge, than greed and genocide?

2) Amerigo Vespucci: The first European to understand (unlike Columbus) that North and South America were actual continents, and not part of Asia/India. Furthermore, our entire country and continent are named after him.

What, Galileo and Vespucci weren't Americans? Neither was Columbus.

3) Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci: Italian immigrant (lived in New York) now recognized as the true inventor of the telephone. It wasn't Alexander Graham Bell (nor Steve Jobs, as some today believe).

If Congress enacted a federal holiday to celebrate Adolph Hitler for his contribution to American culture of conceiving the Volkswagen Beetle, and simply gave you the option of not honoring him by instead going to work on that day that everyone else gets off, would you be okay with that?

You may not identify with Hitler's Holocaust, but just imagine some similar scenario in which your family, friends, and community/culture were systematically exterminated for centuries. How would you feel about your new community celebrating the person who initiated their extermination?

There are first hand written accounts from horrified witnesses who were shocked by Columbus's brutal behavior. According to these accounts, his actions were by no means the way "things worked" back then. Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas wrote "Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it."

The standards of human decency that oppose mass murder, mass torture, and mass rape are not at all new. They were far from being legal behavior even in the 1490's. That's why Columbus was eventually arrested, sent back to Europe in chains, and put in prison for what he'd been doing in the Caribbean. And even though he eventually engineered a "pardon" for his crimes, he was forbidden from governing anywhere, ever, again.

As history professor Jeffrey Burton Russell explains, "no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat." Greek scholars had mathematically proved the world to be round well over a thousand years before Columbus was born, and it was accepted as very common knowledge by the 1400's.

As for physically proving the world to be round by sailing around it, Columbus might have done that if he had reached India. But he wasn't even close to India. Regardless, he had no interest in such an accomplishment. His interests were finding gold and selling slaves.

*It was in 1522 that eighteen members of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan's crew were the first to circumnavigate the globe.

Christopher Columbus once referred to Caribbean natives as cannibals, but that was a story he fabricated to justify their slaughter and enslavement. At most, Columbus or his men forced natives to eat the bodies of other natives by starving them into doing so. Sadly, cannibalism is still mentioned in some YouTube videos as justification for cultural genocide of Native Americans.

The fact is that cannibalism has occurred throughout human history, among all cultures, especially during times of great starvation. There's fossil evidence that it may have taken place in Britain 2,000 years ago. It's generally accepted by historians to have occurred among American pilgrims just 400 years ago. And it also occurred less than 200 years ago in California when the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism while stranded in heavy Sierra snow.

The larger message implied by the cannibalism argument is that Native Americans were "savages" or somehow "less-than-human." But this has proven to be a ridiculous concept, likely spread to justify other self-serving injustices to Native Americans.

Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, a statue of King George III was taken down in Manhattan. Would we call that "un-American"?

Whether the removal of a statue (or renaming of a holiday) is appropriate depends on what it symbolizes. When Columbus Day was enacted in the 1930's, little was known about the real history behind it. However, we now know that Christopher Columbus symbolizes something we would not want part of our or our children's future... Tyranny, oppression, exploitation, slavery, torture, genocide... He was no Buddha.

For some people today, a proposal to rename Columbus Day may seem like a tampering with American tradition. But the fact is that Columbus Day wasn't enacted until relatively recently in American history. And it was only enacted as a result of political lobbying by special interests, based on false information. This proposal simply seeks to reverse that tampering.

Martin Luther King Jr. did not march against gay marriage. Nor did our Founding Fathers further oppress anyone with the Declaration of Independence. And although there was still a segregated military at the end of FDR's presidency, he did manage to outlaw federal hiring based on race, which was an important step toward completely desegregating the military (which his successor, Harry Truman, did).

While never perfect, good leaders take steps in the right direction. In this way, Christopher Columbus was nothing like Thomas Paine, MLK Jr, or FDR. He was a violent gold seeker who got lost and stumbled upon human paydirt in the Caribbean. He then ruled through tyranny, oppression and violence all the way up until his arrest, extradition and imprisonment by Spain.

The exact date of Columbus's birth is unknown. Columbus Day, the second Monday of October, is associated with Columbus's October 12, 1492 landing on an island in the Caribbean. Given what was to follow, what's now most appropriate is to transfer that day's honor to Indigenous people, the original occupants of this continent, whose mass enslavement and genocide we've been unwittingly celebrating for the last century.

In the 100+ cities where Columbus Day has been renamed, the renames were done through a vote of the city council. That's because voting on this issue is neither necessary, nor appropriate. Given what's now known about Christopher Columbus, this is a moral issue in need of leadership, not majority/mob rule. Christopher Columbus was the founder of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, committed genocide for gold, eventually went to prison, and never even landed on this continent. Would our city take a vote on whether to condone mass murder and human trafficking? Because given what we know today, that's what Columbus Day has come to represent.

Furthermore, you cannot systematically exterminate the majority of people who would vote a certain way, then take a vote on whether or not to respect those people, and call that democracy. It's not.

Finally, Columbus Day was not enacted by vote – it was enacted by misinformed leaders. And when new facts come to light that make a new direction morally obvious, leaders who are aware of those facts should do the right thing no matter how many of their constituents tell them to do otherwise. Without a willingness to do that, at times, democracy, at those times, becomes little more than tyranny by the misinformed majority.

The logic behind this statement completely contradicts the concept of "acting locally," which over a hundred proactive cities have already done. All major changes typically start at local levels – abolition of slavery, women's right to vote, right to interracial marriage, gay marriage, and just about all other legal reversals based on morality were initiated at local/city/state levels. While it would be great if Congress revisits its decision at some point, we don't have to wait for the rest of the world to change before we change. We can make our own decision based on updated information, as many other cities have done.

If any politician tells you that renaming Columbus Day is a federal issue, either they don't understand the politics of this issue, or they don't want you to understand it.

What one considers important is a matter of opinion. While things like fixing roads and ensuring public safety are of course important, some people feel it's also important to not have their children being taught fake history, and to not be honoring dishonorable people themselves.

Also, unlike road maintenance and law enforcement, this issue doesn't involve increasing anyone's taxes. There's no fiscal impact whatsoever. It's a straightforward matter of choosing between right and wrong, and updating some documents/calendars.

If only our grandparents had said that in the 1930's, we wouldn't be dealing with this issue today. In fact, many children nowadays find it extremely confusing that we (Americans living in the "land of the free") have a holiday to celebrate a slave trader and mass murderer who never set foot on this continent.

Our grandparents most likely didn't know the truth about Columbus in the 1930's, so the holiday's enactment seemed like a fine idea at that time. But many children today (either through updated education or the Internet) do know the truth. And for many of them, cognitive dissonance arises when we're still honoring Christopher Columbus.

The most confusing scenario at this point would be for our grandchildren to understand that we knew the truth, but chose to protect the lie. This is actually an opportunity to teach our children and grandchildren an important lesson: that it's okay to correct our mistakes of the past. We won't be able to offer them the same excuse that our parents offered us: that we didn't know.

"Cognitive dissonance" is the mental turmoil that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. For example, when children are taught to treat other people kindly while also being told to admire a murderer/torturer/rapist/racist, some of those children will experience cognitive dissonance.

1. Knowing the truth of one's history is important. Those who don't know real history, or who accept fake history, become prone to repeating mistakes of their past. Self-interested leaders can more easily fool them into doing so.

2. Most people can see the flaw and danger in the mindsets of Neo-Nazis who choose to continue denying the Holocaust and celebrating Hitler. But with an understanding of who Christopher Columbus actually was, that's what Columbus Day actually is.

3. Most would agree that we should not be teaching children to honor the man who established the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Nor should we be celebrating him as the great discoverer of a continent that he never set foot on, or of any place that already had millions of people living in it. Columbus wasn't a hero, he was simply willing to do anything (including committing crimes against humanity) to satisfy his greed. What resulted does have its place in history books, but it's not something to be honored with a holiday.

It's for the above reasons and more that we've asked our City Council to look at why over 100 cities have already renamed Columbus Day. Because it's clearly the right thing to do in our city as well.

The accusation that Indigenous Peoples' Day is an attempt to pit people against each other couldn't be further from the truth. The intention is to stop honoring a man who represents slavery and genocide, the epitomes of human division. Such honoring is hurtful to some, and dishonorable to us all.

Here's an example of pitting people against each other:

1. Because the actual date changes yearly, your city's Resolution should include language specifying that "Indigenous Peoples' Day shall be the second Monday in October of every year" or "[Our city] shall recognize every second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples' Day" or similar.

2. Any Resolution should also specify that such recognition is "instead of / as a replacement for any official recognition of Columbus Day by [our City]." Without that or similar language, the question may later arise as to whether Columbus Day remains on city calendars/communications. Given what Christopher Columbus is now known to represent, the removal of Columbus Day is just as important as the adoption of Indigenous Peoples' Day. Listen to: Reno | Austin

3. It's up to your city as to whether or not your Resolution makes other mentions of Christopher Columbus and/or Columbus Day. Some cities choose to sanitize their document of "negativity" for the sake of not offending any member of the current generation that still associates the day with Italian heritage. Other cities put more weight on the importance of explaining the reason for this change, especially for the sake of future generations. Listen to: Dallas 1 | Dallas 2

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