> All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.

It seems like you’re continually answering your own question about why we should no longer hold these people up on pedestals.

And revisiting horrible actions of historical figures that has taken the shine off them is hardly confined to Columbus, or even focused on him. I’d say the increased visibility of owning, raping, and murdering slaves by the American founding fathers has been more prominent.

> all explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.

What an interesting statement. You praise Armstrong for being an explorer, for going to the Moon, thus putting him in the category of "mostly pretty brutal bounty hunters".

I suppose you think the same of all those polar explorers, and of Jacques Cousteau and other undersea explorers.

Because it sounds to me like you don't have a consistent argument here.

> I'm not sure if he was uniquely horrible in any meaningful way. I know some folks try to argue this, but it seems pretty tenuous.

I've looked into it. It seems he was unusually horrible even for his time. And unique for his status on introducing the genocidal encomienda system to the Americas.

> You praise Armstrong for being an explorer, for going to the Moon, thus putting him in the category of "mostly pretty brutal bounty hunters".

I think you're just being purposefully obtuse here, as I don't think I'm doing that at all. The fact that explorers 500+ years ago were brutal conquerors is orthogonal to the fact that exploration itself should be celebrated.

> And unique for his status on introducing the genocidal encomienda system to the Americas.

I mean this to me just reeks of bias, mainly because it's quite well-known that indigenous peoples of the Americas were already well-versed in slavery, and encomienda is just slavery with extra steps. What exactly did Columbus "introduce" here?

> The fact that explorers 500+ years ago were brutal conquerors

You left out a few caveats. You mean that state sponsored explorers with the mission of bringing in money to the state, including by taking gold and slaves, were brutal conquerors.

Other explorers were not brutal conquerors. You need money to conqueror.

Pytheas, the Greek explorer who first visited what is now Great Britain and Ireland, was not a brutal conqueror.

Marco Polo, 800 years ago, was an explorer who not a brutal conqueror. The same for Ahmad ibn Fadlan, the Muslim diplomat and explorer who went to the Volga Bulghars, and for Ahmad ibn Rustah Isfahani, another Muslim explorer of Europe and Asia.

The Polynesian explorers of the Pacific were not brutal conquerors - there was no one to conquer. The same for the explorers that reached Iceland, the Canary Islands, and other uninhabited places. And for the polar explorers, and space explorers.

The fishermen who explored the Grand Banks in the early 1500s did so for fish, not to conqueror land or people.

The Roman explorers who went to south and east Asia, did not do so to conquer. They did so to trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_sub-Saharan_Africa points out the Roman explorations across the Sahara "had mainly a commercial purpose. Only the one conducted by emperor Nero seemed to be a preparative for the conquest of Ethiopia or Nubia."

Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the Italian explorer who entered the court of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, did not go to conquer the Mongols.

That's a good number of counter-examples, yes? At the very least it sure does seem like you need a few qualifiers to your blanket statement.

> I mean this to me just reeks of bias

I mean, your choice of picking Columbus's first voyage just reeks of bias too, so it's getting pretty stinky here.

> and encomienda is just slavery with extra steps

Really? That's the argument you want to make?

The point is that he's unique because he's one who introduced that abominable system to Americas.

Yes, there were other forms of slavery. Then again, there were other explorers. The world was well-versed in exploration before Columbus was even born. If you diminish the uniqueness of Columbus's brutality, you end up also diminishing the uniqueness of his first voyage.

Yes, someone else could have introduced the encomienda system. And someone else would have made the trip across the Atlantic had Columbus not managed it.

And someone else would have been the first person on the Moon had Armstrong caught the flu or been in a bad accident, thus preventing him from flying that mission.

> exploration itself should be celebrated

Because it's called "Columbus Day", not "Exploration Day", and because the holiday started not in celebration of exploration but as a sort of Italian Pride festival to overcome American xenophobia against the newly-arrived non-white/non-Protestant immigrants.

If you're going to rebrand it, that's fine. But since your idea of "explorer" is closely tied to some pretty horrid behavior, I don't think you'll get much support.

> I mean, your choice of picking Columbus's first voyage just reeks of bias too, so it's getting pretty stinky here.

But isn't that literally what Columbus day celebrates? His first voyage to the New World, not the man himself in particular, all the bad stuff he did, not even his later voyages necessarily. At least that's how I understood it.

> But since your idea of "explorer" is closely tied to some pretty horrid behavior, I don't think you'll get much support.

I very explicitly say the exact opposite (to quote myself: exploration and brutality are orthogonal), and at this point it's becoming obvious you're just arguing in bad faith.

> But isn't that literally what Columbus day celebrates?

No, not primarily and not historically.

President Harrison's 1892 proclamation praised Columbus because "Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment", and because of his "devout faith". He drew a parallel between Columbus's enlightenment and that of the recently introduced "system of universal education". See https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-335-4... .

While yes, it was held on "four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America", it was not a holiday for purpose of celebrating that voyage. It was a day to encourage the "patriotic duties of American citizenship."

It must also be seen in context of white xenophobia, and the 1891 lynchings of 11 Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans.

"As part of a wider effort to ease tensions with Italy and placate Italian Americans, President Benjamin Harrison declared the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Italian explorer's landing in the New World" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings

Now, that is not the modern-day Columbus Day. That effort started in the 1930s by the Knights of Columbus, a male-only Catholic Fraternal organization who wanted to promote a Catholic as being also American. They chose the name "Knights of Columbus" back in the 1880s because, to quote them:

"When founding the Knights of Columbus, Father Michael McGivney picked Christopher Columbus as a namesake for the organization because in a time when anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant feeling ran rampant, the American public embraced this famous explorer." - https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/articles/honoring-columbus...

Bear in mind that Americans mostly knew about Columbus through Washington Irving's best-seller "biography" about him. The scare-quotes there are because that book told falsehoods, like the idea that educated people at the time thought the earth was flat. It did not describe Columbus's brutal orders. That's because Irving's book was not written to be historically correct, but as a way to promote American nationalism.

"Literary critics have noted that Irving "saw American history as a useful means of establishing patriotism in his readers, and while his language tended to be more general, his avowed intention toward Columbus was thoroughly nationalist"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Life_and_Voya...

Furthermore, in 1882 when the KoC started, the US was finishing it's own conquest of the native population, and looking towards expanding its own (short-lived) empire, which by 1900 included Cuba and the Philippines.

So it's not like Americans at that time were against violent attacks on people they considered savages. They were doing something similar!

Again, very little of this is a celebration of exploration. It's using that one event as a hook to promote that Italian immigrants and their descendants, and Catholics, can be patriotic Americans.

> to quote myself: exploration and brutality are orthogonal

To quote you: 'All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.'

That is not true about explorers.

Your discussion about orthogonality is that someone can be an explorer and be a brutal bounty hunter, and those two can be separate.