As I've already pointed out, the long term impacts of the European discovery of the Americas ultimately were positive,
You keep making things up and hoping nobody notices. Why?
1.
Europeans didn't discover the Americas. There were people living in them already.
2. Whatever the long term impacts of European
arrival on the Americas are, is irrelevant. They're not what is being celebrated. However, I wonder what other people we can celebrate with the same level of logic you've demonstrated in that argument:
Americans: - "We can celebrate Stalin, because without him, the USSR would have never fallen in the late 80s!"
Jews - "We can celebrate Hitler writing Mein Kempf because without it, Israel wouldn't have become a state!"
Blacks - "We can celebrate slave owners, because without them we wouldn't have reached the Americas!"
in that they created the culture and civilization which presently flourishes throughout the Western Hemisphere.
I'm pretty sure we're no longer a conglomerate of imperial territories controlled by European nations. So no, they didn't create the civilization which presently flourishes in the US or the Americas. We haven't been part of European civilization for
well over 200 years. So that argument fails on an even bigger level.
Without this event, you, quite literally, would not exist, and neither would I. None of the values or institutions our present culture holds dear would exist either.
Again, the simple fact of the matter is that the European discovery, and subsequent colonization, of the Americas was a major turning point in world history. It was turning point which has ultimately worked out as being in the best interests of both the Americas and humanity in general.
Is that not reason enough to celebrate it; if only for its positive impact on history, and not some of the more negative methods it utilized?
Good grief, this is the third time you make that ridiculously asinine argument. There is a long list of event without which none of us would exist without and we still don't celebrate them. We don't
celebrate events base on whether later history would or wouldn't have happened. We don't celebrate the Roman empire conquering what would eventually become Spain, England and France. Without Spain, there wouldn't have been any funding for Columbus. We don't celebrate Constantine's conversion to Catholicism. Without that, Christianity wouldn't have reached as far as it did as early as it did and thus set the stage for the crusades once it met up with the growing power of Islam on the Middle East. We don't celebrate those events. Why? Why is it those events aren't celebrated even though without them, there would have never been the conditions necessary for Columbus to even think about traveling to
Asia? So with all of that said, what have you tried to argue are the reasons Columbus Day should be celebrated?
1. Get over it.
Get over... what? An event which everyone acknowledges happened? Um alright.
2. History has winners and losers.
No kidding. I bet you it took a very hard look in the history books to realize that.
3. It's part of history.
No ****. So is everything else in a history book. That doesn't make it worthy of a celebration.
4. You're racist!
Funny. I don't agree with celebrating the accidental arrival of a murderous European who never reached North America, that makes me racist. You're getting desperate.
5. Without it happening! You wouldn't be here!
Um, what? There are literally millions of historical events big and small without which none of us would be here. We're not celebrating them all are we? Here's a small list. I bolded the events, so you won't get lost trying to determine how ridiculous your argument of "It happened! You're here because of it! That's a reason to celebrate it!" is.
Without
Spanish victory over the Moors, Columbus wouldn't have been funded by Isabela. Are we going to celebrate that event?
Without
Moorish conquest into Spain, the Castillians would have never fought a war with the Moors and Columbus wouldn't have gotten funding. Are we going to celebrate that event?
Without
Mohammed's conversion to Islam, the Moor's would have just been a group of disorganized pagan sheep herders who would have never gotten into Spain. Are we celebrating that event?
Again, the point is that
it happened and it led to this other stuff is not sufficient of a standard for why something should be celebrated. It's clear you can't even determine what Columbus did that was inherently positive. You can only point at the progression of history and say - well, the results were great and the civilization he created is like our own today! That's a silly standard to have because A) we no longer live in colonies B) we have repudiated through history any further attempts to colonise us and C) we literally have no direct relationship with Columbus' arrival to the Americas.
