Poor Columbus

I have made my peace with Columbus, which is to say I neither praise nor do I condemn him. I see no point in making him the whipping boy for the devastation and genocide that Europeans inflicted on the New World. After all, there were many others, like deSoto, who brought his pigs (there's your first introduction to our beloved bacon in our hemisphere) with their diseases that killed thousands of indigenous peoples and laid havoc on the North American landscape. I understand our traditional Eurocentric view of history with its fallacies and shortcomings and I welcome today's more sophisticated view of history. Let the scholars have at it, and they do have at it. All to the good: but let's let poor Columbus rest in peace. It wasn't all his fault.