[notahacker]

To call Spanish treatment of native Americans 'genocidal' simply echoes the opinion of Raphael Lemkin, the guy who literally defined the term. I'm not sure your assertion that there was no mass killing in Spanish-conquered America (presumably the writings of the conquistadors and their contemporaries are part of the "indoctrination"...) is more intellectually respectable...

As for Columbus as an individual, there are certain circles that will argue that despite being the sort of bloke whose reaction to the natives' peaceful inclinations and ignorance of swords was "with fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever they want", who insisted on making good on that by deporting some of then to Spain even when explicitly asked not to and presaging the encomienda system with demands to find gold in greater quantities than the locals actually knew about, Columbus was a nice man who just wanted to make friends and religious converts who was unfairly maligned by his compatriots, just as there are certain circles that argue that Auschwitz was merely a temporary internment camp. And I've already acknowledged the unintentional role of diseases which helped Columbus and his compatriots depopulate territories with far more efficiency than the Final Solution, but it's more than a little difficult to insist that the forced labour and punishments and roundup of nine and ten year old girls to be used as sex slaves didn't play any role. The best thing that could be said for Columbus is that some of his compatriots were likely a lot worse.