Granted that Spain's (and Great Britain's and France's et al.) exploits in North and South America were rapacious, greedy, bloodthirsty, etc.MediumTex wrote:Columbus, by contrast left in his wake an enormous pile of dead bodies and another pile of people who were crippled physically and culturally as a result of crossing paths with him.
But even if they had focused on benign interactions with the people they found the end results would have been similar. Diseases would have still ravaged American populations, animal and plant introductions would have profoundly changed the American ecology, etc. Native populations would have adapted imported technology, profoundly changing their way of life.
There are, of course, specific individuals or groups of individuals that are conspicuously evil in this history, but the mere fact of contact profoundly changed the American future. And this is true of many human actions and interactions, even today.
American chestnuts, once one of the dominant trees in eastern forests are virtually extinct because of imported chestnut blight. Invertebrate invaders of all kinds (e.g. zebra mussels) now infiltrate American waters, inadvertently imported in ballast tanks. Striped bass, an east coast native, now inhabit the west coast and impact native salmon populations. Ironically the striped bass was imported to enhance sport fishing.
And remember, from polio's perspective, Jonas Salk is a bad guy
