This should be a Universal Day of Mourning. As I notes elsewhere today, this is the anniversary of the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal on June 7, 1494 which divvied up the so-called "New World" between them. Backed by the Pope it caused untold grief and misery for untold numbers that is still not over. Having just returned from Spain, including Toledo, where Their Catholic Majesties (Isabella and Ferdinand) went on a rampage against reason and reasonableness and loosed horror upon the world, one can't forget that Columbus' earlier journey was not one of idle curiosity and was everything but benign.
When this topic is broached in an appropriately condemnatory way, often some one or more persons will assert that surely the horrors that resulted would happened anyway with only a change in the players involved. But this cannot be asserted with anything resembling certainty. What is certain is what in fact did happen, which was the savage ravishing of the “new world” and its peoples.