Napoleon and Columbus have secured for themselves their seats in the pantheon of history and it will take longer than a thousand years for mankind to forget about them.
All these men built our world.
Though by that metric, all of written history is 300 generations (6,000 years), of modern humans about 30,000 generations. About 100,000 generations separate us from chimpanzees.
But yes, our timescale is pretty short by that measure.
The US and Canada genocided most of a continent over 2-300. We were killing buffalo herds and not even harvesting the meat just to deny them food.
Convenient to blame the non-anglo guy while most of the Spanish countries aside from Argentina didnt commit genocide to nearly the same extent.
The effort to blame Columbus ahead of our own presidents is all about protecting our own icons.
The question isn't who should sit in the pantheon of great men of history. The question is, should we have such a pantheon? Are we wiser for it? Better off?