The killing of George Floyd has inspired a campaign against memorials of historical figures.
In the US, statues of Christopher Columbus have become a popular target of protesters – and which, I'm certain, drives you to ask what has an Italian explorer who made four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1400s that opened up what European colonizers dubbed “the New World” got to do with BLM?
Popular literature may have romanticized Columbus (left) as the famous adventurer who sailed under the Spanish flag and who discovered America – in truth, he never even set foot in mainland America (the US today)!
Nonetheless, he represents the original white European oppressor, a hated symbol of the colonizing forces that would follow to victimize and brutalize the indigenous and African populations.
Make no mistake, Columbus was responsible for enslaving and systematically exterminating the native Taino population on Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
“Columbus's programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million by 1496. Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time of his departure – but his policies, however, remained, with the outcome that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542, only two hundred were recorded. Thereafter, they were considered extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totalled more than fifteen million at the point of first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known”. [Excerpts from Ward Churchill’s “Indians are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America”, Common Courage Press, 1994].
And just to give you a glimpse of the inhuman acts perpetrated by the Spanish conquistadors – they included hanging Tainos en masse, roasting them on spits or burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed and so forth, all of it to instil in the natives a "proper attitude of respect" toward their Spanish "superiors".
That is Columbus' murderous legacy of genocide.
Popular literature may have romanticized Columbus (left) as the famous adventurer who sailed under the Spanish flag and who discovered America – in truth, he never even set foot in mainland America (the US today)!Nonetheless, he represents the original white European oppressor, a hated symbol of the colonizing forces that would follow to victimize and brutalize the indigenous and African populations.
Make no mistake, Columbus was responsible for enslaving and systematically exterminating the native Taino population on Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
“Columbus's programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million by 1496. Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time of his departure – but his policies, however, remained, with the outcome that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542, only two hundred were recorded. Thereafter, they were considered extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totalled more than fifteen million at the point of first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known”. [Excerpts from Ward Churchill’s “Indians are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America”, Common Courage Press, 1994].
And just to give you a glimpse of the inhuman acts perpetrated by the Spanish conquistadors – they included hanging Tainos en masse, roasting them on spits or burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed and so forth, all of it to instil in the natives a "proper attitude of respect" toward their Spanish "superiors".
That is Columbus' murderous legacy of genocide.
That is why protesters take aim at Columbus statues.
On June 09, 2020, an eight-foot-tall statue of Columbus was vandalized and thrown into a lake in Richmond, Virginia.
On June 09, 2020, an eight-foot-tall statue of Columbus was vandalized and thrown into a lake in Richmond, Virginia.
The following day, police in Boston, Massachusetts received a report that a marble statue of the fifteenth century colonizer and genocidal maniac on the North End Waterfront had lost its head.
On the same day too, demonstrators spray painted statues of Columbus and Ponce de León, a Spanish conquistador, in Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida.
As reported by KXXV News Channel 25 on Thursday, red paint had been applied onto the hands and face of the 7-foot-tall Columbus statue in Bell Park near the Museum District in Houston, Texas. A piece of cardboard that read, “Rip the head from your oppressor” hung from its neck.
Also, on that day, in St. Paul, Minnesota, demonstrators toppled a ten-foot-tall bronze Columbus statue that stood in front of the State Capitol.
And NBC Chicago divulged on Saturday that a Columbus statue in the Museum Campus park in Chicago, Illinois was vandalized – the letters "BLM" (Black Lives Matter) and “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) were spray painted onto its base.
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