Protests in America are getting more and more intense with each passing day. Yesterday, a group of protestors tore down a statue of European slaver Christopher Columbus and then set it on fire, other statue of him was thrown in a river, while another one was beheaded.
Christopher Columbus was the first European to arrive on the continent of America, and he started the onset of genocide, slavery, ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of this land.
Christopher Columbus statues torn down, burnt, and drowned in protest
A thousand protestors reached the Byrd Park in Richmond, Virginia where a Columbus statue had been standing for a century. They brought down the statue by tying it with ropes, and pulled it down.
Members of Richmond Indigenous Society were present at the scene, they said they support the Black Lives Matter movement, and then they smeared Columbus’ statue with red paint to signify the blood he had spilled in his lifetime.
Social activist Chelsea Higgs-Wise spoke to the crowd:
“We have to start where it all began. We have to start with the people who stood first on this land.”
There were powerful messages left by people
The pedestal was statue was marked with messages like “Black Lives Matter” and “Columbus represents genocide.” Another message stamped near the statue said “This land is POWHATAN land.”
The statue was dragged for 200 feet and then got dumped into the nearby lake.
On the weekend, the protestors in England had taken down the stature of a slave-trader named Edward Colston and dumped him into the nearby harbour where he used to keep his slave ships.
In Belgium, the statue of King Leopold II was taken down, painted red, and set on fire. Leopold II was a colonialist as responsible for slave trafficking and millions of deaths.
These are the crimes of Christopher Columbus
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Turtle Island, which was the name by which indigenous people referred to their continent before it was renamed to America after the Italian cartographer Amerigo Vespucci who mapped some of the areas here.
Columbus owned people as slaves, and he sold nearly 1500 people as slaves in European slave markets. He committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people, and got many of them mutilated and castrated.
He was also responsible for selling children into sexual slavery.
Christopher Columbus alone is accountable for the deaths of 3 million indigenous people who were murdered by his direct orders.
Yet, America still celebrates Columbus Day
In 1892, the US President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a day of celebration. In 1934, Columbus Day was turned into an annual thing and it was celebrated on October 12th of each year.
Since 1989, 140 cities and 10 US states have refused to celebrate Columbus Day and instead mark this day as the Indigenous People’s Day to remember the people who were lost along with their history and the culture because the European colonialists murdered them.
Next statue to be torn down is Winston Churchill’s
This is what Winston Churchill said to the Palestine Royal Commission, 1937:
“I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia, by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race has come in and taken its place.”
Churchill was also responsible for causing the great famine of India in 1943, where 3 million people had starved to death in the state of Bengal.
First President of USA George Washington also owned slaves, and inherited slaves from many others. He never did anything to offer them even the bare minimum but kept them famished, overworked, and whipped.
Why shouldn’t they be next?
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