Columbus Statue Vandalised in Sadiq Khan’s London

Columbus
Jack Montgomery

A statue of famed European explorer Christopher Columbus was vandalised on Tuesday in London, led by iconoclast leftist mayor Sadiq Khan.

The attack was likely intended to make a political point, having taken place around Columbus Day — or, as some woke activists and politicians would now have it, including U.S. President Joe Biden, Indigenous Peoples Day.

Once celebrated as the man who discovered America — Leif Erikson and others who failed to really put the continent on the map notwithstanding — Columbus is now nigh-universally vilified by left-liberal academics, activists, and pundits, with defenders of the explorer such as historian Robert Royal, the founder and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., finding increasingly little space for their views in the mainstream media.

A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police, led by woke commissioner Dame Cressida Dick, told The Times that Met officers were called to the incident in the early morning arrested four people on suspicion of criminal damage.

“This is the first act of statue vandalism we’ve had in the UK for a while,” remarked Robert Poll, of the Save Our Statues campaign — “not including the addition of plaques”.

“Targeting Columbus is clearly a symbolic attack on European and Western civilisation,” he added.

Poll’s allusion to plaques was a reference to the characteristically weak response of the Conservative Party government to the tearing down and vandalisation of statues in the United Kingdom after the Black Lives Matter unrest following George Floyd’s death spread across the Atlantic, which caused a number of woke local government authorities and institutions sympathetic to the mob to begin proactively removing monuments.

The Conservatives’ answer to this, beyond much noisy rhetoric, was not a robust and straightforward defence of Britain’s built heritage and historical figures, but the pursuit of a so-called “retain and explain” policy, in which monuments would receive new plaques and information boards providing “context” — that is to say, disclaimers of sometimes dubious historical veracity denigrating the figures represented, thus turning the monuments honouring the memory of those depicted to marks of shame.

“We don’t need plaques everywhere telling us to feel ashamed all the time,” Poll complained of the phenomenon earlier in October.

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