Protesters: Columbus Started Colonialism, Genocide.

Ho Plaza played host to a small and unenthusiastic crowd of 20 or so Columbus day protesters, who set up shop outside Willard-Straight just as Oakenshields began to get the lunch hour rush.

The protesters carried a motley array of signs, although there seemed to be some common buzz words on their home-made boards; the most consistent of these was “colonialism,” a common theme in the remarks given at the podium.

The speaker, who I could not identify, first recited the trite and frankly banal litany of crimes committed by Columbus and voyagers from across the pond. Among these grand crimes were “genocide,” caused by diseases Westerners didn’t know they carried due to their genetic immunity, and colonialism. Sounding off through an Al Sharpton-style megaphone, the chief propagandist insisted that the “genocide” of 120 million Indians constituted the first instance of colonialism by the civilized world (this man would do well to question what Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Carthaginians, and the Romans were doing if not invading other lands for their wealth). The War on Terror is just another link in a long chain of colonialist endeavors by the West that begins with Columbus’s trip in 1492. Even parallels between modern US Military terminology and the oppression of Indians were drawn.

The greed of Cortez and the vicious populism of Andrew Jackson are lamentable chapters in this continent’s past, but can these protesters really make a convincing claim that the Western world systematically seeks out victims to plunder and pillage? The crimes of the Iroquois against Christian settlers and those of the Cherokee against those passing by on their path to the West Coast are similarly damnable. Why then does Christopher Columbus get the blame? Would the world really be better off had he not sailed the ocean blue?