seen on Instapundit

Maybe I should explain my own perspective on this question. The above image is meant to point out, satirically, that the indigenous peoples of the Americas could be fucking barbaric. Many Mesoamerican civilizations were built on mountains of skulls and drenched in rivers of blood. When Kevin Costner's revisionist Western "Dances with Wolves" came out, some historians sourly noted that the native populations were already doing a good job of driving the buffalo into extinction even as various tribes did unspeakable things to each other. It's people of white European stock who persist in the racist myth of the noble savage in some vain attempt to sanitize the history of the natives.

So I can acknowledge that Columbus was, himself, an unsavory person whose misdeeds ought to be reported along with his laudable achievements. This is only right and fair if we're to have a clear picture of the man, one that does away with encrustations of myth, legend, and hagiography. At the same time, we shouldn't be blind to the ugly realities of the native peoples who gleefully committed their own long series of horrific depredations—against the white man, but more importantly, against each other. Europeans brought new diseases to the New World, but the natives who greeted them were already quite good at things like murder, plunder, and the ravishing of the natural world.

Christopher Columbus statue torn down, thrown into lake by "protesters."