A group calling itself the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement released a video in recent days, calling for a “National Deface Day” on October 9, Columbus Day.

“The battle lines have been drawn and white supremacists are on notice,” the group said in a statement on its website. “White nationalist statues are crumbling all over the U.S. as our collective revolutionary power is growing. As the monuments of white supremacist society fall we must continue to make it clear that their reign of terror is coming to an end.”

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The video starts with a clip of a young adult in a black leather jacket, shown from behind walking quickly through a field toward a tall apartment building, slashing at the overgrown grass with a knife, while the words “A Call to Action Against Columbus Day” flash on the screen. It quickly cuts to a clip of a crowd, identified in news reports as members of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Workers World Party, pulling down the statue of a Confederate solider in Durham, North Carolina, in August. It then cuts to teenagers or young men in black leather coats, walking quickly — and then to a video clip of people taking a sledgehammer to the base of the monument to Columbus in Baltimore in August. The monument is the oldest monument to Christopher Columbus in the U.S., having been erected in 1792, on the 300-year anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the Americas.

“For the occasion of Columbus Day, October 9th, one of the most vile ‘holidays’ of the year, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement is calling for collectives all over the country to take action against this day and in support of indigenous people in the U.S. and abroad who have been victims of colonialism and genocide,” the group exhorts in the statement.

Radical leftists answered the call in several cities across the country.

Two statues of Christopher Columbus were vandalized with red paint in Connecticut overnight on Saturday — one in Middletown and one in New Haven, in the Italian neighborhood of Wooster Square.

In Chicago, an off-duty police officer nabbed one of three young adults he caught spraying red paint on a Christopher Columbus statue in the city’s Little Italy neighborhood on Saturday night. The Chicago Tribune reports that the three wore masks and that 30-year-old Kyle Miskell, who was arrested after he fell off his bike while being pursued by the officer, had shouted “F*** Columbus,” “F*** the USA” and “Die Columbus,” while defacing the monument.

City workers scrubbed the red paint off the statue, only to have it defaced a second time early Monday morning, again with red paint, with the words “murderer” and “decolonize” spray-painted on the pedestal. A jogger out for a run at about 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning saw the red paint on the statue and said that it was wet, according to website DNAinfo.

The enormous statue of Christopher Columbus in the middle of Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan, meanwhile, is under 24-hour police protection, though not at the direction of Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio, who recently established a commission to study the possible removal of “oppressive” monuments. The New York Post reported that an Italian-American named Angelo Vivolo, president of the Columbus Citizens Foundation, said he called City Commissioner Joseph Esposito at the city’s Office of Emergency Management, who “called his old pals at the NYPD,” where he’d been chief of the department until 2013, and got them to guard the monument. Since mid-September there have been one to two officers guarding the monument around the clock.

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But this didn’t prevent a vandal from defacing a bronze relief of Columbus on the monument’s pedestal with pink nail polish on September 23. The vandal, Daniel Kimery, was fined $170 and released.

Several other Columbus statues in New York have also been defaced, with vandals painting the hands of the Columbus monument in Central Park red in September and scrawling “Hate will not be tolerated” on the pedestal.

Columbus, an Italian from Genoa who sailed under the flag of Spain, has been revered by Americans for hundreds of years for his courage in sailing across an open sea over thousands of miles of uncharted wars, and opening up communication between two worlds — East and West. He was driven by a desire to spread the Gospel of salvation through Christ to people in distant lands and by a desire to establish new trade routes by sea, as the Ottoman Turks — Muslims conquerors — had invaded and taken Constantinople, making land routes to Asia perilous. When his ship, the Santa Maria, wrecked at what is now Haiti, Columbus thought he’d arrived in the East Indies, near what is now Malaysia.

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The war on Columbus has been long simmering but intensified this year with the rise of Antifa, a revolutionary movement that calls for the use of violence to disrupt and stop speech and protests that it opposes.

Several Antifa-affiliated groups took to Twitter on Sunday and Monday, posting scores of photos of monuments to Christopher Columbus defaced with red paint and even beheaded. One, in Detroit, is shown splashed with red paint with an ax stuck in the forehead.

Several U.S. cities have given in to the demands of the radical groups, and given up all celebrations of Columbus Day. They include Los Angeles, Denver, Santa Fe, Ann Arbor (Michigan), and Phoenix. In Los Angeles, which is celebrating Indigenous People’s Day for the first time this year, the monument to Christopher Columbus is covered with a white cloth.

(photo credit, article images: Christopher Columbus, Twitter, by ABC13 Houston)