Baltimore's 225-year-old monument to Christopher Columbus, said to be the oldest in the country and the world dedicated to the explorer that is still standing, has been severely vandalized.

This morning the words on the statue – Sacred to the Memory of Chris. Columbus Oct. XII MDCC VIIIC – were unreadable, a hole smashed in the stone.

“Racism: Tear it down,” one sign leaning on the monument base says. “The future is racial and economic justice,” said another sign that was lying in the grass.

As BaltimoreBrew reports, a video posted today shows someone smashing the inscription at the base of the 44-foot-tall obelisk located at the intersection of Harford Road and Walther Avenue, across from Herring Run Park.

In the video, one person smashes the monument with a sledge hammer as another holds a sign. An unidentified narrator explains why the action was being taken:

“Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere. Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas. That Columbian wave of destruction continues on the backs of Indigenous, African-American and brown people. “Racist monuments to slave owners and murderers have always bothered me. Baltimore’s poverty is concentrated in African-American households, and these statues are just an extra slap in the face. They were built in the 20th century in response to a movement for African Americans’ human dignity. What kind of a culture goes to such lengths to build such hate-filled monuments? What kind of a culture clings to those monuments in 2017?”

This vandalism follows protests at a Christopher Columbus statue in Detroit over the weekend.

Dozens of demonstrators converged under a raised bust of Christopher Columbus in downtown Detroit on Saturday and demanded the monument come down as they protested against white supremacy and a list of perceived affronts to black Detroiters.

The Detroit demonstration, held on a large traffic island with the Columbus monument at Randolph and Jefferson, went off without incident. It had been publicized on Facebook and dubbed, "Reclaiming our history: A Detroit without white supremacy.” ... "A lot of these symbols of genocide and colonialism in America are no longer being tolerated," said Adrian Polk, a member of the chapter, which is largely comprised of people ages 18 to 35. "These symbols need to come down." "Christopher Columbus has a real disturbing legacy in the United States," said demonstrator Antonio Cosme. "He's a central central narrative to white nationalism. He's one of the key figures in this whole Western identity. This whole idea that the civilization of the world started in England, that it started in France, that it started in Germany."

And finally, Boston Antifa sends their love to whoever did this...

Where does it end?