Wrecking monuments won’t help the cause
In the aftermath of tragedies like the mosque shootings in Christchurch last year or the recent killing of yet another African American man by police we try to assure ourselves that New Zealand is not really like that; that we are somehow different to the rest of the world and all our people are treated equally.
It is a comfortable but hollow delusion.
We can hide behind the cliche´ s ‘‘This is not New Zealand’’ or ‘‘This is not us.’’ Sadly, yes it is. New Zealand has always had racists and bigots and they are not confined to Pakeha New Zealanders.
All cultures have them to some degree and we can hear it in everyday life to the point where it has become the norm in many clubs, pubs and workplaces to denigrate minority groups, particularly immigrants of all colours and creeds, including British Europeans, usually in their absence, though not always.
The troubled issue of institutionalised racism was thrust in our collective faces again with the death of George Floyd during an unnecessarily violent arrest in Minnesota.
That triggered wide-spread outrage among all sectors of the American population which has spread world-wide with the Black Lives Matter campaign.
This slogan, which has been taken up by some New Zealand high school students to the annoyance of their teachers, quickly developed a velocity of its own.
It follows a similar pattern to the Je Suis Charlie campaign of 2015 following the murder of French journalists and cartoonists by Muslim terrorists when their magazine ridiculed the prophet Mohamed.
The focus of this latest tragedy however shifted from police brutality towards African Americans to racism in its many forms and then to include historic slavery.
There followed predictable demands for monuments and statues of historic statesmen even remotely associated with that era of history to be pulled down.
We have had similar demands here in Waikato to remove statues and monuments to the people who fought and died in the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s.
That seems little different to burning books and the destruction by the Taliban of ancient effigies of other religions.
We can’t re-write the past but, in the process of trying to erase those parts we don’t like, we risk losing some of the most important lessons of history.
Regardless of how we judge past actions by today’s rules the past remains the past, good, bad warts and all.
It should also not be forgotten that many statues and monuments were erected to commemorate people for much more than an association with slavery or the atrocities of war, as bad as they were, and that not all slaves were black Africans.
In the brutal aftermath of the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1690 and the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746 thousands of Irish and Scottish people, who survived the retribution slaughter, were also sold into slavery in the American colonies.
Is anyone brave enough to suggest we pull down the statues and paintings of the British monarchs who sanctioned those battles and slavery sales?
With the wisdom of hindsight we can however view those monuments for reasons other than those they were originally erected for rather than destroy them.
An example are the Nazi death camps of World War II.
They were erected for one of the most horrific crimes against humanity in history but today they are maintained as memorials to the millions of innocent people who were murdered in them.
There are also statues and portraits of Winston Churchill who guided Great Britain through the horror days of World War II.
Two decades earlier he was the lead architect of the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign of World War I and knowingly sent thousands of young men to certain death knowing they had been landed on the wrong beaches and had no possible chance of success and few of survival.
Does anyone want to pull his statue down?
There are many other examples of monuments to people to commemorate their good works regardless of the other negative actions they may also have been involved in.
When the flag waving, marches, protests and looting have died down, the world will return to pretty much as it was before unless we do something more than shout past each other, exchange petty insults and engage in hollow symbolism like pulling down statues.
We have made a good start with the decision to teach the New Zealand Land Wars as part of the history curriculum.
Changing adult attitudes will not be so easy and wrecking historic monuments won’t help.