Think twice before crying ‘off with their heads!’
HE echoes of Charlottesville continue to resonate (page 66). For those who have forgotten the casus belli: a proposal to remove a statue of Gen Robert E. Lee from the grounds of the University of Virginia provided a rallying point for members of America’s hardly slumbering Ultra-right to reignite their Ku Klux Klan torches and revocalise a miscellany of white supremacist catchphrases. Protest and counterprotest grew, a woman was killed and Donald Trump made ill-advised remarks.
Soon, there was a national hue and cry on the one side demanding the removal of Confederate statues and, on the other, their die-hard defenders. Somewhere in the middle were those who pondered the complex indications of ‘rewriting’—or perhaps we might say ‘erasing’—history.
To many observers, the whole controversy is emblematic of the USA’S continuing issues about race and identity. It’s all been simmering for a long time and not just in America. Last year, Oxbridge colleges were wrestling with issues about the commemoration of donors who were racist, imperialist or both. Even in our age of mass media, statues have great symbolic power.
The fall of totalitarian regimes is usually marked by the destruction of statues. George III was pulled off his pedestal in New York during the opening days of the American Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871 rejoiced in the demolition of the Place Vendôme column dedicated to Napoleon and countless Lenins and Stalins have fallen in former Communist countries over recent decades.
Athena is troubled by the actions of zealots on both sides of the debate. Commemoration is not celebration. Each case is different. Most of the contested Confederate statues were erected in the years in which Southern states were introducing a programme of black disenfranchisement and so may be considered a systematic expression of racial discrimination. Few of history’s great men and woman have skeleton-free cupboards. Does Lloyd George’s admiration of Hitler mean that his statue should be removed from Parliament Square or is it punishment enough that he’s so ludicrously portrayed?
During the benighted regime of ‘Citizen Ken’, there was talk of replacing the statues of Victorian military men in Trafalgar Square with more worthy honourees, yet, would a statue of Mary Seacole or Morecambe and Wise really prove that we were a better society than one that let pigeons rest on Gen Napier’s head? A recent comment in The Guardian suggested that, as a white supremacist, Nelson might usefully step down from his column.
Athena has previously pleaded that we call a timeout on the erection of further statues. She has also urged that inscriptions can help give public monuments new or modulated meanings. In addition, she now cautions that, rather than listening to polemicists, we should stop and think deeply before anyone is pulled down.
‘Even in our age of mass media, statues have great symbolic power