Sometimes the statue-topplers are right
The demolishing of monuments is far more complex than simply history versus heritage
After the hatred and violence in Virginia last weekend, it is easy to forget the reason stated by white supremacists for their march in Charlottesville. It was, they said, a protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee. If that link had slipped from people’s minds, students in Durham, North Carolina, yesterday made sure it was restored. Acting in “solidarity” with Charlottesville, they tied a rope around a statue of a Confederate soldier and dragged it – Saddam Hussein-style – from its pedestal, before kicking and spitting at it.
It’s always odd when those who demand tolerance behave in intolerant ways, and Durham was an unattractive outburst of mob mentality. Yet without excusing incitement and violence, when it comes to statue-topplers and defenders it’s hard not to see justice on both sides. The removal of memorials is the erasure of history. Equally, we shouldn’t have monuments that are deeply offensive to local people. And no, we shouldn’t judge our forefathers by the standards of today. Yet some actions, no matter contemporary standards, are always abhorrent.
We may only notice them when they boil over, but these competing pressures are with us all the time. Many people have heard of “Rhodes Must Fall”, a successful campaign begun at the University of Cape Town to get rid of a large statue of Cecil Rhodes, which some at Oxford tried and failed to copy. But that’s small fry. In 2007 Estonia saw riots and a massive, crippling, multi-day cyber attack from Russia, after a Soviet war memorial was moved out of Tallinn city centre. Poland’s government, meanwhile, has been warned this month of “asymmetric measures” if it removes Soviet war memorials.
There’s a long human history of wiping out monuments, artwork, edifices and much else for political purposes. Sometimes it’s tragic – see the medieval frescoes in Lichfield cathedral with faces smashed out by Oliver Cromwell’s puritan followers. Yet often it’s absolutely necessary. Would you not be a little surprised to see a 25-metre statue of Joseph Stalin in Budapest’s City Park, or to stroll down Adolf Hitler Strasse in Berlin?
Where a truce has been declared, it’s usually because to remove a monument would be the only thing more controversial than keeping it. The Soviet War Memorial in Vienna, for example, is a grossly out of place imposition by a deeply violent occupying force, and is regularly vandalised. But it also commemorates 17,000 dead Soviet soldiers who fought to expunge fascism from Austria.
What about the American South? It seems a common misconception that statues like that of Robert E Lee are war memorials dating back to the dying days of the Confederacy. They are not. They are the products of 20th-century white supremacy. The statue of Lee in Charlottesville was erected in 1917, at the Ku Klux Klan’s peak of popularity, by a man who also donated land for a “whites-only park”.
The statue in Durham is from 1924. The world’s largest bas-relief (at one and a half acres), on Stone Mountain, Georgia, is of three Confederate generals including Lee. It was started in 1916, but ran out of money. Then, in 1958, two years after the Confederate battle ensign was added to Georgia’s state flag, it was given a huge sum of public money to ensure its completion.
Why did this happen in the Fifties? Because it was a very public statement by elected officials that the South would not stand for the civil rights movement. Likewise, putting up statues in the 1910s and 1920s made clear that, though the North had won the war, it would not win the settlement. The Confederate statues across the South may be monuments to the Civil War, but they are monuments of Jim Crow and segregation. So they must go.
Of course, the hundreds of thousands of Confederate dead deserve commemoration. But ultimately they fought for slavery. So remember them like the German soldiers of the Second World War, with sombre cemeteries memorialising the dead and not their cause, without a trace of glorification.
As for General Lee and his fellow Southern leaders, they should be seen for what they were: traitors who took the United States into a conflict that cost it more lives than any other war. That deserves no monuments.