HOW EVERY STATUE KEEPS HISTORY ALIVE
Prisoners Of History Keith Lowe William Collins £20
All around the world, statues are falling. In Britain it’s slave traders and colonialists who have found themselves at the bottom of rivers, or boarded up for their own safety. Protesting Americans, meanwhile, have pulled down monuments to Confederate generals who fought for the slaveowning South during the Civil War. Heroes including Winston Churchill, George Washington and Christopher Columbus have all found themselves in danger of being reduced to rubble. But what, really, are people doing when they take a sledgehammer to the physical past?
In this brilliantly researched and timely book, Keith Lowe takes us on a tour of the monuments that were erected in the long aftermath of the Second World War. We see the figure of General MacArthur striding ashore to liberate the Philippines in 1944. In Seoul, we are shown a large bronze figure of a young Korean girl with the curious name of The Peace Statue. In Jersey City, Lowe points out a graphic, almost obscene statue that commemorates a Polish officer being stabbed in the back by a bayonet (above, right). And in London we visit the most recent of the Second World War memorials, Bomber Command in Green Park, an elaborate blend of Doric architecture and neo-classical sculpture.
So far, so heroic. But behind each of these monuments, says Lowe, there is a more complicated history. The MacArthur statue was put up by Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines in the 1970s just at the point when the dictator needed to demonstrate how grateful he was to the US for propping up his regime. Indeed, says Lowe, far from being a heroic liberator of South-East Asia, MacArthur spent much of the war safely tucked up in Australia. There’s a similarly knotty story behind the Peace Statue girl in Seoul. She actually represents the thousands of Koreans who were sex-trafficked to become ‘comfort women’ for Japanese troops.
Lowe is not afraid to tread on sensitive ground, but he does so with the integrity that comes from really knowing his material. In a fascinating chapter on Auschwitz, he reveals how the museum and memorial site have been subject to constant negotiations. In the 1970s, Polish Catholics felt that the fact that thousands of their people had perished alongside the Jews was being left out of the picture. In 1984, a group of Carmelite nuns established a convent beside the perimeter fence, a gesture that caused immense offence in some quarters. Today, the World Heritage Site is so popular that tourists are herded through by guides in the same way that prisoners were hurried to the gas chambers. Is this deeply offensive or a positive kind of re-enactment and a sign that the Holocaust is in no danger of being forgotten?
Lowe doesn’t come up with any easy answers. But he does suggest that simply tearing down statues of people whose views no longer coincide with our own might be short-sighted. While a monument still stands, it ‘holds us to account’. Once it has gone, we might be tempted to take the easy course of pretending that the more difficult bits of history never happened.