Daniel Hannan Don’t tear down statue of Nelson
When you condemn Nelson or Churchill for their incidental views, you’re really condemning English-speaking civilisation
Does Winston Churchill deserve a statue? He wrote some nasty things about Muslims. What about Wellington, a snob who opposed extending the franchise? Or Gandhi, who disdained black Africans? Most of us recognise that these men are memorialised for other reasons, such as winning wars against tyrants or, in Gandhi’s case, maintaining his creed of non-violence while leading a great country to independence.
There are some people, though, for whom statues – like everything else – are primarily about them. The fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveowner, albeit a tortured one, allows them to look down on the author of the Declaration of Independence.
The fact that Churchill declared himself “strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes” lets them feel superior to the man who beat Hitler.
Once you grasp that protesting against statues is partly a way of showing off, it all makes sense. Flaunting your piety is a competitive game. It’s not enough to be against statues of, say, Franco: anyone can do that. You need to find a revered national figure, and then let everyone know that, at least in one sense, you are a better human being than he was.
Eventually, this virtue-signalling was bound to reach the top – literally. In The Guardian, Afua Hirsch took aim at Nelson’s Column. By any conventional definition, the Admiral was a hero: brave, dashing, adored by his men. He died at the moment of his triumph, saving Britain from the threat of Bonapartist tyranny and, indeed, making possible the liberation of Europe. All this, though, counts for nothing, because Nelson was, we are told, “a white supremacist”.
It is true that Nelson, to the extent that he took any interest at all, backed the pro-slavery West Indies lobby against Wilberforce’s abolitionists, whom we now recognise as moral titans. Still, it is facile to assess historical figures wholly according to how closely their views resemble ours. As Herbert Butterfield put it in his famous 1931 critique of Whig history: “The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word ‘unhistorical’.”
In 1805, when Nelson died, slavery was, for most people, a familiar and immemorial part of the human condition. It was widely practised in Asia, Africa and the Americas and, in the adapted form of serfdom, across much of Europe. The real outlier turned out to be the United Kingdom which, 18 months later, voted to outlaw the slave trade – an act partly made possible, ironically enough, by Nelson’s victory. Although the war with France continued, Britain proudly diverted ships to hunt down the slavers.
How bizarre to judge Nelson by an opinion which, though we find it obnoxious, was incidental to his story. Sure, all ages have their shibboleths: some medieval clergymen wanted to ban classical philosophers, such as Aristotle, because they were not Christian. Still, it’s odd that we should be so obsessed with slavery at a time when everyone agrees that it is abominable. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a less controversial issue. Whom are the statue-fellers trying to convince?
The current bout of iconoclasm began two years ago at my old Oxford College, Oriel, with a campaign to dislodge the guano-encrusted Cecil Rhodes from his discreet niche – a campaign that still rumbles on. On Newsnight last week Rahul Rao, an anti-statue academic from SOAS and former Rhodes scholar, described the diamond magnate as “the father figure of apartheid” – a bizarre claim when Rhodes died in 1902, and apartheid was imposed in 1948.
Actually, by the standards of his age, Rhodes was pretty enlightened: he enjoyed warm relations with Africans, opposed the attempt to disfranchise indigenous voters in Cape Colony and funded the newspaper of what became the ANC. It seems harsh to us that he displaced the Ndebele from their lands in pursuit of diamond wealth. But we are committing Butterfield’s sin. The Ndebele had themselves seized those lands from the Shona, many of whom they killed or enslaved. Their outlook was, by most measures, far more distant from modern opinion than that of Oriel’s benefactor. But the campaign was never really about Rhodes; it was about angry students fitting everything around their own prejudices.
Statues can be removed for good reasons. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, hundreds of little Lenins were plucked from their pedestals. When Saddam Hussein was overthrown, his vast and trunkless legs of stone were left standing in the desert. In the same way, local communities in the American South have every right to take down Confederate memorials, some of them recent and gimcrack.
The trouble is, it doesn’t stop there. The oldest monument to Christopher Columbus in North America, which had stood in Baltimore since 1792, was sledgehammered last week by a man who, in an accompanying video, blamed the explorer for capitalism. There are campaigns in Australia against Captain Cook, who discovered the place, and governor Macquarie, who oversaw its settlement. Statues of both men were vandalised yesterday.
If you see Churchill, Nelson, Cook and even Columbus as villains, you’re effectively saying that you’d rather English-speaking civilisation hadn’t happened, that the world would be better off without jury trials, uncensored media, parliamentary democracy, habeas corpus and, come to that, the anti-slavery movement.
One question, then. Whose civilisation would you prefer? Where else were individual liberty, free speech, women’s rights, equality before the law and prosperity for the masses so secure? Among the Montenegrins? The Masai? The Maori? The Maya? Against whom are we being so harshly judged?