The statue war
Is it time to topple Nelson?
A few years ago nobody paid much mind to the “drab grey monuments” in our public spaces, said David Olusoga in The Observer. Yet almost overnight, the statues of “great men” have become the front line in what are now being characterised as the “history wars”. In the US, where memorials to Confederate generals are being removed in more than 30 cities, a woman was killed while protesting against the white supremacists who’d rallied to prevent the toppling of a statue of General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville ( see page 44). Here in Britain, furious rows have broken out over proposals to pull down statues of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes and the slave trader Edward Colston. The statues’ defenders regard their adversaries as “Huns at the gate” engaged in an assault on history, truth and national pride. But for those who would pull them down, the statues memorialise “the murderous careers” of slavers and imperialists and represent a version of history that has too long gone unchallenged.
America is at least engaged in serious debate about how to deal with its slave-ridden past, said Afua Hirsch in The Guardian, whereas Britain, thanks to our “inertia, arrogance and intellectual laziness”, is not. There have been no calls, for example, to take Admiral Nelson off his column in Trafalgar Square. Yet he was, without question, “a white supremacist”. He vigorously defended the institution of slavery and used his seat in the House of Lords “to perpetuate the tyranny”. Does his statue really deserve a better fate than those of the Confederate generals in the US? Of course it does, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. The Confederate generals were given statues – many erected long after the Civil War – to salute their pro-slavery views and “assert white American primacy against black Americans”. Nelson’s statue, by contrast, commemorates not his support for slavery “but his success in war”. To condemn great historical figures for having opinions which were commonplace then but are now seen as unacceptable is insane, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. Are we to smash Gandhi’s statue because “he disdained black Africans”? Must Winston Churchill fall because “he wrote some nasty things about Muslims”? No. Much of this statue obsession is just a form of showing-off: it allows the smashers to flaunt their piety and fit everything “around their own prejudices”.
But not all of it, said Tim Stanley in the Daily Mail. Those wanting to pull Robert E. Lee off his pedestal in Charlottesville aren’t just attacking a statue but “the racist culture that put it in place”. True, Lee did once call slavery “a moral and political evil”, but he also saw it as a discipline the slaves needed “for their instruction as a race” and fought to preserve it. “His views are repugnant.” He probably deserves to go. Yet even in the few cases where statue toppling is justified, the decision to do so can’t be left to angry students. “We cannot allow one group to appoint themselves the archivists of acceptable history.” It isn’t just unfair. “It’s also a recipe for a far-right backlash.”