Which statues should fall?

In the normal, virus-free course of events, I spend the first few weeks of July in the ancient capital of Poland. Krakow is Poland’s cultural heart and it is there that the 20th century happened — the end of empires, the restoration of independence to nations under colonial rule, the two world wars and the attendant horror of the Holocaust, Nazism, communism, the Cold War and its peaceful conclusion. It’s a dramatic story, with a happy ending. It was a great drama, happily concluding with the restoration of liberty.

Poland has too much history and not enough geography, the inversion of Canada’s situation. The same is true of Europe as a whole, which means we might profit from their experience in what has now become a very public dispute about statues. Statues bring together geography and history at a specific place and a specific time.

The first time I ever thought about tearing down statues was a most pleasant, even exhilarating, experience. It was the summer of 1994 and I was on my first trip to Poland. Freshly liberated from Soviet enslavement, the civic spaces of Polish cities were getting a good cleansing. Cultural hygiene required that the statues of Vladimir Lenin come down, and statues of Pope John Paul II go up. Former u.s. president ronald reagan got a few prominent ones, as well.

I had asked for directions and was told to get off the streetcar in the square “where the statue of Lenin used to be.” How would I know where that was? At the time, all the locals knew where the communists had put up the hated statue and why truth and justice required that it come down. The fact that Lenin’s statue had been there, and was no longer, was both necessary and important.

A year later, while studying at the university of Cambridge, I had another novel experience regarding statues. I had gone over to Churchill College in the company of a fellow graduate student from Australia. He expressed his dismay about the bust of Winston Churchill. For him, Churchill, as first lord of the admiralty, was the villain of Gallipoli, the First World War defeat that cost Australian and New Zealand forces dearly.

I had grown up with the heroic view of Churchill, hearing my grandmother tell me about being inspired by his wartime radio addresses to the British Empire, which she listened to in uganda. Churchill became prime minister 25 years after Gallipoli and any fair rendering of history would rank the Second World War far ahead of Gallipoli in assessing Churchill’s record. But not for my Aussie colleague in 1995.

Of course, Cambridge itself — and Britain more generally — is a replete with challenging statuary for a Catholic student. At Pembroke, my college, pride of place is given to Nicholas ridley, the former master and bishop who took the Protestant side in the Tudor succession battles after the death of Henry VIII. He is celebrated as a martyr under Queen Mary, whose accession he opposed because she was Catholic.

Is he honoured today because of his martyrdom? As a notable alumnus of the college? Or because he was anti-catholic? A fair reading, it seems to me, would exclude the last option as likely.

How then do we think about statues today? How do we figure out what is appropriate in any given place?

A few weeks back, when the statue-toppling got going in earnest, one critic wondered what should be done about Michelangelo’s “david” in Florence. After all, he abused his power to commit adultery and subsequently had Bathsheba’s husband killed.

One response noted that “david” was fine for a Florentine art gallery but would be unsuitable if erected in the town square of a Hittite village, among the descendants of the murdered uriah. Fair point. Geography and history matter.

So reasonable discussions can be had. A Churchill statue at Westminster has a different significance than, say, one proposed for the Australian military headquarters.

As Canadians look at their history, such questions can be reasonably discussed. How do we evaluate the record of former prime minister John A. Macdonald? What does his statue in Kingston, Ont., for example, celebrate? Is he an oppressor like Lenin, whose statue must come down? Is he a hero of history, like Churchill, whose record is not without stain?

For the 50th anniversary of declaration of martial law during the FLQ crisis this October, should the prime minister remove his father’s name from the airport in Montreal? I would think not, because when Prime Minister Jean Chretien gave Trudeau airport its name, it was not to honour the suspension of civil liberties, but to honour Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s larger contributions to the country and national unity. The same man can do many things.

Geography and history matter. The federal government named Montreal’s airport after Pierre Trudeau; the city government renamed one of Montreal’s most prominent streets after Quebec Premier rené Lévesque. Together they tell a more complete story than either would alone.

how do we evaluate the record of former prime minister john a. macdonald?