Opinion

On the shoulders of history: Why the statues should not be pulled down

29 August 2017 - 06:19 By Daniel Hannan
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BOTTOM RANKING US Marines remove a statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with ropes in central Baghdad in 2003 Picture: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
BOTTOM RANKING US Marines remove a statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with ropes in central Baghdad in 2003 Picture: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

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, 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 slave-owner, albeit a tortured one, allows them to look down on the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Once you grasp that protesting against statues is 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 "a white supremacist".

But 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'."

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 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 antistatue academic 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 disenfranchise indigenous voters in the 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.

One question, then. Whose civilisation would you prefer?

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 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. A monument to Christopher Columbus in North America, which had stood in Baltimore since 1792, was sledgehammered last week by a man who blamed him for capitalism.

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 antislavery movement.

One question, then. Whose civilisation would you prefer? Where else are individual liberty, free speech, women's rights and equality before the law so secure?

Against whom are we being so harshly judged?

- The Sunday Telegraph

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