Erasure

Given that the vast, vst majority of such statues were put up during the early 20th century “Lost Cause” push in support of Jim Crow, they’re not even history, but propaganda.

They should be melted down and used for something appropriate to their history and meaning, like anchors for garbage scows…

The more I think about it, the more I feel my preference would be to have no statues of this kind at all. Do I mean no statues of any kind? I’m not sure I’d want to go that far. But why are statues of identified individuals things we should have? How are we better off for them?

Monolingual American that I am, I don’t really understand enough of the history of the British Empire and specifically the experiences of people of color in Britain, to understand whether the push to topple statues to slavers and assorted [nationally treasured] evildoers is justified or not, justified at the present time, or not. I’d like to understand that, though. I’ve read at least one blog of someone whom I otherwise respect, who bemoans knocking down Colston’s statue as just another example of lawlessness. I don’t know whether to agree with him or not, but ….. I’m inclined to not, simply b/c I have some understanding of the British Empire and what it inflicted in its colonies, as well as things like Windrush. But it’s hard to tell, from so far away.

I wouldn’t mind learning, though.

[For sure, the statues to the Fucking Lost Cause and the Dixie Swastika in America should have been torn down and melted for slag long ago. And as to the question “why now?” the best answer is: “why TF not now, cracker?”]

A bit before that, Lenin and Stalin had their turn.
In Russia, lots of statutes of Lenin were taken down, but then a lot of them were put back up again. Although Lenin’s crimes are large in number, I’m in general not opposed to the statutes, I think – he’s too important a figure and has significant achievements. There are few Stalin statutes standing in original places now, I think. The ones I’ve seen are in museum like settings, and seem fine to me there.

With the exception of Washington, Arnold is probably the only Revolutionary War general most Americans could name.
It’s hard for me to know about “most” Americans, but lots of them could name Lafayette and many who lived in the NE, at least could name Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. (It is, perhaps, ironic that more people might be able to name “foreign” generals.) Alexander Hamilton is better known for other things, but was a revolutionary war general, and many, perhaps most, people know of him. At least in NY, George Clinton is also well known (not least because of Fort Clinton in Manhattan.)

Ethan Allen is perhaps better associated with furniture, but was a general in the Militia. Samuel Adams is probably better associated with beer now, but was a leader in the navy, and John Paul Jones is pretty well known as a naval commander, too, because of his “I have not yet begun to fight” statement, if nothing else.

Every day for almost forty years I drove past a house in my commute to the campus that had a “lawn jockey” prominently displayed on the driveway. That owner finally died/moved out but two houses down another magically appeared–maybe the same one, who knows. These offend me at least as much as those celebrating our racist past–maybe more because they are such insulting caricatures and obviously placed as a particular statement of overt racism. Hell, even Disney years ago stamped out all traces of its similar stereotyped horror “Song of the South”. I’d like to know how prevalent these moral monster mini-statues are. (For years when I drove to Tennessee to see my Mom on the outskirts of Louisville off I-65 there was a yard monument business that had hundreds of these on display–the city that supposedly is the proud home of Mohammed Ali. What a sick culture we are.)

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blockquote cite=”Hell, even Disney years ago stamped out all traces of its similar stereotyped horror “Song of the South””> they may have done quite recently, but it was readily available throughout the 90’s and 00’s in Europe.

Well, the intelligent question about the removal of statues such as Colston, Rhodes etc isn’t whether they should be removed, but under what public process they are removed. If such ‘adjustments’ are made with little or no public process, or simply by the actions of a mob (no matter how correct that mob may be in its internal analysis of things) then the physical action has been performed without advancing the wider public understanding of the issue / person / history in question. More honest and open public debates that lead to the same results (in at least some cases) are clearly a better path. Unilateral monument destruction just gets the backs up of those who have not yet contemplated the issue, and even some who have but don’t like vandalism.

About the only thing statutes can teach us is that history changes as its people do. At the moment a statue is commissioned and placed is usually the moment that the honored person’s mythos is at its greatest height, it only goes down from there until either

A) The flaws of the person are revealed through subsequent analysis and review of the details that surround the mythos or;
B) The person becomes a “who’s that?” that no one cares about any more other than as the answer to a difficult question on trivia night.

In either case the right answer is removal – probably to be replaced by some different persona that will eventually run through the same cycle.

I wouldn’t be bothered if all statues of all kinds were removed. I can think of exceedingly few I have seen anywhere in the US (or in much of the world for that matter) that couldn’t be tainted with some stink if viewed with the right lens. Even the “make way for ducklings” statue referenced above probably violates some tenet of PETA that I don’t comprehend.

For example, it must always be remembered that Robert E. Lee recaptured his escaped slaves and watched while they were whipped and had brine poured on their wounds, and then he fought to preserve that system, and then the statue of him was built. All of this should be engraved on a placard under the statue, right next to the account of how long, and the exact reasons why, the nation suffered his statue in the public square until the events which finally led to its removal.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

It seems like a no-brainer to pull down statues of people who don’t deserve that kind of veneration, because they are remembered for things we now recognize to be awful. A harder question is whether anybody deserves that kind of veneration: is there anyone whose contributions, whether creative, political, military, or humanitarian, don’t also come wrapped up with other characteristics that range from foibles to monstrosities?

Quite possibly not. But MLK is not remembered for (allegedly) cheating on his wife and plagiarizing his thesis, but for the movement he lead; statues of him are not just about him, but about that movement. Churchill is remembered, not for the horrific famine he was responsible for, but for leading the defense of his nation. Jefferson is remembered, not for raping his slave, but for his role in the steps toward better government that America took. These struggles toward human freedom and dignity, or in their defense, deserve remembrance, and sometimes that memory is held through the leaders of those struggles.

I’d like to think that the full complexity of history, and actors in it, can be remembered and understood; that we can do better than to replace the Lost Cause mythology with the 1619 mythology. But maybe not.

On a personal level, I quite like the statues. Whenever I visit a new city, I like to wander around, looking at the architecture and paying particular attention to statues, plaques, and so on. I’ve never been to Bristol and so I never saw the Colston statue, but I’m fairly sure I would have guessed how an 18th-century merchant like him would have made his money. The bigger and bolder the statue, the more one imagines it is covering up. But I am under no illusions that my response is typical, and I can hardly ask everyone to preserve their unpleasant histories for my touristic enjoyment.

With that said, in cities like London or Vienna, it’s practically impossible to disentangle the city itself from the empire that built it, and there seems to be something dishonest about keeping the buildings and infrastructure while stashing the monuments away. In the case of Rhodes and Oxford, it’s even more obvious – the statue might be taken down, but nobody is proposing to return so much as a penny of the endowment. It surprises me that this has not been mentioned at all.

Maybe, though, the tide of history is ebbing away in these places. Perhaps these memorials simply stop us from moving on, and the practical harm they do to people today outweighs the need to remember what was done in centuries past. Black students really ought to be able to go to Oxford without being reminded of the slavery that paid for the buildings they study in, and they deserve this in a way that the white students don’t.

It’s not quite what I expected, but then I suppose it wouldn’t be history if it didn’t surprise us now and again.

Speaking of Australia, to the best of my knowledge, not one of the ‘statues are our heritage’ mob spoke out about this.

https://www.mining.com/rio-tinto-sorry-for-blasting-of-46000-year-old-aboriginal-site/

@18 the more I learn about this particular case, the more I (as a reflexively anti-vandalist) am coming around to the view that this particular harbour dumping may indeed have been right…

To be boring though, it’s a precedent, and can easily be used to justify the same kind of action with little or no antecedent community consideration. Which leads to the conclusion that if a public mob does something that really should have already been done some time ago (the Colston case), there needs to be a following chapter where everyone gets together, and the police and council say things like, ok, ok, no arrests on this one, and the relevant museum and historians retrieve the statue (maybe) and put it in the bad guys corner of the museum, and journalists all process the event in the media such that everyone feels like the final result is indeed pretty representative of a considered public mood.

Hidari @ 14 : I’ve always associated the filthy habit of spitting on the Heart of Midlothian as something tourists do because they’ve read about it in some Tourist Guide. (I hope Nicola Sturgeon has banned this as part of the effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus.)

John Quiggin’s mention of an empty niche also brought to mind all those empty niches on pre-Reformation buildings. I think there was a sort of architectural follow up to that sort of emptiness: buildings—e.g., at the University of Chicago—where buildings were constructed with empty niches (or am I betraying my ignorance of architecture?).

https://www.ats.edu/uploads/member-schools/images/university-of-chicago-divinity-school.jpg

I imagine there’s a place for all sorts of arcane interpretation in all of this.

But why stop at empty niches? The people of St Andrews put bits of their cathedral to good use, to build a pier.

https://images.trvl-media.com/media/content/shared/images/travelguides/destination/6023729/St-Andrews-Cathedral-149795.jpg

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/new-students-at-the-university-of-st-andrews-take-part-in-the-pier-picture-id845238194

PS. If it’s ok to reference another site:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/what-monuments-does-britain-need/

I’ve seen the Arnold monument on the Saratoga battlefield. A granite boot(he was wounded in the leg), the stars of his general’s rank, no name, although a modern marker helpfully explains it. At West Point, where he was the commandant before trying to sell it to the British, they have plaques with the names of the various commanders; his name is scratched out, as I recall: that is the plaque was mounted already defaced.

Lee and the rest were traitors, but nobody really holds that against them. They weren’t sneaking around and selling out like Arnold. Its their terrible cause. Which was so bad, apologists tried to find another reason for nearly a century. And have failed.

Matt McKeon @ 31: “but nobody really holds that against them.”

[just jokin’ here]Hey, speak for yourself, buddy![end joking] More seriously, many, many people hold it against him and all the other Traitors. There’s even an acronym for it (TIDOS: “Treason In Defense Of Slavery”) and trust me, it’s existed for at least a decade, it’s not just something that came along with BLM.

I think that this is the part that really angers people (certainly what angers me). If these (Lost Cause) statues hadn’t be erected as a celebration of white supremacy, if the supporters of their continued existence weren’t wholly overlapping with white supremacists to this day, if America weren’t obvious a white supremacist state in the way it treats Black Americans, maybe, just -maybe- nobody would care about these statues. They’d wear away like Ozymandias’ statue.

But that’s not the timeline in which we live. In this timeline, you can pretty much predict a person’s views of their fellow Black Americans, by their attitude towards these statues. The Venn diagram is a circle.

Ripping down these statues won’t heal racism in America. But keeping them up most surely does support racism in America. And hey, the bitter, bitter tears of white supremacists everywhere at seeing these statues torn down and melted into slag? That’s sweet, sweet ambrosia to decent Americans.

So many things in play here. Only two:

1) “Censorship” is right out; but the definitional debates about what “censorship” is, and why it is A Bad Thing, were held at a time when it was not possible to imagine the public discourse morphing into a form in which it were infeasible to assert any standards whatever.

2) Who won the Civil War? Today it is violently clear that the South won. They had a severe, purely military setback in 1865, but by 1877 they had won in Congress and the Executive Branch what they could not win on the battlefield; and today they hold a decisive veto over any national initiative. Thus, the argument that the South “lost” and it is therefore inappropriate to display their flag or to celebrate the lives and works of their leaders, collapses into revanchism; it becomes the argument that the South should have lost and it is therefore, etc. etc. Much and deep confusion flows from this.

I just remembered ‘The Innumerable Dawodow’, one of the ‘Woeful Tales From Mahigul’ in Ursula Le Guin’s Changing Planes. It has serendipitous value as comment on this topic. (Dawodow was an emperor, and his titular innumerability was in statue form.)

With Rhodes, the main complaint against him seems to be that he was obnoxiously racist, but almost all white people were obnoxiously racist in 1900.

There were white opponents of racism in, and before, 1900: you are erasing them. You are also erasing the non-white opponents of racism. Don’t do that. It was possible in 1900 for people to recognise how obnoxious racism was; it is ahistorical to pretend that it wasn’t.

My modest proposal is to leave the statues in place, but decorate them. The necks of traitors should be adorned with nooses, the ankles of slaveowners shackled with chains. Bronze decorations upon marble, steel upon bronze, to accentuate the contrast. This would get the point across better than any explanatory plaque.

Jonathon Monroe @34

Why are you opposed to this sort of campaign? On what basis have you determined that your feeling that statues should remain is of greater validity than other people’s that they should not?

On what basis should any Rhodes Scholar associated with the campaign lose their scholarship? Please be specific about how exactly they have broken the terms of their scholarship, and why they should no longer qualify.

If the approach were as others have suggested (to remove the statue itself, but to leave historical markers explaining the situation and decisions), how would that constitute whitewashing? What additional context do you think can be gained from a statue, which cannot be gained from a history book?

On what basis have you concluded that Cecil Rhodes “obnoxiously racist” (and nationalistic, etc. etc.) views were normal at the time to the degree that he held them?

TIDOS
Its the “defense of slavery” that makes the Confederacy so obnoxious, more than the treason part. The Confederacy is like that scene in 1984 where O’Brien tells Winston Smith that the future is a “boot stamping on a human face, forever.”

I don’t have a huge stake in this debate. But just to point out that while I am for an accurate remembrance of history and in favor of ending the memorialization of people who don’t deserve it, I am not in favor of damnatio memoria/erasure, and think we need a non-biased appraisal of every historical figure we read about. A list of examples:

As El Muneco points out, Arnold was one of the better generals while he fought for the rebels, and deserves the largest share of credit for victory at Saratoga; his subsequent treason should not erase that fact.
Andrew Jackson is probably one of our more loathsome presidents and has no business being on the $20, but he may very well have saved the union by threatening to hang John C. Calhoun (I sometimes wish he had) rather than meekly giving in to the latter’s nullification demands, which another president like James Buchanan might have done.
The execrable parts of Robert E. Lee’s career (slaveowner, violent disciplinarian of slaves, and enactor of the retaliatory enslavement of free blacks in Maryland and Pennsylvania) should not be forgotten, and the removal of his statues is deserved. But we should also remember that after the war he told Southerners to accept the outcome and to take no further part in revanchist resistance nor in revanchist rewriting of history. This puts him in a much better light than Nathan Bedford Forrest or Jefferson Davis.
To elaborate on LFC: Otto Von Bismarck was a sour old conservative and imperialist, but in terms of who came later–Kaiser Willy, Von Tirpitz, Falkenhayn, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and finally dear old Adolf–Bismarck is a shining example of pragmatic domestic and foreign policy. The first pension system in Germany and the German-Russian alliance as a tool for European stability, the decay of this alliance being the prelude to WWI, were his main policy achievements.
Considering that he was responsible for Gallipoli, the shelling and bombing of Iraqi civilians, the Black and Tans, the poison-gassing of Red Army soldiers, and for the Bengal famine in 1942-43, Winston Churchill has no business calling any of his contemporaries mass murderers, and his statues should definitely be hauled down. But even if he was a stopped clock, he was completely right about opposing Nazi Germany even before 1939.

Another way of understanding this point is that there are no individuals who are so utterly heroic that they deserve to be given posthumous personality cults, very few who can be remembered as heroes (and have statues) even with warts and all knowledge of their lives, and also very few whose careers are so vile that they join the list of history’s monsters. Rewriting to be closer to the truth, yes, erasure no.

The ripping down the statue footage was ludicrous. Like, the statue was too strong for the people and they had to get a marines apc or something with chains an’ a’. While the streets were blocked off further down, as I recall. I remember watching it with my family in staggered disbelief at the incompetence of the propaganda.

Was it actually presented as credible, as important? I’d heard hints, but I’d always kinda assumed it was a five second montage brushed under the carpet. Jesus fuck.

@42

‘So I was thinking that protests against Confederate statues are so very American, and to cause upset in the UK you’ll need a statue of someone like William of Orange. A quick web search reveals that his statue in Glasgow is now under 24 hour police protection.’

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, it simply beggars belief that there is still, in the 21st century, a statue of such a divisive figure as William of Orange in Glasgow (of all places).

In case English people are feeling smug about this, William ‘of Orange’ (AKA William the 1st) was the man whose invasion of the UK was subsequently rebranded as the (very much so-called) ‘Glorious’ ‘Revolution’, the wonderfulness of which was ,until very recently, taken for granted in English historiography.

They key problem with the statue issue in the UK is that British people are taught, at school, and via the media, a version of their history that, not to put too fine a point on it, bears no relationship to reality. It touches base with reality at occasional points (World War 2 and World War 1 did actually happen, although what British people are taught about these events is at best highly misleading, and at worst completely wrong) but huge swathes of what passes for popular ‘history’ is simply fictional (this problem gets worse the closer you get to London, the imperial capital (excepting the Unionist sections of the North of Ireland)).

The point about Rhodes etc. being men of their time is true enough, but it misses a key point which is that the system they believed in (white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism) still exists although much more coy euphemism are used to describe it nowadays (in a sense Rhodes was better than the current crop of politicians: at least he was honest).

The attack on Afghanistan, the attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the (not particularly) ‘secret’ war on Syria were and are colonial wars by imperial powers and the ideological assumptions which underpin them were and are racist. This is why the statue issue is still ‘live’. This is why it is important.

Finally if you are talking about ‘destroying history’ then how many of those pretending to care about statues (many of which I have no doubt they didn’t even know existed until recently) then how many of them cared about this?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes#:~:text=Thousands%20of%20documents%20detailing%20some,an%20official%20review%20has%20concluded.

Incidentally anyone wondering how the ironically named ‘Labour’ Party will react to the largest popular uprising in a generation, now that it has got rid of that beastly man Corbyn (who didn’t even go to University you know), and is now safely in the hands of Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC MP.

‘Shadow Home Secretary says Labour could support new law to make vandalising war memorials punishable with 10 years in jail.’*

https://twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1272072725717225473

*As someone on Twitter quickly pointed out, 10 years is more than a first offender can expect for rape.

This is kind of a side topic, but I saw a couple people up in comments above this one bring up the fear of setting a bad precedent, and have seen it elsewhere. As usual, when it comes to possibly giving license to the right wing, the time came and went. Read up on the memorial plaque to Emmett Till, a teenaged Black boy lynched in the ’50s. The memorial went up a few years ago, and got shot up so badly, again and again, that they had to replace it with a new bullet-proof one. Right wingers are always ahead of us when it comes to degradation and stupid cruelty.

Hidari @ 51: I think you mean William the Third. And surely your capsule summary of the events of 1688 ignores the fact that William of Orange’s invasion would not have happened had not the political divisions within Britain been extremely intense at that time and had there not been a bunch of political exiles in his vicinity urging him on. I agree that it’s important to try to expose the historical falsehoods and manipulations. But let’s not get sloppy doing that so that a whole new set of misrepresentations get spread about.

notGoodenough@43: I’m not going to try to defend my gut reaction against Rhodes Must Fall rationally – as I said it was a gut reaction I was trying to interrogate.

After stopping to think, statues of Cecil Rhodes in public places in the UKshould definitely come down – you can’t separate the achievements he was celebrated for from the racism and land theft. Notably, I didn’t know about the Cape Qualified Franchise or the way Rhodes undermined it as PM of the Cape Colony when I put up @34. The statue in Oriel should be moved, but I’m not going to complain about the College allegedly accepting a £100 million bung to leave it up. I also don’t understand why the Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town
hasn’t seen changes, but obviously that is the locals’ call and not mine.
LFC@50: Good point about the thing that matters being the message the statue sends in the present. A statue, like a statute, is always speaking and the message can change over time. Given the donor response, my suspicion is that the message Oriel are trying to send in 2020 by leaving up the Rhodes statue is not “Cecil Rhodes was a great man” but more “A large enough donation to Oriel College can wipe away even Cecil Rhodes’ crimes.” And tearing down the Edward Colston statue sends the opposite message: “No amount of money can buy forgiveness for a slave trader”. I suppose both these messages could be true if you think slavery is a lot worse than general imperialism, but otherwise it doesn’t look particularly good for Oriel.

@35

I have to disagree with your second point, because it conflates white supremacy with the South. The South did lose the Civil War — but white supremacy prevailed in both the South and the North. To this day.