“I just want to be apolitical for God’s sake”
Statues aren’t just pieces of marble or metal. They represent something. Something more than the material that they’re chiseled or smelted from. They can highlight the philosophy of history, the public memory, and how we latch onto arbitrary objects just for collective identity. This is the point of contention within our zeitgeist — how should we craft identities around arbitrary objects?
To many such as Boris Johnson, the removal of statues is tantamount to the erasure of history. As he stated in a tweet on 12th June, statues present “different perspectives…different understandings of right and wrong…[they] teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history.” Toppling monuments or statues doesn’t mean the erasure of history. As esteemed historian, Sir Richard J. Evans stated in a recent piece in the New Statesman, “pulling down statues has nothing to do with history, and everything to do with memory”. History is a discipline ruled by its own principles and axioms. On the other hand, statues push a subjective memory of the past. This memory is used by public history — the democratically-legitimised version of history — to serve a public purpose. That is statues cultivate values within collective public memory; they can highlight lessons through memorialisation or values through veneration.
In Liberal Democracies, we seek to cultivate liberal values of liberty, justice, and equality. Public history has to maintain these values. So are these statues consistent with these values?
To make it blunt, no. A clear example would be Edward Colston. He was a slave-trader who made his fortune as the director of the Royal African Company which transported 84,000 enslaved men, women, and children to the Americas with 19,000 of them dying on the journey; he was a philanthropist who dealt in blood money. However, those who erected the statue did not care about how Colston gained his fortune.
At the time the statue was erected (1895) — the height of the European Imperialist enterprise — statues were used to embellish and “invent traditions” and construct new national identities. In fact, during the height of nationalism and imperialism (between 1848–1914), major European cities erected hundreds of statues in a fever of ‘Statuomania’; for example, 61 were built in London. Political authorities used statues, alongside racial science, to justify new nation-states and imperialism. His statue wasn’t a commemoration of his crimes rather the veneration of old regional pride, imperialist oppression, and the racial hierarchy used to justify that. Colston’s statue is emblematic of these anachronistic values.
Those who erected these statues also propagated misinformation to push revisionist political agendas. For example, the statues erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy propagated fabrications such as the Lost Cause, underplaying the brutality of slavery and glorifying the Confederacy. Statues constantly reminded African-Americans of their role: to be fearfully subservient under the boot of white supremacy. It was a clear erasure of historical public memory.
However, even if these monuments go against the values that we venerate within our Liberal Democracy and “erase history”, does that give ample justification for extrajudicially removing public property without going through democratic procedures?
Protests against the statue have been going on since the 1990s with attempts by the Bristol City Council to erect a plaque stating his involvement in the slave trade. But this amounted to nothing much materially. It could be said that a buildup of frustration propelled its extrajudicial removal on 7th June.
The complacency and apathy of Liberal Democracy can sometimes be rectified by a minority movement making moral arguments against injustices. For philosopher John Rawls and Malcolm X, civil disobedience and public anger can be justified as a tool to correct oppressive social structures once democracy has failed. For Rawls, effective civil disobedience can be undertaken to garner the attention of the indifferent majority to the injustice of the minority. It doesn’t always lead to practical positive outcomes but, it serves a virtuous symbolic purpose.
However, cathartic anger isn’t always optimal. Winston Churchill was a wartime prime minister who united a nation against Nazism but was an avid imperialist and a racist. Lines are blurry sometimes. We forget that. An acknowledgment of the ambiguity of Churchill and others is necessary. This ambiguity indicates that we shouldn’t parade people like this; it will necessarily mask the history that should be memorialised within our public memory.
Statues serve a utility within the public memory. It can help solidify the values that we seek to uphold. Statues of Cecil Rhodes, Edward Colston, or Robert Milligan don’t represent any of these values. A greater understanding of the issue of iconoclasm will not wash our hands of the sins of the past but, it can help us foster values that we should seek to propel now. As Richard Evans summarises “pulling down a statue can strike a blow for the recalibration of public memory and… proclaim a new national identity”. Liberal Democracy, when working, can serve a great purpose. However, democratic institutions tend to get bogged down by bureaucracy and political considerations. Thus popular action is necessary to alleviate certain injustices when democracy fails to address them.
