History is better served by putting the Men in Stone in museums

Changing attitudes towards racial injustice will affect who we consider tolerable and who intolerable to memorialise.

Workers clean graffiti from a statue of Belgium's King Leopold II in Brussels, that was targeted by protesters during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. AP

Simon Schama

Jun 17, 2020 – 6.24am

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Statues are not history; rather, its opposite. History is argument; statues brook none. The whole honour of history lies in its contrarian irrepressibility; its brief to puncture the pieties of power, should they belie the truth.

Those horrified by the de-pedestalisations of recent days – the Black Lives Matter protests have led to the felling of statues from the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol to the brutal colonialist Leopold II in Belgian cities – claim that such acts “erase” history.

Financial Times