Hating history might be a monumental mistake

The Parthenon could be next on the removalists’ hit list. Picture: Margaret Wenham

Statues of slavers, racists and imperialists are coming down like ten-pins. A curious thing about this contagion of removalism — the impulse to erase an emblem of something you abhor — is that no one is defending slavery. Nor are there boosters for the barbaric excesses of colonialism symbolised by the trade. This is not an argument with the present; it’s an argument with the past.

So why the rage? Is it pent-up lockdown energy?

William Faulkner was surely right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The place is Florence, the date 1497. Dominican fundamentalist Girolamo Savonarola orders the Bonfire of the Vanities: a mass burning of cosmetics, paintings, jewellery and books. The sentiment is remarkably similar to the removalist instinct abroad today, which has as its aim the eradication of sinful objects. What we are seeing is a revival of the heresy impulse: burn the witch!

It’s an ancient urge. Our species has a habit of vaporising things it can’t abide.

Alexander the Great incinerated Xerxes’s palace of Persepolis — torched it in a moment of madness — after defeating the Persian king. Roughly two centuries later the Romans, when they finally sacked their redoubtable Mediterranean rival, Carthage (Hannibal was a Carthaginian general), ploughed the city into the earth and sowed salt into the soil so that it would never rise from its ruinous state.

One of the problems with the removalist movement is that its target is low-hanging fruit. It’s not playing to the future; it’s playing to the cameras. Destruction is not a terribly intelligent response to the physical presence of an objectionable memory — for it dims the memory and silences any attempt to make sense of it.

The words of Edmund Burke seem right for the times: “But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed? Your mob can do this … The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, is more than equal to the task … At once to preserve and reform is quite another thing.”

I understand the sentiment behind the removal of Bristol merchant Edward Colston’s statue. But perhaps the city of Bristol might have been wiser to keep Colston standing and erect beside him a statue of an unknown — or better still a known — slave. The ensemble could have served as a memorial to the estimated 12.5 million Africans pressed into slavery. Why not an accompanying app — “Historic Slave Trails” — that allows you to visit Bristol and follow the traces of slavery profits. At least we’d learn something.

Black lives matter but so, too, in this context, do bad guys.

Illustration: John Tiedemann

Oxford’s Cecil Rhodes statue needn’t serve as a glorification of Rhodes’s ideals. Given that nobody in their right mind actually agrees with Rhodes’s fantasy of an Anglo-Saxon empire led by Britain, the statue at Oriel College can hardly serve as a work of persuasion, or legitimation. But it might help us remember.

If we’re going to take the removalist response to its logical conclusion, there won’t be much left. We might find that we’ve done a Taliban on our own cultural heritage and detonated it simply because it recalls an unpalatable past.

Last September, to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in the US, news agency Reuters published a photo series of monuments built with slave labour. The White House is No 1 on the list; the US Capitol building is second; while third place goes to the Statue of Freedom standing atop the Capitol building. It was forged by a slave named Philip Reid, who was paid $US1.25 a day (not far below today’s minimum wage in some US states). I have a feeling that Reid might like the statue he cast to remain in situ, but the building it adorns might have a short life under the present disposition.

Athens and Rome were built on the backs of slaves and wouldn’t have functioned without them. The Parthenon is the greatest emblem of Greek — of Western — civilisation. But the broken temple that crowns the Acropolis, one-time home of the Athena Parthenos cult statue, is primarily a glorification of Athenian imperialism. And there was no more xenophobic culture: the word barbarian comes from Ancient Greek barbaros, which was coined after the blah-blah sound, to Greek ears, of foreign tongues. So the Parthenon, from the removalist perspective, represents the very worst kind of history. Hard to believe it’s still standing.

The Great Pyramids of Giza were built by slave labour and these outsized emblems of cruelty and Pharaonic vanity — 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks – clearly must go.

The Great Pyramids of Giza were built by slave labour and these outsized emblems of cruelty and Pharaonic vanity clearly must go. Picture: AFP

The few surviving Roman roads, which were also built with slave labour, will need to be dismantled, cobble by cobble. And where the physical structures no longer remain but the routes themselves have been preserved, we shall just have to redirect traffic. And as for ancient Roman edifices built with slave labour, such as the Colosseum and the city of Pompeii — we have the preserved corpses of slaves who perished during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD to prove it — well, hey-ho, they’ll also have to go.

Europe’s grand cultural capitals were all raised and adorned on the proceeds of imperial plunder. But how do we get back at Napoleon? I, for one, plan to punish the French by guzzling their wine.

Liverpool and Bristol were at the forefront of the British slave trade, while Glasgow and Edinburgh — two cities I adore — were also in on the action. You can’t visit these cities without guiltily admiring the physical traces of slaving profits in the form of grand warehouses and stores, mansions, universities and art galleries. Should they, too, be added to the removalist list?

In total France enslaved more than 1.2 million Africans, who were mostly put to work in its colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint-Domingue, and the business continued illegally when the trade was formally abolished. In France, Nantes was a key to the slave trade, but La Rochelle, Marseilles and Bordeaux were also involved. Are they to be subjected to a tourist boycott — a sprinkling of salt rubbed into the wounds inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic?

My own genealogy is Irish with a bit of Jewish in the mix. While I can’t think of a specific icon of my race’s historical oppression, the world is not short of British royals on podiums. Queen Victoria: your time is up!

But then there are few public figures immortalised in statues that can’t be arraigned for imperialist crimes. Kings and queens, princes and popes, conquerors and generals, all wielded power over subject people.

The logical extension of the removalist impulse is surely a kind of deforestation of public statuary — a mass iconoclasm.

That, too, is something we’ve seen before.