Irrelevant backpedal.
It may be an irrelevant backpedal to your interest in this thread, but it is utterly relevant to mine–that there are always people profoundly eager to destroy monuments and works of art they don’t like.
Let’s be honest: To have a problem with anything related to Christopher Columbus being changed - the day, the statues - you are ignorant about a lot of things. You’d have to be ignorant of how he wiped the Taíno off the map, how he and his men enslaved and slaughtered and raped tens and hundreds of thousands of people - so the people whining about how George Washington or even Andrew Jackson are “next” should be relieved that they were choirboys in comparison.
And unlike the flawed forefathers, Columbus didn’t do anything for North America. He didn’t ever set foot here, let alone discover the place. The only reason he is revered is because Washington Irving’s fabricated history was pointed to by Italian immigrants whose turn it was to be treated like shit to show that they belonged here. It sucks that any immigrants were persecuted, but the Italian - just like the Irish - have managed to become white people and gain all of the privilege associated with the pale shade on these shores so they shouldn’t need a book of lies to make them feel welcome any more.
So if you are Italian, you don’t need him now. He didn’t do anything historic for this country, and all he did for the island nations to our south was cause pain and death.
Knowing all of this, if someone still pines for a statue or a day to celebrate him, that means they simply want to keep having those things because it’s always been that way. And “we’ve always done this” is the shittiest reason for continuing to do something.
At least, that’s what I thought until very recently. Because some people who decry Columbus getting his comeuppance are neither ignorant nor dogmatic. They like that Columbus upsets people, they like that Confederate monuments and flags upset people, they think it’s great to “trigger the snowflakes.” And that is officially not only the dumbest reason to want to keep those relics, but the most hateful reason as well.
If that’s your point, it’s totally inane. You can find people who want to do any extreme thing you can imagine.
Excellent points. It still doesn’t excuse mob violence as a political tool. We have a functioning system of self governance and we have processes in place where change can be made legitimately. Unfortunately, we are now in an era where political leaders and law enforcement are too cowardly to prevent vandalism, arson, rioting, and looting.
So regardless of who or what the statue represents to you or to me or to anyone else there is a right and a wrong way of addressing that. Currently, folks are foolishly advocating the wrong way because it suits their political agenda. That is very dangerous.
Thomas Jefferson statue just got toppled. Protesters pull down Thomas Jefferson statue in front of Portland high school - oregonlive.com
And when they get enough support behind them, they succeed. The extreme things don’t happen–until they do.
The idea that destroying statues destroys history fails at the first step, because statues are not history. Yes, they may be historical–meaning important to the historical record–but that’s not the same thing. History is the past written down. That’s why the past that is only known from artifacts is considered prehistory. So, to preserve the history of a statue, one needs merely to preserve a written record of its existence, not the statue itself.
Statues of individuals generally exist to honor them in some way. And it is in fact the honoring of people in the past that often causes people to forget history. People have a completely fucked up idea of who Christopher Columbus was due to how he has been honored, and actually upending the myth and restoring the true history has resulted in many thinking he didn’t really need to be honored at all.
As for statues being art–they can be. But not even all art is actually preserved. Do your parents still have every drawing you made in school? There can be decisions on what art is worth keeping and what isn’t. There can be debate.
But that debate can only happen if the reasons that someone thinks the art should be destroyed are actually taken into account, and not reduced to strawmen, like saying that people “want to get rid of art they don’t like.” That very much is not the position of anyone involved in this. It is about how that art is currently being used by our culture, and whether it can be preserved while changing that usage.
Because, a lot of times, the answer seems to be no–people will not tolerate the art being moved to a new location or even placards explaining the historical purpose. Or there just is way, way too much of it to try and preserve: do we really want a museum of all the statues that the KKK put up to try and push their racist lifestyle on others, while hiding it as “patriotism” or “preserving history”?
There’s a major issue with that though; maybe there is theoretically a process in place to have monuments removed, but how often does it actually happen?
I’m going to take the Colston statue in Bristol which was dragged down as an example, because I’m pretty familiar with that one. Campaigns had been going on to get it removed for at least a decade, but at every step there’s a problem; what else should be put up there instead? Who pays for the replacement? Shouldn’t we just put a plaque there explaining the controversy? What should that say? Round and round, with no decisions actually being made, just a claim that alternatives were being considered, for year after year.
All this for a statue of someone really not especially notable, he was just very wealthy and gave money to various projects, having made that money largely from the trade in human lives. In actual fact, most of the organisations which received money from him closed down decades or centuries ago, and many buildings currently named for him are completely unconnected. No big groups claiming him as a symbol of their heritage, no achievements people could point to and say ‘Well, without him, we wouldn’t have this’. The whole argument was people on one side angry because the city was honouring someone who profited from the suffering and death of their ancestors, vs people who said ‘Well, it’s a historic statue, we shouldn’t just take them down because someone doesn’t like it’. In the whole time I lived there, I never heard any reason to keep the statue that amounted to more than that. And still the statue stayed up.
How much harder is it going to be if there is a group who actively honour the person or feel a personal connection? Even if those people are, to put it bluntly, total arseholes?
Inertia is a powerful force, especially in local politics, and sometimes, people get sick of waiting.
Statues last a long time, and you could say that they often outlive their original intended purpose. In various places I have seen statues of everything from civic dignitaries who were probably not even well known at the time, to forgotten soldiers from past wars, to various politicians. And the museums are full of statues, some of them intentionally damaged when the king / emperor / local bigshot died and his representation in stone or metal got hammered.
Opinions change, too. In the UK, in Bristol, a port city that was very heavily involved in the slave trade, protesters dumped the statue of one Edward Colston into the harbor. WTF is the good Mr Colston, and why did he get a status, asks a modern audience. Colston was a businessman who was active at the end of the 17C and the early part of the 18C, and was known as a philanthropist and general benefactor, albeit only to people who shared his religious and political views. That was normal in those days. Among other things, he made money from the slave trade. And many others like him did so as well, it is part of the dirty history of Bristol. The statue was put up several decades after his demise, but still before slavery became an issue.
Giving him a bath has actually done more for his memory than leaving his statue there, and while you could say that it reignites the debate about slavery and its consequences - there isn’t one, slavery is anathema and many people are also aware that Colston and the UK as a whole profited from it back then. There had been efforts made recently to have the plaque reworded to note that his record was mixed, but the civic authorities refused. Not a good move.
What to do with those who have a blemished reputation and offend modern sensibilities? I don’t care much for destroying them, or dumping them in deep water. The PRC got rid of its legacy of imperial statuary in Hong Kong by taking them into storage somewhere.
Some statues are artistically good, regardless of the subject, most are OK, and then there are some which are indeed controversial. If nothing else, the reasons for their existence and the timing. I gather that in the USA most of the statues of Confederate soldiers were put up quite some time after the Civil War (or whatever you want to call it) and as an ostentatious display. Frankly, I think such statues could disappear, quietly, but the problem is that if anyone feels he or she can just attack any statue that incurs their wrath, then where does it stop?
I am just amazed that the statue of Churchill in London was attacked, even though he is a controversial figure in some respects. However, I strongly feel that the status of Arthur “Bomber” Harris should never have been put up, and it should be consigned to visual oblivion in some dusty warehouse. But I would not take a hammer to it or dump it in a suitable body of water.
Statues and monuments are a tangible record of a past event or individual. In cultures that don’t have other surviving written accounts, those statues are some of the very little history there is. I challenge you to tell me that the carvings at Gobekli Tepi are not history, for example. You are simply dead wrong.
The funny thing is, statues generally existing to honor them in some way is contradictory to the idea that statues are not history.
If people thousands of years from now dig up monuments and were somehow able to know who the people were, they would rightly feel that the people who put them up valued those people. But they would also feel that by not tearing them down, the people who came after them also valued the people behind the statues. Even if this is not a strictly correct conclusion they would come to, they would be correct that they valued them enough that their artistic or historical value overweighed whatever disagreements they might have with the people.
Be that as it may, it’s still not productive or desirable to continue to appease radical mobs. As history has demonstrated, appeasing the deranged only encourages them.
Churchill is next? Who woulda thunk it.:rolleyes:
The police could have physically stepped in and tried to prevent the statue being pulled down, but at what cost? Actions like that are a spark to a powder keg and it would probably have triggered a riot. The police chose to allow it to happen rather than escalate the conflict, and I fully support that decision. Besides, one of the officials who’s been getting publicity about this, the Mayor, has Jamaican ancestry himself (where a large number of the people trafficked by Colston’s company were taken). He’s been one of the people trying to get the stupid thing pulled down (he’s claimed the main reason he hadn’t pushed harder was because, as the first black mayor, it was risking racial backlash), why’s he suddenly going to do a u-turn? To appease people who demand respect for authoritah? Balls to that. I fail to see why the ‘principle’, as stated by someone on another continent, should have priority over the safety of protesters who are threatening the well-being only of a lump of copper, or safety of the police, for that matter. If it’s a choice of violence against people or symbolic violence against shaped chunks of metal, I’ll pick attacking the non-living every time, thanks.
And it’s hardly the first, or second, or third time someone’s attacked or defaced a Churchill statue or even that specific Churchill statue. In some parts of the country especially, he was extremely unpopular. I’m pretty sure there’s Churchill-statue-shaped protective boxes kept stashed away somewhere, because it won’t be the last time either.
Sorry, making the slippery slope argument that if we take down a statue of Columbus then the next thing you know people will be tearing down the Pyramids is inane.
A very misleading title. The life-threatening violence was on the part of someone brandishing a gun at the protesters, who shot one of the protesters when they took him down. He’s been charged with aggravated assault, as well other militia members who were there with him. They were threatening to commit murder in order to protect a fucking statue.
And this is the guy whose statue people were prepared to commit murder to protect:
So Oñate was basically found guilty of war crimes even by the Spanish.
CNN analyst Angela Rye:
See the video at 4:50 CNN’s Angela Rye: Statues of Washington, Jefferson and Lee ‘All Need to Come Down’