Tear it Down…

It cannot have escaped your notice dear reader that there seems a growing trend for tearing things down.

It is a trend that, to use modern parlance, has “gone viral”.

Everywhere, it seems, people are rushing to tear down or deface statues or monuments to greats of the past.

In Belgium, statues of King Leopold II, in Britain statues of Edward Colston and Winston Churchill, in the U.S. statues of former presidents and leaders by the dozen and in Australia, statues of Captain Cook, among others, have all been either defaced or de-throned.

Equally, there have been many decrying this behaviour.

Simple vandalism that is carried out by “woke” hypocrites they claim. Kowtowing to mob rule and the triumph of leftist guilt are both seen as explanations for this behaviour.

Now there is something to be said for this point of view.

In the case of Cook, for example, no amount of spray painted daubs of “racist” can erase the fact that the arrival of the Endeavour in 1770 proved (after a few decades) to be the most significant event in the history of our country since the arrival of the first people tens of millennia ago.

This first arrival, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago is indeed, one of the more astonishing accomplishments in all of human history, but I digress.

Cook, like all of us, every single last one of us, was a product of his time. Times and attitudes, change.

Does this mean that we diminish the incredible achievements of Cook?

Equally, in the United States there are some inconvenient truths. As I found out from the wonderful Facebook page of Narrabri High School, the author of the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”) Thomas Jefferson, was a slave owner, and apparently, very friendly indeed, with at least one of his slaves. (Thanks to those young history enthusiasts for that information!)

Does that quite appalling behaviour negate that he outlined the basic ideas of modern democracy and freedom that everyone in the West lives under today? (And hundreds of millions more wish they could live under!)

Should Jefferson’s monuments be consigned to the garbage tip?

As has been said, the fact that past heroes had flaws does not make them less heroic, it simply makes them more human and that this, along with the fact that they were products of their time, and the idea that we should acknowledge the truth of history, combine to show those pulling down these monuments in a pretty dim light.

Cries of “Stalinist eradication of history” have some merit.

But…and there’s always a but! There is also a counter-viewpoint.

I had never heard much about the aforementioned King Leopold, but he really was not very nice.

A product of his time, yes. But a product who was quite willing for his own actions to cause the death of millions in Central Africa.

Not for the benefit of his country, or for freedom, justice or other noble causes, but simply for his own personal profit.

The more I read, the more I wondered why a monument was built in the first place. Probably at the orders of King Leopold himself!

Then I found myself thinking back a few years to the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. I fail to recall anyone complaining about that “re-writing” of history!

You could very easily argue that the statue of Saddam Hussein should have been kept as a reminder of his brutal rule.

So sometimes it is OK to pull down a statue?

Also, it should be noted, that there are now very, very few monuments in Germany to one Adolf Hitler, or very few in Russia to Mr Stalin. Again, the tearing down of certain monuments seems to be OK, as sometimes the past is best left in the past.

As usual, it seems that I have very few firm conclusions.

But perhaps, like me, you conclude that it’s a tricky proposition.

Bill Doyle, The Courier’s occasional guest columnist