Demands to remove the statue of racist Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes have fallen at the second hurdle, disappointing many of those who wish to whitewash, edit and censor our history - but don't worry! London alone is still dotted with statues of people who really don't deserve to be there in modern Britain. Let me take you by the wrecking ball and lead you around Parliament Square.
Jan Smuts. Smuts by name, tosser by nature. PM of South Africa twice. A vocal supporter of apartheid in its earliest form with views on race and segregation that might make even Britain First blush. Smite Smuts now.
David Lloyd-George. WW1 Prime Minister and womaniser who helped draft the Versailles Treaty which led inexorably to the terrible sequel. When that war came he was chief among those wishing to appease that nice Mr Hitler, who he called "The George Washington of Germany." Clearly sulking when nobody asked him to save the nation a second time against his BFF, his general pessimism and unpatriotic beastliness in the early days of the Second War led to Churchill calling him The British Petain. Liquefy Lloyd-George!
Abraham Lincoln. Emancipator of slaves. Great American hero right? WRONG! Lincoln was more concerned with economic realities than the cruelties of slavery - his taking up of the black cause was more to do with self promotion, political expediency and a place in the history books than pretty much anything else. Also a rabidly pro-colonisation, segregationist who wanted to build an American Empire in South America. Atomise Abe!
Robert Peel. Created the Metropolitan Police to crush honest criminals going about their daily criminality. British PM during the Irish Potato Famine and thus indirectly responsible for many of Sinead O'Connor's post "nothing Compares 2 U" work. Murdering scum! Pulverise Peel.
George Canning. Prime Minister. First seat was a rotten borough and the bad start just kept getting worse. Didn't like the French. Or liberty. Attacked and destroyed Copenhagen. Robbed India of its wealth. And as for his views on the Scots ..... well put it this way - he wouldn't get a Christmas card from Nicola Sturgeon. Can Canning!
14th Earl Derby - Tory! Went to Eton! Tory SCUM! Dynamite Derby!
Gandhi - an absolute bastard to his son. Wrote nice letters to Hitler. Religious nut-case. Did nothing at all for the beef industry. Grind up Gandhi!
Nelson Mandela? Terrorist! Encouraged the Spice Girls. Sent Christmas cards to Gaddafi. Er..... NEXT!
Finally. The real villain of the piece. Responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in WW2. He gassed the Kurds and the Russians. In fact he was a long term and enthusiastic advocate of chemical warfare. He could be anti-semitic. He was at the helm and actively fought to maintain a huge and unethical Empire. He blew up the French navy. He said rude things about Muslims. Racist! He nearly converted to Islam. Quisling! He hated the idea of a European Union. Kipper! He longed for a European Union. Leftard! His son was an alcoholic. He ruined Simon Ward's nascent acting career, he kept changing sides politically and he had a macaw (animal abuser) which he taught to swear. He also oversaw the burning of a masterful painting by Graham Sutherland of one of our greatest Prime Ministers, so you can add vandalism to the list.
Thing is. Apart from the odd monument honouring "War Animals" we don't put up many statues nowadays and I for one think there's a good reason for that. Statues are there to urge respect for state appointed paragons and as Brecht says in Galilleo "unhappy the land that is in need of heroes." Human beings who reach great office are not superheroes, they are people lost in time. As our democracy has matured we have come instinctively to realise that. Time moves on and judgement quite rightly alters with it, but if we seek to exorcise the past, or blow it up, or melt it down we end up with a sanitised and impoverished present. That Santayana epithet:
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
is a bit of a cliche, but like many great cliches it is true.
"While the desire to touch and fondle parts of statues is something of which I do not really approve, nevertheless there is, in this need that some people have, something encouraging to the statue itself. What I mean to say is that, especially in our time, there is a strong talibaneering element in play (modernists, puritans, brute scientisticists) that would like to see all statues removed or abraded away entirely - as was recently attempted on George Square in Glasgow. This motivation is part of the general return to Nature that we observe all around, and the concomitant re-embrace of all-out barbarism. But when simple people turn to rub a bit of a statue, this, in a plodding sort of way, provides an assurance that at least the work is liked by some. Those who by disposition detest statues are generally of the belligerent, socialistic sort. Thus the evidence of adoration on a work of statuary, however pathetic it is and annoying to have to perceive from a purely aesthetic point of view, stands as a kind of People's Defence of the thing, against the righteous ideologues who assume that the People, like them, resent the statue and everything to do with it. So the rub- a- dub is a scar so many statues have to bear in order to preserve their general life. My own view is that any attempt to prevent people touching works of art like this would be bound to unleash a tide of resentment against them, and lead to wholesale attacks and every kind of toppling. The desire to touch is so fundamental in children and others lacking self-knowledge, that to prevent it would be like trying to convert India's teeming strand to Christianity. One had better try discharging a pistol against a cliff.
ReplyDeleteWe are trying to instil in people, in these dangerous times for statues, a notion that what a statue wants is to be left in peace. Too many not-busy-enough public employees are meddling with them, especially in respect of their patinations. When they see green, they see what they call "tarnish" and blithely scout off to spend gigantic sums of our money getting rid of dearly-bought, time-cultivated Verdigris effects that any sculptor worth his salt would adore, for the clarity of reading it can afford a sculpted form. The Lick of Paint constituency is a danger lurking behind the form of care, in too many cases. I would recommend renunciation in all events, and a spirit of forbearance in respect of a statue's ageing appearance. Make-overs are for TV shows, but we live in the real world, with all the scars that come of that spell of penal servitude. The statue suffers in parallel with us, and so is a kind of companion. Periodically he can be restored, but only in real emergencies.
Barbarians are everywhere, and always have been. Those who pat Greyfriars Bobby on the nose, or try to kiss David Hume's foot away with a billion pilgrim lips, are relatively harmless, and might indeed amount to a defence of the work in question, against the more Mosaic dispensations that our modern, deplorable cultural institutions too often lay down. The patters, and the kissers, are found in the shallow end of that pool which hosts, at the deep end, no end of sea-monsters in the form of Goths, Huns and Vandals for whom the words "statue" and "sledge-hammer" belong together in civil partnership. If we turn against the tiddlers, we might bring the un-named Trench-dwellers too close to shore for comfort". End.
A verse by Alexander Stoddart and reproduced by kind permission.