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What we should do with the toppled statues
Oct 1, 2020
History moves on, reputations change, careers are reassessed. Yesterday’s men are discovered to have skeletons in their closest. Yesterday’s victories are – in the light of later events – shown to be pyrrhic or illusory. But statues stay the same, frozen in time, set in stone – literally. That is why they have become a problem and why in 2020 we find ourselves in the midst of Statue Wars 2.0
Nothing much has changed. This new outbreak of hostilities picks up where the battles of 2018 left off. The same arguments are being wheeled out as last time. The ultimate crime, we are told, is to judge people from the past by “modern standards”: to do so is to attempt to rewrite history. This argument is untrue at the most fundamental level: the people of the past, just like the people of the present, never had a single and universal set of moral standards. It is also a misunderstanding of what history is and what it is not. History is rewritten all the time. That literally is the job of professional historians.
Casting a “great man” in bronze or setting him in stone is not history, but an attempt to control history, to end debate and prevent future assessments. But history is alive, fluid, constantly up for renegotiation and always in need of reappraisal. The casualties of endless historical reassessment are unwanted states. So what do we do with them?
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