Which statues should fall?

National Post, 10 July 2020

Statues bring together geography and history at a specific place and a specific time.

In the normal, virus-free course of events, I spend the first few weeks of July in the ancient capital of Poland. Krakow is Poland’s cultural heart and it is there that the 20th century happened — the end of empires, the restoration of independence to nations under colonial rule, the two world wars and the attendant horror of the Holocaust, Nazism, communism, the Cold War and its peaceful conclusion. It’s a dramatic story, with a happy ending. It was a great drama, happily concluding with the restoration of liberty.

Poland has too much history and not enough geography, the inversion of Canada’s situation. The same is true of Europe as a whole, which means we might profit from their experience in what has now become a very public dispute about statues. Statues bring together geography and history at a specific place and a specific time.

The first time I ever thought about tearing down statues was a most pleasant, even exhilarating, experience. It was the summer of 1994 and I was on my first trip to Poland. Freshly liberated from Soviet enslavement, the civic spaces of Polish cities were getting a good cleansing. Cultural hygiene required that the statues of Vladimir Lenin come down, and statues of Pope John Paul II go up. Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan got a few prominent ones, as well.

I had asked for directions and was told to get off the streetcar in the square “where the statue of Lenin used to be.” How would I know where that was? At the time, all the locals knew where the communists had put up the hated statue and why truth and justice required that it come down. The fact that Lenin’s statue had been there, and was no longer, was both necessary and important.

A year later, while studying at the University of Cambridge, I had another novel experience regarding statues. I had gone over to Churchill College in the company of a fellow graduate student from Australia. He expressed his dismay about the bust of Winston Churchill. For him, Churchill, as first lord of the admiralty, was the villain of Gallipoli, the First World War defeat that cost Australian and New Zealand forces dearly.

I had grown up with the heroic view of Churchill, hearing my grandmother tell me about being inspired by his wartime radio addresses to the British Empire, which she listened to in Uganda. Churchill became prime minister 25 years after Gallipoli and any fair rendering of history would rank the Second World War far ahead of Gallipoli in assessing Churchill’s record. But not for my Aussie colleague in 1995.

Continue reading at the National Post:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/raymond-j-de-souza-which-statues-should-fall