Don't confuse toppling statues with confronting the past

Monday, June 15 2020
By Michael Glackin

One of the most iconic images of the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the toppling of the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Fidros Square in Baghdad. It started with a group of Iraqis, one of whom was Kadhim Al-Jabbouri.  Kadhim had spent more than a year in one of Saddam’s jails and claimed more than a dozen members of his family had been killed by the regime. After fruitlessly hammering at the statue with a sledgehammer, Kadhim was relieved when a unit of US Marines arrived in a M88 armored vehicle. The marines attached a chain to the statue from their vehicle and the rest is history. Images of the giant statue being ripped from its plinth beamed around the globe, and made the front pages of the world’s newspapers the next day. 

A similar fate has befallen a number of statues around the UK, and elsewhere, in the last week, following the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in the US, and the globalisation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Most of the statues targeted in the UK are those of Georgian and Victorian luminaries who had links to the slave trade. That they ended up being commemorated with statues is largely due to their philanthropy, often founding schools for the poor. The fact that the wealth which funded their philanthropy was made in trade of human flesh is rarely noted on their monuments. However, against the backdrop of Floyd’s murder, other statues, those with no links to the slave trade, have also been targeted, most notably the statue of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill in Parliament Square.

Earlier this month his statue was daubed with the words “racist” during a Black Lives Matter demonstration.  Another protest at the weekend saw the statue, as well as the Cenotaph – the memorial to the dead of the two world wars – boarded up to protect them from protestors. A small number of people have now ridiculously demanded Churchill’s statue be taken down.

Churchill held indisputably abhorrent views on race. He famously said “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

And it’s not just words. Churchill’s treatment of the Marsh Arabs in Mesopotamia in 1920, during the Iraqi revolt, remains controversial. Churchill, then UK secretary of state for war, was a vocal supporter of using chemical weapons against the insurgents, decades before Saddam actually did so. In the event Churchill ordered the air force to drop almost 100 tons of bombs indiscriminately on the region killing around 9,000 Iraqis to quell the revolt.

And yet, while working as a journalist covering the battle of Omdurman in Sudan 1898, Churchill denounced the British Army for its treatment of enemy casualties, many of whom were ill-treated and some even murdered after a British led Egyptian and Sudanese force defeated the army of Abdullah al-Taashi, the successor to the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad. In an ironic parallel with the current frenzy of statue toppling, he also denounced the destruction of the Mahdi's tomb and the seizure of the Sudanese leader's skull as a souvenir. Churchill wrote: “To declare that to destroy what was sacred and holy to them was a wicked act, of which the true Christian, no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence.”

Clearly, while Churchill believed white people, primarily white Protestants, were superior, he did not believe it right to treat non-white people inhumanely, even when zealously prosecuting war. It is also surely worth pointing out that Churchill’s views on race pale beside those of Hitler's murderous racial hierarchy. Churchill did not seek to wipe out every Arab in 1920, or every German when he opposed Hitler. Once those he fought against were defeated, Churchill's wars ended. For Hitler and the Third Reich, exterminating Europe's Jews, Gypsies, and every political opponent was an end in itself. The Nazis continued killing Jews and their political opponents, and others who resisted them, right up to the very last day of the Second World War, long after it was clear the war was lost. 

Churchill was not perfect. He held opinions that no politician would dare think today, let along express. However, as military historian Max Hastings put it this week, it “seems grotesque to suppose that if this fault is weighed in the balance against his vast services to Britain, and to mankind, it can justify defacing his image in public, or toppling him from the pantheon of national heroes.”
There is also talk of renaming the Rhodes Scholarship, which allows students from Africa, the Arab world, and the US among others, to study at Oxford University. The scholarship was established in 1902 with money from Cecil Rhodes, who expanded British imperialism in southern Africa at the end of the 19th Century, and was the founder of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

Where will this end? Should we also now tear down the London School of Economics (LSE)? Nothing personal. Indeed, I once, shamefully, turned down a generous bursary from the LSE in favour of starting my first job in journalism. Journalism’s loss some might say. The LSE was founded by those secular saints of the left, the Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. But the diaries of Ivan Maisky, who was the Soviet Union’s ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943, reveal socialist Beatrice held some unsavoury views on race. After a meeting with Beatrice, in October 1939, Maisky wrote: “I mentioned what Churchill said to me the other day: ‘Better communism than Nazism!’ Beatrice shrugged her shoulders and noted that such a statement was not typical of the British ruling elite . . . But then, for some reason, she found it necessary to add: ‘Churchill is not a true Englishman, you know. He has negro blood. You can tell even from his appearance.’” Beatrice then told Maisky “a long story” about Churchill’s mother coming from a family in the American South and her sister looked like a “negroid”.

For what it’s worth, I’m all for certain monuments being taken down and consigned to museums with explanatory notes which properly explain their role in history. But we shouldn’t airbrush our murky history. We should own up to it and explain it. I would prefer if my children had been properly taught Britain’s role in the slave trade in school, as I was at my tiny state school in London five decades ago.
Let’s confront our past, understand it, and learn from it. Toppling a statue would not have saved George Floyd’s life, but a better understanding of our shared past, and our sins, might have.

The final irony is all this statue toppling brings us back to Fidris Square in Baghdad. Speaking a dozen years after he helped destroy Saddam’s monument, Khadhim, lamenting on the state of his war torn country, said: “I feel pain and shame. I ask myself, ‘Why did I topple this statue?’. I'd like to put it back up, to rebuild it. I'd put it back up but I'm afraid I would be killed.”
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.