statues

Statues

I have mixed feelings about this, therefore I kept quite, listening and educating myself about the issue.

Today, I saw some videos of Neo Nazis in London "defending" Churchill's statue! Irony, stupid, ignorance, or what?

First, it's worth noting that statues, memorials, and monuments have been erected and taken down so many times in this country and everywhere. History, is just a way of perceiving the present. We, humans, continue to change our beliefs, values, ideologies and with that statues go up and down, heroes become villains, terrorists become national treasures, and freedom fighters become oppressors. They, the characters in the story (story here is history) are the same, their fights, struggles, achievements have not changed, but we see it in a different prism, we learn new things, we change.

In Parliament Square (and surroundings) stands Boudicca, a defeated and executed rebel. Not far Nelson Mandela statue was erected few years ago to celebrate his struggle against the state of South Africa, a strong British ally, who imprison Mandela on terrorism charges. Recently a new statue was erected for a woman, Millicent Fawcett, who during her active political life was not a national treasure and on the contrary was hated and vilified for advocating women's right to vote.

Erecting a new statue is much easier and less controversial than removing one, but we have removed many and always willing to change our views about people, removing a statue or changing a road name does not change history, it highlights our new understanding of history, our ever evolving present.

Some figures clearly have no place in modern Britain, we have concensus on how bad they were. The few generous gestures that some people benefited from cannot mask how horrible they were. Jimmy Savile was a great marathon runner, philanthropist and big supporter of the NHS, still that didn't and couldn't hide the terrible things that we learnt about him and his name will always be associated with the bad history we know off him.

On the other hand, we have figures that have done great things, but today we can see a darker side to those characters. Do we judge them by today's standards or their era's? Do we allow them to be perceived as heroes of the day or highlight their flaws?

I don't know, I have mixed feelings about that. The thing I am sure about is that we need to learn history properly. Not the history written by winners, not the history that glorified our mistakes, not the history that turned blind eye to our sins, we need to learn history properly. 

Then, we might have a better judgement on those figures, or at least we might be less biased and better equipped to make a judgement. 

More importantly, we will be able to understand ourselves and the suffering of others in a better way.

Ahmad Baker