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Winston Churchill and the quest to find the right standard for public memorialization

On June 7, during a Black Lives Matter protest, a statue of Winston Churchill in central London was vandalized. Rather than properly contextualize the incident as part of a global movement for black rights, many news sources conjured images of unruly gangs of teenagers randomly tagging beloved national monuments (and on D-Day anniversary weekend, no less).

How could anyone, argued Twitter patriots with a Union Jack in their usernames, defile the memory of the man who defeated the Nazis and is widely considered to be the Greatest Briton Of All Time?

What the question forgets, and what history confirms, is that destroying statues is a perfectly legitimate form of political protest. Few complained about the destruction of Joseph Stalin’s statue in Budapest in 1956, or the removal of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003, among many others. Whatever problems people have with statues being torn down are more context-dependent than they like to admit.

Some pointed out that no one defaced the statue of Karl Marx that day, presumably in an attempt to paint anyone interested in promoting racial justice as a communist. The “statue” of Karl Marx is actually his tomb, and it was nowhere near any of the protest sites.

There was less harrumphing when a statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader with the Royal African Company, was toppled in central Bristol and thrown into Bristol Harbour on June 7. Ironically, professional restorers intend to preserve the graffiti, as it is now an important part of the history of the statue.

In Ireland, we know how to deal with the stone and metal monuments to our erstwhile colonial occupiers. Statues to William of Orange, King George II, and Viscount Gough had already been destroyed before 1966, when dissident IRA members blew up a statue of Lord Nelson in the middle of the main street of our capital city. The government spokesmen did a good job of acting horrified, but the general reaction was more sanguine.

On June 15, as part of an official statement in response to the defacement of the Churchill statue, Boris Johnson, the English prime minister and author of The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, asked: “Where will it end? Are we supposed to haul down Cromwell who killed so many thousands of people in Ireland?”

In England, Oliver Cromwell is widely regarded as a hero and a pioneer of what would eventually and gradually turn into representative democracy. His position in the national consciousness is cemented by a statue outside the House of Commons.

In Ireland, his name is synonymous with brutality and xenophobia. J. Michael Straczynski, the showrunner for season eight of Murder She Wrote, tells the story of how the mere mention of the name Cromwell to an Irish hotel receptionist was enough to cause a cancellation of a wrap party of one of the episodes set in Ireland.

What about a statue’s pedagogical function? Of course a monument could play an educational role, but then again, that’s not the contribution a statue tends to make. Statues of war criminals, perhaps prime candidates for enlightening the citizenry, often fail to convey even a minimal understanding of the figure’s checkered past. Cromwell’s statue has been outside Westminster since 1899, yet Johnson’s comments about his murders will be the first many British people have heard about his ruthless violence against the Irish people.

British colonial crimes are often news to English people. However, once they make the effort to do some research, they often not only realize their mistake, but conclude that, in the words of former cabinet minister and Johnson’s fellow-Conservative, Michael Portillo, the “ignorance of Ireland among the British is rather shocking.”

Their Finest Hour

Despite the air of mystery surrounding initial reports, Black Lives Matter protesters did not work very hard to hide their opinions about Winston Churchill. After all, they did not merely deface the statue, but they painted the specific accusation “was a racist” under his name. This appears to be unambiguously true.

In 1920, Churchill established and deployed the Royal Irish Constabulary Special Reserve to Ireland. This group, known in Ireland as the Black and Tans, was notorious for its human rights abuses and war crimes.

In 1943, Churchill had thousands of tons of rice shipped out of India for use in the war effort, while a famine hit millions of Indians, whom he regarded as “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Churchill was reluctant to send relief on the basis that Indians “breed like rabbits.” (Ireland had a similar problem from 1845–1849, when exploitative English government policies caused a famine while massive shipments of grain were simultaneously being exported.)

In 1902, he called China a “barbaric nation” and in 1954 said he didn’t “like the look of [Chinese people] or the smell of them.”

In 1922, as Colonial Secretary, he financed the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia despite stating that they were “intolerant, well-armed, and bloodthirsty.”

In 1937, when discussing the future of the Arabs in Palestine, he said that the Arabs could hardly complain that “a stronger race, a higher-grade race … has come in and taken their place,” as this was, in his view, the natural order.

Moreover, the warm feelings Brits in the 1940s had for Churchill’s defeat of the Nazis did not translate to blind worship of the man. He was decisively voted out of office in 1945 in favor of Labour’s Clement Atlee, albeit for reasons entirely unconnected with his racism.

This litany of shame is not to besmirch the memory of Churchill in particular. The point is that statues don’t educate anyone unfamiliar with the subject. If you don’t know anything about Winston Churchill, then a statue erected to him without any context could be reasonably interpreted as a celebration of his achievements, whatever they might be.

The statue depicts the well-documented Hitler defeater, but doesn’t tell us much about the brutal racist. That’s not appreciating, or even acknowledging, history. That’s not education of any kind. That’s propaganda.

In a long Twitter thread, the same Boris Johnson tweeted that “we cannot pretend to have a different history” and that the abuse of statues is “to lie about our history.” However, there is a legitimate argument that many of these statues were erected specifically to pretend to have a different history in the first place.

It’s understandable to erect thoughtless memorials to people who were heroes given the standards of the time. It’s less understandable when you find out that huge chunks of British history have been intentionally “censored and airbrushed,” including the “mass destruction of documents,” the kind of thing we correctly mock Stalin for, and which forms the basis of Winston Smith’s job in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Nor is this old news. More recently, the Home Office destroyed evidence of the right to citizenship of thousands of Windrush immigrants. In 2013, the Conservative Party deleted an archive of their speeches from their public website, in a move which demonstrates the extent of their commitment to transparency and preserving the historical record more than tweeting about a statue.

The Germans, natürlich, have a word to describe the entire ideology behind dealing with all the awkwardness of a murky past, the glorious rollercoaster of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. There is no German who is not aware of the Third Reich, and they manage to achieve that awareness without putting up statues to war criminals. They accept their history, but they are very careful to avoid anything which could be confused with a celebration of it.

In the same way that German targets of the Holocaust could reasonably feel angry if there were a statue of a Nazi outside the Rathaus, is it not reasonable for English black people to feel angry when there is a statue of a slave trader in the middle of town?

Reading History

Conservatives love the idea that the destruction of statues is somehow editing history because they subscribe to the idea that history is a collection of immutable names and dates and unquestionable facts.

History as a discipline, however, can be better understood as a series of competing narratives, and the project of historians is to identify, evaluate, and eventually assemble for themselves those narratives. To historians, names and dates are the mere raw material of facts. Facts have no inherent meaning, because meaning is something we do. It is an action, not a property.

Historians learn to fear any person or organization who claims ownership over the collective memories of the past.

Students of history will be constantly aware of the need to keep an open mind, to adapt their approach to different types of information, to understand that the prevailing theory is just that, the prevailing theory, and that phrases like “we only use the facts” and “this is an objective account” are fairly reliable indicators that something is about to go badly wrong.

Arc Digital, 20 August 2020