To understand history we must confront our past, not erase it

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”- Cicero

It is safe to say that it has been a rather tumultuous year for race relations. In the days and weeks following the death of George Floyd, activists across the United States flooded into the streets to protest racial injustice. It wasn’t long until the voices became loud enough to be heard over the Atlantic and were picked up here. Slowly but surely, legitimate questions over excess police force gave way to questions over our colonial past.

As 2020 moves slowly towards the inevitable dustbin of history, the year will be remembered not only for coronavirus, but for the fierce arguments that have been waged over our comportment during the years of colonisation and expansion which marked the era of the British empire. During the last twelve months, we have witnessed a sustained attack on British history like never before. All of a sudden, through the lens of power, our cultural institutions, such as libraries, exhibitions and museums, became the subject of intense scrutiny.

But by far the biggest target were statues.

The statue of Edward Colston was pulled down, defaced and ceremoniously dumped in the Bristol harbour, a few months later, the bust of Sir Hans Sloane – the founder of the British Museum – was moved out of sight of visitors. On different occasions over the summer, the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was vandalised by both Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors.

One monument that has faced a sustained attack has been the one of Cecil Rhodes. The effigy that looks down upon Oriel college in Oxford has been the subject of a protracted “Rhodes must fall” campaign.

What do all these statues have in common?

These people all held morally reprehensible views in their time. Some participated in the heinous act of slavery, while others played a more indirect role in the trade.

The act of removing the statues throws up interesting questions. The attack on these monuments revives a longstanding debate about how and indeed whether we should continue to display monuments from our age of empire.

A large part of the problem comes from our educational institutions. Pulling down Rhodes has become part of the wider campaign by Oxford University to “decolonise” the curriculum. On university campuses up and down the country students are being taught to despise their own history. Those who teach disciplines such as critical race theory and post-colonial studies share an ideological form of European exceptionalism. They teach a version of history where the transatlantic slave trade takes precedence over everything else.

When it comes to slavery, the only exceptional thing about Britain was the effort expended to end it. Though it is certainly a stain on our history, we were not the only country that participated in the practice. Slavery is an evil that has plagued every corner of the world for thousands of years. Little is mentioned of the one million Europeans who were captured off the Barbary coast by pirates and sold in the slave markets of North Africa. Nor is much made of The British South Africa Company, who were patrolling the oceans to stop the Arab slavers in Nyasaland in 1880. Who ran the company? None other than Cecil Rhodes.

This isn’t covered by people like Kehinde Andrews. Andrews a “black studies” teacher has a very contemptuous view of British history, once making the ludicrous claim that Winston Churchill was comparable to Adolf Hitler in their views on eugenics. These academics and teachers indoctrinate their students with a vision of empire that conforms to the zero-sum fallacy: the mutually exclusive theory that states when one side wins the other side always inevitably loses. These academics have weaponised identity politics: all they see are power relations.

This naive and biased reading of history by people like Andrews is far from the whole story. As Niall Ferguson has shown in his book Empire, our colonial history is a more complex story. While we took part in the abominable trade of slaves, we exported many wonderful things. The Empire gave the world culture, the English language, common law, free trade and liberty. This is a process Ferguson calls “Anglobalization”.

These students have been taught that power is the only framework to evaluate the past. They are ideologues, incapable of adopting anything but a binary position: you are either victim or oppressor. History is a complex affair, one that moves in a linear direction and always builds upon the past. As such, ideas, politics and morality evolve. To sit in anachronistic judgment is wrong. We simply cannot judge today by the standards and practices that were once held in the past.

But, through lawless acts of ritualistic nihilism, these people would rather erase history. We need to look for a sensible approach. Perhaps there’s another option?

Some have suggested a more democratic process should be considered. A potential vote on whether or not these works of art be sequestered in a museum.

A few miles outside of Budapest lays Memento Park. This is an open-air museum where many of the statues from the Communist era were placed when they were removed. Communists revelled in garish statuary and now effigies of some of its most fervent advocates and leaders such as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin sit in perpetuity in this beautiful part of Hungary. Designed by the Hungarian architect Ákos Eleöd, he said of the project “This park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described, built, this park is about democracy. After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship.”

Or perhaps more thought could be given to a memorial to the victims of slavery, like the one that exists in Czechia to commemorate those that died during the forty years the country was under Communist rule.

One thing is clear, to portray the last four hundred years of our history as one of shame is simplistic and shallow. If we accept the anaemic vision of history put forward by critical race theorists, we will be held forever responsible for the hereditary crimes of our ancestors, unable to atone for the sin of inherited collective guilt. To escape this, it is crucial that we sensibly debate the lives of those who came before us.

When you pull down statues you are giving tacit acceptance to erase any evidence that these people existed. This stops us from understanding how far we have come. History is a wonderful discipline – its methodology forms the basis of objective rational inquiry. It tells us not only who we are, but more importantly, who we were. But the way some are teaching it, through a shameless misrepresentation of the past, I fear the statue toppling class of 2020 will graduate next year with first-class honours.