How the Mighty have Fallen

If you want to be considered a serious thinker in these times, the wise policy is to disagree with everything Donald Trump, the U.S. president, says. While this is normally quite easy to do, I find myself strongly agreeing with his concerns about tearing down statues.

History is often hard going. The more we learn about figures from the past, the more disagreeable they seem. Looking at ancient times through modern lenses often makes us glad that we weren’t around in those less enlightened times. But history concerns the past, all the past, not just ancient empires.

For example, during my lifetime, Martin Luther King Jr marched from Selma to Montgomery looking for equal rights for blacks in America’s Deep South. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and South Africa’s apartheid regime collapsed. We saw the fall of the Berlin Wall a year earlier, the harbinger of the collapse of communism. This led the way to free market capitalism and the trauma that brought to former communist states. To this day, we see cultures where women are little more than property and even in our own Western societies, secure employment is, for more and more of us, a thing of the past. Another big change I have witnessed is the legalization of homosexuality, culminating in gay marriage in many countries.

In other words, the world changes with time and our views evolve accordingly. What was perfectly normal when I was a child is no longer acceptable. I remember when every public space provided ashtrays as smoking was so common. Also, driving while under the influence of alcohol was not the taboo it is nowadays. Ironically, when I start driving first, seeing someone driving slowly and erratically meant that they were drunk; today it means they are trying to compose a text message!

This is why I agree with Donald Trump (on this issue at least). Tearing down statues and denying events and former heroes is a really bad idea. We need to learn from the past and this will not be possible if we try to airbrush it out. People in the U.S. did own slaves and some of the slave owners treated their slaves really badly. A civil war was fought over it.

But the ancient Romans and Greeks also owned slaves. Are we going to abandon the concept of democracy (even our own very poor imitation of it) simply because its originators owned slaves? Is this the reason why Latin and Greek are no longer taught in schools? Probably not, because they were taught back when Alan Turing was being chemically castrated to put a stop to his homosexual activities. Did we turn a blind eye to the open homosexuality of the ancient Greeks? Were we comfortable with what we would now call the inappropriate relationships between elderly scholars and young boys?

The Americans are not the only ones at it. In Belgium, they want to tear down statues of Leopold the Second, whose claim to fame was colonizing what we know today as the Democratic Republic of Congo. But empire building was what it was all about in those times. You really had no status among the European nations if you didn’t have a few colonies to exploit. Why should the Belgians feel so guilty about their past – after all, they were definitely in the second division compared to the likes of Britain and Spain?

Statues are very much a symbol of the past. That was how our ancestors commemorated their great heroes – their leaders and military generals. We don’t do this anymore. Instead we build statues to entertainers. Walk around Limerick and you will find statues of Richard Harris (actor), Terry Wogan (broadcaster) and Anthony Foley (rugby player). I have been living in Limerick for over twenty years and there has never been any mention of erecting a statue to Willie O’Dea or Michael Noonan (former government ministers).

The figures that will go down in history will be products of their time. For example, Adolf Hitler is always portrayed as an exceptionally evil man. However, if you have a look at political landscape in Europe in the 1930’s, you had Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal and Metaxas in Greece. The concept of a leadership cult and far-right policies were everywhere; the Germans simply took them to a much higher (lower?) level. However, these forces are still to be seen in today’s Europe. We have Marine LePen’s National Rally party in France and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary and, of course, there is Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. Maybe we need to study what happened in the 1930’s in the hopes that we can stop Europe’s history repeating itself?

It would certainly be a more profitable use of our time than tearing down statues and denying that our ancestors were anything more than products of their societies and eras.