The assault on statues around the world

 Washington Examiner:

Here is a story of two statues. Last week, in the Kazakh railway town of Taldykorgan, protesters looped ropes around the bronze likeness of their former autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and hauled him off his pedestal.

On the same day, in the English port city of Bristol, four protesters were acquitted of causing criminal damage despite cheerfully admitting having toppled the statue of Edward Colston (1636–1721), a local philanthropist, part of whose fortune had derived from the slave trade. Their lawyer argued that the statue was so offensive that rolling it into the harbor constituted the prevention of a hate crime. Incredibly, the jury agreed.

In both instances, the vandals believed that their hatred of inanimate metal trumped laws on property rights and physical force. But in other regards, the two cases are not comparable.

The difference does not lie in the statues. Most statues offend someone or other. If you are a consequential enough public figure to have been commemorated in bronze, the chances are you will have provoked some opposition. A case can certainly be made against both Nazarbayev and Colston.

Nazarbayev is a typical post-Soviet strongman who kept the nomenklatura in power after the breakup of the USSR. He happened to be the senior communist in Kazakhstan in 1991. Determined to remain in office, he ditched Marxism but clung on to Leninism. He won five successive elections, typically with about 97% of the vote, before standing aside in favor of a hand-picked successor in 2019. He was not the harshest of the post-Soviet tyrants — plenty of Central Asian republics are in a worse place — but he plundered the resources of the state and quashed dissent.

As for Colston, his offense was to have been involved with the Royal African Company, which transported enslaved human beings to the New World. Until recently, it was Colston’s philanthropy rather than the source of it that was remarkable. In the late 17th century, slavery was seen the world over as part of the natural order of things. What made Colston unusual was not that he had made money from human misery, but that he gave it away to endow schools, orphanages, almshouses, and churches all over Bristol. Only toward the end of the 20th century was there a reappraisal of his legacy, and not until 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests took off in Britain in imitation of the violence that followed the murder of George Floyd, did his statue become a target.

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Historical figures who have statues made of their image have sometimes been equally reviled.  Julius Ceasar was murdered by politicians, but his statue remained intact.  It gives students of history an idea of what this historical figure looked like.  I think the war against statutes is a war against history both good and bad.  It is a bararic response to historical figures.