America's monument smashing is spinning out of control
MIDDLE ISRAEL: Jerusalem hosts a monument for the Jordanians who fell there during the Six Day War. It’s basic. It’s human. It’s completely removed from politics and ideology.
By AMOTZ ASA-ELWORKMEN GET READY to load the toppled Richmond Howitzers Monument, erected in 1892 to commemorate a Confederate artillery unit, onto a truck, after protesters against racial inequality pulled it down in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday.(photo credit: JAY PAUL/REUTERS)
Like the 16th-century Calvinists who vandalized sculptures in churches from Scandinavia through Holland to the Alps, holier-than-thou iconoclasts have been wielding their axes from Boston in the east to Sacramento in the west.In Birmingham, Alabama, protesters hammered the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument’s base, compelling the mayor to send a crane that summarily removed its 16-meter obelisk.In Richmond, Virginia, Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s statue was felled by protesters and then whisked away by a truck, shortly before Confederate Gen. Williams Carter Wickham’s monument met a similar fate, along with a nearby Christopher Columbus statue, which was toppled and dragged to the local Fountain Lake, where the great navigator was, ironically, drowned.Confederate monuments are limited to the South, but Columbus monuments are everywhere, and the psychosis now gripping America made all 600 of them fair game, including one in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which was defaced, and one in Boston’s North End, which was decapitated.Where this carnage originates is well known. African-Americans feel unequal, insecure and angry, along with millions of whites who rightly share their wrath. Storming provocative monuments is one way of venting these feelings.Yet the question is not where America’s iconoclastic spirit begins, but where it ends, and the answer is that it is headed to bad places, undermining the very values of freedom, enlightenment and equality that its bearers purport to defend.THE ASSAULT on Confederate monuments has been around for several years, triggered by the shooting in which a white supremacist massacred nine African-American worshipers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. More than 100 monuments have already been removed.As explained here three years ago (“Who moved my statue?” 18 August 2017), these monuments’ original proliferation was not intended to salute the Confederacy’s ideology, but to embrace the South, by salvaging its heroes’ honor and tempering its sense of defeat. Northerners saw the monuments as part of their culture’s generosity.That this complexity is now lost on America’s iconoclasts is understandable. Yes, secession is no longer a political prospect, but the racism that fed it is alive and well.Crowding under the mounted Robert E. Lee’s monument in Richmond while demanding that the 18-meter sculpture atop them go the way of its neighbor Jefferson Davis, the multitude and the horseman overlooking them seemed ready for renewed war, even though he has been dead for 150 years.
Yes, with millions feeling George Floyd’s killing was part of something much larger and deeper than an isolated incident, it is no longer reasonable to expect that Confederate heroes’ commemoration will remain unaffected.The problem is that once allowed to destroy just this and just today, the mob will proceed to rampage anything, anytime. That is how what began with the reasonable cause of removing Confederate leaders’ traces from the American public sphere quickly proceeded to ordinary Confederate soldiers, and worse.HONORING FALLEN foot soldiers is not the same as honoring the generals and statesmen who orchestrated their deaths, much less is it a statement about the cause for which they fought.We Jerusalemites respectfully host a monument, outside the Old City’s northeastern corner, for the Jordanians who fell throughout the city during the Six Day War. It’s basic. It’s human. It’s completely removed from politics and ideology.It follows that lumping together Jefferson Davis’s or Robert E. Lee’s statue with the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument is inhuman. The South’s leaders may deserve some renewed humbling, but the troops they commanded deserve no humbling. They should rest in peace.Unfortunately, such complexity is of no interest to the maddened crowd, which has chosen a path that in due course will make it storm anything that commemorates anyone, as if these vandals are armed with history’s facts and equipped to pass its verdicts.That is how the iconoclasts’ targets proceeded to Columbus, who was neither a statesman nor a general, and had no pretension to either change history or preserve it. He was a sailor, for heaven’s sake, not a thinker or politician; an adventurer whose daring voyage unveiled the continent that gave rise to the power that fought for freedom like no one in human history ever did.Was he perfect? He wasn’t. When tasked with ruling over a swath of land, he did nasty things, but he did them as a product of his time, not as its shaper. It is no reason not to appreciate his bravery and to thank him for its results.Even more mind-boggling are the attacks on Thomas Jefferson, whose monument in front of a high school in Portland, Oregon, was also pulled down by protesters.YES, AS the graffiti on the statue’s orphaned pedestal screamed, Jefferson was a slave owner. It was a status into which he was born. However, he also led Virginia’s groundbreaking banishment of slave importation, and as president he criminalized international slave trade and sought a way to emancipate all slaves. Can any of his defacers claim to have done for liberty and equality just a fraction of all this?They can’t, but with the ill spirits these know-nothings uncorked quickly assuming a life of their own, their idiocy has reached London, where Winston Churchill’s statue is now boarded up after iconoclasts sprayed on it “racist.”Was Churchill perfect? No. Did he spearhead liberty’s most heroic, resolute and bloody war on racism? He sure did. Does even just one of his defacers rise to just one inch of his stature? They wish.And lest these ignoramuses soon run out of targets, here’s a suggestion for their next victim: Michelangelo’s Moses. Yes, the man outlawed murder, robbery and theft, but he ordered Amalek’s every baby killed, didn’t he? And yes, he cautioned “Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past,” but with no Google, Twitter, Instagram or even just a smartphone, what did he know?www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer’s best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019) is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.
