jim360 - // There is a clear gulf between statues celebrating people who, perhaps, should not be so celebrated, and between the buildings their ill-gotten gains have provided. //
Actually, there isn't, quite the opposite in fact.
If you start analysing philanthropy based on the income source, where on earth do you stop?
Are you going to say that millowners who paid their workers slave wages and let them work in seriously dangerous conditions are going to have the buildings they endowed torn down?
Because surely, if we start demolishing the statues that commemorate such people, you can't stop there, we have to dig deeper and start erasing every trace of them walking the earth before our ludicrously retrospective social conscience in appeased.
// Nor is it clear that the lessons have been learned from history previously, with the statues, anyway. What does the presence of Confederacy monuments in the US teach us, except that some people never quite got over their crushing defeat? //
That's a perspective, and on that basis, we can start destruction in the morning.
As naomi points out, the essentiall point to remember in all this post lock-down 'we can all go out now, let's smash something and let off steam' activity - is that history cannot and should never be eradicated.
Our history is all around us to remind us of where we came from, how we got here, what we got right, and more importantly, what we got wrong.
Just because a statue erected two hundred years ago does not reflect modern attitudes is no reason to destroy it. Rather, it should be relocated in a museum as part of an exhibition in social history, with appropriate context to show how it came to be made and erected.
That is how future generations will learn that we didn't always get it right, because we are human and fallible, and those are valuable lessons that history has, and always will, teach us about ourselves.
This fatuous nihilismm of a demented few who think that destroying an image of something means that it never happened is utterly naïve, and should be stopped for the nightmare '1984' activity that it clearly is.
History is not always pretty - but that does not mean that it does not belong to us - it has made us who we are.