This article was originally published by Wanjiru Njoya at The Mises Institute.
Public memorials, statues, and art play an important role in the popular understanding of history. Even those who may lack the time or inclination to study history in any depth may acquire a general understanding of history from what they see and hear around them as part of the general cultural expression. This explains why revolutionary movements often destroy or remove public art, such as the infamous case of the statues destroyed by the Taliban.
Built in the 6th century, the Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental size statues, standing at 115 and 174 feet tall, carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan… In 2001, the statues were destroyed by the Taliban over the course of 25 days. Although Islam became the dominant religion in the region, these Buddhist monuments were still integral to Afghan history and were a source of national pride, and their destruction has been seen as a great loss to many Afghan people.
The goal of iconoclasts in the context of revolution is not merely vandalism for its own sake, but to destroy people’s understanding of their history and cultural heritage. Totalitarians who want no competition for the loyalties of the people are often keen to leave no trace of a different and happier time. As George Orwell puts it, revolutionary leaders destroy relics of the past because they realize that, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Orwell vividly depicts how history is falsified in the dystopian world of 1984: “every statue and street and building has been re-named…and that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”
Some commentators have argued that the destruction of public art is merely part of the social evolution of art and culture. For example, the art historian Marina Anne Bass argues that “monuments as sites of memory only work if, or for as long as, their version of history is met with consensus” and that when the consensus evolves, the monuments fall into “disregard, neglect, condemnation, or destruction.” She argues that in the West, monuments of the past stood for “The cult of greatness that so long valorized ‘great’ men who performed ‘great’ feats in the service of their nations,” which she sees as “no longer one that we collectively espouse.” As she sees it, society has moved on from revering such “greatness,” therefore, the statues of the great no longer serve their original purpose.
Another art historian, Alexander Adams, takes a different view. In his book Iconoclasm: Identity Politics and the Erasure of History, he argues that destroying monuments on grounds that we no longer consider them to reflect our values amounts to erasing history, making us “less informed” and “more primitive.” Further, as the sociologist Frank Furedi points out in his foreword to Adams’s book, the destruction of statues witnessed in recent years is not an organic reflection of changing social values. Furedi distinguishes between cultural destruction designed to erase the past centuries after the events in question and the destruction of monuments associated with the revolution. In revolution, statues of the detested leaders fall as part of the revolution. He gives the example of the statue of Stalin being toppled during the Hungarian Revolution. Similarly, the American Revolutionaries toppled the statue of King George III.
On the evening of July 9, 1776, after news reached New York of the approval by the Second Continental Congress of the Declaration of Independence, a mob toppled the statue of the British king George III in an act of “symbolic regicide.” According to legend, the pieces of the statue were then sent to Connecticut, where they were melted down and made into 40,000 bullets for the Continental Army.
This is a good example of the iconoclasm described by Adams as “principled, just, explicable and excusable.” It is not merely the mindless vandalism of a riot, the destruction that goes along with burning and looting, but a means of destroying the evil against which the revolutionaries revolt. In his “Just War” lecture, Rothbard favored the toppling of statues honoring war criminals for principled reasons. Here the aim would not be to erase the past, but to denounce the crimes for which the perpetrators stood:
…we must always remember, we must never forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in modern times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln. Perhaps, some day, their statues, like Lenin’s in Russia, will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, “Dixie” and the Stars and Bars, will once again be truly honored and remembered.
Ironically, various statues of Lincoln were removed in 2020 from Boston, Massachusetts, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, although alas, it was not because their war crimes were finally recognized and denounced as Rothbard would have hoped. When the statue depicting Lincoln emancipating slaves was taken down in Boston, the reason given was that the statue was “perpetuating harmful prejudices, obscuring the role of black Americans in shaping the nation’s freedoms” and that removing it would make Boston “more equitable and just.” This was in response to the “racial reckoning” concerning George Floyd. The New York Times reported that,
Calls for the removal of statues like “Emancipation Group” and the Emancipation Memorial intensified over the summer after George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer sparked protests for racial justice across the country. Demonstrators rallied for the removal of public art installations that were seen by some as honoring racist figures.
These iconoclasts deny that their destruction is about erasing history, and insist that they have the principled purpose of denouncing “racism” and “white supremacy.” As they see it, when society recognizes that racism is wrong then it follows that any public art celebrating racism should be destroyed. But even if we take them at their word and accept that they genuinely abhor racism and therefore want to destroy monuments depicting racism, it is still plain that their revolution against “racism” is founded on fraud and deception. First, no evidence is ever offered that the destroyed statues were any more “racist” than those which remain standing. The statue of General Sherman—who said and did far more “racist” things than Lincoln—is still standing in New York. Second, the reality is that nobody in the nineteenth century was any more racist than anyone else who lived in his time, and there is no reason why one building from the time should remind us of racism any more than anything else that has survived from the same era. We can only hope that the iconoclasts are not planning to destroy the entire world for having been “racist” in the nineteenth century.
When the Welsh government in the United Kingdom announced that, “Statues of ‘old white men’ such as the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Lord Nelson could be hidden or destroyed to create ‘the right historical narrative,’” they claimed that this was because, “Historical statues that often glorify ‘powerful, older, able-bodied white men’ may be ‘offensive’ to a more diverse modern public.” This is the revolutionary method of identity politics that lies at the heart of cultural Marxism. Adams points out that “revolution is inextricably linked to iconoclasm. No revolution takes place without usurping symbols.” If statues of nineteenth century white men must all be destroyed to avoid offending “a more diverse modern public,” this tells us that the ongoing destruction of historic statues is not merely organic social change, nor is it intended symbolically to denounce historical crimes. It is merely yet another component of the identity politics revolution, the latest iteration of what Trotsky called “the permanent socialist revolution.”
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