Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Iconoclasm 21st century style

During the Middle Ages, there was an outbreak of smashing up of statues of religious significance – iconoclasm, which literally means the destruction of icons – which the perpetrators (iconoclasts) regarded as idolatrous.

Statues can be potent symbols of power that may attract iconoclastic attention should they be associated with toppled regimes. Many a statue of Lenin and Stalin were brought down after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in Iraq people flocked to witness statues of Saddam Hussein biting the dust after his demise.

 

So long, communism. So long, Lenin.

Recently, there have been outbreaks of statue-busting in the US, and there is a vociferous movement to bring down various statues in Australia.

In the US, the main focus of late has been on statues of the canny general Robert E. Lee who, despite being outmanned and outgunned, gave the Union forces pitted against him cause for major concern. (In case you’ve forgotten, the Confederacy was made up of southern states that had broken away from the Union, leading to the American Civil War, which the Confederacy lost.) Robert E. Lee remains a folk hero to many southerners and his statue is in the same league as the star-spangled banner as an expression of southern pride.

Statues of the good general were erected after the war. It is not often that people commemorate losers, although there are exceptions where the figure in question made a huge and lasting impact, such as Napoleon, and where public sympathy lies with that personage. Robert E. Lee is widely perceived as a war hero to his southern folk despite having been eventually militarily defeated by superior forces, and to many he continues to symbolise all that was wholesome and charming about the ‘old south’ – a Colonel Sanders-type figure.

This had been a civil war, in which context reconciliation is of paramount importance – national cohesion has to be re-established. Some ‘Yankees’ might well have been irked by what they saw as the glorification of a man who had on occasion humiliated them through unlikely victories, and whose efforts had cost the lives of many Union soldiers. But to try to ban those statues would have been rubbing salt into the wound by reminding the southerners who had been the victors and who had been the vanquished, and would have created a great deal of ill-will in those sensitive decades in the aftermath of the war.

So why, almost 150 years after the man’s death, is there such a fuss about statues of him? Common answer: because he fought to defend the practice of slavery. Now to say that the American Civil War was all about slavery is a simplification, but there is no denying that slavery played a major role in the north/south rift leading to the war. The largely rural, agricultural south with its plantation-based economy was heavily reliant on slave labour, much more so than the more urbanised and industrialised north. Slaves who escaped to Union states would be hunted down and returned by force, to the chagrin of the Union states involved.

The Lee family had slaves and Robert E. was a general in the army of the pro-slavery side in the war. He is on record as ordering the whipping of slaves who had been recaptured or had otherwise transgressed. All that makes him a very bad man, and so we should not have statues in his honour, so the reasoning of the iconoclasts goes.

Robert E. Lee – southern gentleman, formidable military commander, and slave-owner – folk hero to many southerners, devil incarnate to some other people

But whoa. Lee was a southern land-owner, so it would have been most irregular for him to not have slaves. And corporal punishment was a fact of life in those times, used in the armed forces, prisons, schools – it would have been most peculiar if slaves had been exempted.

What all this amounts to is that Robert E. Lee was a man of his time and place. Yes, the abolitionist movement came out on top, but slavery had been embedded in the southern ethos since the 17^th century and it took generations to flush the slavery mentality out of the southern mindset.

Of course, if being a slave-owner disqualifies people from having statues erected in their honour, Robert E. Lee is not the only likely target – as Donald Trump mused, who’s next – Washington? Jefferson?

The fallacy underlying the mentality of the new iconoclasts is that if something is wrong, then someone who did it at some time in the historical past was wrong. This new absolutism – for we have been incessantly told for the past half century that all ethics and morality are relative – ignores the readily observable fact that standards change. People can not be condemned for doing what they believed to be right by the standards of their own time and place (see my article “Let’s all ‘apologise’ to one another for the alleged wrongs of our forebears”, Breaking Views 4 September 2016).

TRULY DISGUSTING!!!

A statue does not have to be of a specific personage to attract the attention of the rabid scum ‘protesting’ against what it supposedly represents. Here, they tear down a statue erected to the memory of the many thousands of young men who lost their lives fighting for the Confederacy, and then show what utter trash they are by kicking hell out of it.  

In Australia, statues of historical figures currently being eyed for tearing down by the new iconoclasts include Macquarie and Cook. In NZ, there have been rumblings along similar lines – look out Governor Grey? It’s not slavery that is the issue here but colonialism: colonialism is wrong, therefore those people were wrong – the same simplistic, absolutist reasoning is at work. But colonialism was not wrong by the standards of their day, and those are what we should judge them by.

Defacement of the commemorative statue to Capt. Cook in Sydney.

Moral absolutism gets up my nose – it is intellectually unrefined and represents the height of self-righteousness naiveté. It comes across as a form of fundamentalism – this is how it is and has always been and will always be, no argument brooked. Simple concepts for simple minds. But I, for one, do not see any reason why statues to decent people who did their best by the standards of their own time and played a major role in shaping the history of parts of the world should be torn down just because the ethical and moral norms then prevailing have changed.

The rabid left should not be dictating the direction this debate takes through mobsterism and vandalism. We should not pander to their warped totalitarian ideology and we must not let them win in their campaign to destroy our heritage.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek BA, BSc, BEdSt, PGDipLaws, MAppSc, PhD is an associate professor of education at the American University of Beirut and is a regular commentator on social and political issues. Feedback welcome at bv00@aub.edu.lb