Statue Smashing

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

Statue smashing is back in the news.

…History is also not kind to statue smashers. The Romans defaced the statues (“damned the memory”) of unpopular emperors (albeit safely when dead) up to whom they had once toadied. Cadres of frenzied French revolutionaries sought to wipe out all Catholic iconography, clergy, churches and monasteries, and are now condemned by history for their destruction. Joseph Stalin eliminated all pictures and even printed references to renegade Communist rival Leon Trotsky.

The ultimate logic of today’s statue smashers is a similar effort to war against the past, and erase all the complexities, all the tragic lessons of history, and to replace it was some easy Manichean morality play. Where exactly will it stop?

…In 1971 Joan Baez resurrected her career by refashioning The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” into a popular hit song. The verses are a veritable romantic paean to the futile resistance of white Southerners to the Union army:

Like my father before me

I will work the land

And like my brother above me

Who took a rebel stand

He was just 18, proud and brave

But a Yankee laid him in his grave.

Should we ban the song, which is still played often on radio, or petition surviving members of the Band or Joan Baez to rewrite or recalibrate their recordings to express distaste rather than admiration for the Southern struggle? Cannot “Gone With the Wind” be digitally remastered or dubbed to alter insensitive language; and if not, at least banned?

After all, in today’s logic, the artifacts of history do not survive to teach us of the errors of the past, but must perish to demonstrate the superiority of the present.

Or at least sort of.

…If North Carolina forbids the removal of Confederate statues without proper legal sanction, then by all means the aggrieved should peacefully protest, sue, or petition. From Henry Thoreau to Martin Luther King, dissidents have peacefully expressed their opposition to what they felt were moral injustices protected by immoral laws. And when arrested, convicted, and jailed, they bravely accepted the consequences precisely to draw attention to what they what they saw as cosmic injustice.

But the snowflake mentality of today’s campus is cowardly. It sees protest as performance art to virtue signal one’s easy morality, almost as career enhancement. Violence is often by night, sometimes in disguise, and by design aimed at avoiding culpability and the legal consequences thereof.

…In the most leisured, free, and affluent society in history, it is also hard to find present victim status. By default, mining the past for grievances must do. We war against mute stones, an easier fight, given that we have no idea of how to address the greater catastrophes of the present such as the urban war zones in Chicago. Live people can push back in a way that dead bronze does not.

…Smashing particular statues has more to do with the present than the past, and less with morality than power politics.

Read more here.