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Monday, September 4, 2017

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 17th 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 Рit is intellectually unrefined and represents the height of self-righteousness naivet̩. It comes across as a form of fundamentalism Рthis 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 

2 comments:

paul scott said...

The Orwellian named group Antifa who go about as armed mobs directing the prevention of free expression, and attack any flag holding patriot “Nazis” are now declared as a terrorist group. Some sense of sanity shines through in USA.
Many good columnists advise people to stay away from crowds in USA, but that does not confront the reality of the violent nature that has infected these people.
Most of them would know little or anything of the reality of their civil war >
latter day historians will dish up freedom from slavery and spoon feed virtuous nonsense about Lincoln and the North. > And here comes my piece on Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln stated clearly and did prevent the right of the South to secession.
He said things like > " I would prosecute this war if no slaves were freed, and if some slaves were freed, and if all the slaves were freed” <.
The fundamental reason for secession have been so thoroughly buried in revisionary history, that any person wishing to research should go to the oldest documents possible. On entering the Presidency he announced that the Morrill tax would be imposed by force, and raised tariffs on foreign goods which the south depended on to such levels which did all but force a revolution.
The Morrill tariff, was a continuously increasing tax on imported goods, and the South paid heavily because with less industrial support, it imported plenty.
Their taxes were sent to the North to benefit Northern mercantilism,the protectionist cause, and the emerging banking system, that same cartel who had lifted Lincoln to the Presidency.
Lincoln was evil in other ways and I recommend the brief video by Stefan Molyneux, > ‘The truth about Lincoln’. This recommendation to all who have the stomach for the nature of the times as Barend has referred to in his article.
Lincoln’s wife’s family had slaves, the North has slaves, and there was a tax funded payment to return escaped slaves from the North back to the south.
It was an uneven war in the way that a war between the South Island and the North island would be uneven, if we were taxed 50% on everything arriving from the North Island. Not quite like that, similar.

The Robert E Lee family plantation was where now is Arlington cemetery, an idea that pleased the North.
Lee had left the Union army to lead the Confederates .
He was born in Virginia, [ the border with Virginia meets Maryland right at Washington DC], and his loyalty and patriotism to that sovereign state was strong.
The States as we see them now were close to sovereign with a small Government Federation until the [near] psychopath Lincoln, decimated the continent with 600,000 dead men.
Before that Napoleon gave up the real estate deal of all time when he sold Louisiana, the entire central North South strip of the now USA from Montana down to New Orleans.
No one knew who owned it, and the claws of Federal Government started to grow, and kept growing till we have the monster as it is today..
On the matter of statues, many people wanted to raise a monument to Nigel Farage in Trafalgar Square, they rang the Mayor Sadiq Khan..
He said you must be joking, we’re taking down Nelson’s column soon, and replacing it with a Mosque.

Brian said...

I feel that the last comment by Paul Scott sums up this whole situation really well, and now we find a similar situation occurring in God's Own, with the demand to remove a statue than offends Maori. Will however the Guerrilla campaigns and massacres by Maori not only of settlers, but also of those Maori who supported the Crown be “commemorated” by removing such incidents from history? The old adage “out of sight out of mind” applies very well.
Will this be the start of another campaign of bitterness, if so, then it is time we had a firm reply to the re-writing Left wing revisionists (in my day we just called them Communists). The violence by the leftists in our society now dominated due mainly to weak responses by our political parties and by the general public. Who feel rightly threatened by the use of such phrases as racial, Nazis, Fascists etc.
It is not well known that President Lincoln offered Lee total command of all the Union armed forces on the outbreak of the American Civil War. It cost Lee, who had actually freed his slaves, a night of grave reflection before making his decision. He could have accepted Lincoln’s offer as he did not believe in secession, but his loyalty as Paul mentions; was that he was a Virginian.
Hence his statement “Where Virginia goes so go I”.
Despite his failings as a President Lincoln was first, and foremost a human being, consumed with doubts regarding the Civil war, and only issued the Emancipation Declaration after it was obvious that the Union would win the war. His greatest failure during that conflict was his inability to pick the right Commanders of the Union army until the final years. The worst blow for the defeated Southern Confederacy was Lincoln’s assassination, which deprived them of their only protector. As by his statement made on the victory regarding the South “Judge not, that thou be not judged”.
Something that Maori activists might consider!
Brian