I have mixed, though only slightly mixed, feelings about the pulling down of monuments to figures we now deplore. I confess that Edward Colston had not appeared on my cultural radar until shortly after he went for a dip in Bristol Harbour. I gather that the monument raised to him in 1895 celebrated his philanthropic works rather than his participation in the sale of Africans (“It is uncertain how much of his wealth stemmed from the slave trade,” says his Wikipedia entry), but it is understandable that his CV has subsequently raised hackles.

A couple of decades ago, I supervised the distribution to the workforce of a company “yearbook” published in 1915 by the San Francisco office of FCT&D as part of the citywide celebration of that year’s Panama-Pacific Exposition. Problem was, among the many amusing articles contributed by that year’s staff, there was one that spoke condescendingly—I am being charitable here—about “chinks,” accompanied by a caricature that would not have passed muster in most newspapers published stateside much after the end of WW II.

So I was under orders to make sure that about 750 copies of the commemorative reprint were distributed to the staff here in 1999, and it was going to bear my shop’s imprimatur. Bummer. What I wound up doing was printing an insert (closely mimicking, I’m pleased to say, the typography of the original product) acknowledging the offensive material, vigorously repudiating it on behalf of my clueless managers, but including this cautionary paragraph:

It perhaps remains to be observed that men and women in all societies and in all epochs are to varying extents unavoidably the captives, for good and for ill, of the cultures in which they live. Conventional wisdom is a highly perishable commodity. We may be thankful not to share the reflexive xenophobia of some of our forebears, and comfortable with such tolerance as our own milieu has learned since their time, but we do ourselves no favors merely to indulge a facile condescension toward the attitudes of the past. Better, perhaps, for each of us to scrutinize some of our own reflexive beliefs, and consider that among them at least a few, however deeply held, however self-evident these seem to us today, must inevitably strike posterity as outlandish or worse. A commitment to critical thinking, tempered with a certain generosity of spirit, could be the more appropriate way for us to pass along our own heritage for the next millennium.

As to monuments to Confederate officers, I’ll note that statues of Third Reich military leaders are rather thin on the ground in Germany, which would not be the case had they prevailed during the late unpleasantness. I’ve read—haven’t looked into this—that many of the Confederate statues later erected had “generic” bodies upon which the desired hero’s head might be affixed, and I greet with great cheer the notion that these figures could be left in place with dinosaur heads swapped in for those of the traitors.

Finally, I’m given to understand that there has been some grumbling in Auld Blighty regarding Winston Churchill’s memorialization in bronze. I acknowledge that he was an ambiguous and even, in certain significant respects, an appalling character, but whatever one may think of the old and incorrigible imperialist, his “antifa” credentials require no burnishing.

cordially,

Do you know Peter Fleming’s book Operation Sea Lion? I think I have a spare copy kicking around.

cordially,