In my town, a statue of Edward Cornwallis was recently removed from its pedestal and trucked away. The statue of the first British Governor of Nova Scotia was erected in Halifax in the 1930s. It went up with great fanfare, but most people who since passed it by, including me, took little notice. Most students who attended the school that no longer bears his name could not have told you who he was. Little of the man’s role in the city’s history, nor of the fledgling city’s role in the sprawling chessboard of his mid-18th century world was widely known, let alone understood. In recent decades, however, his part in our bloodied history has been revealed. Dr. Daniel N Paul’s acclaimed We Were Not the Savages (1993) unveiled Cornwallis with his murderous warts. He has since been suitably vilified in the familiar manner. Few here have their tiki torches out in his defence and it is likely that his larger than life bronze rendering will remain warehoused to gather dust instead of pigeon dung until memory recedes and it is melted down for some other bronzed purpose. This censorious victory has whetted appetites and statues of a Boer War soldier and that of Winston Churchill are now on the landscape-cleansers’ wanni’gone list.
This iconoclastic socio/political movement has influenced public spaces in many countries around the globe as the alt-right and the lite-left fuel each other’s flames. Throwing a blanket over Cornwallis and taking him away reminded me of a visit to a Virginian friend and the drive with her down Richmond’s Monument Avenue which is now near the epicentre of this debate. It has caused me to reflect on structures humans create to mark their place and time, and when and why they put these markers up, take them down or let them crumble.
At the outset I would have said that I had little interest in statues and other monuments. That some people could be so emotional about them puzzled me. As I thought back, however, to those that I had seen, I was surprised. Each time my mind wandered to the subject the list got longer. I discovered that the meaning of monuments changes with passing time and that they frequently say more about their creator than their subject. The unifying thread that connects controversial monuments around the world: imperial, Confederate, religious - is that they are physical embodiments of mythologies. Our reactions to them, therefore, often come from our subconscious. I discovered they intrigue me and that sometimes they profoundly moved me. My self perception as a rational iconoclast is dashed. My life has actually been one of monumental excess.
Those that came to mind fell roughly into two categories; monuments I had stumbled on, as well as those to which I had deliberately travelled. Sometimes they just caught a curious eye. Beside the doorway of a humble stone row-house in Dunkeld, Scotland is a small plaque noting it was once the home of Alexander Mackenzie, Canada’s second Prime Minister. A sculpture of Shakespeare “breaks a leg” beside the Danube in Budapest. In Paris a plaque on a schoolyard fence memorializes the five hundred children from the neighbourhood of the school who, during the Vichy Regime, had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered PARCE QU’ILS ETAIENT NÉS JUEF. On a narrow country road that winds beside abandoned and overgrown farms along the Canaan River in New Brunswick, Canada, a stone cairn stands beside a small white clapboarded church. On it in bronze, shocking in length and jolting with the repetition of family names, is a list of the fallen in the Great War. Boys from the local farms. Near the State Capital building in New Mexico is a tree sculpted in dark metal, each of its many leaves naming a Native tribe that did not survive. I looked for some time to find Beothuk. In the JEATH War Museum in Thailand I was surprised by a 1944 photograph of a Japanese General unveiling a cenotaph to commemorate the tens of thousands of South Asians and Prisoners of War who died brutally while building the Thai-Burma “Death Railroad”. In Heidelberg Germany, lured by a work-crew selectively harvesting trees, I wandered upwards through the forest trails above the Philosophers’ Way where, at the top of the Holy Mountain stands a Thingstätte. Empty, gloomy, and moldering the 15,000-seat amphitheatre was depicted by Joseph Goebbels as “National Socialism in Stone” when he addressed the 20,000 who thronged to its celebratory opening in 1936. In Tyre, Lebanon in the ruins of the old city an elderly man from the nearby Palestinian Refugee camp guided us down its Roman era main street. Many of the green marble columns that lined the tiled street still stand and, on the one closest to the sea, gouged in the marble at the height of a mounted knight, a cross. “Crusader”, he said and gestured as though he was swinging a broadsword vertically then horizontally.
Monuments have always focused human journeys: cave paintings, henges, inuksuit, pyramids and the like. Our travels today are the same. We go to see the wonders large and small. Many have lured me. Sometimes experience did not match anticipation and, on some occasions, my response to being there differed sharply from the original thoughts and feelings that drew me there. As a teen, I read about the relocation of monuments about to be flooded in Egypt. Decades later I went to Abu Simbel. On Edinburg’s Royal Mile I hunted to find Adam Smith’s gravestone because J.K. Galbraith had mentioned it was there. The Behistun Inscription was pictured in a school history textbook, a huge billboard carved in stone 2500 years ago high above a branch of the old silk-road. The tour guide/driver took some persuading, but he left his normal Tehran-Isfahan-Shiraz route to go for two days to Kermanshah in Kurdish Iran to see it. A First World War battlefield tour with a group of Australians stemmed from my desire to see the Canadian National War Monument at Vimy Ridge. A visit to Nairn in Scotland where my patronymic forbear was born stemmed mainly from a wish to visit the nearby battlefield at Culloden where the poet Alden Nowlan said, “the last of the old barbarians were destroyed by the first of the new.” It was my “little engineer’s” fascination with building a circular dome over a rectangular base that first intrigued me about the Church of Holy Wisdom in Istanbul. There are many reasons to visit Istanbul, but its greatest jewel is the Hagia Sophia. Its history tells everything about putting things up and taking them down, about believers and iconoclasts and the bloodshed they have caused.
Consider a few of the icons mentioned above. They not only speak about the subject depicted, they also tell us of those who put them up and of their times. Prime Minister Mackenzie’s plaque is where, a lifetime later, historical preservation and tourism intersected. A tiny Rushmore. The sculpture of vanished tribes in Santa Fe speaks not only to what happened, but to what is happening. It says both, “They are gone” and “We are here!” The Parisian plaque commemorates the victims of atrocity and reminds of what happened, but its concluding entreaty “NE LES OBLIONS JAMAIS” is an implicit warning about the now. That Churchyard memorial by a winding country road was probably erected many years, perhaps decades, after the war. Surviving relatives likely attended its unveiling and one may have remembered the grandfather who raised her sighing as he gazed out the kitchen window. Monuments tell a story about their subject, another about their creators and yet another about those who view them or just pass them by. Each generation recreates history according to its understanding and the meaning and significance of monuments changes as time passes. Cornwallis’s purpose, the purpose of those who erected his statue, and the purposes of those who now make it newsworthy are radically different. Likewise, could be said of all the graven images, including Confederate soldiers and Imperialists, now in dispute around the world.
Monuments are largely unchanged in a human lifetime, but we are not. I first saw the temple of Abu Simbel in the National Geographic in 1964. I marvelled at the just-in-time engineering feat that moved it to safety high above the pending Aswan flood. I knew then that progress was benign. Fifty years later an armored vehicle with a machine-gun toting soldier, with another trailing, led our small convoy of rickety vans up the Nile from Aswan. But as we skirted Lake Nasser in murky moonlight, I thought of the countless ancient Nubian villages and monuments that were not moved and the fractured people who were. By sunrise children stood by the road in poor villages, where we were not allowed to stop, waving as we rumbled by, scrambling for the occasional greenback that fluttered out a window. I was reminded of the sacred Snowshoe Islands of the Wolastoqiyik, tracks of the mighty Glooscap, now submerged in the head-pond of the Mactaquac Dam in New Brunswick; a monument to progress, another Lake Perfidy.
The story of the British soldier Henry Rawlinson captured my boyhood imagination not because his copying the Behistun Inscription led to solving the mystery of ancient cuneiform writing, but because he had copied the engraving with the help of a local boy. I related to that unknown Kurdish lad who had climbed up to the precarious higher reaches of the inscription to dangle ropes to make the papier-mâché imprints that Rawlinson would take back to London for translation. The inscription, 50 ft. high and 80 ft. wide, was carved on a sheer limestone cliff more than 300 ft. above the ancient road.
I could not imagine myself as a soldier or a scholar, but a brave boy as hero was alluring. When I got there about 170 years after Rawlinson, ongoing restoration allowed us to go only to the base of the cliff. The caravansarai on the opposite side of the road, a Medieval camel-riding businessman’s motel, offered a clear perspective, best with binoculars. But now my thoughts were not about the daring acrobatics of a boy. I had discovered during my overnight stay in Kermanshah that one prong of Saddam Hussein’s 1980s invasion of Iran had been halted there. And so, gazing upward I thought of Saddam’s attempt to build a palace near the Ishtar Gate thus linking himself to the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II. High above, Darius the Great still stood with his bow, one foot on the chest of a supine foe, towering over bound prisoners their necks in nooses. Above them the inscription, repeated in three languages, tells how Darius triumphed over pretenders to HIS throne.
How much of the ancient inscription was factual? The tribal kinsman of the vanquished warriors would certainly have told it differently. I thought about dictators and their paranoia, their false narratives, and their need for legitimacy and adulation. Saddam Hussein changed my appreciation of the Behistun Inscription. I suspect that Darius, like Saddam, was adept at manipulating his followers. The inscription is so high up that those travelling the road below could not read it. This was no accident. The printed word, especially that which is unread, awes and baffles and most of those who travelled the Silk Road were illiterate anyway. (Think of signing a legal document “here”, “here” and “here”.) Given the Orwellian moment in which we live, when I think of Behistun I now think of Darius and Saddam and of narcissistic messaging.
The 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is about as nationalistic as Canadians get about warfare. Iconic in English-speaking Canada, it is less so in Quebec where many had the good sense to avoid European war. (Successful federations have built-in checks on nationalistic excess and the tyrannies of majorities or minorities.) The successful Canadian assault on the ridge, after many others had failed, is seen to have given impetus to Canada becoming fully independent as a country. It was an essential learning in my schooling. Heroic stories of Canadian soldiers were told, their bravery revered and the 10,000 Canadians who fell in the four-day battle were honored. (The 20,000 Germans who fell went unmentioned.) Being there in northern France and seeing the remnants of trenches and tunnels and hearing the details of the courageous assault from a young Canadian guide, brought stirring readings of In Flanders Fields and solemn Remembrance Day ceremonies back to mind. But when I climbed the long slope to the Canadian National Vimy Memorial my nationalism evaporated. It overlooks gentle slopes that were fields of carnage; within its horizon well more than one hundred thousand young soldiers were killed. It is not triumphal; it is serene.
Standing there, I did not feel victorious or proud. That small stone cairn 3,000 miles away in New Brunswick, Canada came to my mind. Then a long-forgotten conversation with old Lou, the maintenance foreman at my university from whom I rented a student room, surprised my memory. One night over a beer he laughed when I asked him about retirement. He said he would finish late because he had started early. He told me he had “lied his age” to go. I do not recall which battles he was in, but he said that one evening, when the guns were finally done, he and a friend walked amongst the twisted corpses looking for familiar faces, the boys from Fredericton. They rolled over the bodies of those who were face down if their heads were still there. When they finally stopped and stood without speaking, he heard complete silence for the first and only time. Then, on the horizon, a giant white sheet unfurled and floated above them the entire length of the battlefield and vanished in the setting sun. He told me that he never felt more at peace than in that moment. We sat quietly for a while when his story ended. He picked at the label on his beer bottle and muttered, “A peace which passeth all understanding.”
The Thingstätte in Heidelberg was one of several outdoor “meeting places” built under the direction of Joseph Goebbels to indoctrinate Germans, particularly the Hitler Youth, by linking them to pre-Roman, Germanic solar and lunar festivals. This one was significant because the Reich’s architect, Albert Speer, was born nearby and Goebbels himself held a PhD from the local university. Now more an unkempt ruin than an amphitheatre my first instinct was, “Why hasn’t this been bulldozed?” The previous evening, we had shared Flammkuchen with a young backpacking couple who had just come from Poland where she had visited her mother’s no longer Jewish ancestral village. The next morning, as I meandered around the empty stone seats, I climbed to the upper tier of the bowl. Looking down on the sprawling stage, I saw her enter stage-right with her backpack. Slowly, pausing occasionally, thoughtfully, she walked across the stage. A Canadian, she was from the branch of her family that had emigrated in time to escape the mass murders. I know not what she was thinking, but I wondered then about the Jews from Heidelberg. Had some anxiously climbed the Heiligenberg that day in 1936, to say, “we too are Germans.” I thought then that the site should be preserved as a monument to human folly.
I had watched Peter Watkins BBC TV 1964 docudrama Culloden about the battle that ended the ’45 Jacobite Rising in Scotland on April 16, 1746. I went to that battlefield with romantic myths about Bonnie Prince Charlie and popular misconceptions about the battle well in check. But then as I wandered with my young sons amongst the burial mounds, I was overwhelmed emotionally when I saw the stone inscribed, “MACLEAN.” That simple, rough cut, word tapped into tales of the Clans I had heard as a boy. My father was not yet two years old when his own father died and I think his layman’s interest in Scottish mythology, his Romantic view of the Clans, his collection of Harry Lauder records all resulted from his yearning for a father. I watched my children play on the mounded mass-graves and the thought that DNA resting there in old bones might well be present in them tapped into an emotional sense of tribalism that shocked, even embarrassed me. I was choked-up. The knowledge that my 3rd great grandfather, Allan McLean, was born in nearby Nairn in 1745 took on greater significance. I do not know who his parents were or where they had fit in the complexities of Scottish politics of that time. Nor do I know why he immigrated to British North America thirty-eight years later, but it is very likely he and his mother heard the swirl of the pipes amidst the cannons, the chattering muskets and the cries of agony and rage that April day in 1746. I suppose it is also possible, not probable, that his father lies in that field.
And that brings me back to Edward Cornwallis the first Governor of Nova Scotia and the now disgraced founder of Halifax. He was a lieutenant-colonel in the British army that put down the Jacobite rebellion. In the aftermath of the British victory he was dispatched by the commanding general, the Duke of Cumberland, to wipe out the shattered remnants of the Jacobite army and its supporters. He was ordered into the western Highlands of Scotland to "plunder, burn and destroy” and it was added: "You have positive orders to bring no more prisoners to the camp.” The ensuing rampage gave Cumberland the epithet “Butcher” and seasoned the thirty-three years old Cornwallis in the ways of scorched-earth warfare. Even by the brutal norms of the day Cumberland was judged harshly by his peers causing officials to defend the atrocities by falsely indicating that the Jacobite army was also under orders to “Give no Quarter.” Scotland, the last rising crushed, would remain part of Great Britain in The United Kingdom. The Highlands, portrayed as backward and barbaric, would be “pacified”. The clan system, already in decline, was dismantled, its legal structures replaced, and Clan Chieftains reduced. The Gaelic language was discouraged, and cultural expressions seen to be militaristic such as bagpipes, tartans and the kilt were banned.
This is all good reason for me to applaud the departure of the Lieutenant Colonel’s statue from downtown Halifax. Why then have I been troubled by his statue being trucked away? What makes me uneasy about the present wave of iconoclasm? Why should it concern me if a statue of a Boer War soldier or Winston Churchill were also cloaked and trucked away?
The history of Halifax, Nova Scotia is tied to the current turmoil over Confederate statues in the USA. A lifetime after the destruction of the Clans at Culloden, Sir Walter Scott rehabilitated the image of the Scottish Highlands. He became the most popular writer of the English language in the first half of the nineteenth century. His works peopled a golden Scottish past with virtuous heroines and likeable rogues such as Jeanie Deans and Rob Roy. Old folktales were embellished. His fictional heroes prevailed despite great hardship as they brought justice to the oppressed. His poetry, historical writing and historical novels reinvented the Scottish past and established a romantic, chivalric mythology that exalted the notion of the homeland and the importance of rank and cultured civility. It became integral to the sustaining mythology of the United Kingdom. His enormous impact on Scotland is demonstrated by the towering, two hundred-foot gothic Scott Monument that was constructed in Edinburgh after his death, but this monument is not as influential nor perhaps as enduring as the mythology he created. Even those who have not read his works have his virtual monument in their minds.
Every human and every grouping of humans – family, tribe, nation - has constructed such monuments of the mind. We often represent them in statuary and pay homage to them in story and song. They are our sustaining mythologies; entangled, contradictory but always there. Sprinkled with embellished fact and fabrication they can be helpful, harmless or dangerous. It is said that a Canadian hockey player steps up his play just by putting on the jersey of the fabled Montreal Canadiens. There are those of us who think that the Red Sox were more interesting when they labored under the “Curse of the Bambino.” The British do have a stiff upper lip, sometimes. My emotional response to Culloden was an echo of Sir Walter Scott. My pacific reaction to Vimy fits with our image of Canada as a tolerant keeper of the peace. There is usually a grain of truth within our myths, but they can also buttress evil. Goebbels tapped into pre-Roman German mythology and twisted it into a narrative he hoped would sustain the Third Reich for a millennium.
“O ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road, And I'll be in Scotland a'fore ye”. Scott is not alone. Myths about loss, suffering and martyrdom are pervasive. They run through the Abrahamic religions. In Jerusalem I witnessed Jews at prayer at the Wailing Wall and watched fervent Christian pilgrims enact the Stations of the Cross. In the Middle East I lived near a Shia Mosque and on Ashura saw their rituals of mourning for Husayn ibn Ali, the third Imam, thirteen centuries after his death at the disastrous Battle of Karbala. That descendants of the vanquished create mythic pasts commemorating loss seems to be a universal human trait. (The engraved tombstone may be the most common expression of this lost-cause reflex.) Serbians celebrate the day of their catastrophic defeat by the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Though it led to centuries of Turkish Muslim occupation, the defeat became romanticized as a Christian victory through a promised heavenly resurrection. I imagine that what happened in Srebrenica is connected. The Catalans celebrate Diada Nacional each September 11, the day Barcelona fell in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714. More than a century later the holiday marking the loss came to symbolize the struggle for Catalan independence from Spain. Myths that turn defeats to victory, the celebration of lost causes, are durable and disturb the present in unexpected ways.
Abolitionist and pro-slavery advocates both referenced Sir Walter Scott in the querulous period leading to the American Civil War, but the popularity of Scott’s romantic novels remained strong in the Old South long after it had waned elsewhere. Mark Twain, years later, drolly wrote that, “Sir Walter …is in great measure responsible for the war.” Scott’s brave and chivalrous knights, his chaste and virtuous maidens, his gentlemen of rank and breeding informed the myths of the “genteel” plantocracy. That myth became entangled with another, the mythology of race.
Holding others in bondage in one form or another is common throughout our meandering human journey. The enslavement of Africans by the Europeans who had occupied eastern North America, is unique not only in scale, but also in that its sustaining mythology is an unusually virulent and durable form of racism. The rapid expansion of the plantation economy coincided with the liberal revolution and its emancipatory and empowering notion that all men were created equal. This presented the troubling Jeffersonian paradox. How could slavery and liberty coexist?
Humans perform such mental gymnastics with embarrassing ease. Some excused enslavement in the same manner as European imperialists defended colonization: it was a civilizing process, the White Mans’ Burden. This variant, though bigoted at root and brutal in practice, was seen at least by some as transitory. People of colour, given a large enough dose of missionaries and modernity, could be civilized. “Red or yellow, black or white, they are precious in HIS sight”, went the Sunday school song.
A more pernicious nineteenth century variant of this thinking justified European imperialism and American slavery through biological determinism. The unwritten corollary to the Declaration of Independence became that African descended people were not men; they were a sub species fit only for enslavement based on immutable race. Nineteenth century humanism and better science, spurred by African American rebels and intellectuals, revealed the theory to be a nonsense and the practice to be abhorrent. As the abolitionist movement strengthened, however, this racist excuse for slavery became more deeply entrenched while simultaneously a romanticized image of the kind, patriarchal plantation owner muffled the jangle of chains and the crack of the whip.
Robert E Lee came of age in that world. He was an interesting person worthy of historical study from many vantages, but he was just a man with an unusual life trajectory. The Robert E Lee fondly remembered after the “War Between the States”, however, is an incarnation of the myth, in the tradition of Scott, of the gallant and chivalrous Southern Gentleman. This myth was also twisted in the cauldron of that war into its most malignant variant, self-styled chivalrous knights, the night riding terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan.
The image of the Southern Gentleman who presided over carefree slaves swept the wider world in the period of Jim Crow. Gone were the days of the golden past. As the grandsons of Confederate soldiers re-invigorated the KKK in 1915, and as the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised statues to veterans, historian Ulrich Phillips was writing American Negro Slavery. His benign portrait of the antebellum South was expressed in popular culture twenty years later in Gone With The Wind. In the ensuing decades, in “As God is my Witness” moments, the myth turned loss into victory and seeped into our consciousness. The Southern Gentleman came in many guises including Colonel Higbee to whom the rotund, round faced and beaming Aunt Jemima served her delicious pancakes. In the popular mind of the twentieth century the Civil War came to be about fighting for a bygone homeland, a genteel place, not a war for or against slavery. The mythical Robert E Lee existed before the man Robert E Lee was born and he was born again as an equestrian statue long after his death.
Monuments of the mind are ubiquitous and durable.
The present impatience with racist laggards who “just don’t get it”; the impulse to remove icons, often violently, from public spaces, ignores that our relationship to artifacts is often deeply personal. Not everyone who would preserve the Confederate Statues or have Cornwallis continue to pose in Halifax is a racist. There are well intentioned people who would keep these statues in the public square. For some it is as simple as liking the equine form. Others may want them preserved but not be able to articulate why. I can imagine, for example, somewhere an older woman argues with her daughter who wants the towns Confederate Statue taken down. But to mother, it is not about the Civil War, the Confederacy or Jim Crow. On the threshold of her subconscious is a photograph of her son who never completely came home from Iraq. He smiles proudly in his first uniform, an innocent lad framed against a man on horseback.
Conservative wisdom encourages the preservation of historical relics. The problem is that we often mistake the history of which they speak. The Cornwwallis statue is silent about the eighteenth century. The Confederate statues do little or nothing to illuminate the history of the Civil War, in fact they shroud its ugliness. More fitting than a gallant knight in a Civil War uniform would be a tattered amputee teetering on a crutch. Ostensibly they are memorials that honour the Confederacy but in fact they are triumphal statues that celebrate Jim Crow.
Part of me wants to ridicule the “Hang onto your Confederate money” crowd and the faux triumphalism of the statues. Take them seriously by not taking them so seriously. If the Confederate monuments were all buried together in the desert sand as a Terracotta Army, an archaeologist in some distant time could turn them into treasure. Canada, always the kindly neighbour, would risk opening old wounds by sending Cornwallis along to stand in his rightful place at the head of that army. Alternately, any statue that offends could be given to the local chapter of the KKK along with a bucket, a mop and a ladder. Stringent laws could be passed stating that monuments with accumulated bird dung would be trucked away. The KKK would keep the statues pristine, they could even work by torchlight and be known as the Ku Klux Kleansers.
But being facetious says more about me than about them. Those who march to right-wing shrines and fondle their NAZI memorabilia, embarrass me. I failed as an educator within a failing educational system. I want to make them look ridiculous. Ridicule, however, is not compatible with good teaching. Good teachers thoroughly understand the subject they are teaching, excellent teachers not only understand the subject they also understand its misunderstandings. They have patience with those who “just don’t get it.” Ridiculing and vilifying do not work. The hatred and the fear that fuels the right-wing marches and the chants is learned. It must be un-learned – it is easy to take down or tear down a statue, it is the monuments of the mind that are difficult to deconstruct. The hardcore propagandists are ineducable, but most of their woebegone followers are not. The iconoclastic zealots of the lite-left who march in counter protest, imbued with the arrogance of certainty, also represent a failure of the educational system.
Many try to appease those now offended by monuments by “putting them in a museum”. The sad fact is that our culture is shallow and self absorbed with an ankle deep knowledge of its own history and no knowledge of what the discipline of history entails. The vast majority of the citizenry never visit museums. The public square, nevertheless, could put them there as they come and go through our streets and parks. Monuments do not need to celebrate, they can educate. Museums do not need to be indoors. We do not need an airplane hangar filled with forbidden icons that no one visits. The problem with Richmond’s Monument Avenue is that it is incomplete. The present statues give profound insight into the Jim Crow era and the master/slave psychology it sought to re-impose. It is an example of a fearful people trying to rule by fear. It exemplifies a ubiquitous human response to catastrophic failure. We should not try to hide all of that errant thinking. Keep it on display. I suggest additions to Monument Avenue that speak to the horrors of the real not the romanticized American Civil War as well as to the victims and the survivors of Jim Crow and to our abiding struggle with racism. Those additions would not only depict their objects, they would reveal us to those who follow. Our monumental renderings will enable people to understand the way we were.
Reactions to monuments are not mainly about what happened in the past, they are mostly shaped by what is happening now. The Cornwallis statue in Halifax stood without offending me because Scots are no longer seen as primitive and barbaric, excluded from commerce by a mercantile system, mocked for what they wear or the food they eat. I did not feel diminished by it and although its removal did make me uneasy, I neither rejoiced nor anguished. If Native Canadians were not marginalized in the present, if Native women could walk without fear, then a statue of a British soldier would be just another boring relic. If African Americans did not experience pervasive racism, if all lives mattered equally, if Jews and Muslims could go to worship without fear, a Confederate statue would fade into the background. Destroying offending relics of the past will delay the arrival of such a just and inclusive society. In some settings it seems possible to spirit statues away without disturbance, but in others they are lightning rods. Testosterone driven head butting is very dangerous whether it is done physically or intellectually. Dismantling physical embodiments of entrenched mythologies is akin to defusing an unexploded bomb. It is best they be left if only to molder as monuments to human folly. All the Confederate statues piled in a heap with Traveller on top are not worth another human life.
The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran said, “If it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.” A sobering example is Syria. A hapless world has watched as it descended into barbarous tribalism with unfathomable cruelty. In the heady days of the Arab Spring rebels battered monuments that exalted the Assad regime with sledgehammers, strafed them with bullets and pulled them down. A triumphal Statue of Hafez al Assad, father of the current president, stood on the outskirts of Hama the place where his army slaughtered tens of thousands to crush a rebellion in 1982. The statue was moved by the regime in the early days of the current uprising and tauntingly reinstalled in 2017 when that city was once again “pacified.” The frightening and frightened minorities that support the regime celebrate its resurrection; the opposing majority, crushed again, chafes in its shadow of despair. The “throne erected within” is more adored and more deeply hated than ever.
In the aftermath of the Charlottesville tragedy in August 2017 young people in Durham, North Carolina were filmed pulling down the statue of a Confederate soldier and then kicking and spitting on it. What if anything did this achieve or provoke? We know that the trigger was the terrible killing of an innocent, but the unnerving thing is that we cannot know what madness now smolders. The vandals, at a glance, are a cross section of students on a typical college campus who do not know the sad history of iconoclasm. An iconoclast challenges established beliefs and revered institutions on the grounds that they are erroneous or pernicious. “Those who come to the altar of Confederate statues worship the false god of White Supremacy. We must raze their temple.” The ancient Egyptians who expunged images of the pharaoh Akhenaten, early Christians who desecrated temples and destroyed Classical manuscripts, conquering Muslims who painted over murals in the Hagia Sophia, Mao’s Red Guards who destroyed priceless historical artifacts during the Cultural Revolution, Taliban militants who cannonaded the giant Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, all held the moral high ground. They shared that dangerous human trait, self righteous certainty.
Certainty makes me uneasy. It is especially worrisome when we are certain about history. That is what troubles me about hiding or destroying historical artifacts. In the television series The Ascent of Man (1973), the mathematician Jacob Bronowski celebrated human ingenuity, but also spoke to the perils of its certainty. In the episode called “Knowledge or Certainty” Bronowski argues that the “uncertainty principle” should be renamed the “tolerance principle.” There is always a margin of error. It was filmed at Auschwitz and concluded as he knelt and grasped a handful of ashes that may well have been those of his kinfolk. “Science is a very human form of knowledge,” he said, “We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward to what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.” He closed by quoting Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you might be mistaken.”
Orthodoxy makes us certain. Ignorance of history is often lamented, but we can know a history too well. Those responsible for building the statue of Cornwallis suffered this sort of myopia – they knew the official celebratory school-book story of the British Empire and suffered its bigotries and prejudices. Their jingoistic view of the world made them oblivious to those suffering on the margins and to believe that “all things good came from Britain”. Their embarrassed descendants of the lite-left share a new orthodoxy. They know a history that holds “nothing good came from Britain” and its corollary “and that goes for you too Shakespeare, and the rest of you old white men.”
Historical inquiry is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle without having any clear notion of what the final picture will look like, knowing there will always be pieces missing, additional pieces discovered and old ones re-interpreted. The past is always misty. In order to gain the greatest insight, we must consider the topic from various perspectives and through different lenses. It is not ignorance of history but ignorance of historiography that is the problem. Put simply, historiography implies a critical examination of the histories of an event. The competent historian, like any good investigator, attempts to be emotionally detached from the subject or, as a journalist would put it, objective. Yet, being a human studying humanity, the historian is on both ends of the microscope. All histories and all journals therefore are biased. One can know about an event by reading one historian. You can begin to understand the event if you know its historiography and thus become less certain. That is what we are missing in our public discourse; uncertainty.
Certainty stands in the way of inquiry. For example, if I note that the human ingenuity that produced this critical approach to history first blossomed in Europe, many on the lite-left would dismiss the statement as Eurocentric. That critique stems from a contemporary, often self-loathing, form of tribalism that afflicts them. If one has finally transcended tribalism, he or she should feel pride in human ingenuity wherever it appears. It is absurd that someone of Chinese ancestry would feel prouder of Confucius than does someone of African ancestry. I should not feel stupid because my European forbears lived in the northern forests and on the shores of the northern seas but did not develop the intricate technology of the kayak or canoe. If I accept that we are all equally human, then I know it is only culture, learned behavior, that separates me from the Yanomami of the Amazon. I should be proud of the human ingenuity that has enabled their survival for millennia in an environment in which I, on my own, would quickly perish. We can admire achievements and deplore evil without making it a tribal competition.
There was a great deal of certainty around during the Reformation. Calvinist mobs ransacked churches and defaced “graven images.” In some European towns civil authorities got there ahead of the mobs and removed offending statues for safe keeping. That thought came to me when Cornwallis was cloaked and ignominiously carted away. Those opposed to its removal say the statue is “part of our history,” those in favor say we should not celebrate villainy.
The statue is historical, but the “part” of history it reveals is not the eighteenth century nor Cornwallis. It speaks to the Euro descended population of Halifax in the 1920s when it was conceived. There are lessons in its outsized proportions and its Romanesque pomposity. It opens a door on the troubled times leading to the Second World War. The masculinity that was extolled that day in 1931 when it was unveiled - virile, strong and stern – belies a lack of confidence in the future that was then afoot in the world. It presages in some small way the thuggish strongmen then waiting in the wings. Hitler and Mussolini did not appeal to populations that were confident and secure.
Those who had the statue of Cornwallis erected were from a city emerging from a horrendous war and still reeling from its own 1917 catastrophe; one the world has now forgotten. The life blood of the city for 180 years had been the British Navy and the commercial interests it protected. My guess is that the now offending statue subconsciously said, “forget us not”. Taking the statue away closes a door into the 1920s; a faltering empire, skepticism about Nova Scotia’s place in the new Canadian firmament and ambivalence about the voracious behemoth to our south, ironically the population that the city was originally built to protect. I would not destroy the Cornwallis monument anymore than I would knock over the tombstone of one of those who put it there. Our errant grandfathers should not be expunged from history. As a teaching tool it is a portal into their time and, thanks to the present controversy, if we use it thoughtfully it can become a positive representation of ours.
Public monuments do not need to be celebratory or triumphal even though that was their intent. The understanding of all artforms changes over time. We can only speculate as to why early humans took torches into the depths of caves to view the images they had made. The Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square is no longer triumphal; Englishmen and Spaniards stroll by it daily not even knowing who he was, and quizzical Americans look up and wonder why he is up there without his horse. It no longer serves its triumphal purpose, but it should not be taken down. Neither should a guiding inuksuk be abandoned because we have GPS on our snowmobiles. It is a marker of place and time.
It is Dr. Paul’s We Were Not the Savages that opens a door onto the eighteenth century “part of our history”. Nova Scotia was then at stage centre of epic events, an astounding canvas for art that could be both timely and timeless. Paul’s work should inspire artistic commemoration in a form that is on permanent public display. Perhaps we could invent an outdoor museum of historiography in sculpture and place this at its centre. He has also suggested that we erect a statue honoring Donald Marshall, the Native Nova Scotian who, at the age of seventeen, endured eleven years in prison after being wrongly convicted of murder. It should be there as well; a disturbing reminder of the certainty that convicted him. When this sculptured museum opens in the public square, it will reference horrific stories from our past, but it will also speak about those who live here now. The real Edward Cornwallis in all his human complexity would play a role in this; not forgiven, nor forgotten but understood.
The Sheriff in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men laments a civilization teetering on the brink. "Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam," he observes, "the end is pretty much in sight." He recalls an old stone trough that sat beside a house in which he and his unit had hunkered down during World War Two. He marvels at its age and wonders about the man who chiselled it from stone. Europe had been roiled by destructive wars for centuries, “But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? … And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart… I would like to be able to make that kind of promise.”
Do we no longer have promise in our hearts? Promise to whom? In a world where your promise is my threat, it is at best a stalemate. There is no we. This drama is being played out around the world. The most common historical path out of such intra-cultural impasse is the zero-sum game of war. I defile your temple, you defile mine until the last man standing. We should reflect on this as we deal with those proto-Fascists of the alt-right who march to statues in defense of homeland (One achievement of Osama Bin Laden was the naming of the Department of Homeland Security). The lite-left who march in counter-protest, especially those who mask their Antifa faces, should also give us sober pause.
In Irish playwright Brendon Freil’s play, The Freedom of the City (1973), three peaceful protesters in Derry find themselves inadvertently trapped in the Lord Mayor’s Office surrounded by British troops. Mistaken as terrorists and under siege, they spend the night talking. One question they probe in the stressful hours leading to their deaths is, “Why were you marching?” One character, Lily Doherty, answers that question in a progressive revelation. The audience discovers that her motivation is not historical events, nor the current “troubles”, and not even the hardships of her own impoverished life. When all is stripped away, she reveals that she is marching for her eleventh child who has Down’s Syndrome.
Those who protest and counter-protest should ask, “Why am I marching?” There are many answers, but it is not about statues.