When You Pull Down Statues, Make Sure They’re of the Right People

Since Colston’s statue was pulled over and lobbed in the docks in Bristol on Sunday, others have called for the removal of similar statues and monuments to those connected to the slave trade. Down in Devon there have been calls for a statue of the Elizabethan explorer Francis Drake to be removed. At Oxford University demands have started up again for the removal of the university’s statue to the 19th century imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. And on Sky News’ The Pledge, Afua Hirsh managed to get LBC’s Nick Ferrari in a right tizzy for suggesting that not only should Rhodes’ statue be taken down, but also Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill.

I can’t defend Rhodes. He seems to me to be have been a thoroughly ruthless character, who was intent only on grabbing as much land for himself and Britain on any pretext whatsoever. I might be wrong, but I’ve got a horrible suspicion he was one of the people behind the Anglo-South African or Boer War during which tens or hundreds of thousands of Afrikaner women and children died in concentration camps. He was also instrumental in the creation of Rhodesia’s colour bar.

Nelson and Churchill are going to be much more controversial. Most people only know of Nelson for his victory at Trafalgar during the Napoleonic War. This was to stop the French imperial domination of Europe, and Napoleonic forces had also invaded Egypt. I think most Brits will therefore take an attack on Nelson as an attack on a key figure, who kept Britain and Europe free. Yes, he’s a symbol of British imperial strength, but I doubt many people associate him with the oppression of Blacks and Asians. It’s going to look like a spiteful attack on Britain, rather than a gesture of Black liberation.

Ditto Hirsh’s other target, Winston Churchill. I’m absolutely no fan of Churchill myself. He was an authoritarian aristocrat, whose real reason for opposing Hitler was that he saw Nazi Germany as a threat to British interests in the North Sea, not because he was an opponent of Fascism. He sent troops in to shoot striking miners in Wales, and was all for calling them in during the General Strike. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative prime minister at the time, wanted him kept well out of the way to avoid exacerbating the situation. As for Ireland, back in the 1990s there was an interesting little programme on BBC 2, The Living Dead, which was about the way Churchill’s heroic view of British history in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples had influenced subsequent politics. One of the key offenders here was one Baroness Margaret Thatcher, who had been strongly influenced by the great war leader herself, and tried to invoke his memory at nearly every opportunity. The programme interviewed a former member of the Irish republican paramilitary group, the INLA. He said that it was easier to recruit members under Thatcher than under Ted Heath because of Thatcher’s celebration of Churchill. For Irish nationalists, Churchill was the monster, who sent in the Black and Tans. His sequestration of grain from the Bengal peasants during the War resulted in an horrific famine which killed something like 2-4 million people. This is comparable to the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis, and some senior British army officers saw it as exactly that. Churchill, however, declared it was all their fault for ‘pullulating’, or having too many children.

That is not, however, why Churchill is celebrated over here. He’s lauded because he, Roosevelt and Stalin together overthrew the Nazis and their allies. The War swept away Fascist Italy, and the other Fascist or Fascist-aligned regimes in Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. It liberated Greece and Albania. Stalin was no angel either. He killed at least 30 million Soviet citizens during the purges and deported whole nations and ethnic groups to Siberia. Instead of letting the eastern European countries decide their future for themselves, he imposed a ruthless autocratic Communist dictatorship. I think Churchill would have liked those nations to have been free to decide for themselves. Back in the ’90s there was a radio series on Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, the conference that would decide the post-War European order. It was called The Eagle and the Small Birds, from a quote from Churchill ‘The eagle should let the small birds sing, and care not wherefore they sang’. A Nazi victory would have been the stuff of nightmares, and I don’t know how many millions Hitler would have murdered had he been successful. What the Nazis did to the Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians was horrific enough as it is.

Churchill isn’t the saint or the great molten idol the Tories claim he is by any stretch of the imagination, but he is one of the reasons why Hirsh and Black activists like her are able to make their criticisms of traditional British history and its heroes. If Hitler had won, or his mate Oswald Mosley had seized power in some kind of coup over here, Hirsh and her allies would not have been tolerated. The Nazis’ eugenics programme included not only the murder of the disabled, but also the sterilisation of the mixed race children of White German women and Black American soldiers from the post-First World War army of occupation. Mosley himself would have made Britain an apartheid state, with citizenship granted only to those who conformed to aryan British culture, if not physiology. The War and the horrors of the Nazi and Fascist regimes made eugenics and racism and anti-Semitism far less acceptable than they were before. I am very much aware how institutionally racist Britain is and has been. But it’s much better than what would have existed had Churchill been defeated.

But most of all, I’m concerned that the zeal for smashing statues and monuments may destroy those to abolitionists. Nearly 20 years ago, when I was doing voluntary work in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum here in Bristol, one of the books that found its way into the slavery archive and library was a little bit of local history by the Liverpudlian writer, Fritz Spiegel. Spiegel prides himself on being a ‘Dicky Sam’, the Liverpudlian equivalent of a ‘real Cockney sparrow’. The book was on the fascinating history of the abolition movement in that great city. If I remember rightly, it included not only White abolitionists, but also some of the Black people who also populated the city. It wasn’t just a piece of local history for its own sake, though. In his introduction, Spiegel explained that he moved to right it because, in their zeal to destroy monuments to the city’s slavers, some people had also vandalized those of innocent merchants and abolitionists.

I’m afraid there might be a danger of something similar happening in the current zeal for smashing statues commemorating Black oppression and slavery. There are good reasons for removing monuments like Colston’s. But let’s not confuse those with slavery’s opponents.

The Young Turks Celebrate the Defeat of Ted Cruz

Mike over at Vox Political has posted this piece about Trump’s victory over Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/05/04/trump-now-certain-to-get-republican-presidential-nomination-as-ted-cruz-quits/

He rightly notes that this makes it almost certain that Trump will get the Republican nomination. And so he says, ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’

On the other hand, The Young Turks’ anchor, Cenk Uygur, is ecstatic about Cruz’s defeat, as showing in the video below.

This isn’t because The Turks are an ultra-Right news organisation, like Fox. Rather the opposite. But they took the line that as bad as Trump was – and he is abysmal – Cruz was slightly worse. Trump talked about banning Muslims from America. Ted Cruz was actually trying to put this policy into practice. He was part of a team in Congress that was trying to pass a bill limiting Muslim immigration to the US. So depending on your view of Ted Cruz – Uygur actually describes him as ‘Lucifer’, Cruz’s defeat isn’t all bad.

Unfortunately, it means that Americans when they go to the polls may well be faced with a choice between Trump – a raving White supremacist and misogynist creep – and Hillary Clinton, a corporate shill for American imperialism. Neither will do much for the ordinary blue-collar and middle class people of America. As for foreign policy, Trump has said various contradictory statements, but several of them have been about how he’ll ramp up the war on terror and increase the use of torture ‘even if it doesn’t work’. As for Shrillary, she’s been a party to the overthrow of a democratically elected Leftist government in Honduras, all for American corporate profit. And the Rightist government that followed have carried out intimidation, purges and assassinations of Left-wing and indigenous rights activists.

Twenty years or so ago, Radio 4 did a series on the negotiations at Yalta between Stalin, Churchill, and president Truman on how the world was to be divided up after the Second World War. It was called The Eagle and the Small Birds, after a comment from Churchill:

‘The eagle should let the small birds sing, and care not wherefore they sang.’

That was a metaphor for the smaller, less powerful nations, that Churchill rightly feared were threatened by the new global dominance of the Soviet Union.

But Churchill’s words are also all-too descriptive of the smaller, weaker nations that have been dominated and brutalised by American and western power over the same period, a process that has not stopped after the Fall of Communism. Bernie Sanders in one of his speeches recognised this evil, and said that if he was president, there’d be no more invasions. I hope he wins the Democratic nomination against Shrillary. The last thing this planet needs is more war, and more bloody coups.

William Blum on Right-Wing Coups in Greece

This is another interesting piece from William Blum’s Anti-Empire Report. Blum is a long-time critic of American imperialism. I’ve already reblogged several of his pieces. In issue 137 of his Report, he comments on the election of the new Syriza government in Greece. A number of the commenters on Mike’s blog wondered how far Syriza would be allowed to go in defying the Troika and its economic diktats before they were overthrown by the Fascist right, all in the name of fiscal responsibility, properly paying off the debt, Greece honouring its international obligations, and so forth.

They weren’t alone in fearing for Greece’s future as a democratic country in the face of pressure from the EU and the international financial and industrial nexus. Blum also wondered how long they would last, based on the historical precedents. After the War, Greece was forced into the Western, capitalist bloc following the agreement Churchill and the Americans had made with Stalin at Yalta. The result was a bloody civil war fought against the Communist partisans, who had done the most to stop the Italians and had fought hardest against the Germans. Then, in 1964, when the liberal Papandreou came to power and began to pursue an independent line, he was overthrown in a coup, backed again by the CIA and the Americans. Blum writes

American historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”

The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).

In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

As far as I can tell, all of this is correct. Misha Glenny, talking about his book on the Balkans at the Cheltenham Literature Festival back in the ’90s, stated that the division between the ‘east’ and ‘west’ bloc countries was entirely artificial, and was made according to the interests of the great powers, not the people of those countries themselves. The Communists were far stronger in Greece than in Romania, for example, but geopolitical considerations decided that Greece ended up in the West, and Romania in the Communist bloc.

The full article can be read at: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137. The article’s entitled, Some Things Not To Forget, Which the New Greek Leaders Have Not’.