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Britain Battles over History

Jamie Dettmer

   The statue of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill in London's
   Parliament Square is now boarded up.

   In the Dorset town of Poole on England's southern coast police are
   mounting a 24-hour guard on a statue commemorating Robert Baden Powell,
   the founder of the Scouts movement and briefly an admirer Adolf
   Hitler's autobiographicalmanifesto MeinKampf, once
   describingitasa"wonderful book."

   In east London last week, just days before ugly clashes erupted in the
   British capital between far right activists and supporters of Black
   Lives Matters, workmen hastily removed a statue memorializing Robert
   Milligan, an eighteenth-century merchant, who on his death owned 526
   slaves laboring on sugar plantations in Jamaica.

   Anti-racist campaigners inBritain have a burgeoning hit list of statues
   they want removed, triggering a new front in a culture war that risks
   future violent street tussles.

   Most Britons pay little heed when rushing pastmonuments lionizing some
   of the great menof Britain's past -- from national leaders like
   Churchill to grand merchants and city fathers like Milligan.

   William Shakespeare, the country's great playwright and poet, once
   described public statuary as"unsweptstone besmeared with sluttish
   time." He bragged that his words would outlast statues of great men,
   mocking,"Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOfprinces shall outlive
   this powerful rhyme."

   He may be right.

   Britain's public statues-- many erected at the height of the British
   empire between 1830 to 1914 -- have become a tumultuous flashpoint,
   which on Saturday spilled violently on to the streets of London in
   running skirmishes between bottle-throwing far right agitators,
   baton-wielding police and Black Lives Matters protesters, all under the
   watchful eyeofAdmiralHoratioNelsonfrom atop his column in Trafalgar
   Square.

   Nelson, the preeminent British admiral during the Napoleonic era,
   himself once wrote in defense of the Jamaican slave trade.

   Anger at the past

   Far right activists said they had come to protect statues in the
   capital from being toppled -- as happened during anti-racist protests
   earlier this month to a monument in Bristol commemorating
   EdwardColston. Jubilant protesters draggedColston'sbronzestatue from
   its plinth and chucked it in the harbor, in scenes more reminiscent of
   the 2003 toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad or the
   removal of monuments to Lenin and Stalin witnessed at the end of the
   Soviet era.

   In a dramatic gesture mirroring what happened to Floyd, one protester
   placed his knee onColston'sbronze throat before the statute was rolled
   to the harbor wall.

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