By Jonathan Cook
June 12, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
I did not expect to be returning to this issue so
soon but I was surprised, to put it mildly, to discover
that my
last post on anti-racists toppling a statue of the
notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol proved
to be the most polarising article I have ever written.
Given the many controversial topics I have addressed
over the years, that seems noteworthy in itself.
It
may not be surprising that those on the right are
troubled by ordinary people challenging authority,
demanding change rather than conserving what we already
have, and “taking the law into their own hands”. None of
this sits too easily with the conservative political
worldview. But some on the left seem equally disturbed
by this act of popular protest. That needs to be
analysed and challenged.
I have been able to identify three main types of
criticism from the left.
Cities on the back foot
The first suggests that tearing down statues is
ineffective. It does not change anything, and actually
conceals society’s continuing racism. These actions may
make activists feel good but they fail to bring about
any tangible progress.
Such arguments are obviously undermined by the fact
that Bristol’s mayor and its council, which had been
ignoring demands to remove Colston’s statue for decades,
are finally proposing action. For the first time, the
mayor has called for a “citywide
conversation” about all of Bristol’s public
memorials. He has promised to discuss their future with
historians, presumably to identify which ones venerate
people like Colston so obscenely horrible that they have
no place in public squares looking down on us. Instead
they should be in museums so their crimes can be
contextualised and properly understood.
Other cities and organisations are taking rapid,
pre-emptive action too to remove the most offensive
statues. Slave owner Robert Milligan (below) has been
removed from outside the museum in London
Docklands (an area rebuilt on money made from modern
slavery, mostly of labourers in the Third World), while
two London hospitals have removed from public view
statues to the slave traders that founded them. Cities
and public bodies are for the first time assessing which
statues are of figures simply too odious to be defended.
These institutions are on the back foot. That is a
victory of some kind.
I have been able to identify three main types of
criticism from the left.
Cities on the back foot
The first suggests that tearing down statues is
ineffective. It does not change anything, and actually
conceals society’s continuing racism. These actions may
make activists feel good but they fail to bring about
any tangible progress.
Such arguments are obviously undermined by the fact
that Bristol’s mayor and its council, which had been
ignoring demands to remove Colston’s statue for decades,
are finally proposing action. For the first time, the
mayor has called for a “citywide
conversation” about all of Bristol’s public
memorials. He has promised to discuss their future with
historians, presumably to identify which ones venerate
people like Colston so obscenely horrible that they have
no place in public squares looking down on us. Instead
they should be in museums so their crimes can be
contextualised and properly understood.
Other cities and organisations are taking rapid,
pre-emptive action too to remove the most offensive
statues. Slave owner Robert Milligan (below) has been
removed from outside the museum in London
Docklands (an area rebuilt on money made from modern
slavery, mostly of labourers in the Third World), while
two London hospitals have removed from public view
statues to the slave traders that founded them. Cities
and public bodies are for the first time assessing which
statues are of figures simply too odious to be defended.
These institutions are on the back foot. That is a
victory of some kind.
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Overthrowing symbols
The second criticism is that toppling statues is a
distraction from proper political activism, that statues
are meaningless symbols, that there are much more
important things to be getting on with, and that the
establishment wants us to target statues to sow division
or direct our energies into irrelevancies. It is claimed
that tearing down Colston’s statue has detracted from
the inspiration for the protests: challenging
police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s
murder by a white policeman in Minneapolis.
There are lots of reasons why this approach is a
wrong-headed.
Symbols are important. They are the illustrations to
the stories we are fed about who we are and what we hold
dear. Like images in the picture books our parents read
to us before we could make out the letters of the text,
these symbols often have more impact than the stories
themselves. When we challenge symbols we begin to
deconstruct the stories that they illustrate. Overthrow
a symbol, and you are taking the first step on the path
to overthrowing the system behind it.
After all, if these symbols weren’t so important in
entrenching a sense of “national life” and “national
values”, the establishment would not have bothered to
erect them. That’s why the right-wingers will make a
battleground of protecting statues of Winston Churchill
and Queen Victoria. Because it is vitally important to
them that we don’t tear off the mask to see for
ourselves – or to show them – what really lies beneath.
The claim that the establishment actually favours the
toppling of statues – and that our energies are being
channeled into irrelevant action – is apparently
justified by the fact that the police backed off in
Bristol and that some politicians and journalists are
expressing sympathy for the protesters.
Sadly, this is a very popular line of argument on the
left nowadays: as soon as a group with progressive aims
has the most limited success, some start claiming it
proves that the establishment wanted it to happen
anyway, and that we have fallen into a trap set for us
by the elite. One wonders what possible path to
improvement such people envision, what first steps to
change they would ever accept as progress. Their view is
pure defeatism. If the left is crushed, we lose; and if
we win a few concessions, we have been conned. For them,
it is complete revolution or nothing.
A fearful establishment
In fact, the reason the police backed off in Bristol
is because they are frightened right now of the febrile
mood in the country. There is lots of anger and
frustration, especially among young people, much of it
provoked by lockdown.
The police understood it was not a time to be making
baton charges to defend a statue, especially one to a
slave trader. They are on the back foot themselves
because of the police violence that triggered the
protests in the first place. Violence is their Achilles’
heel right now, and the protesters can exploit that
weakness to reclaim public space for protest and
dissent.
The politicians and media are similarly frightened of
the current unrest, which they have been labelling as a
dangerous “populism” for some time. Isn’t having the
establishment fearful exactly where the left should want
them? Because when the establishment is not frightened,
all they do is line their pockets more deeply. They make
concessions only when we raise the stakes.
If that is not obvious, recall the mass marches
against the Iraq war. They failed not because they were
not popular – they were some of the largest protests
ever in Britain. They failed because the public could
not make Tony Blair and his cabinet more frightened of
us – the British people – than they were of the White
House and the Pentagon. The cynical, dispiriting lesson
we took away from the Iraq war was that we could never
have an effect on the political class. The real lesson
was that we needed to bare our teeth.
Last week the crowds in Bristol bared their teeth,
and the politicians and police decided the fight – this
time – wasn’t worth it. Defending a racist statue is
much less of a priority for the establishment than
placating the US, of course. But it doesn’t mean it is
no priority at all.
The lessons of revolts through the ages are that
small victories inspire crowds to larger battles. That
is why the establishment usually tries to crush or
co-opt the first signs of popular dissent and defiance.
They fear our empowerment. It is also why it is
important for those who want fairer societies to
support, not diminish, the actions of those who take on
initial confrontations with the establishment. They
build the launchpad for bigger things.
Progress through protest
The third and seemingly most common criticism is that
it is dangerous to allow the mob to win, and that once
“mob rule” scores a success it will lead to anarchy and
violence.
As I explained in my last post, none of the things we
value today in Britain – from the vote to the National
Health Service – happened without either direct protest
in defiance of the establishment or the threat of such
protest. It was only ever fear about the breakdown of
order or of the eruption of violence that pushed the
establishment to give up any of its wealth and power.
Ordinary people finally got free universal health
care in 1948 – over the opposition of most doctors –
largely because of establishment concerns about an
empowered male population returning from war who knew
how to bear arms and, having avoided death on the
battlefield, were not likely to accept seeing themselves
or their loved ones die of easily treatable diseases
because they were still poor.
Similarly, labour rights were won – over the
opposition of business – only because workers organised
into unions and threatened to withdraw their labour.
That was most definitely seen as a form of violence by a
capitalist class whose only measure of value has ever
been money.
Those who worry about “mob rule” assume that we now
live in democracies that are responsive to the popular
will. I will not waste my breath again demolishing that
fallacy – it has been the sole reason for my writing
this blog for the past six years. We live in
sophisticated oligarchies, where corporations control
the narratives of our lives through their control of the
mass media to make us compliant and believe in
fairytales. The biggest is that we, the people, are in
charge through our vote, in a political system that
offers only two choices, both of them political parties
that were long ago captured by the corporations. The one
countervailing force – organised labour – now plays
almost no role. It has been either destroyed or its
leaders co-opted themselves.
Wrong about democracy
All that aside, those anxious about “the mob” have
failed to understand what liberal democracy means – the
model of democracy we are all supposed to subscribe to.
It does not give carte blanche to the white majority to
smother symbols all over the public space of people who
abused, murdered and oppressed our black neighbours’
ancestors. That is democracy as the tyranny of the
majority.
If this is not blindingly obvious, let me propose a
hypothetical analogy. How would we judge Britain’s
Jewish community if after years of failed protests they
and non-Jewish supporters “took the law into their own
hands” and tore down a statue in Hamstead to Adolf
Eichmann? Would we call them a mob? Would we
characterise what they did as vigilantism? And perhaps
more to the point, can we conceive of an Eichmann statue
being erected in Hamstead – or anywhere? Of course, not.
So why is it even conceivable that a man like Colston
who profited from the destruction of the lives of tens
of thousands of Africans should still be presiding over
a multicultural city like Bristol, where some of the
descendants of those Africans live today?
The fact that we cannot imagine being so insensitive
to the Jewish community should underscore how
unbelievably insensitive we have been to Britain’s black
community for many decades.
The fear of “the mob” is really our fear of making
even liberal democracy work as it is supposed to.
Because in a proper liberal democracy the minority is
protected from the majority. And when the system proves
itself no longer capable of protecting the minority –
from symbolic violence, for example – then the minority
has a right to “take the law into their own hands” by
pulling down those symbols. That is how history was
always made, and how it is being made now.
Inclusive or cruel?
“Where will it all end?” people are asking. In the
short term, the campaign is likely to run out of steam
when the most offensive symbols in the public square
have been removed. An informal trade-off will be arrived
at: anti-racists will succeed in clearing out the worst
symbols, and the right will defend with equal passion
the symbols it values most highly.
Most of us can sketch out in our own minds where this
ends. Few will fight to save those associated
exclusively with the slave trade, but the majority will
insist on keeping the biggest symbols of Britishness,
such as Churchill and Queen Victoria. The contest will
be over those few figures, like Cecil Rhodes, who lie in
the grey area between these two extremes.
But longer term, it will end when we have a frank,
inclusive conversation about what we want our societies
to be. Whether we want them to be welcoming and fair, or
cruel places that commemorate the naked exercise of
power in the past and implicitly condone its continuing
use today (as was highlighted by our recent crimes in
Afghanistan and Iraq).
It will end when we all have the same stake in our
societies, when we all feel equally valued. It will end
when not only have symbols of inequality and injustice
been toppled, but the reality of inequality and
injustice has been consigned to history too.
Jonathan Cook
won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website
is www.jonathan-cook.net.
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