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How To Change The Meaning Of Monuments Without Removing Them
On Sunday protesters toppled a bronze statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England. It was thrown into a river. Some had tried for years to get rid of the monument but others had rejected that as Colston had also donated a lot for various local social purposes. Some of the institutions he had supported still exist.
In the U.S. there are many discussions about removing memorials and statues of people who had fought in support of slavery during the civil war.
But when and where is it right to remove the memorials our ancestors erected?
When the Taliban destroyed a large Buddha statue figure in Bamyan, Afghanistan, there was a global outrage. The U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein statues in Baghdad to some applause but also as an act of propaganda. After the Nazi-led Maidan putsch the Ukraine removed many statues of Lenin and erected some new ones which glorify fascists. Czechia is currently in a struggle with Russia over the potential removal of a memorial that hails Soviet troops for liberating the country from the fascist German occupation.
Which of these removals were right or wrong? To whom?
What about statues of George Washington, the slave owner, or of Winston Churchill, the mass murderer and utter racist. Should they all be taken down? What about John Stuart Mill?
How will future children learn about the bad sides of those men if they go down the memory holes of history?
Where does such iconoclasm end?
Here is a concept that may help to avoid conflicts over such memorials.
The German language has two different words for memorials:
- A 'Denkmal' is a memorial of a historic incident, period or figure. It is generally seen as honorific. Its linguistic root is the verb 'denken' which means 'to think' combined with the noun 'Mal' which means 'mark'.
- A 'Mahnmal' is also a memorial of a historic incident, period or figure. But its purpose is to serve as a lesson or warning. Its linguistic root is 'mahnen' which means 'to urge' 'to exhort' 'to admonish' again combined with 'Mal' which means "mark".
A memorial that was once erected as a 'think-mark' can be turned into an 'exhort-mark' by changing its context.
A famous example is the memorial for the 76th Infantry Regiment in Hamburg, Germany. During the first world war the 76th had been recruited in Hamburg and fought with great losses at the western front. A memorial for its soldiers was only built in 1936 when the Nazis ruled in Germany.
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The memorial shows marching soldiers. The inscription above the soldiers means "Germany must live even if we must die".
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The main purpose of the memorial at the time of its creation was obviously not to remember the soldiers of the 76th but to propagandize for the new wars the Nazis were planing and preparing for.
After the second world war there were many discussions if the memorial should be removed or not. One side saw it as glorifying war while the other side saw it as a honorable reminder of the soldiers of the 76th who were children of the city. Both sides were objectively right.
In the early 1980s a compromise was found. The memorial would stay but it would be amended with a second one a few steps away. This would turn the whole ensemble from a 'Denkmal' into a 'Mahnmal'.
The Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka was hired to create a counterpoint to the war glorifying memorial. His work depicts the horrors of war and includes a reference to the Operation Gomorrah bombing in July 1943 which had killed some 35,000 civilians in Hamburg.
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There have been other conversions from 'Denkmal' to 'Mahnmal' in several places. Sometimes by just adding a bronze plaque with words that describe the historic context of the original 'Denkmal' or which explains that the good man depicted also had quite bad sides.
Artists will come up with better ideas for such purposes. Ask them to do so.
The controversial monuments should be reminders that we must learn and teach history in a way that is not one sided or glorifying. Setting them into context or countering them with new art is a better way to do that than to just throw them aside.
Imho the destruction of Cultural Artifacts like Statues is to be avoided, on the whole. Arguments for, maybe; when ppl do this, they attack concrete symbols, and not living people, animals, Nature – perhaps there is a cathartic effect, and an attempt for change in ‘minds’ or ‘culture’ is better than direct aggro, etc.
If people don’t want to see statues of X Y or Z, they can be removed and put into a warehouse, dusty museum, available for viewing, study. Or they could be covered up in tarp (mini Christo-like, he just died btw) with a sign >, Not Suitable for Viewing. This being another form of contextualizing in situ (see b top post for the good kind which may work in some place, some time.) Another good way is simply an explanatory plaque, but of course real hate can’t be stopped by ‘teacher-like’ preachy moments and soggy leaflets.
The agression, damaging, toppling is the whole point! (Ex. see all the mutilated Roman statues, no arms, head chopped off, etc. That wasn’t done by ‘time’ but by violence. See vk 14 for some of the same points.) Just as when shooting practice puts up pictures of say Obama to aim at.
Tampa Bay News. https://bit.ly/3hhfc8X
Some religions forbid the depiction of the revered entities – they are not to have any material representation, figuration, but must rest in the spirit only. ‘Secular’ states (e.g. France) also forbid representation of religious figures, in pictorial form, statues, or any other medium, and emblems of religious belonging (veil, kippa, cross..) in spaces that are tagged as ‘run by the state.’ So here opposing ends meet in restrictions, censorship, for reasons that seem different at first blush but perhaps aren’t so much… — very complicated.
Those who want to commemorate the end of US slavery might sculpt or mold statues of the tractor, or the Taylorist factory, the grim buildings, shoddy housing around. Slavery ended for economic reasons, not moral ones, and in any case it was not the main issue, see others above. And it is still around, today evident in the US Prison Industry, room and board paid by the tax payer for ppl locked up who work for …e.g. Victoria’s Secret!
http://blackeconomics.co.uk/wp/big-businesses-that-benefit-from-prison-labour/
Posted by: Noirette | Jun 10 2020 19:21 utc | 145
Okay this is typical of the kind of comment where I normally think “Oh fuck it, not going to bother” after writing and rewriting it for an hour or more and then I don’t post it. You have been warned: this is a rant and I think there’s a little bit of foaming too XD
Discussing both the US civil war and WWII (and really also WWI) in the same breath because the hypocrisy is the same means the reader must pay close attention to the switching back and forth between addressing particulars of each and also realize when both are talked about simultaneously.
Honestly not sure if I trust most commenters or even myself to be able to do that 😀 (I see “feuds” or disagreement where people don’t seem to have correctly read each others relatively to the point comments —which always happens, it’s normal, failure of communication is normal, and I do it too— so what will/could people do with something like this?)
I consider a lot of “history” to be whitewashing (and how come that’s not a “racist” word being banned? Ah, “white”. So fucking apparent it’s laughable, so much for “racism”) for public consumption, much like one can see being done on a regular basis. Here’s my take on it.
Against slavery in what sense? Against fascism in what sense?
To save slaves, the actual people who were slaves? To instantly free them at the very earliest possibility? To reward those who “voluntarily” did so? And then what? Where would all these people live and work? Save how and how soon? Did the North draw up great plans for the future of freed slaves, did they ramp up their own society to enable themselves to do such a thing as giving a large amount of people freedom?
When most people think about Nazism and fascism they think about “white” supremacy (although it wasn’t, it was Germanic/Teutonic/Boreal/Arian aka Aryan supremacy and in their own propaganda redefining “white” from its historical meaning of highest upper class wealth requiring no labor and no exposure to the sun) and concentration camps. Well the war certainly wasn’t against that kind of wealth (if anything that was what the Nazis claimed to be against, just like the Communists) so was the war to stop concentration and death camps, the people dying in them? “Everyone who isn’t us”? Well beyond scale even that wasn’t truly anything new under the sun, fascism behind all sort of names and guises was well and truly the establishment in not only all of Europe but also all of the world both before and after, so if it was against fascism it was only against a handful of particular brands of fascism. But it wasn’t even that, and almost everyone had been busy praising the good sides of order and progress right up until the rulers (“right”, “left”, and “center”) started becoming worried about being replaced or out-competed.
No, most in the North couldn’t give a fuck about slaves unless they were white ones in other parts of the world. How many black people would anyone in the North have met to being with? Not that many and mostly a few escaped slaves in a city?
No, most people in the world had never heard anything about any extermination camps, allied soldiers (Soviet, US, any) didn’t understand what they found when they found it and then the first thing they do is to send Germans on death marches south and east to camps, just as if they themselves were “good Nazis”. Can one call that irony? Is hypocrisy a sufficient word? I find both lacking, but maybe the word “human” is ugly enough to fit? Sure people at the top knew about the camps, and made no big deal out of it and mostly kept it secret (one has to wonder why) if established history is really true.
So when it concerns slavery and fascism while there are exceptions where normal individuals, small groups, soldiers and so on were motivated or were fighting for such reasons (as personal convictions or fears or rumor) the answer in general and for those in power is clearly absolutely not. For the powers that be/were and most people such ideas are hypocritical self-justifications and propaganda far removed from any true reason no matter what is claimed or written, then or now. The North loved cheap “labor” as much as the South. The British and the Soviet loved camps and gas chambers (and invented them!) as much as the Nazis, and every government in Europe had been “in love” with eugenics for decades and would continue for some time after the war, often for decades. But saying so openly crushes a lot of people’s world-view both on the left and the right and in the center. People like to think they themselves are “good people”, it might be the most cherished lie in the world (currently running rampant on “the left” although the whole point is that no one is immune to it no matter what they believe in, no shortage of takers anywhere, not today, not tomorrow).
Thus people are eager to sacrifice history and facts, just as we see now. To destroy anything for any reason.
The US civil war was all about money and the power and control it entails. WWI and WWII were in an expanded sense all about territory and what that entails (again: power, control, including of the future) although admittedly for many countries in WWII it was all about regaining or defending such territory which many of them only had because of WWI.
None of these wars should have happened. None of these wars were any better or “necessary” or “good” or “needed” than any other war beyond the simple fact of people defending themselves from getting killed (but that’s nearly always true anyway). The mythos surrounding WWII is mostly false and easily a lot of the “popular history” too; shallow and biased in all kinds of strange manners including talking up the Nazis to make oneself look better as well as enough uncomfortable undeniable “documented” truths to be either lauded or debunked according to current taste to have created a cottage industry of “remembrance” still churning out new-ish material 80 years later where we can all bathe ourselves in the radiated “glory” of millions dead, either heroes or victims or both while we boo, hate, and superimpose any evil either forwards or backwards in time on whoever deemed deserving then or now.
It’s a perpetual circus! Lessons? There are none! Absolutely nothing learnt by anyone.
No there’s no such thing as a “great generation” or “the greatest…” only “dead generations” plural: outright slaughter of your own populations as well as “the enemy” and all sides guilty.
War is always theft.
[Ps. for anyone curious I am aware that “whitewashing” comes from washing stone white using some limestone mix (although I forget what the combination is but remember it’s caustic as hell), it adds a white colored coat and helps preserve the stone (usually a building wall) thus white is in no way offensive much like I also am aware that all the variations in various languages on the word/name “negro bun” comes from the buns being black or brown in color, sweet, delicious, and a joy/treat …and all those good things are in this case associated with black people. But of course: “racism” for the moronic.
Expecting blackbirds to be renamed next week, in fact why shouldn’t I insist upon it? 😛 Let’s remove everything “black” from all languages and replace the name of the color with “color-deficient” since it’s technically an absence and then we can rename “brown” as “partially color-deficient” too and of course under such circumstances there can be no black people anywhere and all the actual supremacists will be as happy as the “most color-deficient” night. Welcome to 1984 version 2.1]
Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Jun 12 2020 14:15 utc | 174
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