Europe’s Statues and Limitations Churchill and Gandhi are out, Lenin is in, and Marx never went away.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-statues-and-limitations-11593040923?mod=opinion_lead_pos4
The U.S. isn’t alone in grappling with whom to commemorate in public monuments. Europe is having its own debates, and as in America the results are sometimes positive and just as often ridiculous.
In the positive column, there’s Belgium’s rethink of statues honoring King Leopold II, and Bristol’s removal of monuments to Edward Colston in the United Kingdom. Leopold’s personal rule of Belgian Congo was marked by brutality on an industrial scale, with mass amputations a favored means of controlling a population enslaved in service of Leopold’s rubber interests. Colston made his fortune in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The problem in both places is that the statues have been attacked by mobs rather than removed by local governments after reasoned debate. That absence of reasonable discussion also explains the other mob targets.
Those include statues of Winston Churchill, one of which in London’s Parliament Square had to be boarded up to protect it. The role of Churchill’s government in exacerbating a Bengal famine that killed several million Indians in 1943 is worth debating. But Churchill’s leadership in defeating Nazi Germany counts for more to any rational mind.
Speaking of India, Gandhi isn’t immune. A move is afoot in addled corners of the left to remove statues of the leader of India’s independence movement due to racist remarks he made about Africans.
In Germany, a different monumental controversy culminated last weekend when a band of Stalinist-Maoists erected a statue of Lenin in Gelsenkirchen, believed to be the first monument to the revolutionary tyrant in the former West Germany. A cross-party alliance of local officials sued to block the statue but lost because the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany planned to place the statue on private property owned by the party. And they say irony is dead.
Meanwhile, hundreds of streets and squares across Germany still are named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, including Karl-Marx-Allee, a famous boulevard in Berlin. The East German communists ditched that street’s former name, Stalinallee, amid the Soviet bloc’s de-Stalinization in the 1960s.
No less than in the U.S., Europe’s statuary debates touch on core values and public understanding of national histories. Some of these debates are long overdue, others are misguided or represent dishonest history, but none will be settled by roving outrage mobs.
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