Michael McDowell: Sanitising Britain's imperialist past would require collective amnesia

Many people will find themselves somewhat emotionally torn by the sight of statues being toppled and defaced by angry, if self-appointed, modern iconoclasts.

On the one hand, George Floyd’s cruel murder has started a long-delayed and hugely needed confrontation by the United States with the reality of its shameful political, economic, penal and social discrimination against, and subjugation of, black people, a process that has sent ripples across the world.

Removing monuments to the Confederacy and its politicians that proliferate in the US and ending the provocative use of their flag is, I think, a justifiable symbolic reaction and expression of a pent-up sense of injustice in relation to the cruel mass relegation of African Americans to second-class citizenship and social inferiority.

It is open to every generation in any society to take its own view of its collective history and to interpret it anew

The erection of those statues in the past and the use of those flags in the present represent an implied approbation, in some way, of the Confederacy’s legitimacy. For most African Americans, they connote white ambivalence about racial equality, given that the South fought for the retention of enslavement of African Americans.

What would the ‘referendum on housing’ be about and do we really need one?

---

Fintan O’Toole: Greens have no choice but to enter government

---

How you can share in Patrick Kavanagh’s isolation at Inniskeen this year

---

The Irish Times view on historical monuments: The statues keep falling

---

On the other hand, the rictus of self-examination occurring in Britain raises questions as to how far a society can or should go in sanitising its public spaces and institutions of traces that commemorate or even acknowledge Britain’s imperial past, including British involvement in slavery.

Subjugation

The whole idea of empire, after all, is based on subjugation. Imperialists and colonists have always clothed subjugation with the moral mantle of bringing civilisation and redemption. Rome gave the English its blessing on that account to subjugate and colonise Ireland.

Reading the excellent Handbook of the Irish Revival, edited by Declan Kiberd and PJ Mathews, I came across a piece written by my grandfather, Eóin Mac Néill, in 1919 during the War of Independence which he passionately supported, describing imperialism as “something more than the glory of dominating over lands and seas and subject peoples. To the pride of life, it adds the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, the appetite for luxury and gain.

“Its pride, being contemplative, needs to be sustained by these active forces; and whenever you find the imperialist spirit, you will find that it takes to itself a body made up of predatory feudalism and predatory capitalism, of oligarchies seeking to dominate the earth given to the millions to inhabit and the industry exerted by the millions to make the world inhabitable – in short, to enslave the world.”

Perhaps Dublin might acknowledge the glaring truth that Roger Casement was gay and give him a decent statue to commemorate his struggles for Ireland

That judgment has some relevance to the present British examination of conscience over racism. Toppling the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol or removing the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford is one thing; facing up to the fact that Britain, as a new political entity distinct from England, evolved over three centuries into Great Britain only by a sustained process of imperialism, involving enslavement, subjugation and colonisation, is another matter.

Mac Néill might well have added that one aspect of imperialist pride was a penchant for monumental self-glorification.

If all traces of its imperial past are to be carefully sanitised or removed or covered up to create space for a new, inclusive British political narrative, a collective amnesia bordering on historical dementia will be needed. You simply can’t eradicate these traces and be true to history; they are woven into the tapestry of British history as permanently as the events of 1066 are woven into the Bayeux tapestry.

Leaving traces

By all means, it is open to every generation in any society to take its own view of its collective history and to interpret it anew. But it can’t be falsified or denied. Leaving the traces of history is qualitatively different from waving the Confederate flag in today’s US.

Any person wandering in London’s Parliament Square will see statues of Churchill, Gandhi and Cromwell. A well-informed Indian will look at Churchill and see a man who privately despised the Indian people as a race and publicly argued for their continued subjugation in the British empire. A well-informed Irish visitor will, at the very least, have deeply ambivalent views about both Churchill and Cromwell.

A black South African might remember the racial prejudices of Gandhi in his younger days in South Africa – as might any lower-caste Indian who remembers Gandhi’s defence of the caste system earlier in his life.

Others might think that the three statues stand in that square as physical monuments to very diverse figures from Britain’s imperial history which should cause no offence to reasonable British people of all colours and nationalities.

They shouldn’t have to be boarded up – let alone be “defended” by a self-appointed gang of racist thugs.

I think the answer is more statues, not fewer. I don’t mind Prince Albert lurking in the bushes at Leinster House, long after his wife was removed from there and transported, like her Young Irelander rebel felons, to Australia.

Perhaps, in Pride Week, Dublin might acknowledge the glaring truth that Roger Casement was gay and give him a decent statue to commemorate his struggles for Ireland, against imperialism and for the cruelly enslaved people of the Congo and Amazon basins.