Heroes and butchers – 16/02/2019

Since we live a serene time here in England, with little reason for concern except for the impending confrontation against the Brexit iceberg, we are distracted by asking ourselves if Winston Churchill was the largest Briton in history or a big son of a bitch.

Newspapers do not stop to face the issue, networks are burned since a Scottish MP took the opportunity the anniversary of Churchill's death last month to announce that he was "a white supremacist". A few days ago, the Labor Party's number two, the main opposition to Prime Minister Theresa May's titanic government, joined the party in declaring Churchill "a villain".

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This type of discussion about the moral purity of certain historical personalities is of great interest to Anglo-Saxon nations. Right now in the United States, they are wondering about the project to build a statue in New York commemorating the role of two pioneers of the feminist movement, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who have beaten in the 19th century so that women could vote. It now turns out that they were racist.

More usual is to campaign to shoot down the statues. There are people who say that Churchill must be destroyed in the square in front of the British Parliament. There were a lot of problems last year when progressive voices, including newspaper columnists The Guardian, they cried for removing the statue of Admiral Horatio Nelson from the Plaza de Trafalgar, named after the naval victory that Nelson played against the Spanish army and that of Napoleon in 1805. His sin? The same. He was also racist.

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Since I do not doubt that there is historical evidence to support all these charges, I have only one question. Should we seriously take the idea of ​​eradicating from any visible memory the existence or not of these historical figures? I'm looking at no. With one exception, if it's about recent tyrants like Hitler, I'd say statues should be left alone. And I say it more than anything because of the work and public expenses that this would represent. We are talking about manpower and money that could be better invested in construction than in destruction. The quantities of which we spoke would be colossal because once established the principle to put an end to all the traces of these figures of the past whose vision of the world was not identical to ours today, where would we finish?

The statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the same square as Churchill in London should leave, to begin. Yes, yes, Gandhi is one of the most revered figures in the history of mankind. It is the universal emblem of peace. But if we dig into his past, we see that, on a number of occasions, he has said some very ugly things about blacks during his years in South Africa. He favored a kind of apartheid before apartheid was invented. He stated in a letter of 1904 that he was firmly opposed to "civilized" Hindus like him mingling in public with African "aborigines". In Accra, the capital of Ghana, they removed a statue of Gandhi a few months ago precisely for these reasons.

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And why limit oneself to acting alone against ancient heroes who have sinned with racism? Why not also engage with those who have attitudes contrary to ours about the treatment of women, homobaduals, transgender people?

We should be doing some kind of genocide against 95% of the statutes around the world. Goodbye, basically, to all those who were erected in public before, for example, 1960. The different generals of the two world wars, on the outside; painters, architects and writers (there are reasons to consider that Picbado was rather misogynist, is not it?), on the outside; Latin American liberators (what did Bolivar think of the liberation of homobaduals – nothing good, no danger), outside; and not to mention the Spanish conquerors, or kings and queens and counts and dukes of old Europe (we would give Isabel the Catholic of 25 years old at least today). All outside

As for the churches, they would all become dusty quarries. Which saint would remain safe?

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And another thing. If we begin to erase the statues from the face of the earth, who knows if, once the task is over, the iconoclastic fever would not extend to books written by characters such as Cervantes or Shakespeare who, no doubt , did not share one hundred percent contemporary orthodoxies about badual preference or racial equality? Burning them all could become the slogan. What interests me as a subject of reflection is what seems normal to us today will be considered a serious offense in 50 years. I think, for example, the hamburger I'm going to eat as soon as I finish this article. And then the vegan movement comes to mind, which takes more strength every day. In London, a group of hooded militants recently stormed a supermarket, shouted anti-carnivore slogans and threatened local customers selling chicken, steaks and sausages.

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It is not totally ignored that even in less than 50 years, killing animals and eating their meat are considered as something as heinous as to insult someone of another race. That's why it's best to let the statues of past celebrities rest in peace and ask if Churchill, Bolivar, Nelson or San Pablo were good or bad, things that have their grace and intellectual appeal. when there is no news topics, like today in England, where, during the next 40 days, until March 29, day we leave Europe and sombrons in the irrelevance and misery, we can continue to live happy and serene while remaining confident of living in the time of fat cows.