Queen Victoria statue defaced: #VictoriaMustFall
by Archbishop Cranmer:
The mob has now risen against a Queen Victoria statue in Leeds, which is perfectly reasonable considering she ruled the Empire under whose aegis all those slave-traders flourished and made their fortunes. If statues of Edward Colston and Robert Milligan must fall, then so must that of the Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India whose imperial patronage of white-privilege they enjoyed.
‘Murderer’, ‘Slave owner’, ‘Slag’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Racist’, ‘Whore’: she oppressed and subjugated nations and peoples. The British Empire was very bad and very wrong. Lord Adonis said so, so it must be true. And so the Empress of India must be very bad if not really quite evil, and her statue must fall; #VictoriaMustFall.
And so must the evil racist islamophobe Winston Churchill, and the evil murderous religious bigot Oliver Cromwell, and the evil capitalist witch Margaret Thatcher, and so on and so forth. And let’s not forget buildings named after the sons of slave-owners: even William Ewart Gladstone must be expunged, for he inherited the sins of his father and voted against abolition of the slave trade, so the due punishment must be meted out. #GladstoneMustFall. If students at Liverpool University can achieve that, perhaps those in Churchill College Cambridge might march and protest and scream and scream until their college is renamed Mandela College or Roy Jenkins College or some such: #ChurchillMustFall.
There is no nuance to apprehend; no weighing of their moral good relative to the bad; no space for ethical debate of their virtues and violations. Their greatness (should there be any) must be viewed through the diffracting lens of contemporary offence. As Shakespeare observed, ‘The evil that men do lives after them; /The good is oft interred with their bones.’ So let it be with all those of whom the mob or Sadiq Khan disapprove.
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