Feet of Clay

"I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake." - Mark Twain

The target of that marvelous insult, British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, is making headlines this morning. Oriel College, one of 38 largely self-governing colleges at Oxford University, released a statement saying that it has decided not to remove a statue of Rhodes from the campus. The surprise announcement has infuriated student activists who, under the battle cry of Rhodes Must Fall, had been petitioning the school to take it down. The students were seeking to emulate the protest movement at the University of Cape Town in South Africa that culminated in the removal of a statue of Rhodes from the campus on April 9, 2015.

The problem they have with Cecil Rhodes boils down to the incontrovertible fact that the man was an unapologetic racist, and imperialist, who does not deserve to be honored. Yet, on the other side, you have those who support keeping the statues and they generally frame their argument by invoking the defense of history. It typically sounds like this: "Yes, Rhodes was a complicated figure who held some decidedly incorrect opinions about many things, but we shouldn't judge him through a 21st Century lens. We must not erase our history, however unpleasant it may be, because that would make us no different than the Taliban". The very tenuous connection there being that the Taliban blew up some statues of Buddha when they took power in Afghanistan.

If those arguments sound familiar to you, it is almost certainly because we have been hearing the same things coming out of the mouths of Americans, who have their own monuments to white supremacy to defend. The symbols of the failed slave republic, called the Confederate States of America, have become weapons in the ongoing culture wars that roil our political waters. In particular, the Confederate battle flag has been a lightning rod especially since the mass-shooting that took place in an historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina in June of this past year. And once it became known that the white gunman, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, had posed in photos brandishing both guns and the Confederate battle flag, a movement targeting the flag started. A movement that quickly broadened to include other symbols of the Confederacy, including the statues of prominent Confederate political and military leaders.