The real reason to pull down Churchill’s statue

Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics briefly united the world in Anglophilia. The Britain celebrated there seemed amused, multicultural, cool — the Britain of the Beatles, the National Health Service, Shakespeare and Mr Bean. There was, however, one strong dissonant note: the moment when, as a camera follows the Queen’s supposed helicopter from Buckingham Palace to the East End, Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square smiles and waves its stick in greeting. That had no place in this warm celebration of Cool Britannia.
Those who abhor Churchill do so for good reason. Shashi Tharoor has explained that Churchill was “a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-white peoples, a man who fought not to defend but to deny our freedom.” When angry Londoners attacked this same statue last week, many cheered here in the colonies Churchill struggled all his life to keep.
Boris Johnson disagrees. The statue, says the British prime minister, “is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country — and the whole of Europe — from a fascist and racist tyranny.” His achievement? I suppose America, Russia, the rest of Europe, not to mention the rest of the Empire, had nothing to do with it?
The war was won thanks to half the world’s determination and to the superior innovation of free societies — not a few speeches. I am as much of a historian as is Johnson — that is, not at all, in spite of his awful book on Winston — but unlike him, I read actual historians. And, as the historian Richard Toye has so painstakingly demonstrated, the myth of Churchill’s speeches stiffening the spine of a half-defeated world is just that — a myth. In a world where Winston Churchill never existed, the war would still have been won.
Naturally Johnson would have to defend Churchill. The entire movement that has catapulted Britain out of Europe and Johnson into No. 10 is based upon a painstaking preservation of various absurd myths about British history. The notion that Churchill saved Europe is an unsubtle claim that Europe owes Britain. The idea that Britain, with its vast overseas empire, stood alone in 1940 is an equally unsubtle reminder that it could stand alone today.
Beyond Brexit, the notion of Britishness that Churchill embodies is one that has no place for racial minorities and which dismisses their justified complaints. Without an honest reckoning with its past, the Britain of 2020 will continue to be adrift in a world with few allies, uncertain of what its own economic advantages are and with an increasingly unclear sense of itself as a modern nation. This is a Britain whose mind has been poisoned by such myths and, yes, held back by the weight of statues of slavers and imperialists. Johnson said that statues “teach us about our past, with all its faults.” Statues do not teach; schools do.
So, take down such statues — Churchill, of course, but also Clive “of India” on Whitehall and the generals of the British Indian Army in Trafalgar Square. But if we are to leach this poison from the British mind, then it is school curricula that will have to change. A University of Liverpool lecturer pointed out her students “know very little about Britain’s past, let alone Britain’s connections with the wider world or the history of the world outside Europe. … They therefore know practically nothing about empire and its legacies — including in Britain.”

—Bloomberg