The history is bad enough, we don't need the monuments

Pulling down statues? Oh, it’s a controversial question in Britain today.

The Prime Minister has said that removing statues of celebrated men of the past is in effect lying about our history. But, like so much that Johnson says, that’s simply false. The history is there with or without the statues. No one is suggesting rewriting it. Statues aren’t about recording history, they're about honouring people who helped make it.

Why honour those responsible for some of its most shameful moments?

The demand to rid the country of statues to our most discreditable historical figures comes chiefly from the Black Lives Matter movement. I support their general aims, and in particular their desire to free ourselves of those blots on the urban landscape, though I would like to see it go a little further.

Edward Colston's statue drowned
Black Lives Matter protestors dump slave trader's monument

Would I have backed the tearing down and dumping in Bristol harbour, of the statue of Edward Colston? I don’t know. It might have been better to have the City Council remove it by democratic decision. But, in purely pragmatic terms, it’s probably easier for Councillors not to put it back in place, than it wold have been to take the initial decision to get rid of it.

Maybe the protestors did the Councillors a favour.

Certainly, the streets of Bristol are cleaner for not having the statue there. I remember clearly the shock I had on seeing it for the first time. I hadn’t previously known anything about him, far less that he had a public monument. Discovering that he did left me speechless. How, I thought, could we honour a man who was a major figure in the Transatlantic slave trade? He may have been a benefactor to Bristol, London and other places, but some at least of his wealth came from slavery. Doesn’t that mean that whatever worthy cause he funded, and however much he gave, what he was handling was the filthiest of dirty money?

Let’s be clear. The slave trade in which Colston prospered believed that men and women could be treated as cargo. It took 12-12.8 million free men and women, captured either in slave raids or as a result of African wars in which Europeans had no legitimate interest, and transported them across the Atlantic. Between 1.2 and 2.4 million of them died on the voyage, the conditions were so inhuman.

Once in the West Indies or Americas, they were reduced to they status of cattle. They had no protection against rape, torture or murder. A white slaveowner had the legal right to do what he liked to a slave with whom he was dissatisfied, or with whom he wanted to satisfy a desire.

The justification for slavery was that the enslaved, for the most part black Africans, were less than human. So the institution set out deliberately to dehumanise them.

How can anyone who played a leading role in this business deserve a statue, simply because he endowed some schools, hospitals and almshouses? Should Berlin erect a statue to Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, on the grounds that he put up some fancy buildings?

The Black Lives Matter movement exists precisely because whites have still not fully emancipated themselves from the attitudes that legitimised slavery. The slogan  is needed because at some fundamental level, we live in societies which don’t think black lives matter enough.

Getting rid of statues of slave traders, of those who resisted the end of slavery, or of those who felt they could treat some people as inferior to others, will contribute to emancipating us all from those shameful attitudes. So I support the movement wholeheartedly.

However, I would like to see the movement go further still, at some time, without distracting from the top priority today, bringing to an end the undervaluing of black lives. I have longed for years to see at least one additional statue removed. It shocked me the first time I saw it just as much as the Colston statue later did. And I saw it a lot, as I was a student for four years at King’s College London and the statue is in the Strand, not far from the College.

It is the statue of Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris who headed the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command during World War 2.

Bomber Harris's statue in the Strand

The principal actions of Bomber Command were mass air raids on German cities. They were sometimes masked as aimed at ‘military targets’, but it’s hard to see how carpet bombing the whole of Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden, could possibly be necessary to hit the few, if any, legitimate military targets they contained.

Dresden after the bombing
A legitimate military target? Seriously?

More honestly, if still euphemistically, the raids are sometimes defended as action to ‘break the enemy’s morale’. In other words, it was hoped they would batter the German population into withdrawing its support from Hitler. That’s military action to obtain political change. And that means action directed against a whole population, and therefore against civilians. 

There’s a name for that. We call it terrorism.

My father served in the Royal Air Force during that war. Indeed, he was a Navigator in a bomber. But he was never in Bomber Command, serving instead in 101 Squadron, which dropped supplies to resistance fighters, towed gliders or dropped paratroops.

Leonard Beeson
Bomber Navigator but never a terror bomber

He often said he was relieved that he’d never taken part in any of the raids on cities. He was forever grateful that he had, by good fortune, avoided being involved in terrorism.

So it shocks me that we still have a statue to the main architect of that terrorism in one of the great streets of the British capital.

The key issue today is to teach us all that Black Lives Matter. So let’s get rid of the statues of the slave trade traders and deniers of freedom, today.

But tomorrow? Perhaps we can move on and learn to stop honouring our terrorists either. After all, we need to remember the role these people played in history, but we don’t need to honour them with monuments.

Pleasure, and a timely lesson, from the Hamburgers

There are more bridges in Hamburg than there are in the whole of Venice and Amsterdam. Taken together.

How do I know that? I was told by a taxi driver. And the word of a taxi driver is not to be doubted, is it? Like the word of a US President. So I haven’t checked. I have to admit, though, that if I haven’t looked, it’s partly just because I wouldn’t want to find out that it wasn’t true.

The Elbe in Hamburg

In any case, it’s highly plausible. The city has water everywhere. It’s a great port, after all, at the mouth of the river Elbe, and with many channels of its tributary, the Alster, flowing through parts of the city centre. Water, hills and parks make a city, in my view, and Hamburg has the first and last of these.

Water, water, everywhere

Many of the waterways are lined with old warehouses, a reminder that the city was once one of the chief centres of a great trading association of northern Europe, the Hanseatic League. Most German cities like to have their car number plates identified by a single letter – B for Berlin or F for Frankfurt, for instance – because a short abbreviation indicates a great city. Hamburg insists on two – HH for Hansestadt Hamburg, recalling its long commercial traditions.

Hamburg warehouses. And more water, of course.

‘England is a nation of shopkeepers,’ Napoleon once said. I realised just what he meant, and just why he said it, when I was recently reading some material on Britain in the eighteenth-century. In the Napoleonic wars, Britain tried for as long as possible to avoid getting involved in fighting on land in Europe, preferring to limit its military commitments to the sea (trade needed the sealanes kept open, after all). Instead, it offered subsidies to its allies to do the actual fighting. It could offer those subsidies because it was a powerful trading nation, though as I argued here recently, even Britain suffered as embargoes and counter-embargoes were imposed.

Hamburg, like Britain, prospered by trade. A message Brexiters and Trumpistas would do well to remember. Erecting barriers makes nations poorer. Knocking them down makes them richer – all of them: this isn’t a zero-sum game, both sides gain from trade. And war damages them.

Alongside parks and waterways, spires help a city too. My eye was caught by a tall church tower as I was walking between meetings, but I couldn’t get to it just then – I was in the city for work, after all. However, later, having seen a colleague off at the station, I found that my route back to the hotel took me close to it. “I could take a look,” I thought.

The ruined church of St Nikolai in Hamburg

It turned out to be the tower of the St Nikolai church. Only the tower and the chancel survive. The main part of the nave was destroyed in 1943 when the Allies bombed the city, in the aptly – and vengefully – named ‘Operation Gomorrah’. The Royal Air Force bombed at night, the US Air Force by day; the RAF carpeted the city indiscriminately, the USAF targeted military works (such as a submarine factory); a fire storm engulfed the city, leaving a number of dead that has never been precisely determined, some of the corpses having been completely incinerated in the flames.

Picasso evoked the terror of the Nazi bombing of Guernica

The museum in the crypt of the ruined church makes it clear that the chief blame for the horror belongs to Hitler and Nazism, that none of this would have happened had they not set Germany on a vain road to world power, and that the Nazis indeed had pioneered the use of mass bombing of civilians before the Allies did: the museum mentions Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Warsaw, Coventry and, indeed, London, all bombed long before 1943.

That’s generous of the German historians.

However, it hardly lessens the guilt of the Allied strategists. The exhibition quotes Air Chief Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris saying ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried… and we shall see.’

Let’s be clear: the bombing of civilian targets has only one aim. In World War 2, the Allies called it ‘breaking the morale of the population’. Today we call such attempts by a single and simple word: terrorism. The destruction of Hamburg by fire was absolutely clearly an act of state terrorism, something we would do well to remember whenever we throw up our hands in horror at state terrorism practised by our enemies today.

Hamburg ablaze during Operation Gomorrah

St Nikolai has been left ruined, like the Memorial Church in Berlin or Coventry Cathedral in England. There is a quiet, stately mournfulness about these monuments to those moments when we get things wrong and build walls instead of bridges. 

Salutary in this city of so many bridges and which has suffered so much.

Are you listening, Trumpistas and Brexiters?

I suppose it would have been appropriate to have had a hamburger
among the Hamburgers. But I resisted the temptation