I have to admit when I learned of the news that the statue of Edward Colston was toppled and thrown into the harbor of Bristol on June 4, I had to look his name up on Wikipedia in order to grasp the significance of the incident. Colston, a 17th Century slave trader, made his fortune through kidnapping and transporting tens of thousands of native inhabitants from Africa to the new world, where, upon arrival, those who were fortunate enough to survive the nightmarish, if perilous, voyage across the Atlantic were then auctioned and sold as slaves. Between 1672 and 1689, Colston’s ships are believed to have transported about 80,000 men, women and children from what was then known as the “Dark Continent” to the Americas.

I doubt that many people in Britain, probably apart from those who live in—or otherwise have a connection with—Bristol, would have heard of Colston and his unspeakably atrocious back story, had his bronze not been toppled and thrown into the water by the angry protesters of Bristol last week. Considering the monumental wickedness of the slave trade and the instrumental role that Colston played in it, an effigy in tribute to him should never have been standing. It goes without saying that nobody should ever condone vandalism, but given the context, and the sheer offensiveness of the statue to some of the ethnic minority groups in the country, superficial condemnations on ‘mob vandalism’, such as the one made by Priti Patel, the British home secretary, would seem to me to be making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill.

Whilst the removal of Colston’s statue may have given us an opportunity to re-examine and interrogate our past, the velocity at which things have descended into utter absurdity truly beggars belief. The support for the removal of Colston’s statue was soon replaced with that for a mindless, nitpicking exercise on everything under the sun, from Gandhi’s remarks on Africans as “savages”, “uncivilized” and “dirty”, to Churchill’s comment on the “Hindus” as being “a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due”. On June 11 the crusade against bigotry and racism evolved to a whole new level when the BBC announced that an episode of Fawlty Towers would be withdrawn from the online streaming platform UKTV because it contained ‘racial slurs’ and ‘outdated language’—the portrayal of which by the old Major and Basil Fawlty in the episode was obviously meant to be a mockery of, as John Cleese himself put it, “old fossil[s] leftover from decades before”. “If they [the BBC] can’t see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?” Cleese added.

The demise of Colston’s effigy acted as a catalyst for debate; it begs the question as to whether historical figures with moral flaws, or, who held views that are no longer acceptable in modern times, should merit a place of honour. In Colston’s case, the argument against honoring him with a statue is quite compelling: despite his generous donation to the city of Bristol, Colston made his fortune through a barbaric trade that caused unutterable human suffering. The fact that he was instrumental in the Atlantic slave trade makes it impossible to separate his charitable deeds from the countless tragedies that he directly or indirectly caused as a slave trader; to merit Colston a place of honor is tantamount to endorsing the slave trade—which involved the kidnapping and trafficking of human beings—for his money was the only reason that he was immortalized in the forms of statuary and eponyms.

Whereas the case for removing Colston’s statue is fairly compelling, it is not liable to persuade us that the petitions over the removal of the statues of Churchill and Gandhi on the grounds of their racist comments should be considered with the same line of thought. Those who believe that the statues of Churchill and Gandhi should be removed tacitly assume that there is a touchstone of honorability—by which one can be judged for one’s ‘deservedness’ for a place of honor, and the two fell below the standard because of their racist views. They assume that by harboring views that are unacceptable in modern times, Churchill and Gandhi are unworthy of being honored with an effigy of their own, despite all that they had done for the betterment of this world. Without entering into a detailed criticism, I wonder whether any historical figure at all would be able to pass the ‘test of honorability’, given the exceptionally high pass mark and the fact that it was merely fifty years ago, during the sixties, that racism surfaced as a social and moral issue.

As we can see from the #MeToo movement that started in 2017, or the civil rights protests that were sparked off by the tragic death of George Floyd in May this year, progress often comes in unexpected convulsions. Whilst it is beneficial, and indeed pivotal, to the betterment of society that we interrogate and re-examine the past, indulging ourselves in extremes—for instance, the rash and implicit acceptance of the practice of nitpicking, and censorships on the basis of cultural and political correctness—risks sacrificing the quality of tolerance and the prevalence of common sense that all open society should dearly cherish.

(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong. He is a Philosophy graduate of King’s College London and has been a member of the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom since February 2020.)

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