What Goes Up

Everything that goes up must eventually come down. And of course statues are coming down for political reasons. They went up for political reasons.

If, such as the statues of slave traders in Britain, only the people who want to take them down have ever heard of their subjects, then they are failures in their own terms.

As for the Confederate ones in America, and it is impossible to imagine a more ridiculous rallying point for either side of a British culture war, they went up long after the deaths of their subjects, whom they can barely be said to "remember" in any way at all.

The Confederacy was defeated, and its members were readmitted with exactly the same states' rights as everywhere else. They used those rights, as then understood, to introduce the Jim Crow laws.

And they put up monuments to the long dead, almost entirely in the twentieth century, in order to legitimise those laws in the popular consciousness. That was how it happened.

But everything that goes up must eventually come down. And of course statues are coming down for political reasons. They went up for political reasons.