Many Left Liberals in the United States of America are on a mission to pull down statues of Confederate leaders across the country after their attempts to remove one such memorial to General Robert E Lee in Charlottesville sparked off a battle with far-Right groups, including elements of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists waving Nazi flags.

The General died in 1870 and the statue was erected in 1924. The Liberals have apparently begun to realise of late, after about 93 years of the statue’s existence, that this and other such statues are offensive symbols of white supremacism and racism.

The current debate over this statue reminded me of an earlier one from last year about a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University. A group of students there had similarly demanded removal of Rhodes’ statue on grounds that he was a racist – which he undoubtedly was. He was also an imperialist of the worst kind. He died in 1902, and the statue sat in Oxford for over a century before suddenly becoming so disturbing as to require its removal. Meanwhile, close to 8,000 scholars including Bill Clinton took pride over the years in calling themselves “Rhodes scholars” after the prestigious scholarship that bears Rhodes’ name.

Reacting to that demand, the Chancellor of Oxford University, Chris Patten, had said, “Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudices.” The university refused to remove the statue.

I—a brown man from a formerly colonised country firmly opposed to racism and white supremacism—agree with Patten’s view.

Colonialists everywhere

In India, there is no dearth of monuments, institutions, roads and even whole towns named after imperialists and colonialists. For instance, Dalhousie, a hill town in the state of Himachal Pradesh, is named after Lord Dalhousie, a former Governor General. One of Kolkata’s most famous monuments is Victoria Memorial, named after Queen Victoria. There are plenty of such examples.

Should we now raze every last one of these memorials, rename every road, and erase all signs of our past as a colonised country?

Different people may find different statues disagreeable for different reasons. The Taliban and others of their ilk such as ISIS may simply believe that idolatry is evil and all idols and statues need to be bombed out of existence. That’s what has happened to a lot of ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan and Pakistan. People from formerly colonised countries may want to wipe out memorials to imperialists. Hindu groups may not like roads named after Muslim rulers from the country’s past who they believe were particularly tyrannical towards Hindus. The example of Aurangzeb Road in Delhi comes to mind.

The curious thing is that those who seek to erase symbols of the past they do not like, in places such as India, are from the religious Right. The ones who seek to do so in the US and UK are so-called liberals.

In the present debate over the statues of Confederate leaders in the US, President Donald Trump pointed out that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were also slave owners in their time. “Is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You have to ask yourself where does it stop?” Trump said.

Mr Trump is not popular with Left liberals in the US, to put it very mildly, but in this instance, he does seem to have a point. There are already demands from certain quarters to demolish monuments featuring Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and at least one call to get rid of Mount Rushmore.

Who sold the slaves?

Washington and Jefferson would hardly be the only famous Americans from history to have owned slaves. Pretty much all of the American elites in those days did. Even Benjamin Franklin, who became an abolitionist in his later life, was a slaveholder.

Slavery was common throughout the world in ancient and medieval times. Asia and Africa had their own internal slave trades. There was a bustling Arab slave trade that dealt mainly in women who were sold into sexual slavery. This continued in the Ottoman Empire until 1908. In Saudi Arabia, a permanent US ally, slavery was abolished only in 1962. I’m sure the Americans would not see any need for reform, regime change or democracy in Saudi Arabia even if they had not bothered to abolish slavery till date. They are “good guys”.

In India, most regions had slavery, and this continued in some places into the 20^th Century. For example, in his book “A Philosophy for NEFA” published in 1957, anthropologist Verrier Elwin recounted the example of a woman named Yaniyong who was captured and enslaved in the hills of what is now Arunachal Pradesh. He freed her from slavery.

One outstanding feature of the Atlantic slave trade that fed the Western markets was its scale. In the four centuries of its existence, according to UNESCO estimates, around 17 million people were deported. The conditions in which they were transported were horrific.

The way the trade worked, according to UNESCO, was that ships arrived in Africa laden with goods that the captains exchanged for slaves. The supply of African slaves was provided by African rulers. The earliest beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade, involving Portuguese merchants and King Afonso of Kongo, have been traced by Professor John Thornton, an expert on slavery, in a paper on “African Political Ethics and the Slave Trade”. It reveals, from correspondence of that time, the existence of slave markets in Kongo that supplied slaves to local elites as well as the Portuguese. “When, around 1512 or 1513 he (Afonso) sent some 22 of his young relatives to Europe to study, he included slaves for their support, including extras in case some of the slaves should die,” Thornton writes.

The caste system

The crucial difference between black elites owning slaves – there were a few rare examples of black slave owners even in America – and white people owning them was racism. Until a hundred years ago, it was a common assumption on the part of white people that they were superior to everyone else. This had been formalised in the Spanish caste system in the early days of European colonialism. The Portuguese/Spanish word “casta”, meaning race had the “Peninsulares”, white Europeans born in Spain, at the top of the caste hierarchy, and dark Africans and American Indians at the bottom. The word “negro” comes from here. It is the Spanish word for “black”.

The obsession with purity of blood was also a feature of Spanish colonialism. Spain and Portugal had been conquered by Muslim armies, and remained under Muslim rule for between 300 and 770 years.

After what is called the Reconquista, which ended with the fall of Granada in 1492, the Spanish rulers went on to expel Jews and Muslims from their lands. Many Jews and Muslims converted to avoid persecution. The Spanish Inquisition had already begun by then, under the rule of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who later became Christopher Columbus’ patrons.

The concept of “limpieza de sangre”, which means purity of blood, was incorporated into state policy to ensure that people of Jewish and Muslim blood were denied entry into important jobs.

World War 2

We know quite well where that obsession eventually led. However, it is false to suggest, as many are doing now, that the US entered World War 2 out of moral compulsions, to defeat Nazi Germany. The US, as is well known, entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, more than two years after the War had begun. It did not enter the land war against Germany until November 1942 in North Africa. In fact, it is not even true US had much of a military role in defeating Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler and his military were beaten by the Russians. America jumped in more than halfway into the War to grab a share of the spoils. By November 1942, the Russians had already ground the Nazis to a halt.

According to the British historian Max Hastings, Nazi Germany suffered three quarters of its wartime losses fighting the Red Army. By far the greatest number of casualties on the Allied side lost in fighting the Nazis were Soviets. The total war casualties of World War 2 on the Russian side is estimated at 25 million people, including civilians. On the German side it is estimated at 8 million. The US casualties were around 400,000 and UK lost around 450,000 people. The Battle of Stalingrad alone caused more German casualties than all Nazi battles against the British, Americans and French on the Western Front combined.

The US’ attitude towards Nazis seems to have been neutral even after the start of the War. Nazi supporters organised summer camps and held marches around the US in the late 1930s. There are photos of a massive Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, and a march down New York streets on October 30 the same year, two months after World War 2 had already begun. There was no “Antifa” then, stopping that march. Marchers proudly waved the stars and stripes alongside the Nazi swastika flag.

There is no doubt that the greatest share of credit for defeating the Nazis must be given to the Left – in the shape of Josef Stalin and his Red Army, and the Soviet people. Stalin, however, was no more a nice guy than Hitler was. He executed around 1 million of his own citizens before the war and another million after. He is also blamed for causing around 5 million deaths through famine. The morality of mass murder surely did not enter into wartime equations, since the US and UK embraced Stalin as an ally.

Mass murderers all in a row

The records of mass murder by the US and UK are also quite impressive. British leader Winston Churchill, like Stalin, caused around 3 million deaths by famine – in his case in Bengal in 1943, when he diverted food from the state to British reserves, leaving the Bengalis to starve to death. Harry Truman, the American president, was more direct in his mass murder. He ordered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki three months after Germany had surrendered.

The war was practically over by then. The usual justification trotted out for that act of terrorism is that it hastened the Japanese surrender by demonstrating the power of the nuclear bomb. At the very least, such a demonstration could have been carried out on targets other than entire cities with civilian populations.

What the actions of Hitler, Churchill, Stalin and Truman all reveal is the utter disregard they had for human life. It is a testimony to the power of what Trump calls “fake news” media that Churchill and Truman have escaped anything like the opprobrium Hitler and Stalin got.

Their actions differ in scale and perhaps even in brutality, but I am not certain, for instance, by what logic starving 3 million Indians to death leaves Churchill a hero, whereas starving 5 million Soviet kulaks is a crime for which Stalin must be reviled. Why are Churchill’s statues not being pulled down?

The answer lies in the truism that the victors write the history. They also write the news.

After World War 2, America has been involved in a constant succession of wars. The US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korean towns and cities between 1950 and 1953, until around 3 million people, who were presumably less than human because they were “gooks” – a derogatory term for East Asians – were dead.

In Vietnam, they massacred two million Vietnamese civilians in bombing raids and devastated the country using chemical weapons such as Agent Orange. In neighbouring Cambodia, they dropped about half a million tons of bombs, after sparking off a civil war in the country by backing a coup against the king, Norodom Sihanouk. The bombing campaign caused a backlash that led to the rise to power of the extreme Leftist Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

In East Pakistan, the duo of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, who were busy presiding over the massacres in Cambodia and Vietnam, provided support to Pakistani military dictator Yahya Khan in his genocide of an estimated three million Bengalis. In Guatemala, the CIA engineered a coup because it was opposed to land reforms. Two per cent of the population owned 72 per cent of the land; a lot of it was owned by a single American company, United Fruit. The resulting civil war led to 200,000 deaths.

Follow the money

Iran’s case is somewhat similar to Guatemala’s. Iran’s reformist, socialist, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed in a coup engineered by the US because he had wanted to secure for Iran a greater share of its oil revenues, which were being siphoned off by a British oil company, the Anglo-Persian. The British, to quote Noam Chomsky, “went completely berserk. They refused to make any compromises. They wouldn’t even come near what the American oil companies had just agreed to in Saudi Arabia. They wanted to continue just robbing the Iranians blind.”

One outcome of the coup, according to Chomsky, was that the US took over from Britain about 40 per cent of the share in Iranian oil. 

This was part of a general pattern. The Second World War had exhausted the British, forcing them to abandon their colonial empire. The US stepped in. It is the successor to the British Raj; the capital has moved from London to Washington and New York, but the realities of imperialism, at the core of which is massive loot, remain unchanged.

Racism and empire

Chomsky recalled a statement by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in which he observed that the ideology of British rule in India, “was that of the herrenvolk and the Master Race”. Nehru considered this an idea that is inherent in imperialism, and Chomsky agreed with him.

The notion of the “White Man’s Burden”, the idea of the civilising mission, the cultural representation of Egyptian, Arab and Indian peoples that Edward Said called Orientalism, the idea of Africa as the “Dark Continent”, and the “heart of darkness”…all of these make sense only when viewed in the context of imperialism.

Racism provided the justification for colonial imperialism in centuries past. One could not exist without the other.

That there were racists and imperialists in the world, many of whom have statues in their honour, is not news. That there are still nasty white supremacists around who would like to return to their days as the “master race” is not a surprise either.

However, the real fight, I believe, is not against statues and white supremacists. The battle against racism has largely been won, in the same sense that Francis Fukuyama said history has ended. The idea of racism is in the dustbin of history. The white supremacists may be able to marshal a few thousand supporters in the American South, but there is no danger of slavery becoming legal again, or of Jim Crow laws making a comeback. The white supremacists no longer dream of ruling the world. They fear they are about to get “replaced”.

The ideas of imperial wars, of coups now called “regime change”, and of extortionate corporations in cahoots with local elites robbing countries – especially in Africa and Asia – are, however, alive and well. These are ideas with legitimacy. They flourish because of collaborators like the ones who sold their fellow black men and women into slavery.

Toppling statues of long-dead white men who count for nothing in today’s world is a meaningless gesture, a distraction, a waste of energy. If Liberals want to do something real, they should end the systematic loot of at least one African or Asian country by sharks in suits. Or bring to justice at least one war criminal who destroyed a country and caused the deaths of a few hundred thousand, or perhaps a few million, people.

I am certain they will never attempt anything of the kind.

The writer is an editor and author. He can be found on Twitter as @mrsamratx

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