In Albania, in a small town north of Tirana, there’s a statue dedicated to George W. Bush.
Do I even need more of an intro?
I kind of feel like that’s enough.
After all, it isn't like he left office as the most popular president.
And yet when he visited here, the prime minister called him “the greatest and most distinguished guest we’ve ever had in all time”.
Which is either really glowing praise of George or a scathing indictment of their guestbook.
But deep down, it wasn’t really about him.
Because he represents a symbol.
America.
And Albanians love America.
Nobody’s perfect.
Any time I’m feeling low, I like to imagine incredibly important public figures undergoing the most human of problems.
Nothing brings me back to neutral quite like imagining the Pope overtrusting a fart.
Don’t pretend he hasn't done it, you know he's done it, there have been dozens of popes
and they’re always old.
But we never remember popes for the robes they ruin.
Because that’s not the symbol they’re representing.
Their actions as people only matter to us within a narrow field of vision.
Their humanity is secondary to the position they hold in history.
By all accounts Gandhi was a terrible father.
Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on his wife.
Hell, even God sacrificed his own son.
But nobody’s erecting statues of Gandhi because of his unique parenting tips.
We don’t glorify MLK for his relationship advice.
We remember them for how they changed our world.
The symbols they represented.
And for the past few decades or so, intensifying after the mass murder in Charleston of a church
full of peaceful black parishioners by an insane child indoctrinated into the cult of race extremism,
there has been a push in Western nations to rethink the monuments they’ve erected to historic figures.
The fight against problematic statues has become yet another front on the seemingly unstoppable culture war
currently raging around the globe.
And because of that, in a sense there’s little reason for me to talk about it.
It’s one of those topics that I generally refer to as a troll magnet.
Most everyone has their opinion already solidified,
so all bringing it up does is continue a screaming match between deaf people.
But I found a statue of George W. Bush, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to make a video about it.
Although I suppose I’m a little late to this whole statue craze.
I’m not a particularly topical YouTuber.
But just because the news cycle has moved on doesn’t mean the world has.
The focus on monument worship may have died down in the wake of 24 hour Trump TV,
but it’s never truly dead.
Despite our current polarization of the issue, the concept of vandalizing distasteful monuments is nothing new.
Nor is it uniquely leftist in nature.
Like graffiti, as we discuss in our episode on Grama bay,
vandalism has long since been a way for people to show their disapproval of the less-than-popular choices of the state.
To fight back against the symbols that are being used to underpin our perpetually unjust societies.
Gustave Courbet’s attempted destruction of a column dedicated to Napoleon III in the late 1800’s
was widely celebrated by the people of France, much to the chagrin of their government.
Sledgehammering the Berlin wall, renaming Stalingrad, removing Bill Cosby’s star from the walk of fame
– we don’t need to be told what these actions mean.
We understand them innately.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my thirty odd years on this planet,
it’s that there’s always nuance.
Because although it feels cathartic, destruction does not by definition create a better world.
Tearing down an imperfect person doesn’t create a hero.
And because of that, the removal of monuments is more complicated than simply exposing fault in the humans they glorify.
At its core, it’s less of a fight to destroy the evils of the past,
and more of a fight to define the morals of the future.
After all, statues aren’t really dedicated to humans.
They’re dedicated to symbols.
And people are more complex than symbols.
Because of that, some of us are less interested in the transgressions of the past.
Cosby is a piece of public history, and to some, removing his image is whitewashing history.
To that group of individuals, rape, slavery, imperialism, and other horrific acts of the past
are just the actions of our ancestors.
So why hide them?
Even if we don’t agree with what they’ve said or done, we live in the world they created.
They’re public memories.
A macabre reminder of our imperfect reality.
And in some ways, they’re right.
I can certainly understand where they’re coming from.
Nobody is deserving of glorification to the point that it would stand up to everyone’s personal scrutiny.
If we hold our breath until we find a hero universally deserving of praise,
we’re all going to end up with some pretty blue faces.
The reality is that glory has always been in the eye of the beholder.
Winston Churchill’s wartime decisions led to the starvation of four million Bengali.
An atrocity of the highest order.
A capitalist Holodomor.
But it was a decision that kept his troops fed.
His primary concern wasn't the colonies, but the sceptered isle itself.
I don’t doubt he’d have sacrificed a hundred times that many if it meant England remained free.
But to a citizen of India, there’s little glory in that choice.
During the war England lost a tenth of the people that were killed in that one preventable, British-imposed famine.
Their sacrifice came at Churchill’s will, but in turn, it saved England from ruin.
I doubt you’d find many British people in 1944 who would have preferred their troops starve instead of their colonies.
I suspect in times of distress, the same would even be true today.
Realpolitik is a harsh mistress, and Churchill’s life was a testament to that.
The symbol of what he represents entirely depends on the perspective of the viewer.
So do you tear down his statues?
It depends on the morals you’re trying to instill.
Which part of his history you’re looking to glorify.
It’s the society around a monument that defines it.
Not history.
I think this is particularly evident in the United States.
As the Southern States work to defend statues of Confederate leaders put up during the era of Jim Crow,
many of their supporters have gone through great pains to present the topic as one of historicism, not symbolism.
They call it heritage.
They know they can’t win on symbolism alone, because the systematic racism behind much of their instatement is foundational.
For all the revisionist history of our modern world,
the confederacy was an imperialist slaveholding insurrection rebelling against state authority.
Their stated aim was to destroy the union so that they could continue owning other humans.
Sure, the civil war was also about state’s rights.
But most specifically, the right to own slaves.
For outsiders looking in, it isn’t hard to see that those claiming they’re simply promoting Southern history
more often than not are privately glorifying those on the pedestal.
For example, Georgia congressman Jason Spencer, recently forced into early retirement
for repeatedly screaming racial slurs at the prompting of Sacha Baron Cohen,
even went so far as to publicly threaten a black colleague who spoke out against the monuments
with "something more definitive with torches",
a not so subtle reference to the type of lynching commonplace in Confederate America.
He was reacting to the symbolism he saw in the statues.
And that symbolism was unquestionably racist.
So yes, its defenders are correct that it promotes history.
But its detractors are equally correct about the glorification implied therein.
Perhaps not everyone fighting to keep these statues does so out of racist beliefs,
but it’s undeniable that those with racist beliefs more often than not fight to keep these statues.
You don’t often meet people wrapped in the confederate flag who are looking to create an equal society.
But perhaps that example is too close to home for some.
Watching one of your own ancestors crumble to dust is a bit more emotional than when it happens to foreign societies.
So let’s look at a few others.
Germany has no statues of Hitler, although there are Nazi-era memorials to wartime dead.
Just not their leaders.
Outside of Russia, the former USSR has few, if any, remaining statues of Stalin still looming over public squares.
That is except in Belarus, where a cold war era dictator still remains in power.
When a nation’s identity changes, those it glorified tend to change with it.
The fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad was broadcast widely across Western television in excited voices.
Because the meaning was clear to anyone watching.
There was no debate on if the people of Iraq were erasing their cultural history.
The fall of his statue was far more symbolic than any banner on a warship could ever be.
If you look at China, Mao remains a major part of the nation’s symbolism.
He’s even on the money.
But I suspect that when their system collapses, the public glorification of his memory will collapse with it.
So what are confederate statues?
Does the fact that they still stand not somewhat imply that the system they represented still stands?
I’d argue it does.
Yet, again, there’s nuance here.
History, and our memory of it, is complicated.
So let’s return to Albania.
In the central square of the nation’s capital, a giant sits proudly upon his horse.
His name is Skanderbeg, and although he died in 1468, he’s unquestionably this nation’s most highly respected hero.
You can tell because he’s on a monument in the central square,
and that’s where we put our heroes.
His statue was erected where Stalin once stood,
a few metres away from a giant representation of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s homegrown dictator.
All three represent in some way this nation’s history, but it doesn’t take a genius to understand
why after the fall of totalitarianism they replaced the communist statues for a hero of the ancient past.
Even if that past itself was imperfect.
Skanderbeg was human.
Just like Stalin, just like Hoxha.
He made mistakes.
He committed atrocities.
He murdered to get ahead.
But that’s not really the point, is it?
His legacy, like that of Mother Teresa, or even that of George Bush, is mythologized in Albania.
He’s more than the sum of his parts.
The idea he represents is larger than the reality of who he was.
His transgressions aren’t the point.
They’re not what’s being glorified.
His misdeeds are so far in the past that people feel comfortable erasing them without worrying
who in the modern society it might be harming.
There are few in this nation who still feel the bite of his bad deeds, so those bad deeds simply don’t matter.
But I suspect we won’t be seeing him gracing the streets of Turkey any time soon.
And for that reason, I’d argue that our public statues will always be a problem.
Society isn’t static, and our sins are entirely unoriginal.
The problem of state-sponsored monuments is more than just who’s being glorified.
It’s why.
If a day comes when infidelity is seen as more important than civil rights,
streets named after MLK may very well be removed to make way for someone new.
The day that Lincoln’s failures in business are more important than emancipation,
or Mackenzie King’s thoughts on Asians are more important than wartime stability, they’ll fall, too.
History is complicated, and nobody is perfect.
But we don’t erect statues to teach history.
We put those in a museum.
We don’t create monuments to represent reality.
They exist to glorify.
To mythologize.
And if that myth no longer represents the society it looms over,
don’t be surprised to wake up one morning to find it laying in the dirt.
When I see this statue to George Bush, my first instinct is to chuckle about a statue of George Bush.
Because in my society he doesn't represent positive values.
He isn't worthy of my glorification.
But I didn’t put up this statue.
This isn't my society.
And here, he’s a hero.
So I guess you could say, “mission accomplished”.
This is Rare Earth.