Therefore not an offence
Vandalism or termination of a hate crime?
THE Attorney General is considering referring the case in which four people were cleared of tearing down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston to the Court of Appeal.
Suella Braverman said the verdict is causing “confusion” and she is “carefully considering” whether to use powers which allow her to seek a review so senior judges have the chance to “clarify the law for future cases”.
…
The verdict prompted a debate about the criminal justice system after the defendants – dubbed the Colston Four – opted to stand trial in front of a jury and did not deny involvement in the incident, instead claiming the presence of the statue was a hate crime and it was therefore not an offence to remove it.
It’s not difficult to see some perils in that argument. Trans “activists” could claim that a feminist march is a hate crime and it’s therefore not an offence to disrupt and bully it, to take just one example. On the other hand do the Tories think of the destruction of the Berlin Wall as an offence or crime?
But the prosecution said it was “irrelevant” who Colston was and the case was one of straightforward criminal damage.
Well…what if the statue had been of Hitler? Or Stalin? Or Slobodan Milošević? How about a statue of General Dyer in Amritsar?
Joanna Cherry, the QC and SNP MP, said “possible confusion” would not provide a legal basis for the sort of referral Braverman is looking at – saying there would need to be an error of law identified that required clarification.
…
“The petty and ill-informed attacks on the Colston jury verdict which we have seen from Tory MPs are on par with the attacks on the judiciary we saw at the height of the Brexit crisis.
“Politicians should not question jury verdicts just because they don’t like them, that is damaging to the separation of powers and the rule of law.”
At any rate I can’t muster much concern about the welfare of a statue of a slave trader.
I don’t have much concern about a statue of a slave trader, either. I do have concerns about vigilante justice. I also have a lot of reservations about the concept of “hate crime”, especially given how many things I support are probably considered “hate crimes” ¹ in some jurisdictions. The statue itself isn’t the problem here; raising it in a public space, or commissioning it to be created for that purpose, those are the problems. There’s lots of offensive art, but we don’t go around to private collections or museums and destroy it.
So, maybe vandalism, but extenuating circumstances, in this case?
¹ Criticizing religion, criticizing trans ideology, calling male people male, mocking religion, criticizing Islam, refusing to salute the flag, refusing to say the pledge, criticizing Israel, criticizing Judaism, disputing the Bible, and so on.
Yeah, let’s not vandalize public structures, just to show how morally superior we are. Nor even to show how angry we are. That will not age well.
Spray paint sold well last summer, post George Floyd, here in our nice liberal little town. Mobs spray-painted slogans on the interstate highway, but as far as I can tell nobody stopped to read them. They spray-painted “fuck the police” on university buildings. Way to win the hearts and minds of the uncommitted! I say, you can decorate your own buildings any way you like, and I don’t care what you do with your own statuary, but leave the public ones the way they are!
Now Sackbut, as to your footnote, let’s not omit performing early music on modern instruments!
I take your points, I have reservations too, and yet…as I said: the Berlin Wall? Other Berlin Walls in other places? I have reservations either way.
Well, the Berlin Wall wasn’t public art or even a building — it was just a barrier that no longer had any purpose. I have a couple of chunks of it myself, actually, but it’s not like breaking off a piece of the Acropolis.
Presumably these “problematic” statues were created and erected after some deliberation. Times have changed, we’ve moved on, and those that are now seen as offensive can certainly be removed, possibly to a museum or simply to a recycling facility. But I can’t see how joining a mob to pull them down — and leaving it to a governmental unit to clean up the remains — makes any positive contribution.
It’s not an easy question and I’m not a professional ethicist. I think of the statues of Lenin and Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and other despots being taken down. When they are overthrown do we arrest the people dismantling them? There’s a case to be made that they are art.
Similar to statues of Civil War generals and politicians from the losing side. They were erected as symbols to black Americans in the Jim.Crow era. They were of traitors to a nation. Is it wrong to take them down?
Letting some stand is an affront, but taking them down is a mob reaction.
Fence sitting here.
The statue of Saddam Hussein is a good example, which I’d forgotten. Peter, does that help you see how a mob pulling them down can make a positive contribution?
Sometimes mobs pull down tools or symbols of oppression. I do think that can make a positive contribution. It’s a communal expression of joy and solidarity when a form of oppression is defeated.
The statue of Colston probably isn’t a great example of that, because he’s too obscure and too far in the past to be a symbol of oppression for many people. But…he could be a mediocre or downright feeble example. I don’t want to lump all expressions of liberation and/or solidarity into the “virtue signalling” category. I don’t think that’s fair or accurate.
You got me, with that example of Saddam Hussein. I’d probably have lent a hand if I’d been there.
I can picture a sign at the future Trump gravesite — “Please do not pee on the gilded statue — His, Hers, and Their urinals have been provided for your convenience.”
snort-laugh
Psh, Peter you are too timid. I say, commercialise his grave as follows:
$10 to urinate into a cup (250mL) to pour on his grave
$25 to empty the full contents of your bladder directly on his grave (with privacy screen to block public view while you are peeing)
$100 seat hire; the seat has a hole in the middle, and comes with complementary newspaper. 10 minutes of privacy screening. People with IBS, gastroenteritis and similar get half price!
The line would stretch from Mar-a-Lago halfway to Orlando!
The main objection, or at least the most sympathetic one I’ve heard, to removing such monuments to human cruelty is that doing so could whitewash our history. There is some truth in this, though not as much as its proponents believe; the counterargument is that most people who want to remove such displays from the public square also think they belong in museums, with their history placed in a more thorough context.
To take an example close to my heart, the Berlin Wall still stands in a few places, and where it doesn’t there is often a marker of where it stood — sometimes this is a sign marking a victim who was murdered by the Stasi in the attempt to pass it, sometimes this is a row of bricks following the former wall’s course.
I am not sure there is a hard and fast principle at work here; the oppression of the DDR, and the years of struggle which laid the groundwork for the wall’s spontaneous demolition, are not really comparable (though also not entirely dissimilar) to the decades of Jim Crow and its lingering attenuation, to which the Confederate flags flew and statues stood in commemoration. The fall of the Berlin Wall directly presaged the dissolution of Communism in Germany and its reunification, as well as the retreat of Soviet troops from Germany and ultimately from the rest of Eastern Europe — all much more dramatic and proximate political events than what has been achieved by the death-by-a-thousand-cuts vandalism that has occurred in the South over the last decade.
And it must also be admitted that that vandalism has had an effect so great that thousands of cities and most Southern states have taken up the vandals’ work for them; while some Confederate monuments remain, a great many have been removed, and if I haven’t missed my guess, there are no longer any Confederate icons upon any state flags. Indeed, the vandals have succeeded to such an extent that their tactics and ideas have been exported back to Europe, such as in this case, where American notions are being re-grafted onto a European context that does not quite fit them.
I’ve switched to the “vandalism is bad” mindset mostly because “who decides?”. Up in Portland they’ve had to hide a statue of *Lincoln* for chrissake.
BKisa, that’s pretty much where i am. i have no problem with removing statues of oppressors, but i think that needs to be done with more input, and not decided by one person or group. Statue of the Little Mermaid was vandalized, spray painting it with the slogan ‘racist fish’. For what reason I don’t know. It’s been many years since i read the Little Mermaid and I don’t remember enough about it to assess whether she was racist or not.
The thing that comes to my mind in this is the uproar over the Taliban and other fundamentalist Muslims pulling down iconic statues that are legitimately considered works of art. How can we truly distinguish between these? It’s easy to defend pulling down statues of Civil War southern generals because we agree that they were bad symbols, but other people see things differently. To the Muslims, those statues they pulled over are as big an affront as the Civil War generals are to the BIPOC community, and Hitler/Stalin/Mussolini statues would be to almost everyone. OB has been vocal against the toppling of the statues by the Muslims, and I would say rightfully so. Now, though, because it is statues we are uncomfortable with and see problems with, it’s tempting to take the other side.
Who draws the line? Where is it drawn? The whole thing could energize a basic ethics class for several semesters.
I know this thread is done, but maybe someone else will get a chuckle out of what one of the protesters said at the time the statue was toppled. It was something like “we’ve been trying to get it taken down for a long time and we kept being told we have to go through the proper channels. Well, now he’s in the proper Channel” (the Bristol Channel, that is).
I’m not a fan of of mobs going around smashing up things they don’t like. But on the other hand, I think casting slave traders in bronze and putting them on a pedestal is an affront to human decency, so I would call this one of those rare occasions where two wrongs make a right.
I have some sympathy for public displays of anger. Sometimes they’re necessary and some examples have been given. Here’s another: I grew up in the North East of England during the time of the miners strike. This was a time when entire communities were dismantled wholesale for no fathomable reason. Anger was the only tool these communities had. Not that it did them much good in the end; many of the towns and villages around here never recovered.
But public anger and civil disobedience is what got the issue noticed.
This is different, of course, to the case of Colston’s statue, but imagine if someone were to erect a public statue of Thatcher in a County Durham (former) pit village. I would have absolutely no issue with anyone who wanted to destroy it. I would help them…. But I would do so fully intending to accept the legal consequences.
Admittedly, I expect I’d also do so in the hope that the legal system would be lenient, but I’d accept a criminal damage charge.
But of course I also sympathise with those who have been unjust victims of mob rule and I’m as concerned as anyone about who gets to decide what anger is justified and what isn’t.
So on balance I think that in this case the charge of criminal damage should have stood, but that the sentencing should have reflected how reasonable those actions were under the circumstances. This is a tall order and nowhere near as simple as I’m making it sound.
Perhaps a better defence would have been that it was not in the public interest to prosecute the crime, but that opens a different but similar can of worms.
One thing to bear in mind re the Colston statue is that people had attempted for years to go through channels to have it removed, or even to install a ‘corrective plaque’ providing additional information about Colston, but the city dragged its feet and refused to engage via the appropriate political channels. The same, incidentally, was true of the Luddites, who resorted to breaking weaving frames after years of arguing their case through the proper channels and being ignored.
https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/myths-within-myths/
https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/the-edward-colston-corrective-plaque/
https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/who-owns-colston/