Yet if “October” is a socialist epic, chiseled in soft gray stone to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Lenin’s putsch, it barely receives any attention. Locals mostly seem to ignore it, instead keen only on busting through the cinema’s doors to watch the latest action flick, or grabbing a bite to eat at the Burger King on its corner–or even stopping for a coffee at the adjacent Starbucks. That’s surprising, not least given the revolution “October” commemorates would soon travel from Petrograd to the steppe and grasp Kazakhstan’s people, choking the country and killing millions.

It might seem reasonable, then, to assume that locals would prefer this and other such Soviet monuments to disappear. In fact, the opposite is true. “I’m proud of it,” a Kazakh local told me when I asked her about its place in the city. “It represents a bad time, but that time has gone. It needs to be saved because it is art — and art is beautiful.”

It is a sentiment that has found a home on social media in the last decade, where you will find no end of accounts with thousands of followers and millions of likes and views, each sharing the curious beauty of art and architecture from across the former communist world. From dazzling mosaics to statues of long-dead revolutionaries, these span a bewildering range of styles, from the faux classicism of the Stalin-era Central Academic Theatre of the Russian Army in Moscow to the brutalism of Belgrade’s Eastern and Western City Gates — and indeed the bas-relief style of the “October” mural in Almaty.

Each of these pieces has been able to reinvent itself by doing little more than existing. With the passage of time, the ideologies and messages forged into them have almost disappeared. And, witnessing such a radical change in historical perception got me thinking about Britain’s architectural legacy. Since 2020, after all, debates have raged over whether we should or shouldn’t remove physical history from our public spaces, particularly colonial-era figures who supported despicable racist policies and engaged in the barbaric slave trade.

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These debates existed before, of course, but the Rhodes Must Fall campaign against the British imperial legacy in South Africa, together with the Black Lives Matter movement in America, sparked a new wave of anti-colonialism and historical reframing across the UK. In practice, this manifested itself as anger towards statues of historical figures. These figures, who in some cases lived hundreds of years ago, were seen to have abetted present-day racism.

There’s no need, here, to recapitulate everything that followed — from the Colston debacle to the damage visited against statues of everyone from Robert the Bruce to Queen Victoria. Suffice to say that such actions were popular: multiple 2020 surveys found that the majority of Brits supported removing the statues, with one YouGov survey suggesting 53% of people wanted Colston gone from Bristol. Though grumbles about colonial-era architecture had long existed in academic and activist circles, 2020 marked the time the general public became collectively aware of, and indeed vocal about, the physical heritage around them.

It’s not hard to understand why this might happen. You can see, certainly, why people would want to destroy a statue of a man who made his riches by crushing the potential of countless black lives. Why would we want to celebrate a man who enslaved people? After many years of extensive travel across the former communist world, I began to see the historical parallels. The context is wildly different, of course, but in both Britain and, say, Kazakhstan, there are people who have suffered long histories of subjugation and oppression who must now see that celebrated in public spaces.

Why, then, the wildly different public reactions — especially when the Soviet nightmare happened so much more recently than the Atlantic slave trade, and when murderous despots like Hoxha and Ceauşescu ruled their countries deep into living memory? Perhaps the answer begins with all those Instagram accounts, and how they’ve helped turn communist art from a political symbol, whether good or bad, into a thoroughgoing cultural aesthetic. With the political messages gone, mosaics and murals — which Stalin intended to exude colorful utopian visions — have transformed into pure works of art to be enjoyed by everyone for free. And with communist architecture, its popularity appears to stem from its genuinely unique and alien appearance, which in turn has sparked curiosity over a historical period in which such aesthetics were prized and pursued.

As for an example of this trend in practice, few stand out better than @easternblocgirl, the Instagram account of a young Serbian woman who shares gloomy photographs and videos of Yugoslav architecture and communist memes, simultaneously questioning and reimagining ways in which the world might view these pieces and their history. She even has a Spomenik tattooed to her arm: referring to the futuristic monuments that sprung up across the former Yugoslavia from the Sixties through to the Eighties, and which commemorate victims of the Second World War.

The account is only one of several communist architecture accounts — @travelproof_tjark, @sovietvisuals, @socialistmodernism, @balkan.stories — which have well over a million followers between them. But even more striking is how this digital fame is increasingly jumping from screens into the real world. With online videos often showing crumbling monuments and damaged mosaics, a new generation of art lovers are working to save them, from Kazakhstan to Georgia, Poland to Azerbaijan.

There is perhaps no better example than the Buzludzha monument. Built in 1981, it’s an enormous saucer-like structure, sitting on a dynamited Bulgarian mountain peak of the same name. Inside, no less are no fewer than 937 square meters of mosaics, created by 60 artists using millions of cobalt tiles, each dedicated to the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party, with yet more venerating Marx and Lenin. In the ceremonial hall, you will find depictions of workers, peasants, soldiers and partisans alongside scenes of industrial and agricultural labor; the panoramic corridors retell episodes from Bulgarian social and political history.

When communism fell in 1989, so did the monument’s maintenance. But rather than letting the decay continue, Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova in 2015 launched the Buzludzha Project Foundation. She was aware that there was a structure on a mountain in central Bulgaria that resembled a UFO — but wasn’t entirely sure about what that thing was. After seeing photographs of the monument online, she became convinced that something beautiful lay beneath the ruins of Buzludzha, and embarked on a simple mission: to restore the relic to its former glory. “We believe that it is important to save Buzludzha not only because it is a masterpiece of architecture, engineering, and art,” she wrote after launching the project, “but because we should remember our past, especially if it is traumatic or difficult.”

The sentiment echoes far beyond Bulgaria’s artsy elite. When I visited the monument earlier this year, I found that many local people also wanted it protected. My taxi driver, who had grown up in the nearby town of Kazanlak, even told me about his hopes for it to become a museum for tourists to visit. As he put it: “Imagine how good that would be for Kazanlak.”

Polling shows that Bulgarians overwhelmingly support the preservation of their communist architectural legacy. As researchers at Cardiff University found, over two thirds of them regard such monuments as important to national identity, while 58% support EU involvement to help fund preservation efforts. Most interestingly, a majority of people, including those under the age of 34, recognize the monuments as being part of Bulgarian national identity, even if they didn’t experience the brutal realities of communism themselves.

It is a stark contrast with opinions in Britain, where a 2020 government poll found that only 16% of people aged 16-24 were interested in heritage and its importance. And while separate polling three years later found that 64% of Britons felt proud of Britain’s history, this was down from 86% just a decade earlier. Taken together, these numbers reflect a disturbing trend towards civic disengagement, reflected in growing distrust of other institutions like the police and, most worryingly, education.

There is no doubt that young people across the UK who came out to topple and vandalize statues were vigorously and actively engaging in history, vital for any functioning society. But their acts seemed rash and worlds away from the approaches seen across the former communist world. It is here where the people appear to be aware of the past in a way that escapes those in Britain.

The problem, then, may lie in a lack of historical awareness, or perhaps a lack of desire to be aware. History as a subject is only mandatory in UK schools up until the age of 14, while religious education is (by law, at least) compulsory up to the age of 18. Many young people now use alternative sources of historical education like YouTube (which in 2025 became the second-most watched service in the UK) and podcasts, which aren’t always factually watertight, not to mention dubious in their sources and potentially hidden agendas.

In fact, social media is a hotbed of ill-informed “takes” and eroded critical thinking. Many of the young people seen protesting on the UK’s streets wholeheartedly agreed with BLM statements that Britain had grown rich solely off the back of slavery, and of course, it is partly true. But none seemed to pay heed to the other ways in which the country grew into an imperial titan — not least through its indigenous natural resources and entrepreneurial culture. Viewing history through a single lens inevitably warps the whole world.

Polish journalist and cultural critic Agata Pyzik believes all this is clearing the ground for dangerously misconstrued historical understanding. Writing shortly after statues of Lenin were being pulled down in eastern Ukraine, in 2014, before Russia launched its first invasion of the country, she noted that more people were beginning to wrongly conflate dissatisfaction and anger with modern-day politics with historical monuments. To do so, she said, is to pair things from very “different historical orders”. Sometimes, this conflation has missed the mark entirely. Only this year, multiple statues in Parliament Square, including that of prominent suffragette Dame Millicent Fawcett, were vandalized with graffiti related to trans rights.

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Putin has history on his side

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The anger is misplaced. It is far easier to target statues than it is the real reasons behind the inadequacies of your present-day society, whether Britain or Bulgaria, or any post-communist country for that matter. Yes, these monuments represent periods in which historical ills occurred. But is it really Lenin’s fault that corruption in Hungary is at an all-time high? Or Colston’s fault that the UK government is failing to address systemic racism in 2025?

Germany is all too aware of how easy it is to blame the past, remove it, and blindly move on. The country is second only to Russia in the number of Red Army and communist memorials on its soil. Indeed, one sits just moments away from the Bundestag, the parliament building in Berlin. Yet rather than tear down public art erected by the communist German Democratic Republic (DDR), its democratic successor has actively protected over 4,000 such fixtures. Why? In the decades following the fall of the Nazi regime, Germany adopted “Erinnerungskultur” or a “Culture of Remembrance”: an unspoken, nationwide acknowledgment that it is the duty of citizens to remember and learn from their country’s past — not erase it.

Other countries have also navigated this difficult path successfully. In Tallinn, the Estonian capital, a plaque sits at the heart of the city’s Old Town celebrating Juhan Smuul, a Soviet-era writer whose works are loved in the 21st century. Only recently did Estonia discover that Smuul helped authorities in the mass deportation of Estonians to Siberia during the Stalinist terror. Many of Smuul’s countrymen were worked to death in gulags, never to see their families again.

Clearly, then, Smuul participated in evil, just as Colston happily destroyed the lives of the innocent. But rather than remove and destroy the plaque altogether, the city council installed a small QR code which, when I scanned it, linked to his sins and placed his historical role in context. It all suggests that, by balancing aesthetics with action, even the nastiest of people can be memorialized fairly. And while it may be said that monuments in the post-communist world are easier on the eye (an imposing and colorful Bulgarian mosaic commemorating Marx and Lenin is, I think, more impressive than a statue of a long-dead slaver), Britain’s architectural legacy is one that is beautiful in its own artistic right: the Royal Albert Hall, Wellington Arch, Marble Arch, Manchester Town Hall, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Belfast City Hall — the list goes on.

And so the same can be said of the “October” bas-relief in Almaty. The uninspiring and bleak road that runs parallel to it is in almost constant use by businessmen and students of the nearby university, elderly women heading to the market, and elderly men who sit idly in the adjacent square. People are forced to see and remember the violent past on a daily basis. But rather than rage and protest and call for its removal, they have chosen another path. A path of remembrance, recognition, reconciliation and, most importantly, reinterpretation. Perhaps it is time for the people of Britain to see the sense in this movement too.

In recent years, this has increasingly taken place with language as well as facts. Progressive activists on the Left, for instance, used the term “woke” with admiration for some while. At a certain point, however, the word became more associated with its pejorative use by the political Right. And almost overnight, the same people who coined its popular usage started to pretend that the term was a fantasy; these stupid Right-wingers, went the claim, were railing against a concept that didn’t even exist.

A similar “bait and switch” now appears to be underway over the existence of the culture wars themselves. In the past week, both the Times and the Guardian have run pieces claiming that the culture wars don’t really exist, and are either a figment of febrile Right-wing imaginations or a cynical tool being used by conservatives to remain in power.

One of the most striking aspects of this claim being made in the Guardian, of course, is that it comes from a paper which seems to believe that everything British is racist, laced through with bigotry, slavery and empire — up to and including botanical gardens. Now, after assailing everything from Winston Churchill to the rhododendrons, the same paper seems to believe that the culture wars are a myth.

The spur for these “bait and switch” claims are two new polls: one carried out by Ipsos Mori for the Policy Institute at King’s College London and another by YouGov. The first, in particular, couldn’t have come at a better time: only last week, news emerged of a member of King’s staff being hounded by colleagues for the crime of sharing a photograph of the Duke of Edinburgh following his death. Apparently, the tribute caused “harm” because of the Duke’s “history of racist and sexist comments”.

But back to the King’s analysis of the so-called culture wars that, as last week’s event proved, most definitely do not exist. At the heart of its research is data that purports to show how there are several “culture wars” terms that the public do not recognise. For example, just over 1% of respondents associate the culture wars with transgender issues, suggesting that the transgender debate has had less cut-through than coverage in the media might suggest.

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But there are a number of very obvious reasons for this. First, there’s the fact that the number of people who identify as transgender appears to form an extraordinarily small percentile of the general population, and most people — wisely enough — do not engage in issues unless they directly cross their path.

Likewise, there is an obvious reason why terms such as “cancel culture” and “identity politics” are less popular than some people might imagine (61% of respondents claimed they don’t understand the phases). As terms, they are very recent imports or creations, while many people find them inexact or unclear (myself included).

There is also the more obvious reason why writers, journalists and other people in the public eye might disproportionately focus on a phenomenon such as “cancel culture”: they are more likely to suffer from it than a person with a less visible public platform. As for the fact that 54% of people say they are unaware of “trigger warnings” and 46% know little or nothing about “cultural appropriation” — is that really so surprising? Not everybody in Britain can be expected to spend their days keeping up with every passing fad to emerge from the least productive portions of our universities.

What is revealing, though, is the term which has the highest cut-through: “white privilege”, which was recognised by 82% of respondents. Why might that be? Well, white people remain the largest ethnic group in the UK. Just as trans issues would be more familiar if most people in the UK were transgender, so it is inevitable that the culture war issue which commands the most awareness among the general public is the one that targets the largest demographic.

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Moreover, it is not just unsurprising but inevitable that if you tell people that there is something wrong and oppressive about them because of the colour of their skin, they are likely to take notice. At some point later, they might even object to such gross and racist generalisations.

The recently published YouGov research — which claims that Red Wall voters are no more concerned about the culture wars than conservatives elsewhere — similarly misses a crucial aspect in this debate. YouGov’s definition of “culture wars”, for example, includes not just transgender issues but censorship of online hate and abuse. Yet it isn’t at all clear that this can be counted as an arena for the “culture wars”.

It is a free speech issue, certainly, but even in the small percentage of the British public who see free speech as a major issue — see, once again, writers and journalists — there is by no means agreement over how to balance the problems of curtailing online comment and allowing a wild-west online. Using this to claim that Red Wall voters care more or less for the “culture wars” is to miss the point by incorrectly defining it.

Yet that is largely forgivable when compared with those who wish to push the culture wars in a particular direction while also pretending that they either do not exist or are being weaponised by a Conservative government. It’s a classic case of presuming that one’s enemies are both strikingly stupid and wickedly clever.

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By Ed West

Back in the real world, whether they like it or not, I suspect that what we call the culture wars will most certainly continue. In fact, for proof we need only turn to yesterday’s Guardian: in addition to publishing an opinion piece that claimed the culture wars do not exist, they also ran a “long read” with the headline: “Why every single statue should come down.”

Here was “bait and switch” in action: stoke a crisis and then, just a few pages along, pretend it doesn’t exist. It is a tactic of a kind. A dishonest one — but by no means out of character for the people who use it.

The Government knows who its enemies are: Housing Minister Robert Jenrick has attacked the “woke worthies and town hall militants” trying to remove statues, while Jacob Rees-Mogg has criticised the “woke brigade”.

But what do they mean by this very overused four-letter word? I imagine most people, when they hear the word “woke”, rather feel like King Théoden after a day of Wormtongue whispering in his ear. It’s a boring, overused, culture-war term used to denote people arguing over nothing. Even the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to know. When asked if there was “nothing wrong with being woke”, his spokesman said: “I’m not sure what you mean specifically.”

Some Tories certainly don’t see being woke as a problem. Lord Vaizey, once MP for Alfred the Great’s home of Wantage, has labelled the whole War on Woke “pathetic”, adding for good measure: “Maybe I’m not good enough or noble enough to be woke. I want to be woke.” Rather than getting excited by statues, Vaizey said, the Government should “lean in” to issues of social and racial justice, and be more like Joe Biden — “woke in the best way” — by celebrating both tradition and diversity.

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Because it isn’t clear what it means, woke has become synonymous with either “leftie”, “liberal” or just “nice”. And that is why it will win – just as happened with its ideological forerunner in the 1990s.

One of the reasons that “political correctness” eventually proved successful, or at least overcame the initial disdain and contempt it inspired, is that a less important aspect of it was more attention-grabbing than its central component. PC was, in one respect, a form of political politeness, the desire to use language that was more inclusive and forgiving. But it was also — more importantly — a way of enforcing political orthodoxy, a belief that certain ideas should and could be made unsayable, even unthinkable, with enough social pressure.

Theodore Dalrymple called PC “communism writ small”; it emerged out of radical left American academia in the 1960s, and had certain similarities with the stifling orthodoxy of Soviet Russia. But it might better have been described as a mutation of Christianity, another successful form of behavioural enforcement with a long history of intolerance towards unbelievers, especially heretics.

Woke is not “kindness”, nor is it even “political correctness” — although it is rooted in that ideology. To be woke is to believe particular things about human society and human biology, and with a zeal that is often described as religious. One of the most useful definitions was made by the brothers Bo and Ben Winegard, who identified some of the main credal points of the woke Left, including the idea that “bigotry is pervasive” in America (and the West), that “almost all disparities among demographic groups are caused by bigotry”, that “if we all work really hard, we can create a more just, multicultural society” and that “diversity is almost always a good thing.”

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Unlike political correctness, however, woke — originally an African-American term to mean “awake” to social justice — is primarily about race, although gender is a secondary issue. To be woke in particular means to believe in “equity” rather than equality, that is equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunities between groups.

The term has been around since at least the 1970s but grew in use and salience during the “Great Awokening”, the name for the seismic, radical shift in American upper-middle-class opinion from around 2013. The link between the smartphone and the Great Awokening is as clear as that between printing and the Reformation – and, thanks to social media, this period saw a dramatic shift in attitude towards racial injustice, diversity and immigration.

Social media encourages conformism, which was most visible last summer when huge numbers of people around the world displayed black squares on their Instagram pages following the death of George Floyd. Yet most people know fairly little about US homicide rates and statistics; they imitate the belief systems of their friends, colleagues and people they look up to, and will adopt beliefs if they appear socially desirable or moral.

This can include some quite implausible beliefs that would not survive rigorous scientific analysis and, if the roles were reversed, would resemble conspiracy theories. It is now taken as given that “systemic racism” prevents some minorities from achieving equity in terms of education, income or imprisonment rates, while the fact that other minorities far exceed that average is left unspoken. Indeed, some of the most vocal supporters of the idea that the United States is overwhelmed by systemic and systematic racism come from groups who outperform white Americans on any metric.

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Diversity is a central part of the Creed, and while it clearly has some benefits, especially in restricted settings — such as science — there is also a vast literature on diversity’s negative impact on trust, political stability, corruption and various other social ills. But the mainstream conservative movement has largely given up on this issue, partly because the social cost of debating such a sacred idea is too high. A few narcissistic show-offs on the Right like to be hated; most of us don’t. And when conservatives are no longer willing to fight for their beliefs, they launch wars over symbols instead.

It seems bizarre for a government to flag up the issue of statues and street names while over 1,500 of its citizens are dying each day from a virus they failed to control. But statues and street names don’t actually matter. They are a proxy for the far more important issue of diversity and demography; perhaps people worry about statues of dead Englishmen disappearing from city centres because they worry about Englishmen disappearing from those cities.

America’s iconoclastic spasm is certainly related to the country’s transformation from an overwhelmingly European country to a multicultural liberal caliphate, a bold experiment which is yet to produce its end results. African-Americans, though small in number and in relative overall decline, are a totemic group for the multicultural “Blue Tribe”, and their all-American narrative of slavery and redemption echoes the country’s Christian ideals.

What we call “woke” has become the court religion of that Blue Tribe which, despite or because it is led by wealthy whites, has become obsessed with “whiteness” as a form of original sin. But this strange, apparently masochistic tendency also, perversely, acts as a form of elite justification, distracting from more material injustices and allowing the privileged to present themselves as part of the moral vanguard, protecting society from the bigoted masses. Beliefs can be genuinely held and at the same time be manifestations of class interests; it’s happened throughout history.

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When conservatives liken current Left-wing ideas to religion, they are not doing so to undermine faith, only to point out progressivism’s power to create a strong belief-community — religio means “to bind” — glued together by rituals and creeds and without the need for empirical facts. The mostly peaceful protests we saw last summer, with white protestors washing the feet of black protesters, contained a goldmine for anthropologists studying the binding power of religious ritual — well, they would, if there were any conservative anthropology professors left.

The most obvious religious echo is with Calvinism, which holds that humanity is divided between the saved and the damned. In the 17^th century, Calvinists would agonise over this issue, and in many cases it caused acute psychological distress, just as the desire for moral purity in the social media age does today.

Calvinists also believed that some people were more morally righteous than others, and that these Godly folk should make laws for the betterment of others. Overthrowing the natural hierarchy was an extremely alarming idea to more traditionally-minded Englishmen — and it was in response to this that the political philosophy of conservatism was born. As historian Jerry Z Muller put it:

“Conservatism arose in good part out of the need to defend existing institutions from the threat posed by ‘enthusiasm,’ that is, religious inspiration which seeks to overturn the social order. The critique of religious enthusiasm, which was central to [David] Hume’s conservatism, was later extended… into a critique of political radicalism.”

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It is this “enthusiasm” that makes woke politics dangerous, because to its adherents their opponents really are bad people and, because there will always be inequality, this is a forever war. Equality of outcomes, a doctrine now so all-encompassing that it even enters the vaccine debate, might be theoretically desirable, but by definition it is also a zero-sum game. One group’s success is another’s failure, or injustice, and so it inevitably sets some minorities up against the weakest, poorest and least educated members of the majority, who have nowhere to turn except to Right-wing populists.

This is not just about things like censorship or quasi-blasphemy laws, although these are concerning; the American homicide rate increased 20% after the George Floyd protests, and an additional 3,500 are now dead as a result. These are real-world consequences.

Nothing that spectacular will happen in England, but the underlying ideas behind the Great Awokening will lead to endless bitterness and division, often ostensibly about the pettiest of issues but, deep down, about everything. And conservatives will lose because our own thought-leaders will convince the world that this is about well-meaning kindness vs the performative toughness — vice-signalling — that characterises so much Right-wing politics.

I’m not “anti-Woke” because I care about statues of slave-profiteers, or because of people using their pronouns in emails. I object to it because I think its ideas are fundamentally untrue and dangerous, just as our forefathers believed that “enthusiasm” was untrue and dangerous, as they did of Jacobinism and all the utopian ideologies of the 20^th century, too. That is what conservatives believe — and if our own prime minister cannot even agree on that, then we really are damned.

Ed West’s Tory Boy: Memoirs of the Last Conservative is published by Constable

It should be stressed that cancel culture is not the exclusive preserve of the woke Left. Performative offence-taking is something that can be engaged in by persons of just about any ideological persuasion.

However, if you see a reasoned complaint about cancel culture, then it’s probably coming from a conservative or libertarian point of view. On the other side of the ‘culture war’, liberals have rather less to say about this matter.

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Which is odd, because in many ways they have more to lose. While conservatives are already alienated from modernity, and libertarians dream of a future that hasn’t happened yet, liberals are living in the world that they built. Our cultural infrastructure may have roots in pre-modernity, but today most of it is run by liberals — and has been for decades. It’s not called liberal democracy for nothing.

As radicals exploit the crisis-filled moment to continue their march through the institutions, it is liberal values that are under attack — like free speech, fairness, equality and reason.

So why aren’t the partisans of the Enlightenment rallying against the statue topplers — and the other manifestations of cancel culture? The liberal grandees of the commentariat seem remarkably unalarmed by recent events. Some of them, like Matthew Parris, in a recent piece for The Spectator, emphasise the upside.

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At this point I should point to some honourable exceptions. For instance, impeccably liberal writers like Janice Turner of The Times who speak out against the “tiny, intolerant minority” that “is dictating public policy which the vast majority of us abhor”:

“Where will the righteous anger train stop next? When will we know that ‘progress’ is finally achieved? When every member of every public body utters the required line? When every associate of JK Rowling is shamed? When every corporation is scared into compliance?”

Turner isn’t the only one. There are others, including some who aren’t just liberal but firmly on the Left, who have taken a stand. However, they often pay a price for doing so — becoming othered and isolated from the bien pensant mainstream. The feminists smeared as ‘TERFs’, for instance. Or the defenders of academic freedom associated with Quillette magazine. Or the Remain supporters, like Caroline Flint, who resisted the undemocratic attempt to overturn the referendum result.

Though these all continue to believe the things that placed them firmly in the non-conservative camp, they’ve become defined by their dissent. That’s not because liberalism and wokeness are the same thing (they aren’t), but because liberals who expose the differences find that their fellow liberals refuse to stand with them. It’s not that such solidarity would require full agreement, just a defence of the right to disagree.

So why the passivity? It maybe that mainstream liberals perceive the woke threat to be an exaggeration — perhaps an outright invention of the populist Right. If the calling-out of bigotry does occasionally tip over into cancel culture then any excess is the work of irrelevant fringe. And, anyway, where’s the harm? Will democracy be irreparably damaged if the likes of Katie Hopkins are kicked off Twitter?

Except that cancel culture goes so much further than any of that. This issue is about what is happening within mainstream institutions — and what is being done to people with mainstream views.

Look at what happened to James Bennet, who was, until recently, a well-regarded comment editor at the New York Times. He was forced out after internal ructions a few weeks ago. The controversy was over the paper’s publication of  an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator. It happened at the height of the unrest in several American cities — and Cotton argued for “an overwhelming show of force” to restore order. It was a hawkish piece, but one that drew a distinction between a “majority who seek to protest peacefully” and “bands of miscreants.” Nevertheless, that was too much viewpoint diversity for the paper’s activist-employees — and Bennet had to go.

It’s not only editors who need to watch their step. Columnists too are in danger. In March, Suzanne Moore of The Guardian wrote in defence of Selina Todd, an Oxford professor who was de-platformed for wrongthink on trans issues. Moore soon found herself facing an intense campaign of criticism. This included a condemnatory letter whose signatories included several of her own Guardian colleagues. Buzzfeed News reported on a further letter, this one apparently signed by hundreds of Guardian staff. Unlike James Bennet, this insider pile-on did not force Moore out. Still one doesn’t have to achieve a full cancellation to make others think twice before defying the party line.

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

Not that one has to be a public figure to be targeted. Earlier this month, the Washington Post decided to run a major story (getting on for 3,000 words of it) about a fancy dress party that happened two years ago. This was deemed newsworthy because a party guest had covered her face in black make-up. According to the article, the costume was intended as a satire on people thinking that wearing blackface is OK. The guest quickly regretted her decision and apologised for it. Nevertheless she was subsequently tracked down, named and ended up losing her job. Justin Trudeau is still in his though.

Another recent example is the bizarre story of how David Shor, a political data analyst whose work has contributed to Democrat election campaigns, got cancelled. His offence? Tweeting about research by a black academic showing how, in 1968, peaceful protests increased the Democratic vote while riots reduced it. For this, he was accused by members of his professional peer group of ‘anti-blackness’ and other affronts. His employers, a progressive data analytics company, fired him — though for reasons why are disputed. You can read more about this Kafkaesque tale here and here.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, we’ve had the Booker Prize Foundation’s cancellation of its honorary vice-president Baroness Nicholson, (see Janice Turner’s article for more). And also Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, getting banned from Twitter (trans transgressions, again).

So, no, it’s not just right-wingers who get cancelled. If they do or say the wrong thing — or merely do or say it in the wrong way — progressives can also find themselves in trouble. Indeed, on the principle of pour encourager les autres, liberals make the ideal cancellees.

*

Perhaps that’s the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up — they’re afraid they’ll be next. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last”.

What can liberals do to defend liberal values while standing clear of the snapping jaws? Well, one thing they could do is to name their ‘woke breaking point’ — to state publicly how much woke is too much. Think about it in terms of statues. It’s one thing to object to a monument to a slave trader (I’d certainly hate to have one in my town), but how much further would you want either the illegal topplings or the official removals to go? Where do you say ‘thus far and no further’? Should Churchill be safe? Gandhi too? I’ll admit this is fast becoming a clichéd question, but it does demand an answer — especially from those who fancy themselves cultural arbiters.

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The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

For commentators who believe that the woke threat has been exaggerated there is surely no risk. Either they are right and their lines in the sand will never be breached — or they are wrong, in which case they’d surely want to defend their liberal values. If you use your position of influence to say that the crocodile doesn’t exist (or only eats bad people) then you shouldn’t be afraid to have some skin in the game. If the mob does come for the monuments that you said wouldn’t be toppled, or the writers that you said wouldn’t be sacked, then you should be honour-bound to take a stand.

What is dishonourable (for a self-professed liberal) is to make excuses, or stay conveniently silent, no matter how many times that liberties are encroached upon, or history erased, or language twisted out of shape, or the blatantly irrational imposed as incontestable truth.

*

Note that liberals don’t have to choose the same breaking points as their reactionary opponents. They can heartily approve of getting slave traders out of the public square or banning racist trolls from social media sites. Indeed, this isn’t only about wokeness and anti-wokeness — because not all the threats to free speech are about overtly woke issues.

For instance, in April, the CEO of YouTube announced that content contradicting the World Health Organisation advice on Covid-19 would be banned from the site. One can certainly see the wisdom in denying snake-oil salesmen a platform to peddle their wares. But equally one should see the danger of shutting down sensible debate on scientific questions that have yet to be settled. For instance, take a look at this UnHerd interview with Professor Karol Sikora. Can any true liberal be comfortable with the fact that this entirely reasonable discussion of an important issue was taken down by YouTube for “violating guidelines”? Or that the limits of allowable debate in major forums are now defined by the official line of a UN quango (which, by the way, goes against its own previously published guidance — e.g. by U-turning on the use of face coverings)?

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Why heroes should wear masks

By Peter Franklin

If a spirit of intolerance and paranoia takes hold of our most important institutions — whether in academia, the media, politics or the arts — then that, ultimately, is a threat to everyone. If you can’t find it within you to defend the rights of those you disagree with, then at least think of yourself.

Le Corbusier’s rectangular forms, the alien importation of French colonial planners, were aped by Syrian planners after independence, Atta’s thesis observed, an architectural symbol of Islamic civilisation’s total subjection to the West. Three years later, Atta’s critique of modernist architecture as a symbol of Western domination assumed its final form when, as the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, he flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, the glittering towers in the heart of the liberal empire standing as a symbol for Western modernity itself.

The Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni, a student and admirer of the late Sir Roger Scruton, likewise sees in the Middle East’s modern architecture a tragic symbol of “a region where even the application of modernism has failed,” where “we traded our close-knit neighborhoods, our modest and inward houses, our unostentatious mosques and their neighbouring churches, our collaborative and shared spaces, and our shaded courtyards and knowledge-cultivating corners, leaving us with isolated ghettos and faceless boxes.”

For al-Sabouni, the anomie of liberal modernity was built into its very architecture, bringing desolation in its wake. An opponent of Islamism, she nevertheless shares the Islamist analysis that the Middle East’s instability is not inherent, but comes from the West’s exporting the structures of liberal modernity to the somnolent peace of Islamic civilisation, setting in train chaos.

“Losing our identity in exchange for the Western idea of ‘progress’ has proved to have greater consequences than we could predict,” she claims. “This vacuum in our identity could not be filled by imported ‘middle grounds’, as was once naively thought; this vacuum was instead filled by horrors and radicalizations, by sectarianisms and corruption, by crime and devastation — in one word, by war.”

It is natural to read a culture’s attitudes to its monuments as expressions of its social health. They are the symbolic repository of any given culture, and deeply imbued with political meaning. When civilisations fall and their literature is lost to time, it is their monuments that serve as testaments to their values, to their greatest heroes and their highest aspirations. Statues, great building projects and monuments are stories we tell about ourselves, expressions in stone and bronze of the Burkean compact between generations past and those to come. As Atta’s thesis states, the architecture of the past is imbued with moral meaning: “if we think about the maintenance of urban heritage,” he wrote, “then this is a maintenance of the good values of the former generations for the benefit of today’s and future generations.”

It is only logical then, for the terminal crisis of liberal modernity to play out in culture wars over monuments, as the fate of a monument stands as a metaphor for the civilisation that erected it. It is for this reason that conquerors of a civilisation so often pull down the monuments of their predecessors and replace them with their own, a powerful act of symbolic domination.

The wave of statue-toppling spreading across the Western world from the United States is not an aesthetic act, but a political one, the disfigured monuments in bronze and stone standing for the repudiation of an entire civilisation. No longer limiting their rage to slave-owners, American mobs are pulling down and disfiguring statues of abolitionists, writers and saints in an act of revolt against the country’s European founding, now reimagined as the nation’s original sin, a moral and symbolic shift with which we Europeans will soon be forced to reckon. 

On our own continent, the symbolic, civilisational value of architectural monuments was expressed last year when the world gathered together online to watch Notre Dame in flames. The collective grief that for one evening united so many people was not just for the cathedral itself but for the civilisation that created it, a sudden jolt of loss and pain that came with the realisation the skill and self-belief it took to erect it had vanished forever.

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Like Dark Age farmers tilling their crops in the crumbling ruins of a Roman city, we realise we are already squatting inside the monuments of a lost and greater civilisation, viewing the work of our forebears with the wonder and sadness of the Anglo-Saxon poet of The Ruin: 

This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.
Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came,
death took all the brave men away;

For many observing from outside liberalism, the current iconoclasm of the West is just such a cautionary tale of civilisational collapse. “Statues are being toppled, conditions are deplorable and there are gang wars on the beautiful streets of small towns in civilized Western European countries,” Hungary’s defiantly non-liberal leader Viktor Orban remarked in an interview last week,  “I look at the countries advising us how to conduct our lives properly and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

In contrast, in a recent speech to mark the centenary of the hated Treaty of Trianon, Orban specifically cited the historical monuments of the Carpathian region as a testament to the endurance of the Hungarian people throughout history: “the indelible evidence, churches and cathedrals, cities and town squares still stand everywhere today. They proclaim that we Hungarians are a great, culture-building and state-organising nation.”

It is notable that this speech, laden with architectural metaphors, saw Orban for the first time situate Hungary in a separate Central European civilisation outside the West, adopting the language of anti-colonialism in a marker, perhaps, of his shift towards China as a geopolitical patron. Raging against the “arrogant” French and British and “hypocritical American empire”, Orban claimed that “the West raped the thousand-year-old borders and history of Central Europe… just as the borders of Africa and the Middle East were redrawn. We will never forget that they did this.” But these days are over, Orban exulted: “the world is changing. The changes are tectonic. The United States is no longer alone on the throne of the world, Eurasia is rebuilding with full throttle… A new order is being born.”

It is striking, and meaningful, that the self-conscious civilisation states rising to challenge the collapsing liberal order express their neo-traditionalist value systems in reimagined forms of their pre-modernist architecture, with stone and brick giving concrete expression of the ideal.

In Budapest, Scruton’s city “full of monuments” where “in every park some bearded gentleman stands serenely on a plinth, testifying to the worth of Hungarian poetry, to the beauty of Hungarian music, to the sacrifices made in some great Hungarian cause,” Orban is engaged in an ongoing project to erase the modernist architecture of the communist era. The concrete boxes of the rejected order are now shrouded with neoclassical facades and the long-demolished monuments of the glorious past are being re-erected stone by carved stone.  

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In Russia, Putin’s new Military Cathedral, an archaeofuturistic confection fusing Orthodox church and state in an intimidating expression of raw power, symbolises the country’s apartness from collapsing liberal modernity. The cathedral is a symbol of a civilisation that links its present with its past and future, expressed by Putin in overtly Burkean terms in his recent essay on the Second World War as the “shared historical memory” that foregrounds “the living connection and the blood ties between generations”. 

Erdogan’s Turkey similarly expresses its desire to return to its imperial heyday in the elaborate mosques, palaces and barracks in neo-Ottoman style springing up across Turkey itself and its former imperial dominions. In architecture as in political order, the stylings of modernity already seem old-fashioned and stripped of all vitality, the sunlit optimism of the Bauhaus degenerated over one bloody century to the vision of Grenfell Tower in flames.  

Like liberalism, the architecture of the postwar order conquered the world, for a time, and is now being rejected by the liberal order’s challengers in favour of the styles that immediately preceded modernity, a civilisational kitsch rejected by al-Sabouni as merely “mimicking the creations of our ancestors”.

In a recent essay, the influential software engineer and thinker Marc Andreesen urged the West to start building again, to recover civilisational confidence, but what should we build? What does our architecture reveal about our political order, in the greater West and here in Britain? What are the greatest recent building projects of our times? Perhaps the glass and steel skyscrapers, temples to our financialised economy, that dominate our capital? The Nightingale hospitals, hurriedly converted from conference centres to deal with the mass casualties of a disease of globalisation? 

Perhaps the airport is the fullest architectural expression of liberalism: the liminal symbol, both within the nation state and outside it, of global travel and optimism; a temple of bored consumption where the religions of the pre-liberal order were tucked away, all together, in the bland anonymity of the prayer room; until, that is, Mohammed Atta’s blowback to globalisation soured this post-historical dream, forcing the architecture of liberalism back to its early roots in Bentham’s surveilled and paranoid Panopticon.

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The problem, at heart, is we can take down our monuments but have nothing to replace them with. As Scruton notes, monuments “commemorate the nation, raise it above the land on which it is planted, and express an idea of public duty and public achievement in which everyone can share. Their meaning is not ‘he’ or ‘she’ but ‘we’” — but perhaps there is no We any more, with the nihilism of the American mob an expression of a far deeper malaise. 

It is surely no accident that this is a moral panic driven by millennials, an evanescent generation without property or progeny, barred from creating a future, who now reject their own past in its entirety. This is the endpoint of liberalism, trapped in the eternal present, a shallow growth with no roots from which to draw succour, and bringing forth no seeds of future life.

For Scruton’s pupil al-Sabouni, the salvation of Islamic civilisation is to be found in an architecture rooted in its past, where, she states, “we must be sincere in our own intentions toward our own identity. We must realise the desire to regain it in order to regain peace. And in order to do so, we simply have to do exactly what any dedicated farmer does to a plant: cultivate the roots and carefully prune the branches.” 

But a civilisation that uproots itself will soon wither and die. Able to destroy but not to build, the fading civilisation of liberalism is now a grand, crumbling old edifice whose imminent collapse is wilfully ignored by its occupants, because they have too much invested in it, and can’t imagine what can possibly replace it. But as its unstable masonry keeps falling onto the streets below, the risk of a more spectacular, uncontrolled collapse gathers every day.

As a small boy, I had no idea what I was looking at, though I knew it disturbed me. Why erase human faces, on precious and historic artworks? It didn’t make any sense, but now, of course, I know that I was encountering a famous moment of iconoclasm:  the mutilation of “idolatrous” Catholic monuments in the spiritual fires of the Reformation.

Today, sitting in my flat in London, I have been looking — once more perplexed and disturbed — at another iconoclasm (the word comes from the Greek: eikon, or image, and klaster, breaker): the toppling of statues around the western world, from Christopher Columbus in Virginia to Edward Colston in Bristol to King Leopold II in Antwerp. The latest vandalisation involved Italian journalist Indro Montanelli, and more is surely to follow.

As I write, this contemporary Iconoclasm of the Woke seems to be accelerating, particularly in Britain. There is a website advising the Topplers where else they might chuck statuary in rivers: maybe Sir Francis Drake in Plymouth, or Captain James Cook in Teesside. And it’s not just statues, for the New Iconoclasts are targeting street names, movies, sitcoms, art: one particular target, much lusted after by the Topplers, is the Winston Churchill mural in Croydon (a borough heavily bombed in the Blitz). At the weekend the threats of further iconoclasm, in particular against the image of Britain’s wartime leader, lead to large numbers of ‘statue defenders’ turning up in central London.

Where will this bizarre fury end, and how might it change us: as nations, cultures, peoples? To get an answer you need to examine iconoclasms through history, and in a lifetime of travel I have visited the scenes of several.

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The earliest known iconoclasm took place at the awesomely venerable site of Gobekli Tepe, in Kurdish Turkey, a grandiose sequence of megalithic circles, constructed, it is believed, by hunter-gatherers just after the end of the Ice Age (around 11,000BC). Gobekli Tepe presents many profound mysteries, but one of the deepest is this: why, in 8,000BC, did the presumed builders erase their own magnificent monument, by entombing it with tons of dust, a task which might have taken decades?

On my visit there in 2005, I sat in a tent by the stones, with the chief archaeologist of the site, the late, great Klaus Schmidt. Over sweet Turkish tea, Klaus outlined some theories.

It seems that at the time of the iconoclasm the once-fertile Kurdish landscape was undergoing climate change, the rivers were drying, the game dwindling. Perhaps the Gobekli Tepe builders felt that they had angered the Gods, who therefore needed to be propitiated with a prized offering. Like Celtic warriors throwing jewelled shields into the Thames, the men of Gobekli Tepe hurled their temple under the earth.

Relatedly, the region around Gobekli Tepe, at this time, saw the birth of agriculture: the first wild grasses being farmed, the first wild animals domesticated. This epochal change in human life, this expulsion from fruit-picking Eden, came at a price. Life became harder, even as food became more plentiful. There was more work, less freedom, and viruses leapt joyously from newly-stabled beasts to newly-sedentary man, causing the first epidemics.

The echoes of the era are distinct. Disease, upheaval and climate change, producing an efflorescence of guilt and mortification. The region of Gobeki Tepe also saw, at this time, the first human sacrifices. This may not be coincidence. Perhaps humans were cancelled, as well as images, because, again, the gods were unhappy.

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A very different iconoclasm, at the other end of history, was that of the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, which lasted four brief but terrible years, from 1975 to 1979, by which time the Khmer Rouge were killing each other, having murdered up to a quarter of the country’s population.

The scale of the Khmer Rouge iconoclasm was mind-boggling. They blew up the central bank in Phnom Penh and burned all the money in the country. They threw monks over cliffs and tore down thousands of Buddhist temples (though they spared Angkor Wat, whose spiritual power seemed to unnerve them). They also destroyed the ancient, splendid tradition of Cambodian dance, by slaughtering every single person who knew how to do it.

What provoked this national self-harm? Khmer Rouge leaders were steeped in a radical form of Maoism, acquired in Paris in the 50s. But that insane ideology needed a suitable place to breed, as mosquitoes need standing water. Cambodia in 1975 was a nation horribly traumatised by the neighbouring Vietnam War. Despite the nation’s neutrality in that conflict, the US government dropped more bombs on Cambodia than they dropped on Europe in all of the Second World War; the US bombing caused millions of refugees, and killed at least 250,000. A different kind of God was angry.

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For a third and final example, let’s go to Easter Island (alias Rapa Nui). Lost in the blue wastes of the Pacific, this is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world: it was also the scene of one of history’s strangest iconoclasms.

Many visitors to Easter Island come to see the famous moai, the huge, stylised statues, on their mighty plinths, embodying the spirits of Rapa Nui ancestors. But what most tourists don’t realise is that every standing moai was re-erected in recent decades, and many remain prone because, from 1730 to 1850, all of them were deliberately toppled.

Theories abound as to why: deforestation, religious war, the feared, potent influence of recently-arrived outsiders (Easter Island was “discovered” by Dutch explorers in 1722). Yet the haunted quality of Easter Island today, with its throbbing sense of desertion, suggests a compound answer: all these pressures together led to a total collapse of cultural self confidence. The civilisation died from within, and as it did, the failed Gods had to go. Never to return.

What do these examples tell us of the Great Topplings of 2020? First, iconoclasms are far from rare (I could analyse two dozen more). Second, iconoclasms often burn out quite quickly, because there is only so much denouncing you can do before the denouncers denounce each other, the Revolution devours its own, and the cycle is done. Thirdly, they are commonly caused by external factors, unrelated to the broken images themselves: war, invasion, disease and economic disaster, many things can provoke these frenzies.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, they often herald a major civilisational rupture, which can be negative, or positive.

If we are lucky, as we gaze down at the statues brusquely dumped by Mayor Sadiq Khan in London tips, we are, in principle, looking at the hacked off faces of the Hereford effigies. The iconoclasm of the Reformation destroyed many historic, beautiful things, but it ultimately led to truly Protestant England, and arguably parliamentary democracy, the industrial revolution and the export of liberal values around the world. That’s the positive spin on what we see today.

Yet I confess that on darker days, I am pessimistic. As I watch the fires, riots and graffiti spreading across the West, from New York to Paris, from Gothenburg to Brussels, from the Vietnam War Memorial to the Cenotaph in Whitehall, I sense that, for all the virtues of this campaign for racial equality, we are staring at a calamitous loss of civilisational confidence. That is to say: I hear the hot, mournful Pacific wind, whirring the silent and empty moorlands of Rapa Nui, where the moai used to stand.

The Gustav Eberlein statue from 1901-1903 is attractive if unsettling. I’m Jewish; my four grandparents fled Nazi Germany and many other relations didn’t make it out. So I find it hard to love Wagner’s music: an aural monument to an Aryan vision whose end point was the Final Solution. But I don’t wish either the music or the statues (there are many in Germany) banished.

The world is imperfect and the present — from our political and civic institutions to the arts — is built on history that falls well short of contemporary moral standards. Our cultural inheritance is complex; the bad mixed in with the good. The rabid Aryanism mixing with the soaring music in Wagner’s case; the racism mixed with the towering moral heroism in Churchill’s. If indulged, the urge to smash monuments to a tainted past will leave us with a bleak cultural tundra and the dreary narrowing of intellectual horizons to go with it.

Which is why, as the anti-racism movement in Britain calls with new intensity and power for the cleansing of our public sphere of any reference to people linked to slavery or imperialism, we should be shuddering. Not because we believe in celebrating slavery — of course not — but because of the implications for the rest of culture if there are moves to cleanse and destroy, rather than live with, the past.

This week, it became clear that there is institutional backing right the way through for the cleansing route. After Edward Colston was toppled and sunk in Bristol, the police stood back, deciding to let them get on with it to ‘avoid tension’. Bristol mayor Marvin Rees looked sympathetically towards the act, stopping short only ‘as an elected official’ of condoning law-breaking.

Then London mayor Sadiq Khan launched the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which is looking into having statues that ‘reflect Victorian Britain’ removed, getting new more ‘diverse’ ones erected instead, and renaming museums and other buildings named after people with connections to the slave trade.

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This signals a new era of approval for the destruction or removal of historical artefacts deemed offensive. And given that most of history is offensive by current standards, a lot of destruction is in the offing. Protesters have identified 60 statues to be removed in Britain, and a statue of the merchant Robert Milligan, an 18^th century slave-dealer, has been taken down from West India Quay in the heart of the Docklands he helped build.

The Tate galleries may be renamed, since although Henry Tate was never a slaver trader. But because he made his fortune as a sugar refiner, he is therefore deemed to have benefited. Oxford Council has invited Oriel College to submit a planning request to take down the statue of empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, the subject of a five-year campaign for removal. Thousands have been gathering this week at the college demanding that Rhodes must go.

Some, like Christ Church anthropology post-doc Chihab El Khachab, are “calling out the white supremacists protected by academic institutions” and insisting that activism against the Rhodes statue is actually a rallying cry for the “the Palestinian liberation struggle”. Helped along by craven institutional compliance, these are the people now decreeing what the British public sphere should look like.

As our monuments tumble or are defaced, the arts are also being plucked and censored.

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Netflix, the BBC and the streaming service Britbox have removed David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s Little Britain and Come Fly With Me because,in the BBC’s tortuous lingo, they “include scenes where the comedians portray characters from different ethnic backgrounds”. The long-running American programme Cops has been pulled by Paramount. And Gone With the Wind (1937) has been taken off HBO Max. It will, however, eventually be returned — with a lengthy lesson and ‘denouncement’ of its depictions of slavery. Even Fawlty Towers, one of Britain’s best-loved television institutions, has found itself a victim of the iconoclasm.

As Matthew Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy (1869), in order to be worth anything, art has to be kept separate from the moral and political jockeying of the social sphere. Only then can it exist as an arena for creativity and dissent; for what he called the free play of ideas.

Forcing art to adhere to the contemporary political line, or expecting moral purity in its creator, destroys an essential outlet for critical freedom while also stifling the right to artistic interpretation. Taking Little Britain and Gone With the Wind off screen sends the strong message that art is to be evaluated in one way only, and enjoyed on one strict condition: that it is sufficiently diverse.

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In the end, the void at the heart of the present vision is complexity. Setting out to remove everything morally impure still visible on our cultural horizon is as babyish as it is authoritarian. Just like the past itself, most people are neither wholly one thing nor the other. Dickens was a misogynist, deeply racist, a committed democrat and deeply opposed to slavery. Trollope was rabidly anti-Semitic but wrote with stunning sensitivity about questions of money, power and gender. Michael Jackson was a sex offender who abused children but produced some of the most important pop of the last century. Reducing everything to ‘good/bad’ and ‘agree/disagree’ in the name of present social justice standards destroys not only art and culture but makes a mockery of the contradictions and complexities of life itself.

And where does it end? Those behind long-running calls to ‘decolonise’ school and university curricula seem to want the excision of the canon and the classics as too much the work of dead white men. But once we’ve cut out the Bible, the works of the ancient Greeks, the philosophers of the Medieval and Enlightenment periods, and Victorian thinkers and novelists — all of whom either harboured racist thoughts themselves or associated with racists — the picture looks somewhat thin.

Rather than tear it down and ban it, the lesson should be to learn to live intelligently with the past. I am glad I can see Wagner in plain sight in the Tiergarten, and have the chance to pair his statue’s history with what I know about him. I accept that Volkswagen remains a prosperous car manufacturer despite being one of the first companies to take full advantage of forced labour during the Second World War, profiting greedily off the work of Jewish concentration camp inmates. I am glad I grew up reading Trollope and Dickens, able to enjoy their wondrous, wise prose while also wincing at their sneering at Jews. I am the richer for it all. If, in contrast, we set ourselves the task of banning all history and culture that does not toe the present political line, the road to darkest depths becomes clear.