Horatio Nelson, of course, holds a revered place in British history, having saved this island from Napoleon. This is who we commemorate.
It's such a gross simplification to dilute a person to one issue, as people in the US have done with General Lee. Nelson wasn't a priest or a politician. He was an admiral, and a brilliant one too. You can have Lee be owned by the KKK, but I can take ownership of a figure of reconciliation between the North and the South following the civil war. I get to choose as well.
Let people be people, which means imperfect. Honour the good but also never forget who we are. The fallen.
Lest we forget, the way back to Eden is barred by angels. There isn't a perfect person among us.
The reason for this is fairly simple. In life. we rarely encounter a tricky situation in which a single moral injunction is in play. General Lee was tugged by state patriotism, nation building, and the notion of human beings as property. He prioritised the first of these, just as Lincoln prioritised the second. Hard choices in their day, but Lincoln was luckier than Lee because his politics and morality were in alignment, whereas Lee's were at odds.
Also, ideas of morality change. What we think of as sacred is different from what our forebears did.
I couldn't think of a better way to teach history than the General Lee saga. It isn't a morality play written by saints. And sometimes it can be a healing thing to honour those who lost.
In a way, the problem is with the way we view statues. Just because a person stands on a plinth doesn't make them pure. Or bar their reputation from revision. Yes, Nelson and Lee did some praiseworthy things in their lives. And yes, they did other things which we find terrible by our own measure. That's how the world turns. No statue can change this truth. Pulling it down cannot change it either.
"The reaction in Britain has been, as in the rest of the world, almost entirely condemnatory of neo-Nazis in the US and of its president for failing to denounce them. But when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward. The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised: despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious slaver Edward Colston. When I tweeted this weekend that it’s time we in Britain look again at our own landscape, the reaction was hostile.
“I don’t want that nonsense spreading here from America. Past is past, we have moved on,” one person said. Another accused me of being a “#ClosetRacist” for even raising the question. But the most common sentiment was summed up in this tweet: “Its History – we cant & shouldn’t re-write it – we learn from it. Removing statues would make us no different to terrorists at Palmyra.” Therein lies the point. Britain has committed unquantifiable acts of cultural terrorism – tearing down statues and palaces, and erasing the historical memory of other great civilisations during an imperial era whose supposed greatness we are now, so ironically, very precious about preserving intact."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/22/toppling-statues-nelsons-column-should-be-next-slavery
This article kinda explains why multi-cultural societies require a wide road, and not a narrow, pejorative, puritan one.
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