Have We Entered the Realm of Thoughtcrime?

Baden-Powell Statue

The death in the USA of African American George Floyd at the hands of white police officer Derek Chauvin has seen a number of responses under the banner of “Black Lives Matter”.  Not least of these has been a renewed call to remove the statues of those involved in slavery, and/or the oppression of people of colour, and even other minorities.

Protests have spread worldwide, and one such event in Bristol, England, saw the statue of Edward Colston, an 18^th century slave owner, being torn from its plinth by protestors, dragged through the streets, and dumped in Bristol harbour.  The place where Colston’s statue was dispatched to the harbour was Pero’s Bridge; named after an 18^th century slave, Pero Jones, who was a well-known character in Bristol in his time.  Whether the protestors were aware of the significance of the bridge, or whether it was a complete coincidence remains unknown.

Since then protests in other parts of the UK have taken place, as have statues being sprayed with graffiti.  In one protest in London, a statue of Winston Churchill was so attacked.  However, bizarrely was the Cenotaph, which is the central war memorial for the entire UK.  One man also set light to a Union Flag atop the Cenotaph.  It is true that Winston Churchill was an odious character; a racist, misogynist, anti-Semite, and class elitist, who was responsible for a great number of deaths of unarmed and innocent people.  But the attack upon the statue of the man many see as the victor of the Second World War, allied with the attack upon the Cenotaph, and setting the Union Flag alight, certainly set a great many people against the BLM movement and protests.

Some cities, including London, have responded by stating that they will either remove statues, or where they cannot be removed, plaques explaining the unsavoury past of the characters they represent, which is to be applauded.  At the same time, the authorities claim to have a “hit list” or targeted statues, and one among those was the statue of Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, on Brownsea Island, Poole, where the first Boy Scout camp took place.

The reasons for Baden-Powell’s statue apparently being targeted were things he wrote during his lifetime.  He was blatantly homophobic in his lifetime, admired Adolf Hitler, once advised people to read Mein Kampf, and allegedly was seeking to ally the English Boy Scout movement with the Hitlerjugend in Germany.

Of course, the Scouts never were allied with the Hitler Youth, and had Baden-Powell, who died in 1941, known the enormity of the brainwashing and brutality of that organisation, or indeed the enormity of the horrors of the Nazi regime, which few knew until 1945, then he may well have thought very differently.  As to his homophobia, well it is a well-known phenomena that those who speak out loudest against gays are usually closet cases themselves, and that is almost certainly the case with Robert Baden-Powell, whom many online biographies say was a closeted gay man.

I am not a big fan of Scouting myself, but then, I am not a parent, and I am well aware that many children get a great deal from it, none less than my two dear little great-nephews.  Likewise a friend of mine not only has a son who is very active in the Scouts, but she is very active with the organisation herself.  And I think this is an important point here.  The Scouts of today are no longer the regimented, Empire loyalist organisation they were when I was a boy, and kicked out of the cubs for refusing to swear allegiance to God and Queen, but rather they are a modern, all-inclusive club, which helps to hone children’s social skills, encourages them to achieve, and where all are welcome, including LGBT+ children.

Therefore, to attack a statue of Robert Baden-Powell to me seems a bit silly.  The man himself was never personally responsible for the death or oppression of anyone, but merely wrote some highly questionable opinions.  And this makes me wonder if some protestors are going too far, and have we entered the realm of Thoughtcrime?

There are many people in history who wrote and said many questionable things, but that does not for one moment detract from the great many other things they said, wrote, or did.  During one protest in Edinburgh, a cardboard placard was put around the neck of a statue of David Hume, alleging he was a racist.  Hume, the foremost empiricist and sceptical philosophers of all time, probably did hold views which would be considered racist by modern standards, but given he lived mostly in his native Edinburgh from 1711 to 1776, his experience of anyone of any colour different to his own would have been extremely limited.  Even today, with a population of only 5 million, Scotland simply does not have a large number of ethnic minorities, and in Hume’s day, seeing a black face on the streets of Edinburgh would have been something of a sensation.  Can we then condemn Hume for holding views that could be construed as racist by holding a 21^st century candle up to them?  And do these views somehow suddenly invalidate all the great things one of the fathers of modern philosophy did say and write?

When we try to apply our modern mores to characters of the past, we open up a whole can of worms.  And those on the political left may find that some of their heroes are likewise hardly blameless.

Edinburgh was also the birthplace of Marie Stopes, pioneer of family planning, after whom there are now clinics across the UK, and around the world, which offer family planning information and resources, including abortion.  Therefore, many would see Marie Stopes as a champion of women’s rights, and of a woman’s right to autonomy over her own body, which she indeed was.  Yet Stopes was also a strong believer in and campaigner for Eugenics, and in her 1920 book Radiant Motherhood, she wrote, "inborn incapacity which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs. These populate most rapidly and tend proportionately to increase and these are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality"  Marie Stopes’ answer to this was "when Bills are passed to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased, and to provide for the education of the child-bearing woman so that she spaces her children healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream of the depraved, hopeless and wretched lives which are at present increasing in proportion in our midst"  So in other words, Marie Stopes believed in the enforced sterilisation, “by X-ray”, of women she deemed to be “degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced”. and referred to as a “prolific depravity”.

But let’s up the ante here.  Marie Stopes read Mein Kampf, and as a result started a correspondence with Adolf Hitler, sharing views on Eugenics and the “master race”, and even sent him poems.  This admittedly was however before the Nazis actually outlawed family planning, closed down clinics first in Germany and later across Europe, and even executed doctors who offered family planning, contraceptives, or abortions.

Do we then take down the blue plaque on Edinburgh’s High Street that marks the birthplace of Marie Stopes?  Do we rename all of the Marie Stopes International clinics?  Or do we recognise that she had some very mistaken ideas, but ultimately her 1918 work Married Love was a seminal moment, which recognised that women did indeed enjoy sex, that they could enjoy sex without the worry of falling pregnant, and that Marie Stopes International has helped and continues to help educating and empowering countless women about bodily autonomy?

Eugenics was a product of its time, and grew out of mistaken ideas from the findings of Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species.  People such as Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, and the economist Herbert Spencer, first man to coin the phrase, “Survival of the fittest”, misunderstood natural selection to mean that only the strongest survive; a belief that became known as Social Darwinism.  Galton particularly became the father of Eugenics, and it had many followers across the political spectrum.  Another firm adherent of Eugenics was George Bernard Shaw, who in 1910 at a lecture for the Eugenics Education Society stated, "A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them."  Likewise, Bertrand Russell in ICARUS, or the Future of Science, wrote "But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. The result will be to increase the average intelligence; in the long run, it may be greatly increased."  H.G. Wells, in the American Journal of Sociology (Vol 10, 1904), wrote, "It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."

Do we then take down the statues of George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and H.G. Wells?   Do we discount all the great things they did write?  Should we indeed topple the Martian Tripod sculpture in Woking, which represents one of the alien spacecraft from War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells?

These things are never easy, and it may surprise many on the left to discover that many of their heroes are just as guilty of questionable comments as those considered to be heroes of the political right.  Even Karl Marx is not immune.  A rabid anti-Semite who in his 1844 pamphlet On the Jewish Question, wrote, "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist."  Marx also thought little of Mexicans, whom he considered lazy and feckless; “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

In 1977 the band The Stranglers released one of their most successful songs, No More Heroes.  Songwriter Hugh Cornwell later said of the meaning in the song, “Don’t have heroes.  Be your own hero.”  The message of this is that whatever heroes we have will ultimately let you down.  This is a truth as much as it is for the left as it is for the right.  In recent years Mohandas Gandhi has been exposed as an abusive husband.  John Lennon likewise horribly mistreated firstly Cynthia Powell, and later Yoko Ono.  Both of these may mar forever the memory of these men, but it does not for one moment discredit their nonviolent philosophy.  And just how happy would the left be with someone pulling down a statue of John Lennon or Mohandas Gandhi?

Removing statues and plaques, and renaming streets is by no means a new idea.  Back to Edinburgh, there was once a statue of the 16^th century leader of the Protestant Reformation, John Knox, outside the New College of Divinity.  If you’ve seen the movie Chariots of Fire, you will have seen actor Ian Charleston, playing Eric Liddel, saluting it as he runs past on his way to his studies.  Today it is no longer there, but can still be seen inside St Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile.  The statue was removed due to the venomous anti-Catholic views and actions, and which still fuel the sectarianism that is the scourge and shame of Scotland to this day.  Yet ironically, Knox himself was once exiled from Scotland, which at one time saw him serve on a ship as a galley slave.

I am all for removing statues, plaques, and street names of those whose actions have directly led to the suffering and death of innocents, and I am not for one moment convinced that retaining them would make us forget history.  The absence of statues of Hitler in Germany does not mean we have forgotten the Nazis of World War II.  But where a statue cannot be removed, then there should be plaques put up to tell the whole truth about the individual involved.  But this must be the truth, thoroughly researched, and absolutely accurate.

But it needs more than this.  There needs to be a more holistic approach, whereby children in schools are taught the whole truth.   For the UK, this means teaching children the absolute truth about British imperialism, including its deficits, as well as its benefits.  Too long children have been taught that Britain built an empire upon which the sun never set, where the white man went out and educated and civilised the “ignorant savages”.  Likewise, it is way past time that schools in the USA started telling the truth about their slave-owning Founding Fathers, or indeed, the genocide and continuing mistreatment of Native American peoples, which no president, not even mixed-race Barack Obama, has ever properly addressed.

But the moment we start discounting the artistic works of people who have not personally hurt others, we go down a dangerous road indeed.  We need to recognise that some people were a product of their times, and shared the uninformed ideas of those times, which we cannot condemn in the 21^st century, and even where some views have been objectionable, that does not detract from their other works.

And as Hugh Cornwell said, perhaps we need to stop having heroes - and start being our own heroes.