Tearing down statues is pointless; we should learn from history – Bill Carmichael

At more than 800 pages it is a substantial undertaking, but well worth the effort if you want to understand how the past shapes the present and how events a long time ago can continue to resonate in today’s political and philosophical thought.

One of the towering figures of the Reformation was, of course, Martin Luther, a gifted German monk, who, by defying the religious authority of the Pope and the temporal authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, sparked a revolution that changed the world forever.

There is no doubt that Luther was both brilliant and brave – after his excommunication anyone could kill him without legal consequence – but he also had a decidedly ugly side. For example, he was a confirmed anti-Semite, and in his later years wrote bitter diatribes against the Jews, a fact that discomfits many Lutheran Christians to this day.

This presents admirers of Luther, like me, with some difficulty. Of course you could argue this all happened 500 years ago, when virulent hostility to Jewish people was common in Europe, even amongst educated scholars, and this is true.

But we can’t escape the fact that Luther held vile views that would be unacceptable today, and the historical record can’t, and shouldn’t, be sanitised. We take the bad and the good, and make a judgment.

That is not how today’s new Puritans of the woke cultural revolution see it. Like the righteous mobs of the 16th Century Peasants’ War, they use violence, intolerance and fanaticism in their hunt for heresy and are prepared to tear down monuments in order to expiate the modern sins of racism, sexism and connections with the slave trade.

The problem with this is once you take a step onto cancel culture’s slippery slope there is no knowing where you’ll end up. One minute you are arguing that a statue of Winston Churchill, the man who defeated fascism and liberated Europe, should be torn down because of his inaction during the Bengal famine, and the next Fawlty Towers is banned because Basil was rude about the Germans.

You will find these sins wherever you look for them, because the views of our ancestors were shaped by the societies in which they lived. For example Mahatma Gandhi, the great anti-colonialist who led India to independence, made derogatory comments about black Africans, and that great hero of the left, Karl Marx, wrote an anti-Semitic tract, even though he was born a Jew.

Yorkshire has not been immune from this madness. There have been mutterings about that proud son of Hull, William Wilberforce, who inspired Britain to become the first nation in human history to actually abolish slavery, because of his views on Catholic emancipation and women’s suffrage.

In Huddersfield, it was suggested that a statue of former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson should be torn down because he didn’t stop the Nigerian civil war. Where will it all end? If you demolish everything connected with slavery in our great west coast ports – Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol – there would be hardly anything left standing.

Even that bastion of liberal thought, The Guardian newspaper, is facing calls for it to be shut down because it was founded using profits from a cotton plantation that used slave labour.

Let’s not forget ancient Greece, Egypt and the Roman Empire were founded on slavery – so are we going to demolish the Acropolis, the Pyramids and the Colosseum? And the less said about the Prophet Mohammed’s involvement in the slave trade probably the better.

If you view the actions of historical figures through the prism of today’s fashionable causes, more’s the chance you will learn nothing.

You have to make an effort to understand the societies in which they lived and the impulses that drove them to make the decisions they did. That way researching our past can become a rewarding and enriching experience.

Tearing down, cancelling, censoring and banning will get us absolutely nowhere. We should seek to learn from our history, not destroy it.

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

Almost certainly you are here because you value the quality and the integrity of the journalism produced by The Yorkshire Post’s journalists - almost all of which live alongside you in Yorkshire, spending the wages they earn with Yorkshire businesses - who last year took this title to the industry watchdog’s Most Trusted Newspaper in Britain accolade.

And that is why I must make an urgent request of you: as advertising revenue declines, your support becomes evermore crucial to the maintenance of the journalistic standards expected of The Yorkshire Post. If you can, safely, please buy a paper or take up a subscription. We want to continue to make you proud of Yorkshire’s National Newspaper but we are going to need your help.

Postal subscription copies can be ordered by calling 0330 4030066 or by emailing [email protected]. Vouchers, to be exchanged at retail sales outlets - our newsagents need you, too - can be subscribed to by contacting subscriptions on 0330 1235950 or by visiting www.localsubsplus.co.uk where you should select The Yorkshire Post from the list of titles available.

If you want to help right now, download our tablet app from the App / Play Stores. Every contribution you make helps to provide this county with the best regional journalism in the country.

Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson

Editor