Spontaneously or deliberately, human beings have always eliminated traces and representations of various historical times. Through the symbolic example of destruction, the intention was to permanently overcome that memory. From temples erected on the ruins of subjugated religions to the use of military power to re-educate or decimate “uncivilised” societies, all “civilisations” bear responsibility for the absence of empathy and the cult of hatred for the other, for what is different. For material, religious or ideological motivations or pure undifferentiated usurpation, human beings have guided their presence on Earth (not exclusively, granted) through heinous acts, based on a supposed superiority, feeding a conflictual process that they have always thought to be fair and legitimised in its metaphysical or rational inspiration.

But if the thunderous toppling of the Place-Vendome Column by the “Paris Commune”, on May 16, 1871, or the mediatic explosion of giant Buddhas in Bamiyan in March 2001 by the Islamic fundamentalist group Taliban represent revolutionary political actions, the current rewriting of history through the toppling of statues is an iconoclastic gesture, radical by definition, of a more complex nature. Its arguments are based on reflections, studies and academic agendas that support, under the globally fair and necessary principle of the “decolonisation of knowledge”, the growth of violent action on symbols of “oppression” exposed to “evidence”. Now, the danger that legitimises everything lies in this powerful and “invisible” concept. As Peter Sloterdijk reminds us, “evidence” is to rationalism what the “revealed word” or “apparition” is to religions: “Where the sect was, the school must now arise […] nourished by the conviction that it is the god’s preferred apparition site, the enhanced temple, the enlightened oracle, […] the god learns silence and barely appears except in the form of an intimate presence that blinds without speaking. His name is evidence.” [1]

In the face of an ancestral and omnipresent affiliation, nowadays the effect of pulling statues to the ground has several consequences, besides the most claimed revisionist reading on the dignification of minorities, oppressed by the “evident” ideological meaning of these figurative stones and bronzes. In this dialectical process about the “evidence” – fed between “politically correct progressives” and “conservatives” -, we identify the unequivocal value of the discussion, namely, that the narratives of history cannot be under a kind of untouchable taboo, as in their symbolic materialization. But we must also recognise that, in the activist eagerness for uprising and aggression (sometimes definitive, given the loss of the sculptural object), we forget a crucial fact in the fate of the loathed pieces. After all, in view of their relevant iconographic meaning, the statues also have a formal and artistic qualification; they represent a specific historical period, that of their materialisation as a work of art. Their technical and creative expression partly determined their display in the public arena, beyond the motif of personal and memorialist evocation. Hence, all statues represent a specific cultural heritage, in many cases worthy of special protection. They should survive (in museum rooms or respective depots) regardless of their removal from the urban space and regardless of their burden of identity (i)legitimacy, whether past or present.

The iconoclasm based on historical revisionism does not always have the same value and implications when acting on the past, which is intended to be innocently transformed or forgotten. For instance, after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, we can point out a substantial difference between the revolutionary gesture of covering a Salazar statue, renaming the Tagus bridge, or decapitating the public sculpture “Portuguese women grateful to Salazar” by Leopoldo de Almeida, and the hypothetical urge of some to tear down the Jerónimos Monastery. Only because whoever ordered the latter’s construction, King Manuel I, expelled Jews from Portugal and profited largely from the slave trade. In the first case, the actions to alter an inherited political symbolism represented the immediate will and impulse to erase a memory to make room for the present, rather than the future (and only in this way will they be comprehensible). In the second, the supposedly reflective act of suggesting, 500 years later, the destruction of the Jerónimos Monastery, for being a building associated with racism and religious persecution, would be an unjustifiable mistake. These values are now reprehensible, but they were dominant not only in that period, but during many eras of human history, afflicting many generations and ethnic groups, a little all over the planet. The harmful oppression of human beings is not something exclusive to the historical past. Even today there are countless examples of concealed slavery, harming the most defenceless or underprivileged by the great capitalist machine. If the principle of altering the material and symbolic values of the past is based on decontextualising its original era and imposing today’s values over its moral message, we will be on the way to the generalised annihilation of the entire heritage that has defined us until today, for better or for worse. As a consequence or parody of this radical, allegedly cathartic and redemptive revisionism on the memory of slavery, we could say that the Coliseum of Rome (the monumental pride of the Roman Empire, built by thousands of slaves, and where many also lost their lives in the arena), and all the Aristotle statues (who defended the necessity of slavery) should also be destroyed, more than two millennia later. And we could continue to look for anti-progressive immorality in a past that does not comply with today’s precepts. On the other hand, we cannot forget that the preservation of that distant desire for public representation (architectural, artistic or memorialist tribute), even if pervious to current criticism, meant the possibility of accessing and constructing multiple readings and transformations of its meaning over dozens of generations. Without their presence over such a long period of time, we would not have ended up here, in this exercise of reflection and debate.

That is why the more or less violent rejection of the recent past is an epidermic reaction, sometimes almost inevitable. An impetuous revision of the distant past, according to contemporary values which, when carried out on the basis of group violence, comes too close to demagogy and Manichaeism that suppresses the maturity required for a reflective analysis of the past, attentive to the complexity of time past and sedimentation.

Basically, this conflict, visible in our contemporaneity and, increasingly, in the discourse and conceptual tools of museum programmes (spaces where memory is daily reinterpreted, if only for the intellectual autonomy of its visitors), translates an immanence between identity expression (of past and present values) and the exercise of freedom (when defending the different, conflicting identities and in the will to affirm the creativity of interpretations). Freedom is the basic principle of human action, as an expression of free will. But if the freedom to destroy is within the reach of every human being, its eliminating and definitive result represents the impossibility of others being able to use that freedom to restore that which has been lost forever. It is like the basic rationale that invalidates the death penalty. We know that, in the face of a legal or factual error encountered in hindsight, there can be no reversal of the end of life. To defend and destroy monuments, artefacts and works of art means preventing future generations from being able to make different interpretations from those that established that fateful decision. After all, the destroyed works disappear forever, even if they may partially survive through documentation or sufficient narrative force that makes their memory or even myth viable, as in the example of that giant statue from Antiquity, the Colossus of Rhodes. Even in these cases, we know that we will never again witness and feel its concrete material existence.

Today we know that various peoples (such as the Amazonian Tupi-Guarani) or religions (such as Hinduism and Zen-Buddhism) have other conceptions of freedom, inspired by spiritual values of greater or total communion with nature and the cosmos. But we must remember that, in an instinctive, reflexive, vindicative, legal or normalised way, the concept of freedom (rational, of expression and affirmation of human autonomy and dignity) was at the basis of modern European thought that led the West to the unprecedented development of science and culture, in an experimental and cumulative perspective. This paved the way for the separation, appropriation and domination of human beings over nature, sustained by emancipatory technology in material ways, at the same time fuelling the environmental imbalance that today conditions our future. Despite its ambivalent results, the exercise of liberty rooted in the Enlightenment is still valid today in the increasingly globalised (i.e. westernised) world, which has gradually adopted this decisive principle for reflection and plural use. Only free thought allows a critical view of reality or the defence of its opposition, creating conditions to integrate multiple expressions (majority or minority). Defending the value of freedom is defending humanity itself. And, in the present and future, this is a construction that should be actively and consciously exerted by all. However, freedom is not a dictatorship or an empowerment strategy. It is conquered and defended by its arguments and results, in dialogue or opposition to other ideas of individual expression and collective use.

In this context, art and culture may have a decisive role. They are the manifestation (aesthetic and ethical) of an inviolable power: the freedom to create, in its idiosyncratic expression, an absolute difference. Faced with this reality, which generates the pluralism essential to the development and improvement of everyone’s life, intolerant moral radicalism wants to assert itself as a symptom of surveillance (like the woke culture movement) [2] on life and its distinct, complex and paradoxical meanings.

In a 1913 essay on the Victorian era, Lytton Strachey laid out the fate of intolerance on individual freedom.[3] For the writer and intellectual of the “Bloomsbury Group”, religious persecutions made Metaphysics the first target of intolerance; then it was Ethics, by condemning “deviant” or “transgressive” behaviour, such as homosexuality and other “subversive conduct”, “prevaricating”, deemed “anti-social”. Finally, entrenched views reached artistic objects, i.e., Aesthetics, with much criticism of the immorality, ambiguity or inadequacy of its message. The early diagnosis about the historical path and consequences of intolerance seems to be confirming itself. And, in the 21st century, we see the enforcement of the “cancel culture” and the supposedly “virtuous” replacement of paintings, poems or books of essays and fiction dubbed “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic” or “segregating”, “oppressive” and “offensive”. The result is the dictatorship of denouncement, whose actions “promise” redemption on the basis of “censorship of the good”. All this heralds a future where individual freedom will be only a distant memory. Another outcome of this suspicious interplay is that we have some museums removing artefacts, documents and works of art which, decontextualised from the values of their original time, are accused of perpetuating discrimination against minorities. However, it is their observable presence that could ensure a lesson about meanings, when communicated in an accessible and detailed way, in a culturally responsible perspective. Not to value this mission – which is not neutral, but rather perspectivist – of the sites of memory is to contribute to the persecutory action of a militant engagement logic, ever closer to the “single thought” and the “witch-burning”. The “flower power” generation, symbol of the non-violent ideology, reminds us that the pacifist struggle for freedom of ways, driven in the 60s and 70s of the previous century in the name of a communion of individual and libertarian experiences, is now being betrayed by standardising “progressivism”. The aim is to impose the rule of “politically correct” obedience on each person’s free subjectivity. Perhaps this is the other side of “conservatism”, when on behalf of social “progress” the valorisation of non-aligned thought is forbidden.

On the one hand, the legitimacy and the right of minorities to fight for the same opportunities for access to power, integration and representativeness that are protected by the majorities are increasingly recognised. On the other, there seems to be a will to push through the unilateral urgency and intolerant superiority of the models or processes of such equivalence, whose momentum seems triumphant in its judicative effect, defined by a “politically correct” elite that has authority over the “court”. This is the overturning of the exercise of freedom, which represents individual conscience, which is prohibited in the face of the radicalism of a sort of “inquisition”. Which also has its “index”, in the name of a hypothetical moral correction to acknowledge diversity (defined exclusively by the new order) and the purification of the collective conscience against a wider plurality. I.e., against the freedom to think differently from that original interpretation, employing a reductive and even populist vision of the idea of equality, which will supposedly bring with it the overcoming of the trauma and suffering imposed by the dominating majorities on the dominated minorities. The action believes that this urgency warrants some kind of comfort from the underlying sense of revenge. On the contrary, history has shown that, in the face of violent action, there is almost always an even more violent reaction. Without the necessary understanding, tolerance and acceptance of the past and its mistakes, we can hardly build the future. If we must “question” the past, review its interpretation and meanings, we can never “alter” its original features, the idiosyncrasy that we can criticise today. If we alter this order of signification, we will lose the sense of its reality. This is why the past is the past and not a retroactive present (through the gesture of violence) at every symptom of discomfort or suffering caused by memory. The historical past can always be reinterpreted, but it should not be washed of “alterations” (in its real and concrete traces) in the name of interpretative revisionism. Otherwise, the reading will no longer be about the past, but about the present that intends to transform it unsuccessfully. For example, renaming titles of artistic works, monuments or documents, according to the standards of our time, means “altering” the proper and testimonial expression of the values that led the past to use those designations. And “altering” is not rereading but preventing all future re-readings.

The obsessively iconoclastic strategy of “politically correct” revisionism (as well as its opposite reaction, under a simplistic nostalgia for an unchallenged past) is contrary to the nature of political action, because this is always based on the vital conflict (authorised or clandestine) of an alternative vision, tending to be plural and never monolithic, of opposition to dogma, conventions or the norm. The plurality of thought and action – and not their homogenisation – is what builds the fabric of political diversity and its social and cultural expression. Therefore, throwing statues to the ground, rather than promoting the disappearance of a currently uncomfortable figure (and, ultimately, all figures will always be uncomfortable for someone, somewhere), means throwing us all, with that gesture, into an increasingly arid, empty ground that is devoid of a past. This makes a significant part of our future unviable; which, like the past and the present, will be made up not only of noble and distinguished gestures, but also of mistakes, downfalls and shame. All those actions, positive or negative, should always keep their trace, their memory, so that they can communicate to the people to come, in the variable polyphony of future interpretations, their own difference. To lose this opportunity means to promote a new and more arbitrary Damnatio memoriae.[4]

[Original version in AAVV, RM – Revista de Museus, issue no. 3, General Directorate of Cultural Heritage / Ministry of Culture, 2022, pp. 142-154].

[1] Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Ensaio sobre a intoxicação voluntária, Lisbon, Fenda, 1999.

[2] “Woke”, as a political term of African American origin, refers to a perception and awareness of social and racial justice issues. The term derives from the vernacular African American English expression “stay woke”, whose grammar refers to an ongoing awareness of such issues. In the late 2010s, woke was adopted as more generic jargon, associated with identity politics, socially liberal causes, feminism, LGBT activism and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). […] Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cf. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

[3] Cf. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1913).

[4] “Damnatio memoriae is a Latin locution that means “damnation of the memory”. In Roman law, it referred to the penalty of erasing any trace of memory of a person, as if that person had never existed.” Cf. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoria