Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Historians are not too worried at the threat posed by 'rewriting history'. This is because rewriting history is our occupation, our professional endeavour. We are constantly engaged in a process of re-evaluating the past and reinterpreting stories that we thought we knew. Despite what Leopold von Ranke - one of the pioneers of modern historical research - said, history is not only about finding out 'how it actually happened', but also about how we think about the past and our relationship to it. The past may be dead but history is alive, and it is constructed in the present.

"The other important thing to hold on to in this debate is that statues do not do a particularly effective job of documenting the past or educating people about it. Much has been written recently about British 'imperial nostalgia', and the idea that as a nation we yearn for the empire that, for many of us, ended before we were born. But this country's relationship to its imperial history is built more on erasure and forgetting than on remembering - it is a series of silences from the past. The number of monuments to men who enslaved other humans or who killed hundreds of unarmed civilians or who performed other horrific crimes in the service of empire, or the woman who presided over them, stands in contrast to the number of critically engaged conversations we have about empire's crimes. Every time a statue comes down, we learn a little more."

-- Charlotte Lydia Riley, 2020-06-10