^PICTURE OF A HITLER BUST, TORN DOWN AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR. PROFESSOR MUNGIU-PIPPIDI MIGHT LABEL IT, “BARBARISM.”
Dear Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and the Hertie School,
I have never taken the automatic view that an action, or argument is either racist or centred on a racist worldview. Not because I have found most people I encounter to hold no racist thoughts whatsoever, but rather because of the emotional labour it takes to make such an argument.
In this case however, I view your recent argument and response to critique, where you sided with the statues over protestors to be both problematic due to its lack of coherence and content, and racist. I tend not to use terms such as “white privilege,” or “white supremacy” as they feel like guarded ways of saying the ‘R’ word. So forgive me for being straight to the point.
CONTEXT
I am not of the belief that all arguments should tackle the backdrop within which they exist. I sincerely believe some arguments should be allowed to exist on their own merit, tested against each situation as it arises. This is the point of theory.
What struck me about your piece is that it failed to tackle the moment, the history, the context or worse yet the grievances of those protesting. If in December 1991, I had made the argument that Communism had in fact been a good system of governance without engaging with the obvious horrors that the world was now being made aware of in regards to the collapsing Soviet Union, I would have rightfully been deemed vacuous.
Instead, your piece dismissed those pulling down statues as a “barbaric” mob on the verge of instigating revolution and an “annihilation of the past.” And yet, from a withdrawn perspective, the speed at which these barbarians in my home country of Britain settled on the pulling down of statues signals if anything, how weak they are. They chose symbolism before rights, cynical, and suspecting that the system they lived in would hardly grant them either.
Furthermore, you go on to write,
“It is nice to unleash national and social liberations, but the more radical they are, the faster they engender new forms of subjugation.”
(The Black Lives Matters campaign is not just “nice,” it is right. And your pithy characterisation of this moment is disconcerting.)
What new forms of subjugation might the removal of a statue engender, when the minority destroy representations of their oppression in a society that alleges it no longer holds to those values? An example would have been helpful. Instead you trade analogies with societies at war with each other or where the battle of what was culturally deemed right and wrong had not yet been won. And yet, the belief that slavery is and was a great evil is an almost universal view in the West. The threat of reformation, or revolution, is moot.
Furthermore, who did the denazification of Germany and Central Europe subjugate? A question that holds pertinence considering the country. Would the regimes you denounce as barbaric that tore down statues have been less barbaric had they left the statues up?
The European Reformation, which criticized Catholicism for promoting superstition and corruption, massacred religious statues: you can still see these today from England to Germany, and the scars left by this progressivism blended with an equally profound barbarism.
“As a social psychologist, it is impossible however not to notice how little our behaviour has evolved from other anti-establishment movements, some hundreds of years old.”
It seems to me, that your argument rests on the contrast between revolutions in religion, society and politics where the only similarity that exists, is that statues were torn down. A comparison of the uprooting of Catholicism, the Spanish Civil War or the fall of Communism as viable examples to a revolution where the proponents are … let me check my notes … signing people up to vote for Joe Biden, the very epitome of “the establishment,” seems a tad hyperbolic, wouldn’t you say?
Notwithstanding the fact that the statues being torn down have been done with the intention of preserving them in museums, or with the request to further delve in to the people and what they represent in classes focused on black history within schools.
If anything, this revolution you speak of seems incredibly civilised.
In Britain, requests to remove the statue and memorials of Edward Colston have been ongoing for at least decade. The Society of Merchant Venturers even refused to have addendums that would have left the statue in place but described Colston as what he was, a mass murdering slave trader.
Or, see the 2017 petition to remove the slave auction block in Fredericksburg, Virginia. What barbarians.
You clearly didn’t research the movement of which you infer [but refuse to directly take on] in your piece. Because if you had, you would have found that if anything, the barbarians of today have exhibited too much faith in the establishment.
Also, the term barbarian denounces those who are campaigning as they are as uncivilised. There is a long history of POC, especially black people being referred to as barbarians. This worries me for two reasons. Firstly, that you believe that the limits of civilisation are the statues it erects, and if this is the case, why not have positive representations of the civilisation we’d like to be?
Secondly, you proudly mention that you’re a social psychologist. I can’t help but think you’d be aware of this context, history and if so the likely response. Either you didn’t care, which would make you a poor “psychologist.” Or maybe you noted it and thought the argument valid enough to make the comparison between a subjugated peoples, and that of movements that murdered the clergy for their beliefs, led to the rise of fascism or the mass murder of the aristocracy and their allies.
To make this latter argument credible, as I have made clear, one might have to prove the connection between these moments beyond one simple aspect — they tore down statues.
YOUR RESPONSE
“I lived through a revolution in 1989, when people (like me) had little time to think (or sleep even), and real people were lynched alongside statues — as revolutionists”
You gave yourself and your response to your detractors the dignity of context. Clearly, you realise its importance. If only you had engaged with the context of the situation, I may have been able to disagree with you but at the same time respect that you valued the viewpoints and experiences of others.
I am not even going to respond to the crap on “real people were lynched” on a topic that is contextualised around black people calling for us to stop celebrating the existence of those that lynched us. I would hope everyone sees it for the crass absurdity that it is.
HERTIE SCHOOL
Hertie School is an elite institution. In so far as its academics can’t make basic arguments that are cogent, with relevant examples that adequately deal with the context they find themselves in, it should not employ them. If academia is going to be an ivory tower, it may as well be one that places an emphasis on quality.
In so far as its academics make incoherent arguments comparing, what are the beliefs of some of its own students, to people that led movements which murdered innocents and gave rise to fascism in Spain, I am worried that Hertie is an institution that has a bias that favours its association with racists over interrogating what it means to live in a better society.
Especially when being on the “side of statues” means being not too far from the very utterances of Donald Trump on this same issue.
Furthermore, considering the history of Hertie being a German university named after a Jewish man who sought to escape Nazi oppression, imagine this article coming in the context of a resurgence of Jewish feeling that further or a renewed denazification was needed. Hertie wouldn’t publish it. Nor would it associate with the sort of academic who would.
This would not diminish that academic’s right to freedom of speech. Today’s world has an abundance universities, academic journals, online platforms for people to have themselves heard. Hertie in rejecting this argument and academic, would be simply stating it does not wish to be associated with this academic and their beliefs.
