The High Price of Toppling Statues

The desecration of property has been an unfortunate by-product of the more extreme fringes of the George Floyd protesting movement. In Britain the vandalism and defilement reached new heights when historical monuments were the subject of protester wrath.

In Bristol on Sunday June 7, Black Lives Matter protesters toppled a bronze statue of seventeenth-century British philanthropist, politician and slave trader Edward Colston, provoking cheers from the enthralled witnesses. History has, correctly, not been kind to Colston and many viewed the act as deserved vengeance that was a long time coming. Bristol’s own mayor acknowledged that he had never liked its prominent placement, which he called “an affront”.

But when Sir Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was defaced, the behaviour of the protesters was deemed by many to be a little less justifiable and a little more impetuous. Graffiti was scrawled on Churchill’s monument during the same march in which a lone…