Iconoclasts and Iconodules

Burning buildings, vitriolic screaming and broken statues. One might be forgiven for thinking that such scenes are more reminiscent of the Protestant revolution (Reformation), French Revolution, Bolshevik Revolution or Spanish Civil war than what we like to think of as the enlightened 21st century. Yet iconoclasm has always been with humanity and perhaps always will be.

In recent weeks iconoclasm was once more reared its ugly head. Not in the Middle East -where we have sadly become accustomed to roaming bands of terrorists destroying the artistic legacy of millennia old civilisations- but in the West, especially in the United States of America, the self declared champion of the free world. 

Just as we look upon the ISIS destruction of the long lost Assyrian city of Nimrud with regret, so too should we morn the destruction that we see before us today. The Assyrians lived over 2,500 years ago and share little to no common values with us today. They murdered, raped and pillaged their way from Mesopotamia to the Eastern Mediterranean with litte to no mercy, yet no matter how evil their actions were, their story is no less part of the history of mankind.

The Iconic Spanish Republican staged propaganda “Execution of the Sacred Heart” at the Cerro de los Angeles near Madrid, August 7th 1936.

First we must ask ourselves, what is a statue? Every culture has their own iconography, a collection or language of symbols that communicate meaning and values. These public manifestations of a civilisation create a narrative. Statues say as much about those who erect them as those whom they depict. This iconological meaning, requires us to understand the historical processes in which artworks were created.

One might well say that any monument glorifying evil, such as slavery and sedition, ought well to be removed and preferably done peacefully. The undertone being that the injustices committed by previous generations can be rectified by the erasing of their legacy and starting over. 

This is a common misconception about events occurring in the States. The current iconoclastic rage is not about the civil war, slavery, or police tactics. If it were, then the monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Saint Junipero Serra and Christopher Columbus would not have also been attacked and torn down. 

Remains of graffitied pedestals from monuments to Ulysses Grant and Saint Junipero Serra Photo: Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group

One could attribute this mixup to a series of misunderstandings, in short historical illiteracy. While historical illiteracy is a symptom, it is not the cause. The new iconoclasm is deliberate and calculated. It is about deconstructing a narrative, the narrative of America as a good country, a place of freedom and opportunity. 

Any pretext will do, the goal always remains the same, all that changes are the means. Facilitated by comically passive government officials and muzzled police forces, “peaceful protesters” with the emotional maturity of children, have looted, burned and set about destroying American history. In a classic pincer manoeuvre, their allies in media and academia have gone about rewriting a new revisionist history to replace the old. 

Such efforts are not new. Maximilien Robespierre, Genrikh Yagoda and Andreu Nin Pérez tried the same and are rightly remembered for their respective “Reign of Terror”. There is no pleasing the mob. Just as Robespierre, Yagoda and Pérez were eventually consumed by the revolutions that they each started, so too will these new revolutionaries be engulfed by the flames that they themselves ignited. 

Such scenes are already unfolding in the CHOP/CHAZ rebellion in Seattle Washington. One can contrast the creative energy which builds civilisations and the destructive energy that leads to their fall. In a series of paintings in the 1830s called “The Course of Empire”, Thomas Cole presents us with a visualisation of this rise, golden age, decline and ruin of civilisations.

Thomas Cole’s painting Destruction as part of the 1830s series called “The Course of Empire”.

It certainly is hard not to see modern day America as Ancient Rome, or even the Weimar Republic. Increasing polarisation, loss of identity and a compressed energy of bitterness -exacerbated by months of lockdown- has exploded into pure anarchy. Besides the usual looting of phone and shoe stores, this wave of societal dissatisfaction has been compounded by Iconoclast rage. 

Human beings need a sense of belonging, a purpose that gives their life meaning. Yet since the 1960s, we in the West have gone about dismantling all of our traditional sources of meaning, God, family and country. These efforts culminate with the replacing of divine revelation with the altar of political correctness. Both systems need sacrifices, Christians offer bread and wine, transforming them into the body and blood of Christ. The altar of political correctness instead offers up peace, history, culture, beauty and truth, transforming them into nihilistic hedonism and one directional tolerance. 

People think that by giving in to the demands of the mob that they can placate and appease them, or even win them over to reason. In reality meeting the demands of the mob will only ever lead to more than ever increasingly unreasonable demands.  Reform can only satisfy reformers, revolutionaries are not happy with anything short of revolution.

Sir Roger Scuton rightly pointed out that it is much easier to destroy things than create them. Culture and Civilisation doesn’t just materialise out of thin air. It is rather a product of endless successive generations of struggle and transmitted moral knowledge.

Sir Roger Scruton from November 2018 interview with the Hoover Institution (Source: Roger Scruton Official YouTube Channel)

He predicted that if the West failed to communicate this legacy to the next generation then “the ideals and attachments that have come down to us will disappear, and our civilization will stand unprotected against the rising flood of the world's resentment”. Months after his death, these words carry a prophetic meaning. His was in many ways a voice in the wilderness, warning of the coming storm.

Western civilisation itself is the target of the new Iconoclastic rage, and in the American context who better represents Western civilisation than Christopher Columbus, the man who brought Christendom to the New World.

Yet the lines between iconoclasts and iconodules can often be rather blurred. July 2020 not only saw marxist radicals tear down statues in America, but erect statues in Europe. What statues you might ask? The statue of none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.

Monument to Lenin unveiled at Gelsenkirchen, Germany, June 2020.

While East Germany is busy removing the countless concrete monuments to their recent communist oppression, West German Communists in the city of Gelsenkirchen decided to erect their own monument to the man that was paid by the German Empire to sow political instability in their WW1 enemy, Tsarist Russia.

Removed monument to Lenin on the former Leninplatz in former East Berlin (modern day Platz der Vereinten Nationen”). Photo: Lhademmor

Just as West Germany underwent a denazification program after the second world war to reduce the visibility of National Socialists propaganda, the reintegrated East Germany likewise sought to remove communist propaganda. These monuments were not an organic display of a nations past, but an active attempt in their lifetime, to artificially create a new world order, daily reminders of how the new modern socialist man ought to behave and think.

The East knows too well the hardships that communism brings. Thats why you’ll be hard pressed to find college students there espousing the principles of Karl Marx. However, in Western Europe and the Americas, it’s certainly less taboo (and in German less illegal) to be an international socialist (communist) than a national socialist (Nazi).

So what are those who actually lived under the repressive communist system doing during all this Iconoclasm?

In Czechia, -thanks to generations of state atheism, one of the most non-religious societies in the world-, the people of Prague not only took the side of Taiwan in opposition to the economic behemoth of China, but even re-erected a marian column that was torn down during the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The culmination of Jan Bradna and Petr Vana’s hard work. The Marian column returns to Prague’s Old Town Square after an absence of over 100 years.

The column was originally erected in the wake of the 30 years’ war (1618-1648). It was dedicated to the city’s gratitude for the protection of the Virgin Mary, after successfully repelling an enemy siege in the last year of the war.

All this was possible in a country where only 1 in 5 today identity as belonging to a religious community.

Most of the Western world and especially the Anglo-sphere has no comparable experience of communist hardship and thus take such things as culture, freedom and beauty for granted. This complacency is easily exploited by those who have no time for such things.

One of the best examples of this is the city of Vienna, whose imperial majesty has no rival. Karl Lueger, mayor from 1897 to 1910, oversaw the building of the city that we recognise today. The street opposite the University of Vienna that bore his name was changed in 2012 and now the city centre monument in his honour is under attack. 

While the man who built Vienna is vilified for his retrospectively intolerable “populism”, those who turned Vienna to ashes, i.e. the Red Army, are glorified. Sir Antony Beevor recounts how Soviet soldiers were actively encouraged to rape and kill innocent civilians, how even within the Red Army, war correspondents complained that they were fighting for “an army of rapists”.

Monument to the Soviet Red Army on Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna. Photo: TxllxT

Even Nobel Prize winners like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who witnessed and wrote about civilians being raped to death on mass, were silenced (in the case of Solzhenitsyn being sent to the Gulag).

Just as the NKVD suppressed accounts of atrocities in the 1940s, Russia and Ukraine suppress Sir Beevors’ academic work today. How is all this relevant you might ask? Well, Vienna has a dramatically large and intimidating Red Army monument on Schwarzenbergplatz in the city centre.

No doubt due to the double standards of one directional politically correct tolerance and historical illiteracy it will stay there for some time into the future. While women in 1945 rather killed themselves on park benches in Vienna than be raped to death by bolsheviks, the SPÖ political establishment in Vienna would rather debate renaming Heldenplatz (Heros’ square). The logic being that remembering the generals who defeated the Turks in the 17th century and Napoleon at the turn of the 19th century, somehow glorifies fascism.

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, demolished on Stalins orders in 1931

In western democracies we ought to allow people to make decisions via their elected representatives and not via mob justice. The modern day equivalent of the sacking of Rome at the barbarians doesn't help anyone. It does nothing but promote ignorance, a useful tool for those wolves who wish to govern a society of sheep.

Whenever tyrants claim that they alone speak for “the people”, alarm bells should ring. It’s what Luther, Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler did and led to some of the greatest atrocities of human history. Mob justice is no justice at all.

Yet a decision reached by popular opinion by no means guarantees wisdom or moral integrity. The flawed thinking of elected representatives can often be representative of the flawed thinking within a society.

However, the mob is never the majority but rather a vocal ignoble minority. Their ignobility sparks the consciousness the common man and drives him to act to protect that which he cherishes. In the case of matters of culture and identity, the common man will always appreciate a sense of homeland and belonging. Deep in his consciousness he knows that an attack on his history is an attack on him personally.

What’s new about this iconoclasm is that it is supported by a well funded propaganda system in the form of the modern media establishment. Gutenberg could only dream of the power that Brian Stelter of CNN has at his disposal. What have the modern 24 hour news cycle done with this power? They have merely stoked the flames. They give a stage to the most fringe anti-social elements of society, and are taken aback when they take the time to speak to the common man. The people of Poole in Dorset, southern England represent the feelings of the common man when they say that they will fight for their heritage.

History will never conform to media’s modern ever-changing ideas of what is and what is not politically correct. We ought to study and learn from history and not dismiss it, or even worse erase it. For generations to come, this will be the enduring lesson of the summer of 2020.

We as a society need heroic and transcendent art and architecture. When done correctly and with good intent, conforming to natural law, they can give us an example of virtuous behaviour to imitate and provide us a narrative of meaning, in which we too can participate. A society with no history, no heroes and no culture is no society worth living in. 

Niall Buckley,

June 2020