ICONOCLASM SPASM
Some Thoughts on the Destruction of Statues of Confederate War Heroes
My consistent reaction over time to the destruction of statues of Confederate generals has been to regard them as the spasms of the mob and the result of cultish ideology or the product of a generation of misguided education.
But of course they have a broader meaning and represent a more sinister impulse. The French Revolution stands as an example of iconoclasm as a tool rather than a mere expression of ideological tyranny.
Statues are icons and for millennia icons have stood the place of written language. They are a physical, visible symbol of what is to be respected, venerated or even worshiped. Often after an episode of iconoclastic destruction, new icons are erected to represent the new values to be respected, venerated or even worshiped.
So it is in the French Revolution that we see the destruction of churches along with the physical bodies of churchmen, we see the decapitation of the statues of Kings along the façade of Notre Dame. This was part of the almost rapid anticlericalism of the French revolution. But keep in mind, the destruction of religious icons in the course of the French Revolution was not limited to the initial upheaval but extended for years. Not surprisingly but ironically, after Robespierre had led the way in a bloody spasm of murder and iconoclasm, he erected a new icon toward a supreme being and summoned the people to a festival. Shortly thereafter he was guillotined.
Robespierre had erected a new icon, however transitory it’s historical life, to represent a new supreme being who was to be celebrated if not respected venerated or even worshiped. Napoleon came along and was not in doubt about what should be the object of iconic worship, statues of Napoleon together with paintings exaggerating his Imperial Magnificence became abundant. The more the cult of Napoleon grew, the more intrusive his secret police.
The point is that the iconoclasm unleashed by the storming of the Bastille, a solid fortress torn down in fit of iconoclasm, was a tool of the revolution. No less than the propaganda chief Goebbels, the Jacobins knew that the icons of their ideology must supplant those of the ancient regime.
Czar Nicholas of Russia and his family learned to their sorrow, just as Louis XVI and Marie at Annette learned to their sorrow, that living human bodies are also seen as icons which must be destroyed if the ideology they represent is to be successfully supplanted. Small wonder that statues of dead Confederate generals must also be executed.
Often the iconoclasm has the aura of religious indignation. That is the sort of iconoclasm we have seen as the Taliban smote graven images into bits and out of history. We saw much the same in the Protestant Reformation among the nonconformist sects. These examples are illustrative of an impulse to destroy the icon because it is the absence of the icon, or any icon, that conforms to the new ideology.
The French Revolution justified its iconoclasm by declaring it stood for liberty, equality, fraternity -all enlightened impulses. But regicide or the murder of priests and nuns can hardly be described as enlightened. The Taliban justify their iconoclasm because it obeys the diktat of Allah, but they offer the same justification when they Lopp off the heads of women and children.
