Conveniently Re-Assignment History to the Waste Basket

"It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk for attack by violent protesters."
"Yes, he [Sir Winston Churchill] sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial."
"We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history."
"Whatever progress this country has made in fighting racism — and it has been huge — we all recognize that there is much more work to do. But it is clear that the protests have been sadly hijacked by extremists intent on violence."
“Would it not be better and more honest to ask our children to understand the context, to explain the mixture of good and bad in the career of Churchill and everyone else?"
"I will resist with every breath in my body any attempt to remove that statue from Parliament Square.” 
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Police officers stand in front of the Winston Churchill statue during a rally in Parliament Square in London on Tuesday. Ahead of expected protests on the weekend, the statue has been boarded up. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press)

"It's clear that we're in the middle of a public health crisis. So it's not safe for them [protesters], it's not safe for the people around them [for everyone to be gathering in crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic]."
"Secondly, we do have information that people are intent on coming to cause violence and confrontation."
London Police Chief Cressida Dick

The statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is seen defaced in Parliament Square, central London after a demonstration outside the US Embassy on June 7, 2020. Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP via Getty Images.

In Britain, those styling themselves anti-racism protesters, taking the opportunity of the Black Lives Matter protests set off by the Minneapolis police killing of African-American George Floyd in the United States, have made demands of government and its agencies at every level, universities and other groups who sought to memorialize events and personages in history as part of the nation's heritage, that it is their intention to see that all vestiges of Britain's imperial past reflected in monuments and statuary, the naming of institutions and public thoroughfares be extinguished.

Damage and the assaults of graffiti declaring Sir Winston Churchill -- the WWII saviour of Great Britain, who stood virtually alone with his British Empire support against the axis powers supporting Nazi Germany until the entry of the United States of America following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour -- forced the British government to close off Parliament Square and to board up the parliament-facing statue of Sir Winston Churchill, Britain's war years prime minister whose pledge to the country to 'never give up' in the struggle against the Thousand-year Reich was fulfilled in Germany's defeat.

In the United States, where the protests first emerged in late May, statues erected to memorialize Christopher Columbus were destroyed by ravaging mobs of violent thugs; the statues disfigured in Boston and Richmond, Virginia last week. Black Lives Matter groups protesting the death of George Floyd have outdone themselves in their destructive fury, aiming their vandalism at Confederate memorials n the south of the nation; Richmond and Birmingham, Alabama, Charleston, South Carolina and Raleigh, North Carolina. 

In Virginia, a statue of Christopher Columbus erected in Byrd Park, Richmond, was pulled down, and thrown face down into Fountain Lake; a just end, the mob felt, for a man who violently abused the indigenous people he found occupying the New World, when he 'discovered' it in 1492. A bronze statue that was dedicated in 1927 in recognition of a great explorer. Back in London, its mayor, Sadiq Khan, supported the protests' claims that controversial monuments that cause offence be removed. 

Churchill statue, Whitehall boarded up  Photograph: Blitz Pictures/REX/Shutterstock

The list drawn up by Black Lives Matter supporters includes statues of leading historical figures included among them, Sir Francis Drake, Nancy Astor, Christopher Columbus and William Gladstone "for celebrating slavery and racism", according to the campaigners. A figure of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was thrown into Bristol harbour before councils and museums were able to tuck it out of view.

Over a thousand demonstrators in Oxford fixed a demand for the removal of colonialist Cecil Rhodes' statue. Mayor Khan remarked that he "hoped" a new commission for diversity in the public realm would recommend removal of memorials that "don't accurately reflect our values", in a mayoral bid to place history in the dungeon of a revisionist garbage heap. If you can't see it, it cannot have occurred. London had "an uncomfortable truth" with historical links to slavery, according to Mayor Khan.

  Baden-Powell statue in Poole. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

"Our nation and city owes a large part of its health to its role in the slave trade and while this is reflected in our public realm, the contribution of many of our communities to life in our capital has been willfully ignored -- this cannot continue."  Not all are in agreement with the mayor's assessment. An assembly member, Susan Hall, stated that "Instead of virtue-signalling and starting a divisive debate, Sadiq Khan should focus on his job"

A list of 60 statues, plaques and monuments was put together identifying which among Britain's rich history of movers and shakers were to be destroyed, according to anti-racism activists who declared the "need to be removed so that Britain can finally face the truth about its past". Charles II, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Nelson, Prime Minister Gladstone, Sir Francis Drake, and Charles Grey, the former prime minister who oversaw the abolition of slavery in 1833, all listed given their "responsibility for colonial violence".  

The Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall being boarded up on Friday. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images