THREE MONUMENTS - Steyn

[Snowden]

THREE MONUMENTS Request of the Week Mark,
I couldn't be at your speech in Phoenix but I heard you on the radio. I was hoping you'd be asked about our 9/11 memorial. As you weren't, could you re-post your column on it and some other recent memorials from last year?

Tonya Gray
Phoenix, Arizona

In memoriam
from National Review, November 20th 2006

On the tomb of the great architect Sir Christopher Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral is a famous inscription: si monumentum requiris, circumspice; if you seek my monument, look around.” Conversely, if you’re seeking the tomb of western civilization, look around at the monuments. Not the old ones to generals and potentates, but the new ones.

A year ago, London’s Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone unveiled a new statue on the famous “empty plinth” in Trafalgar Square. Sharing the heart of the capital with King George IV, General Sir Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock these days is Alison Lapper, an armless woman heavily pregnant. At the unveiling, Miss Lapper said the new statue would force Britons to “confront their prejudices” about disability. As my old editor, Charles Moore, pointed out, Trafalgar Square already has a monument to persons who’ve overcome disability: the one-eyed one-armed Admiral Lord Nelson standing on his column and no doubt bemused by the modish posturing below. Red Ken became weirdly obsessed, as is his wont, by the dead white males clogging up the square and was anxious to even up the score. He professed never to have heard of General Napier or General Havelock, which is a sad comment – not that he should be so ignorant, but that he should be so boastful of his ignorance. (National Review readers who wish to bring themselves up to speed on Sir Charles Napier will find him on page 193 of my new book.) So the point of the fourth plinth was to send a message that warmongering white males no longer had the Square to themselves: the statue of Miss Lapper is a monument not to disability so much as to the psychological self-crippling to which so many Britons are prone.

Another monument: the Arizona 9/11 Memorial. It is a remarkable sight. Five years after the slaughter of thousands of Americans, one had long ago given up all hope that the nation might rouse itself to erect, as James Lileks put it at National Review Online, “a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles”. But, even so, the Arizona memorial is an almost parodic exercise in civilizational self-loathing, festooned in slogans that read like a brainstorming session for a Daily Kos publicity campaign: “You don’t win battles of terrorism with more battles.” “Foreign-born Americans afraid.” “Erroneous US airstrike kills 46 Uruzgan civilians.” And this is the official state memorial. Governor Napolitano called it “great” and “honorable”. It isn’t. It’s small and contemptible. Assuming it survives, future generations will stand before it and marvel – either that the United States is still around or that such an obviously deranged country even needed an enemy to lose to.

A third monument, a third country: France. This one was unveiled at the end of October in Clichy-sous-Bois. If that name rings a bell, it’s the bell on the fire truck racing through the streets to douse the flaming Citroens and Renaults in last year’s riots. They began when two of France’s legions of – what’s the word? – “youths” were fleeing the cops and decided to hide out in an electrical sub-station. Bad choice. They were electrocuted. Their fellow “youths” blamed the police and launched a three-week orgy of destruction. Now Clichy-sous-Bois has put up a monument to the unfortunate Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore. As in Arizona and London, this is an official memorial. That’s to say, the Mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois unveiled the monument to Messieurs Benna and Traore in the front of their school and then led a “silent march” to the sub-station where he laid a wreath commemorating their death – or, indeed, manslaughter, if some of the complaints against the pursuing gendarmes come off.

Now let’s take it as read that the deceased were as they’re portrayed – lovable rogues who were alienated only by the lack of employment opportunities, etc. Granted all that, is it still necessary to put up a formal monument to them? Weren’t the thousands of columns saying these riots were nothing to do with Islam and were all about the need for more public spending monument enough? Wasn’t Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s “raft of measures” – the creation of an anti-discrimination agency, 20,000 job contracts with local government agencies, an extra 100 million euros for community associations – monument enough? Weren’t the French government’s desperate entreaties to A-list imams to serve as interlocutors with the “youths” monument enough?

No, no, no. They had to go and build an actual monument.

America, Britain and France are not peripheral members of the developed world but its heart. They’re the west’s three permanent representatives on the Security Council, the three nuclear powers. But if these monuments truly represent the spirit of each nation as those monuments to Nelson and Napier did in their day then you would have to be an unusually optimistic sort to bet on the long-term prospects of all three countries. The poseur diversity of Trafalgar Square slips easily into the self-loathing of Arizona, and from there it’s but a short step to the open appeasement in Clichy-sous-Bois. If you seek our monument, look around: We cannot state who we are, what we believe, why we fight.

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/553/30/