Will We Have Any Heroes Left?

Rohan Rajesh

One of the major battles in today’s culture wars is how we should honor our national heroes. In the United States, as we inch closer to the semiquincentennial anniversary of independence, debates have raged over how we should view once-hallowed figures such as Washington, Jefferson, and even Lincoln, with San Francisco’s Board of Education initially voting to rename a slew of schools over (sometimes poorly researched) historical controversies (they reversed their decision following intense public backlash). In France, Napoleon became the subject of significant controversy on his bicentenary. Last year in London, a statue of Winston Churchill was vandalized during Black Lives Matter protests. These figures are often linked to slavery, racism, etc., but many are asking if, upon critical examination of these figures, there will be any heroes left to celebrate. How should we honor our national heroes in the age of social-media-fueled cancel culture?

Fundamentally, both the hero-worship and self-righteous contempt of these figures are two sides of the same coin - both involve poor readings of history. It is no understatement to say that history is complicated, and there’s a reason for that: history is written about people, by people, and for people, and people are complicated. When Jefferson wrote those immortal words in our Declaration of Independence about man's self-evident, unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that have inspired revolutions and movements for freedom around the globe, he, a Virginian plantation owner, held human beings in bondage who were in that situation because of the color of their skin. Jefferson himself was aware of this hypocrisy and tried to blame American slavery on the British in the first draft of the Declaration (this was not included in the final version). Although Jefferson pushed for ending the importation of slaves and the expansion of slavery to the western territories, he and the other Founders made little effort to end this “savage practice . . . so often proved contrary to the light of nature [and] to every principle of justice and humanity” as his fellow revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote. However, despite this, I still cannot bring myself to reject Jefferson entirely or at all. His words and influential ideas of government and liberty are too powerful to ignore, and it became an article of faith for African Americans who repeatedly held us to those lofty standards and whose advocacy would lead to my parents being able to immigrate to this great country.

At the same time, I fear that this reexamination of historical figures is only being directed towards white historical figures. From a historiographic perspective, this is highly problematic because it denies agency to non-whites. The narrative of whites perpetually oppressing non-whites ignores the history of African chiefs selling Africans of conquered tribes to Europeans and of Indian kings siding with the British against anti-imperial rebels and activists to engage in oftentimes worse exploitation and oppression. Again, history is complicated and rarely do groups fit into neat lines of good and evil. Further, how could we fairly judge historical figures based on our modern-day values? Believe it or not, things change, often rapidly. Just nine years ago, the President of the United States publicly opposed gay marriage, a position considered hopelessly outdated by most Americans today. Despite what we may tell ourselves, many of those canceling our heroes today would have probably made the same decisions and held the same opinions in the same situations. 

Worse still, this uneven reading of history only serves as a wedge issue that inflames racial tensions while doing little to fix actual issues. When the San Francisco Board of Education decided to place a school named after Abraham Lincoln on the chopping block, what issue did they hope to fix? All they did was repulse people from progressive causes over an unnecessary culture war issue. The best way to examine these leaders is to acknowledge their wrongs but not deny the good things they did in creating and defending a fragile, promising, imperfect, and self-improving republic in a morass of despotism.

But hey, you may ask, how would you be able to understand how African Americans may feel about Jefferson or how Native Americans may feel about Lincoln? Fine, I’ll give an example closer to me - Winston Churchill, a defender of freedom in Europe and a staunch supporter of denying those freedoms to the Empire's brown subjects. Churchill is most controversial to Indians for his role in the 1943 Bengal Famine, in which he prevented food supplies from being given to the famine-stricken province of Bengal to provide reserve stocks to Europeans (he considered “sturdy Greeks” to be more useful than underfed Bengalis). In justifying his decision (which was opposed by members of his own cabinet, the British government of India, and President Roosevelt, who offered to provide food aid that was rejected by Churchill), he blamed the Indians for “breeding like rabbits.” Ultimately, three million Bengalis were killed, which is six times the Empire’s casualties in the war and a slap in the face to the millions of British Indian soldiers who fought for the British Empire to liberate Europe and Asia from fascism. 

However, I cannot totally dismiss Churchill because he played a pivotal role in rallying the British against surrendering to the Nazis even after Britain’s most powerful ally on the continent had fallen to Wehrmacht. His refusal to surrender led to the Battle of Britain, which devastated the Luftwaffe and gave the Allies much-needed air superiority on D-Day, leading to the liberation of Europe from fascism and the end of the Holocaust. British imperialism was terrible on many measures, but I won’t pretend that there’s an equivalence with the Holocaust, which, unlike the Bengal Famine, was a systematic, deliberate attempt to wipe out "non-Aryans." If the Nazis and the Japanese had won the war, given the atrocities that took place in Axis-occupied territories, I don't expect there would have been many people of color, including Indians, left. Thus, I won’t demand that Britons not celebrate him but simply acknowledge his sins and the devastation wrought by British imperialism while they celebrate his achievements because that’s what good historians do. After all, Gandhi was a racist (at least in his youth) when it came to Africans, so it’s not like Churchill, Jefferson, Washington, or Lincoln were unique in this regard. That said, all of these men helped humanity make great strides in achieving liberty, something few of us will ever hope to achieve after college. While that may not absolve them of their worst sins, at the very least, we should be able to celebrate those strides and the role they played in them.