In the recent days, protesters are destroying statues of historical figures such as Christopher Columbus, Winston Churchill, Edward Colston, accused of committing crimes related to racism and slavery.
Many of us have condemned the iconoclastic fury of Islamic terrorists for years, yet we are behaving exactly like them: we break down historical monuments because we despise the values they represent. Anyone who has ever read half a history book should immediately notice the mistake: one cannot judge morally who lived in another era using our values of the 21st century as a yardstick. It's dangerous.
Following the fallacious logic of these vandals, in fact, we should scar all the busts of the ancient Romans, because their economy was based on slavery. We should tear the statues of the Assyrians to pieces, because they tortured foreign prisoners to be feared. We should burn the images of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, because he wrote such texts: "Among men there are individuals who are inferior to others as much as the body is compared to the soul or the beast compared to man; they are people from whom the best thing to derive is the use of bodily forces. Such individuals are destined by nature itself to slavery because there is nothing better for them than obeying ".
Are all these men monsters to condemn? No, they are simply people who lived in other historical periods, who reasoned completely differently from ours. Taking it out on their statues is absurd. Also because it will take a moment to go from a statue to other monuments, books and everything that we no longer like from our past.
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