WITH the death of George Floyd lighting a new fire under the Black Lives Matter movement, ropes and chains have become the weapons of choice as activists tear statues of colonial heroes from their pedestals.
The lynched statuary is falling in the name of "cancel culture", a concept that began as the digital mass shaming of corporates or public figures, who were blocked or "cancelled" for doing or saying something that offended their audiences.
We see it on these shores with the campaign to have monuments to such historic figures as Captain James Cook removed from public display for their roles in promoting colonial European settlement at the expense of indigenous cultures on every continent bar Antarctica.
The cruelty - if not outright genocide - that white races imposed on their conquered is an increasingly accepted view in these times.
What's less certain, though, is whether destroying the idols of an earlier era is in the interests of those out to obliterate them.
Whether the statue smashers know it or not, the bringing down of "offensive" monuments is as old as history itself.
The people with the hammers even have an old name.
They are iconoclasts, and their practice is iconoclasm.
Iconoclast: mid 1600s, via medieval Latin from ecclesiastical Greek eikonoklasts, from eikn likeness + klan to break.
Oxford dictionary
The setting was originally religious.
Ancient Egypt, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all had major bouts of iconoclastic behaviour, as the icons of one era are judged as immoral or heretical by the next.
Regardless of the motivation, smashing symbols might bring a burst of satisfaction to the newly empowered, but it can't change history.
What's more, removing the visible signs of past wrongs can work against progress.
For example, It is easy to understand why those whose lives have been ruined by clerical paedophilia want high-profile offenders stripped of the titles and awards they accrued before their double lives were exposed.
But just taking back a bauble, and expunging an offender's duality from the public record, can also help diminish the memory of their crimes.
Before long, it may be as if the person never existed.
From this perspective, an intended good deed can contribute to a whitewashing (no pun intended) of history.
In a similar light, there's a strong argument to say we will gain more from leaving society's statues where they are - with new plaques of interpretation, by all means - than engage in a practice that is ultimately a form of cultural amnesia.
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