Colónic Irritation

Some historical cleansers in Barcelona have displayed similar ambitions to the recent Rhodes Must Fall campaign here on the mainland. A sixty-metre monument to a Genoese thief, slaver and crank, and to his Muslim-bashing patrons, has been targeted for destruction by a group of councillors, who propose to replace it with a monument to "American resistance to imperialism, oppression and indigenous and African-American segregation", although it is unclear how much of this virtuous resistance originated in Barcelona. They also find distasteful the celebration of 12 October, since it marks the beginning of the American genocide; and a nineteenth-century slaver named Antonio López y López, who eventually bought himself the title "Marquis of Comillas" and whose statue adorns the post office.

Since the glorification of such creatures is itself a part of history, and one whose lessons have hardly been learned today, the replacement of their statues by monuments to more worthy causes seems a dubious enterprise. A more honest and educative approach would be to add new inscriptions giving some indication of the revised historical estimates, so that future generations may see what heroes their forefathers chose, and perhaps partly deduce from that how the world they'll be stuck with came about.