In Albania, tearing down statues of the Communist regime made it
harder to remember, and notice the aspects of injustice that
persisted, or got worse.
Statues of the champions of injustice call attention to them and
lionize them. Tearing down the statues ends the lionization but makes
it easy to forget what they did. How can we end the lionization and
encourage attention to political issues about them.
Would building prison cells around the statues be a useful approach
for some of them? For many of them, there are grounds to sentence
them to tens of thousands of years in prison, even in some cases
millions of years. The prison cell could be permanent.
Another idea is to replace the statues with a holiday celebrating the
end of the bad things they did — for instance, in the US, an annual holiday to celebrate the defeat of the Confederacy.
Disputes are developing over whether to remove statues of
controversial people who are mainly known for doing something
generally agreed to be good, but also professed bigotry — for
instance, Baden-Powell who founded scouting, and Winston Churchill
who, more than anyone else, defeated Hitler's empire.
I think Churchill's statues should remain. He was racist and a
colonialist (almost everyone in the UK was that), he defended the
power of the rich (most Britons disagreed, and voted in Labour before
the end of the war), and his decisions caused a deadly famine in
Bengal. Those are large wrongs. Yet he did an enormous good:
Churchill, more than anyone else, defeated Hitler's empire.
On the balance, I think he still deserves admiration, with attention
also to his wrongs.