The recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia shows once again how divided the world has become. It is much easier to contribute to this than to mend it, and it needs mending, so I am risking that I may not win too many friends with what follows.

I’ll start by admitting that I don’t think it is helpful to pull down statues of those we no longer admire or who represent attitudes we abhor. I should quickly make an exception for those of the gigantesque kind pioneered in the Soviet Union that over-dominate an area and render it impossible to think without wondering if some is looking over your shoulder. And it didn’t help much in Iraq.

But the statue of the ‘Wounded Leader’ is important to our Anglophone society because we have produced so many of them, over so many years. My suggestion: We’d be better off using them to reflect on than pulling them off their pedestals, however great that feels.

In this case, America needs to remind herself that was founded on slavery and the genocide of its indigenous peoples — especially because America so much wants to delete this fact. Yes, it is something to be angry about, but in my profession (psychotherapy) we know that there is a more important emotion still — and this is grief.

Until the whole of the American people come out of denial and grieve how their nation was founded they may not be able to be properly united. So much is crystal clear when looking through the lens of psychohistory.

So I propose that such statues could serve as reminders, as focal points for communal grieving, while we commission other statues of the victims of, and fighters against injustice and placing them in equally prominent positions. Right in front of the courthouse or regional assembly building.

This is especially relevant in Britain, which is hardly beginning to come to terms with her Imperial legacy. The current mainstream media attention to Indian Partition (70 years ago and much unnecessary bloodshed) is a welcome start. But the parade of generals around Whitehall really needs some balancing out, and, compared to a city like Oslo, there is very little statutory in London, so it would good for artists too.

Monuments to remembering (re-membering means literally putting limbs back) must be visible and prominent. This is why the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is so powerful. There are no words accompanying it, as if the thought of it leaves one rightly speechless. It is simply a huge experiential space bravely situated yards from the Bundestag (formerly the Reichstag), so that current governments cannot just delete former excesses. Imagine putting a monument to the Indian Mutiny or the Tonypandy miners in London’s Parliament Square!

And there is another, trickier argument. In the American South, generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were local leaders who lost a civil war in which massive casualties occurred. Should we forget them? In New York and Washington there are statues of Ulysses S. Grant who led the North to victory, even though his presidency was the most corrupt on record and he both failed to properly reconstruct the nation or to honour promises made to Native Americans.

The ghastly Civil War was fought over slavery; but it also had to do with local self-determination. The notion of the Confederacy has a local sentimentality, which is not only rooted in racism and has to be integrated or it will revert to the racism it has only very recently tried to abolish. Pulling bronze generals with their Victorian values off their horses won’t do it, any more than knocking Cecil Rhodes into the Oriel College quadrangle (Oxford) will make up for the excesses of the British Empire.

How to integrate such things is a huge question: how do we deal with our legacy, much of which is shameful, most of which is racist?

Here the Anglosphere is most indicted. Britain still has to deal with the legacy of her colonial project of which North America was the major part until we carelessly lost it by refusing the colonisers the most basic of democratic rights. Then the Raj took over. Nowadays you can be forgiven if you wished King George had been better advised and the colonists decided that tea was better in boiling water than salty. (Or better than in cans for that matter: will I forfeit any claim to objectivity if I say there may be no drink on the planet more restorative than a nice cup of tea and — I have to acknowledge my biased disgust — none worse than Liptons iced sugar?)

Once America broke free of Britain she set off on an unshaking journey of progress, into Modernism and eventually transforming colonial imperialism into the rule of globalising corporatocracy. The ordinary person and local sentiment got left behind.

The rise of current populism may be as much a reaction to this as it is to globalised neo-liberalism itself. To me, current popular voting trends seem to be rooted in the most fundamental of basic human emotions — disgust. And disgust has not been studied sufficiently by my profession, psychotherapy, in my view.

President Trump is a master of disgust. The question for those who want to move beyond the current regressive interlude is not whether the Donald is going to make a congruent or valuable comment on racism, on statues, or any other subject. How can he? He has shown that disgust is the emotion he most knows how to spread.

That is not to say that as President he hasn’t a duty to utterly and speedily condemn racism and support the notions of freedom and equality that were built into the revolutionary American Constitution, inspired by the Iroquois system of governance, a hundred years before the indigenous population was systematically brutalised.

He has such a duty, and if he cannot do it he should move over.

But let’s not act out more disgust. Let’s practise grief and start trying to integrate the shadow of our civilisation. Heaven knows it’s about time.

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