Public monuments of historically influential people have been vandalized throughout the United Kingdom, United States of America, Belgium and a few other countries of Europe.
The campaigners have launched online petitions for the removal of public monuments – which they denounce as ‘symbols of racism’ – in France and Ireland and strive to reinvigorate the attempts to topple the monuments of historical figures in Spain.
Starting from the USA, the #BlackLivesMatter protests have rippled across the globe and have resulted in many death and injuries and the destruction of property – specifically in USA.
According to The Balochistan Post news desk, the #BlackLivesMatter protestors have vandalized public monuments throughout the Europe and the USA. The statue of George Washington, the first president of United States, was spray-painted with “slave owner” in Chicago; the statue of the 17th century slave owner Edward Colstan was toppled in Bristol; the monument of the 19th-century Belgian king Leopold II was torched in Antwerp and daubed with paint in Brussels, several statues of Leopold II in Belgium have also been removed by authorities in the wake of the BLM protests; the statue of Christopher Columbus, the ambitious Italian explorer and the ‘discoverer of America’ was torn down in Minnesota; the monument of John B Castleman was vandalized in Louisville.
These are but a few cases of vandalism by the protestors throughout the world. There are more than 700 such statues in USA alone that can be a cynosure for the protestor.
In the UK, the wartime prime minister and the noble laureate Winston Churchill, has been accused of being a racist and his statue has been defaced in London. The protestors spray painted the monument with “was a racist.” After this, government ordered the boarding of “key statues” throughout London, including that of Churchill and Nelson Mandela.
The vandalization of Churchill’s statue prompted the incumbent prime minister of UK, Boris Johnson, to condemn such attempts as “absurd and shameful.” Writing for the Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson described the racism charges against Churchill as the “height of lunacy” and vowed that “I will resist with every breath in my body any attempt to remove that statue from Parliament Square.” He further wrote that the he was “dubious” of the ongoing campaign to “Photoshop” and “edit” their entire cultural landscape.
After the boarding of Churchill’s monument, Mr Johnson posted a series of tweets on Twitter where he said that: “The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country – and the whole of Europe – from a fascist and racist tyranny.” He further said that: “The only responsible course of action is to stay away from these protests.”
Taylor Swift played her part in the BLM protests through a Twitter thread. “As a Tennessean, it makes me sick that there are monuments standing in our state that celebrate racist historical figures who did evil things. Edward Carmack and Nathan Bedford Forrest were DESPICABLE figures in our state history and should be treated as such”, she wrote.
She said that Edward Carmack was a “white supremacist newspaper editor who published pro-lynching editorials and incited the arson of the office of Ida B. Wells.”
The Blank Space singer condemned Nathan Bedford as the “grand wizard of Ku Klux Klan” who murdered dozens of black Union soldiers.