Commentary When people vandalize a statue, for instance of Queen Victoria, I confess to a malevolent urge to leave it there as a squalid monument to their utopian vision, as it once was a dignified one to the society they repudiate. It would just make things worse in a “broken windows” manner, encouraging disorder and despair. But we seem to be going that way anyway. Before you launch into a diatribe against some queen, prime minister, or subway station, I’ll mention a September 1990 “ordinary day in the life of the Soviet Union” item in The Economist ending, “On the late-night news, the announcer says, without a flicker of irony: ‘And now for our daily roundup of attacks on statues of Lenin.’” Which reminds us that there are statues and statues, and different reasons for and manners of removing them. Many people now apparently struggle to recall that statues of …
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