Oliver Cromwell
"Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the
wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid
by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still
it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'
With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God
gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind
up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for
his widow and his orphan to do all which
may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations."
Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address
The last few weeks have seen the removal of statues in the
United States and Britain that were related to the slave trade. While this may
seem justifiable for the moment, the indiscriminate nature of the removal of
statues are troubling, especially when now statues of revolutionary figures such
as George Washington, who led the American Revolution and Abraham Lincoln who
led the Civil War that ended slavery are being removed.
The attacking of revolutionary figures has now crossed the
Atlantic to Britain with the calls for statues of Oliver Cromwell to be
removed. The only thing missing in this reactionary nonsense is the call for the
exhuming of his body in order to drag it through the London streets and place
his head on a spike above Westminister Hall again.
Any historian or general reader of English history will know
that the calling for the statue of Oliver Cromwell to be removed from outside
Parliament is a yearly occurrence. Two years ago the Sunday Telegraph ran an
article called "Parliament's statue of Cromwell becomes the latest
memorial hit by 'rewriting history' row". The article's author Patrick
Sawer must have had a slow day in the office because in the article he says a
bitter row has broken out between historians. His article was stretching things
a bit. The one historian quoted by the newspaper was Jeremy Crick, described as
"a social historian" has called for the statue to be pulled down.
His justification for this being Cromwell's anti-religious
zeal and comparing Cromwell to the actions of the Taliban. He says "Its
banishment would be poetic justice for his Taliban-like destruction of so many
of England's cultural and religious artefacts carried out by his fanatical
Puritan followers."
It is hard to take Crick seriously. Even a cursory search
would find that he has written next to nothing on Cromwell and is hardly a world authority on Cromwell and the English revolution. It would seem that the
only thing Crick specialises in is the calling for "unloved statues"
to be pulled down.
What makes this year, so very different is that it is a
Labour Party member that is calling for it. Lord Adonis who is a Labour Peer
and a "Remainer" has called for the statue to be torn down because
Cromwell committed "genocide"
in his conquest of Ireland (1649-53).
The peer said: "I think Cromwell's statue should be
removed from outside Parliament and put in a museum. Cromwell was a military
dictator who ended up abolishing Parliament and committing genocide in Ireland.
He has no place outside Parliament - unlike Churchill, who led the successful
national and international resistance to Hitler and the Nazi
dictatorship."
It must be said that this "debate" while having a strong
historical interest is also an expression of how reactionary and right-wing the
Labour Party has become. It is also an expression of how large sections of the
English bourgeoisie cannot defend or even remember its revolutionary
traditions.
The English bourgeoisie has had an ambivalent and
contradictory attitude towards Cromwell and for that matter, the English
revolution. While paying lip service to the fact that he was the father of
Parliamentary democracy albeit with a bit of military dictatorship thrown in,
they have always been wary of drawing attention to their revolutionary past.
They would prefer that people saw Britain's history as being tranquil. That any
change that took place was gradual and progress was peaceful through class
compromise without the violent excess of revolution. This illusion is more
important in light of today's explosive political and economic situation.
It is perhaps all the more ironic that it is a section of
the Tory party that has opposed the removal. As the Ashfield Conservative MP
Lee Anderson said: "I walk past the Cromwell statue every single day to
work and he is a daily reminder to me of our history, good and bad. I would
strongly suggest he stays there and that it should be Lord Adonis who is
removed from the House of Lords and put in a museum."Anderson accused Adonis
of having "a juvenile, one-dimensional view of history".
Several Irish historians have opposed the removal with Professor
Louise Richardson arguing that the statue was of educational value and should
be preserved no matter how controversial. She said that it was wrong to pretend
that history should be changed because people do not agree with it.
The erasing of revolutionary figures and revolutions for
that matter from history has a long pedigree. The most infamous being Joseph Stalin's
removal of leading Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky from the historical record.
The successful removal of the Cromwell statue would set a
dangerous precedent. It would embolden all those inside and outside of academia,
especially those who have been involved in a tendency in historiography as
Professor James Oakes points out "to erase revolutions from all of human
history. First, the English revisionists said there was no English Revolution,
and then François Furet came along and said there was no French Revolution. We
have historians telling us that the Spanish-American revolutions were really
just fought among colonial elites that got out of hand and happened to result
in the abolition of slavery".[1]
If Cromwell were alive today, he would be a more than a bit
angry towards today's English bourgeoise who owes everything it has to his
leadership during the English revolution.
Marxist's, on the other hand, have no ambivalence towards
the great bourgeois revolutionary, and workers and youth as the Russian
revolutionary Leon Trotsky said can learn a lot from Cromwell's leadership: "
Cromwell built not merely an army but also a party -- his army was to some
extent an armed party and herein precisely lay its strength. In 1644 Cromwell's
"holy" squadrons won a brilliant victory over the King's horsemen and
won the nickname of "Ironsides." It is always useful for a revolution
to have iron sides. On this score, British workers can learn much from Cromwell".[2]
To conclude the consistent controversy over this statue does
beg the question of why does it keep coming up. Firstly the issue of the
English revolution has never been a mere question of studying a past event; it
is because many of the significant issues that were discussed and fought for on
the battlefield in the 1640s are still
contemporary issues. What do we do with the monarchy, the issue of social
inequality addressed by groups such as the Levellers? Until these and many more
are resolved, we will keep getting more calls for Cromwell's statue to be
removed.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/06/pers-j06.html
[2] www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
