IN our ongoing cultural debate on the merits of tearing down statues, there is a common misconception that only the decision to take action is political, and not the decision to allow these monuments to continue standing.

It stems from the belief that our public spaces are politically neutral, that if a statue of an old racist or slave trader has been around for long enough, it no longer has any political meaning or power over the spaces we inhabit, as if time itself has washed away its vile legacy. But that could only be a position held by someone who has no meaningful ties, whether by race or class, to the atrocities carried out by the various figures our cities are adorned by.

Last week, statues of Queen Victoria and the current queen were torn down in Canada following the discovery of nearly 1000 unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, with another 200 found buried in Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

The legacy of colonialism in Canada cuts deeply. At least 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and made to attend government-funded, church-run boarding schools with the aim of forcibly assimilating them into Canadian society. The practice started in the late 19th century and continued into the 1970s.

To quietly pass under the eyes of Britain’s monarchs, symbols of the violent, colonialist attitude that led to the deaths of hundreds of Indigenous children, is a weight we can’t really expect those feeling the raw pain of this new discovery to bear. With chants of “no pride in genocide”, those statues had to come down.

As far as I’m concerned, all statues in honour of Queen Victoria deserve a similar fate. Victoria oversaw the brutal expansion of the British Empire to cover one-fifth of the Earth’s surface. During her reign, and in her name, the empire used violence and coercion to such a degree that the modern world is still recovering from the cultural destruction left behind by its existence.

Operation Legacy, the Foreign Office-run programme to destroy or hide files that would cast the British Empire in a negative light during its decolonisation, is as much a testament to how unworthy it is of our monuments as anything else.

However, legacy and mythmaking are often the primary reason for putting up statues in public spaces in the first place.

Given the prevalence of the Confederate flag in America, I was surprised to discover while younger that the confederacy existed for no more than four years – a period of time much shorter than you would expect for a symbol that is so pervasive in some communities in the US.

In fact, it wasn’t until decades after the American Civil War that many statues of the “heroes” of the south began to appear across the States, often produced quickly and cheaply. If you ever wondered why the Confederate statue pulled down in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017 crumpled so easily, this was why. Mass producing Confederate monuments was an entire industry in itself.

READ MORE: Protesters pull down statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in Canada

Most of these statues appeared in the 20th century, with a significant uptick in mythic representations of Civil War heroes such as General Robert E Lee appearing during the era of Jim Crow segregation. They weren’t intended just to act as a memorial to the past, but as a threat to anyone who would challenge the dominant white supremacist ideology of the time.

BECAUSE that is much of what statues and memorials to those who came before are really for; not only to commemorate, but to politicise, mythologise and wash away the dirtier aspects of our chosen heroes.

Glasgow still skirts around really tackling head-on its own connections to slavery, while whitewashing the roles of the merchants whose names remain on its streets.

The discussion around how we decolonise our cities without erasing the actions of those who played a significant role in building them is an interesting one, and raises intriguing questions about our relationship with public spaces – questions such as why do some people behave as if our public squares, once populated with statues and memorials, become fixed and immovable facets of our city?

Or at what point do the spaces we create become simply crumbling monuments to our past, with no bearing on our present? In our quest to build a better world, what should remain and what should be left behind?

I can tell you with confidence, however, that there is no justification for maintaining monuments as they stand to those who traded in and sold the lives of other humans taken from their homes and forced into servitude, nor to those whose genocidal and expansionist dreams have left so many scars on our planet.

In the case of Edward Colston, whose statue was pulled down by the good people of Bristol last year and dumped in the river where it belonged, that simple act provided more insight and understanding of his life than his statue alone ever did or could have.

I doubt many people even knew the slave trader’s name before his fateful journey to the depths of Bristol harbour. Direct action is a meaningful way of engaging with our past.

I’d happily see every statue of a slave merchant or violent imperialist suffer the same fate. After all, why should we be forced to live under their cold gaze, knowing them as we do now and the legacy they have left behind? What does it say about us as a society that we allow them to remain?