monuments | Watching America

Senegal: Remove, Rename and Much More, Part 2

Robin Koerner - August 5, 2020. Published in Ndar Info

History is fluid. People are not inert. Our people have the right to demand that the names of any historical figure be erased from our streets.

Senegal: Remove, Rename and Much More, Part 1

Robin Koerner - August 4, 2020. Published in Ndar Info

[T]here is is clearly no risk that one will suffer amnesia if statues are removed, no risk of erasing the collective memory of swaths of history integral to a people’s identity.

Russia: The Great Western Cultural Revolution

Robin Koerner - July 21, 2020. Published in Novaya Gazeta

[I]t is not a protest against the system. It is a new system, and it is a system that was very well known to us in the USSR. We were there.

Russia: Monumental Wars: What the Destruction of Historical Monuments Leads To

Robin Koerner - July 14, 2020. Published in Izvestia

Why ... did protesters merely limit themselves to pulling down a monument of ... George Washington? Following this logic, it would be necessary to rename the U.S. capital.

U.K.: George Washington Reassessed: The Slave-Owning Founding Father Whose Story Is ‘So Relevant Today’

Robin Koerner - July 9, 2020. Published in inews

‘You have so much admiration for [Washington,] who was so important in the success of the Revolution ... And yet you wish he had freed the slaves’.

Venezuela: The Statue’s Fault

Robin Koerner - July 8, 2020. Published in El Universal

What is the obsession with Christopher Columbus these days? ... [H]e belonged to a different, much crueler civilization than ours.

Italy: Italian-Americans vs. Buonismo: ‘Balbo Must Fly On’

Robin Koerner - May 3, 2018. Published in Il Giornale

Germany: The Power of Monuments

Robin Koerner - August 30, 2017. Published in Frankfurter Rundschau

Letting [monuments] stand as witness to an overridden past is something quite different from making the past a role model in defiance of a present that has escaped it.

Tag: monuments