Getting rid of old statuary seems to be an important part of the process of emerging. You can always get a crowd to help inaugurate a new statue- and a much bigger and excited one to pull it down. There seems to be an inner drive to build things up and then break and destroy as a way of sneering at the great and once great…
—I am reminded of 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Baltic nations took their own hammers to their most prominent statues of Lenin. Much could be discerned about national style from the effort. In Lithuania, the most emotional of the republics, the crowd just went at it, using all tools at hand, bringing down Vladimir Ilyich with great gusto. In Latvia, some engineers assumed the task, judging the statue’s material, pulling up a crane, and taking it down very systematically. In Estonia, the town leaders coolly hired a Finnish firm to do the job.—Read More:http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2003/04/toppled.html
The French repatriated some of their statues in Algeria as there seemed to be no end for the French to remind themselves of their glory. At Khartoum, in the Sudan, the statue of Lord Kitchener, symbolic of British rule, was retired with full ceremonial honors; it became a shrouded monument, almost poetic as symbol of the setting of the sun on the British empire. In 1956, citizens of Budapest decided to get rid of a statue of Joseph Stalin with less ceremony. Its decapitated head lies in a city street, adorned with a traffic sign:
Geza Bankuty (sportsman):
We were riding towards the monument to Stalin. When we got to the place there was nobody there beside us yet. Presently, people began to trickle in. In the gathering crowd one could see a militiaman and an “avosz”, a border guard and many, many others. The crowd became united and started calling in one voice: topple the statue! Russians go home, Russians go home!…
—Aug. 23, 1991: The statue of Lenin is dismantled in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius as the government banned the Communist Party. Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and declared its independence in 1990.—Read More:http://www.fp.foreignpolicy.com/category/region/middle_east?page=11
Sandor Kopacsi (head of Budapest’s police):
[The demonstrators] placed […] a thick steel rope around the neck of the 25-metre tall Stalin’s statue while other people, arriving in trucks with oxygen cylinders and metal cutting blowpipes, were setting to work on the statue’s bronze shoes. […]
An hour later the statue fell down from its pedestal. Thanks to prudence shown by the crowd there were no casualties – nobody present in Heroes square suffered even the slightest injury. Read More:http://www.1956.pl/9,42.html
—Statue of Lord Kitche
being erected in Khartoum —Sidney March sculptor. 1912—
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)… The media portrayed the fall of the statue as an act of the Iraqi people, but it was really the U.S. military that was behind it in a spontaneous act. On the morning of April 9, a psychological warfare team attached to the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment in Baghdad, decided to head towards Firdos Square. When they arrived there, they found some Iraqis and reporters milling around. Right across from the square was the Palestine Hotel where many Western reporters were staying. The 3rd Battalion had just arrived there, and then moved to the square as well. They saw a few Iraqis in front of the Saddam statue, which led one Marine to offer a sledgehammer to them to hit the edifice with. The battalion commander then decided to help the Iraqis take the statue down. First, the Iraqis began hitting the statue with the hammer, then the psychological warfare team broadcast their plan to pull it down in Arabic, while the Marines sealed off the square. The Iraqis tried toppling the statue on their own, but that failed. The Marines then drove an M88 tank recovery vehicle up to the statue. While attaching cables to it, a Marine hung an American flag over Saddam’s head. The psychological warfare team told him to take it off because they thought it would look bad for the assembled press. An old Iraqi flag was eventually found, and put on top of the statue instead. Then the M88 pulled it down. Some Marines then suggested that Iraqi children would look nice on the M88, and some were promptly found and photographed by the press. The whole process took around two hours, and there were long down periods where the Iraqis, Marines, and reporters were doing nothing, but milling around. Writer Peter Mass who was travelling with the 3rd Battalion at the time, also believed that many of the scenes seen that day were Iraqis acting out for the cameras. For example, when the Iraqis began hitting the statue with the Marine sledgehammer, journalists swarmed them. When they stopped taking photos however, the Iraqis stopped and walked away.Read More:http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.ca/2011/10/what-happened-when-saddams-statue-came.html
COMMENTS