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Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth about the Past
How statues, heritage and the built environment have become the battleground for the culture wars
The past is weaponised in culture wars and cynically edited by those who wish to impose their ideology upon the physical spaces around us. Holocaust deniers use details of the ruins of the gas chambers Auschwitz to promote their ‘No Holes; No Holocaust’.
Yet long-standing concepts such as ‘authenticity’in heritage are undermined and trivialised by gatekeepers such as UNESCO. At the same, time, opposition to this manipulation is being undermined by cultural ideas that prioritise memory and impressions over history and facts.
In Monumental Lies, Robert Bevan argues that monuments, architecture and cities are material evidence of history. They are the physical trace of past events, of previous ways of thinking and of politics, economics and values that percolate through to today.
When our cities are reshaped as fantasies about the past, when monuments tell lies about who deserves honour or are destroyed and the struggle for justice forgotten, the historical record is being manipulated.
When decisions are based on misinformed assumptions about how the built environment influences our behaviour or we are told, falsely, that certain architectural styles are alien to our cities, or when space pretends to be public but is private, or that physical separation is natural, we are being manipulated. There is a growing threat to the material evidence of the truth about history.
We are in serious trouble if we can no longer trust the tangible world around us to tell us the truth. Monumental Lies explores the threats to our understanding of the built environment and how it impacts on our lives, as well as offers solutions to how to combat the ideological manipulations.
The past is weaponised in culture wars and cynically edited by those who wish to impose their ideology upon the physical spaces around us. Holocaust deniers use details of the ruins of the gas chambers Auschwitz to promote their ‘No Holes; No Holocaust’.
Yet long-standing concepts such as ‘authenticity’in heritage are undermined and trivialised by gatekeepers such as UNESCO. At the same, time, opposition to this manipulation is being undermined by cultural ideas that prioritise memory and impressions over history and facts.
In Monumental Lies, Robert Bevan argues that monuments, architecture and cities are material evidence of history. They are the physical trace of past events, of previous ways of thinking and of politics, economics and values that percolate through to today.
When our cities are reshaped as fantasies about the past, when monuments tell lies about who deserves honour or are destroyed and the struggle for justice forgotten, the historical record is being manipulated.
When decisions are based on misinformed assumptions about how the built environment influences our behaviour or we are told, falsely, that certain architectural styles are alien to our cities, or when space pretends to be public but is private, or that physical separation is natural, we are being manipulated. There is a growing threat to the material evidence of the truth about history.
We are in serious trouble if we can no longer trust the tangible world around us to tell us the truth. Monumental Lies explores the threats to our understanding of the built environment and how it impacts on our lives, as well as offers solutions to how to combat the ideological manipulations.
384 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 5, 2022
This book-of-the-month for October 2022 from Verso is a nuanced look at modern iconoclasm, assessing the debates over architectural memorials in various contexts--the US civil war, the NSDAP, the Soviet empire, post-Saddam Iraq, post-Franco Spain, post-colonial states, and so on. There aren't a lot of obvious rules to distinguish why some monuments should come down and some should stay up--it is a multifariously contested field.
It has a committed leftwing perspective. Various principles stand out--such as Arendt's notion that one does not have the right to obey, and that monuments needn't be entirely or always positive but might instead serve as mahnmal, a scar, a notation of shame. One explanation that works well:
Plenty of useful commentary here about the relation of memorials to history; suffice to say that it is silly to assert that iconoclasm is about erasing or destroying history. Similarly, plenty of great commentary about the determinative effect, if any, of architecture and the built environment. Just to show that there is a lively debate on the left about everything, the discussion regarding the Holocaust features some positions that argue for letting the site of Auschwitz return to nature and others that would seek to hold the ruin as it is forever. The issue is that "memory serves the takeover of history by politics [...] hence culture wars" (314).
I love the classical reference to Athens--that they specifically made monuments to battles out of temporary materials so as to avoid "perpetual symbols of enmity" (322).
Good analysis of Lemkin's attempt to include protections for cultural products and installations as part of the law on genocide: "burning books is not the same as burning bodies, but when one intervenes ... against mass destruction of churches and books, one arrives just in time to prevent the burning of bodies" (230); that is, biological genocide is always preceded by cultural genocide--which is not to say that cultural genocide always leads to biological genocide, however.
Leave the last word however to Angela Davis: bringing down Colston's statue "'is not really going to bring about change.' What matters, says Davis, is organizing" (276).
It has a committed leftwing perspective. Various principles stand out--such as Arendt's notion that one does not have the right to obey, and that monuments needn't be entirely or always positive but might instead serve as mahnmal, a scar, a notation of shame. One explanation that works well:
We can usefully characterize today's culture war arguments as a 'crisis of hegemony: the decay of the dominant forms of bourgeois rule,' where the neoliberal order is crumbling but its opposition is not yet powerful enough to provide an alternative vision that captures the imagination of the mass of people. It is here that the Far Right steps in to exploit the dysfunction and uncertainty (327)Good examination of remedies to problematic monuments, such as 'subversive transformation.' A good example would be Banksy's suggestion that instead of pushing Bristol's Colston into the sea, they might recast the existing statue along with other figures tearing him down in perpetuity. We might imagine all sorts of counter-memorials. My position here in New Orleans was to set up such antitheses adjacent to Jefferson Davis and General Lee, say, showing them hanged as traitors or imprisoned as hostis humani generis, rather than simply tearing them down.
Plenty of useful commentary here about the relation of memorials to history; suffice to say that it is silly to assert that iconoclasm is about erasing or destroying history. Similarly, plenty of great commentary about the determinative effect, if any, of architecture and the built environment. Just to show that there is a lively debate on the left about everything, the discussion regarding the Holocaust features some positions that argue for letting the site of Auschwitz return to nature and others that would seek to hold the ruin as it is forever. The issue is that "memory serves the takeover of history by politics [...] hence culture wars" (314).
I love the classical reference to Athens--that they specifically made monuments to battles out of temporary materials so as to avoid "perpetual symbols of enmity" (322).
Good analysis of Lemkin's attempt to include protections for cultural products and installations as part of the law on genocide: "burning books is not the same as burning bodies, but when one intervenes ... against mass destruction of churches and books, one arrives just in time to prevent the burning of bodies" (230); that is, biological genocide is always preceded by cultural genocide--which is not to say that cultural genocide always leads to biological genocide, however.
Leave the last word however to Angela Davis: bringing down Colston's statue "'is not really going to bring about change.' What matters, says Davis, is organizing" (276).
January 26, 2023
One of the paradoxes of the Covid-pandemic era, when so many of us stayed home, was the increasing concern about cultural environments and especially statuary, notably in the intensification of struggles for racial justice. In many places we saw a re-evaluation of monuments and memorialisation, especially but not only those associated with colonialism and empire, and with the mass enslavement of peoples from Africa during the 16th to 19th centuries. This concern, and the contested character of many especially urban spaces, became woven through right populism’s ‘culture wars’ often leading to absurd claims of the erasure of history when that monumentalisation included denial of the genocidal aspects of colonisation, empire and enslavement….
Yet, as Robert Bevan notes in this important, if problematic, engagement with these contested histories, this focus on memorials and monuments as statuary is too narrow. He begins his discussion and analysis with statues and memorials – with Rhodes in Cape Town, Colston in Bristol, Confederate generals across the South of the USA and more – but this is not his opening salvo. He starts in the northern Italian city of Bolzano where a fascist frieze on a courthouse was not finally completed until the early 1950s, several years after Mussolini’s death and the fall of Italian fascism. This pre-sages Bevan’s wider concern with built environments, with heritage reconstructions and the historical narratives they construct of their places, environments and wider, often national, contexts. So while the high profile focus is on statues and memorials, Bevan has a wider concern with the banality of historical claims made by and through built environments.
Woven through his argument is a wider concern with claims to and assertions of ‘cultural purity’ and the assertions made of the failures of multiculturalism and for a sense of anti-cosmopolitanism. He also weaves into his case the wider claims for notions of authenticity, and the invocation of cultural and heritage protection in global militarisation, both of which often continue to play out that imperial mission of Europe’s former imperialist powers. In this the case is a valuable extension and development of the often narrow focus on the more spectacular aspects of the historical claims made and asserted in memorialisation and monumentalisation.
Where he parts company with much of the concern about the reactionary defence of the historical narrative asserted by existing memorialisation is when he gets to what to do about it. Rather than removal and replacement, as advocated by many, Bevan favours what he labels ‘subversive transformation’. Here he returns to Bolzano, where after extensive consultation the fascist frieze remains but with text projected onto it that problematizes the sculpture and marks the brutality of fascism oppression. In other instances he notes the guerrilla interventions on Eastern Europe’s Soviet war memorials marking both the liberation for Nazi occupation and beginning of the Soviet era.
Cases such as this seem to me to engage well with the relatively blunt cultural tool that is the monumental memorial. Where the case becomes less convincing is his version of subversive transformation through contextualisation. He quite properly rejects the notion that new signage can recast the celebration of oppression into something more nuanced, but then goes on to consider, as another form of subversive transformation, the placement of new memorials/statues alongside existing ones. In one case he suggests William Gladstone’s statue at Bow church in London’s east end and funded by industrialist Theodore Bryant could be recast by adjacent statues of Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx as leaders of the 1888 ‘matchgirl’s strike’, based at Bryant’s Bryant and May nearby factory. Much as I think Eleanor Marx is deserving of memorialisation, this proposal seems to miss the point about way we often see statues as discrete – and it’s hard to see statues elsewhere in the square will necessarily problematize the Gladstone statue, or for that matter why Besant and Marx should be memorialised and not someone such as Sarah Chapman, a worker at that Bryan and May factory widely seen as the strike’s worker-leader.
It’s a fraught case; this kind of subversive transformation relies on a sophisticated historical knowledge not widely held, partly because of the historical claims sustained by the memorialisation that subversion is intended to undermine. What’s more, if not carefully done it risks becoming a form of parody which often, as Anne Elizabeth Moore convincingly shows, tends to reinforce its subject.
Subversive transformation works well in some cases – such as the stolperstien, the ‘stumbling stones’, installed in pavements marking former residences of those killed in the Nazi era Holocaust. Here we can see the approach as disrupting the built environment, of unsettling the sanitisation of pasts often seen in heritage ‘reconstructions’ of urban areas such as that we see in the ‘rebuilding’ of central Dresden in a way that denies the central cultural role of buildings such as the Frauenkirche in German fascism – both Nazi era and contemporary. Even so, subversive transformation becomes much more fraught when the thing being subverted is a domineering monument.
This is not to reject Bevan’s argument; the challenge he makes is important as a reminder that removal and replacement is not straightforward. That said, in many places such as colonies of settlement where existing memorials celebrate the genocide of indigenous peoples, retention even subverted is hard to justify. The case he makes for subversive transformation should encourage us to consider better whether removal and replacement is the best option in many cases, while remembering that subversion relies on a degree of subtlety the presumes a high degree of historical and cultural engagement. Furthermore, this kind of cultural subversion tends to at best critique rather than transform.
Bevan’s case is paradoxical in that it is both more expansive than many of the critiques of memorials by taking wider account of the built environment, but less ambitious in some of its approach to transformation. Even with this paradox it is an important challenge to an often simplistically articulated debate and series of claims – and for that it is most welcome.
Yet, as Robert Bevan notes in this important, if problematic, engagement with these contested histories, this focus on memorials and monuments as statuary is too narrow. He begins his discussion and analysis with statues and memorials – with Rhodes in Cape Town, Colston in Bristol, Confederate generals across the South of the USA and more – but this is not his opening salvo. He starts in the northern Italian city of Bolzano where a fascist frieze on a courthouse was not finally completed until the early 1950s, several years after Mussolini’s death and the fall of Italian fascism. This pre-sages Bevan’s wider concern with built environments, with heritage reconstructions and the historical narratives they construct of their places, environments and wider, often national, contexts. So while the high profile focus is on statues and memorials, Bevan has a wider concern with the banality of historical claims made by and through built environments.
Woven through his argument is a wider concern with claims to and assertions of ‘cultural purity’ and the assertions made of the failures of multiculturalism and for a sense of anti-cosmopolitanism. He also weaves into his case the wider claims for notions of authenticity, and the invocation of cultural and heritage protection in global militarisation, both of which often continue to play out that imperial mission of Europe’s former imperialist powers. In this the case is a valuable extension and development of the often narrow focus on the more spectacular aspects of the historical claims made and asserted in memorialisation and monumentalisation.
Where he parts company with much of the concern about the reactionary defence of the historical narrative asserted by existing memorialisation is when he gets to what to do about it. Rather than removal and replacement, as advocated by many, Bevan favours what he labels ‘subversive transformation’. Here he returns to Bolzano, where after extensive consultation the fascist frieze remains but with text projected onto it that problematizes the sculpture and marks the brutality of fascism oppression. In other instances he notes the guerrilla interventions on Eastern Europe’s Soviet war memorials marking both the liberation for Nazi occupation and beginning of the Soviet era.
Cases such as this seem to me to engage well with the relatively blunt cultural tool that is the monumental memorial. Where the case becomes less convincing is his version of subversive transformation through contextualisation. He quite properly rejects the notion that new signage can recast the celebration of oppression into something more nuanced, but then goes on to consider, as another form of subversive transformation, the placement of new memorials/statues alongside existing ones. In one case he suggests William Gladstone’s statue at Bow church in London’s east end and funded by industrialist Theodore Bryant could be recast by adjacent statues of Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx as leaders of the 1888 ‘matchgirl’s strike’, based at Bryant’s Bryant and May nearby factory. Much as I think Eleanor Marx is deserving of memorialisation, this proposal seems to miss the point about way we often see statues as discrete – and it’s hard to see statues elsewhere in the square will necessarily problematize the Gladstone statue, or for that matter why Besant and Marx should be memorialised and not someone such as Sarah Chapman, a worker at that Bryan and May factory widely seen as the strike’s worker-leader.
It’s a fraught case; this kind of subversive transformation relies on a sophisticated historical knowledge not widely held, partly because of the historical claims sustained by the memorialisation that subversion is intended to undermine. What’s more, if not carefully done it risks becoming a form of parody which often, as Anne Elizabeth Moore convincingly shows, tends to reinforce its subject.
Subversive transformation works well in some cases – such as the stolperstien, the ‘stumbling stones’, installed in pavements marking former residences of those killed in the Nazi era Holocaust. Here we can see the approach as disrupting the built environment, of unsettling the sanitisation of pasts often seen in heritage ‘reconstructions’ of urban areas such as that we see in the ‘rebuilding’ of central Dresden in a way that denies the central cultural role of buildings such as the Frauenkirche in German fascism – both Nazi era and contemporary. Even so, subversive transformation becomes much more fraught when the thing being subverted is a domineering monument.
This is not to reject Bevan’s argument; the challenge he makes is important as a reminder that removal and replacement is not straightforward. That said, in many places such as colonies of settlement where existing memorials celebrate the genocide of indigenous peoples, retention even subverted is hard to justify. The case he makes for subversive transformation should encourage us to consider better whether removal and replacement is the best option in many cases, while remembering that subversion relies on a degree of subtlety the presumes a high degree of historical and cultural engagement. Furthermore, this kind of cultural subversion tends to at best critique rather than transform.
Bevan’s case is paradoxical in that it is both more expansive than many of the critiques of memorials by taking wider account of the built environment, but less ambitious in some of its approach to transformation. Even with this paradox it is an important challenge to an often simplistically articulated debate and series of claims – and for that it is most welcome.
February 3, 2024
És un molt bon llibre. "Mentiras monumentales. La guerra cultural sobre el pasado", coeditat per Barlin Libros i la Institució Alfons el Magnànim, és un volum de quasi quatre-centes pàgines (cites a banda) que reflexiona, amb moltes dades, sobre la "memòria històrica" i l'arquitectura i l'urbanisme, incloses les estàtues.
Robert Bevan, des de posicions clarament progressistes i antifeixistes, s'oposa lògicament a l'oblit (per exemple, dels gitanos i dels homosexuals a camps nazis). De fet, "són els governs, i no els activistes de la cultura de la cancel·lació, els que es resisteixen afanosament a les veritats històriques, tot interferint políticament en l'assignació de fons d'investigació per a projectes històrics i en l'educació". Tot amb tot, qüestiona que tirar avall estàtues (com la del colonialista Edward Colston a Bristol) siga una manera intel·ligent d'oposar-se al revisionisme històric de bona part de les dretes actuals. De fet, aposta per fer com han fet a Bolzen (Bolzano) amb un antic monument feixista italià, que tenia el (terrible) eslogan "Creure, Obeir, Combatre" al qual, per a transformar-lo sense destruir-lo, li afegiren una frase d'Hanna Arendt: "Ningú té dret a obeir". Potser, apunta, és el que caldria fer amb el Valle de los Caídos, resignificar-lo. De fet, "a pesar de todo el cinismo y la hipocresía y del propio historial de borrado del Estado, los monumentos nos ayudan a comprender el pasado. Son registros históricos".
Té moltes parts interessants, sobretot aquella que afirma que els genocidis culturals no són sinó una part dels processos dels genocidis físics. Al cap i a la fi, es comença per cremar llibres i s'acaben cremant persones.
En qualsevol dels casos, llegir-lo ajuda a fer-se una opinió formada. Paga la pena. De veritat.
#elsmeusllibres
Robert Bevan, des de posicions clarament progressistes i antifeixistes, s'oposa lògicament a l'oblit (per exemple, dels gitanos i dels homosexuals a camps nazis). De fet, "són els governs, i no els activistes de la cultura de la cancel·lació, els que es resisteixen afanosament a les veritats històriques, tot interferint políticament en l'assignació de fons d'investigació per a projectes històrics i en l'educació". Tot amb tot, qüestiona que tirar avall estàtues (com la del colonialista Edward Colston a Bristol) siga una manera intel·ligent d'oposar-se al revisionisme històric de bona part de les dretes actuals. De fet, aposta per fer com han fet a Bolzen (Bolzano) amb un antic monument feixista italià, que tenia el (terrible) eslogan "Creure, Obeir, Combatre" al qual, per a transformar-lo sense destruir-lo, li afegiren una frase d'Hanna Arendt: "Ningú té dret a obeir". Potser, apunta, és el que caldria fer amb el Valle de los Caídos, resignificar-lo. De fet, "a pesar de todo el cinismo y la hipocresía y del propio historial de borrado del Estado, los monumentos nos ayudan a comprender el pasado. Son registros históricos".
Té moltes parts interessants, sobretot aquella que afirma que els genocidis culturals no són sinó una part dels processos dels genocidis físics. Al cap i a la fi, es comença per cremar llibres i s'acaben cremant persones.
En qualsevol dels casos, llegir-lo ajuda a fer-se una opinió formada. Paga la pena. De veritat.
#elsmeusllibres
March 11, 2023
My ongoing and painful reconsideration of museums and monuments -- sites that are like church to me in their importance to the formation of my thinking and often in their sacredness -- brings me to this book. I have always been a skeptic (thanks Dad!) so looking around for the "real story" is nothing new. Our great institutions were built and still run on slavery and crime, so there is no surprise that their interpretation is usually lies and propaganda. At least Bevan, in his analysis of some famous (Auschwitz) and not-so famous (an Italian fascist frieze) monuments shows the lie, the fix, and the consequences.
Those two examples run the gamut of emotions I experienced reading this. The corrective on the fascist building is sensitive and powerful. And the politics behind camp ruins/reconstructions is a whole other area of queasy rumination.
Those two examples run the gamut of emotions I experienced reading this. The corrective on the fascist building is sensitive and powerful. And the politics behind camp ruins/reconstructions is a whole other area of queasy rumination.
July 9, 2023
This is a good examination of the controversy about statues and what they mean and how we should deal with them. The problem is that there is a huge chunk in the middle that is more about architecture. This large section felt like it should be part of a related but separate project – or maybe that’ more my USA-centric parochialism showing in that I am less concerned about the legacy of fascist architecture in Italy than I am about the Confederate statues in the US or the honoring of people who held other people as property (and got rich from that trade).
March 8, 2024
I love preservation and i loved a lot of these arguments, but I can’t lie that sometimes this felt very pessimistic. I get it, I do, but sometimes we gotta lift the profession up again! Idk, either way, Bevan used fantastic examples and really eloquent arguments that made this a well worthy school read especially after I got to see him speak last semester!
March 4, 2025
Increíble!
January 23, 2024
Un ensayo complejo sobre un problema contemporáneo: discernir las posiciones sobre el patrimonio monumental, arquitectónico y artístico, que sirve de combustible a las distintas guerras culturales por la hegemonía política..
Es dificil extraer una conclusión clara y util del texto sobre que hacer en un entorno mediático confuso caracterizado por la tergiversación y la mentira.
Quizás lo apropiado es la reconstrucción crítica de la arquitectura y la superposición en los monumentos de nuevas capas de significado que permitan vislumbrar las posiciones culturales de nuestro tiempo.
Un asunto dificil.
Es dificil extraer una conclusión clara y util del texto sobre que hacer en un entorno mediático confuso caracterizado por la tergiversación y la mentira.
Quizás lo apropiado es la reconstrucción crítica de la arquitectura y la superposición en los monumentos de nuevas capas de significado que permitan vislumbrar las posiciones culturales de nuestro tiempo.
Un asunto dificil.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews