Here is a story of two statues. Last week, in the Kazakh railway town of Taldykorgan, protesters looped ropes around the bronze likeness of their former autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and hauled him off his pedestal.
On the same day, in the English port city of Bristol, four protesters were acquitted of causing criminal damage despite cheerfully admitting having toppled the statue of Edward Colston (1636–1721), a local philanthropist, part of whose fortune had derived from the slave trade. Their lawyer argued that the statue was so offensive that rolling it into the harbor constituted the prevention of a hate crime. Incredibly, the jury agreed.
In both instances, the vandals believed that their hatred of inanimate metal trumped laws on property rights and physical force. But in other regards, the two cases are not comparable.
The difference does not lie in the statues. Most statues offend someone or other. If you are a consequential enough public figure to have been commemorated in bronze, the chances are you will have provoked some opposition. A case can certainly be made against both Nazarbayev and Colston.
Nazarbayev is a typical post-Soviet strongman who kept the nomenklatura in power after the breakup of the USSR. He happened to be the senior communist in Kazakhstan in 1991. Determined to remain in office, he ditched Marxism but clung on to Leninism. He won five successive elections, typically with about 97% of the vote, before standing aside in favor of a hand-picked successor in 2019. He was not the harshest of the post-Soviet tyrants — plenty of Central Asian republics are in a worse place — but he plundered the resources of the state and quashed dissent.
As for Colston, his offense was to have been involved with the Royal African Company, which transported enslaved human beings to the New World. Until recently, it was Colston’s philanthropy rather than the source of it that was remarkable. In the late 17th century, slavery was seen the world over as part of the natural order of things. What made Colston unusual was not that he had made money from human misery, but that he gave it away to endow schools, orphanages, almshouses, and churches all over Bristol. Only toward the end of the 20th century was there a reappraisal of his legacy, and not until 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests took off in Britain in imitation of the violence that followed the murder of George Floyd, did his statue become a target.
This is not a column about which effigies should stay up and which should come down. There are plenty of occasions when it is right to remove a statue. Whether the little Lenins in a newly democratic Russia, the stone Saddams in liberated Iraq, or, indeed, the shoddy Robert E. Lees standing in towns that came to disavow his cause, people have a right to change their minds about whom to commemorate.
No, the difference between the Kazakh iconoclasts and their British equivalents has to do with process. Kazakhstan is a dictatorship. It does not offer a democratic alternative to direct action.
In the West, by contrast, there are lawful ways to change policy, including on the display of statues. The Colston statue had recently been the subject of a major consultation by Bristol’s Labour council, which had decided to add contextualizing text but not to remove it. This was not enough for the vandals — white, from comfortable homes, and with such hilariously posh names as Milo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby. They decided to take the law into their own hands.
They got away with it, thanks to what can only be called “woke privilege.” If you smash things up in the name of environmentalism or racial justice, you get acquitted. If you do so during, say, an anti-lockdown protest, you get locked up. Law is subordinated to prejudice.
Reading the two simultaneous stories, my mind drifted back some 15 years to a meeting with Kazakh dissidents in the city then known as Astana but now, tellingly, called Nur-Sultan. What they wanted above all, they told me, was to live in a country where the rules applied evenly and uniformly and could not be changed by those in power. They spoke of it as a demand for “normalization.”
In fact, there was never anything normal about it. The rule of law applies in a few Western states but, even here, outcome is now elevated over process. It is a small step from arguing that BLM protesters should get a special exemption from the lockdown to arguing that elections only count if you win. It is we Westerners who are now going through “normalization.” Politically, we are becoming more and more like Kazakhstan.
