
(L) Portland Police Department; (R) A graffiti reading "Racist Fish" is seen on a statue of "The Little Mermaid" in Copenhagen, Denmark July 3, 2020.
The latest statues to fall victim to the marauding hordes in America and Europe include an elk and the Little Mermaid. A 120-year-old sculpture of the majestic woodland creature was set alight in Portland because of racism, or police brutality, or it being a day with a 'y' in the name... no one has actually bothered to explain yet. It's now been removed and requires extensive repair. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, the 107-year-old sculpture of Hans Christian Andersen's most famous character had "Racist fish" scrawled on it for similarly obscure reasons.
It's high time we admitted that this is just vandalism, that there's no conceivable political motivation for doing any of this anymore. There wasn't really in the first place, either - it was just an excuse for civil disobedience, but those first protesters at least picked targets that had a tangential link to their cause. Obviously, this declined very quickly, having begun with statues of slavers, slave owners and confederate generals, but rapidly ending up with anyone who'd said anything ever that was even moderately critical of foreigners. How the same set of protesters can argue that statues of Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln need to be ripped down will never not baffle me, in much the same way that alleged anti-Nazis and anti-colonialists agitating for ripping down statues of Churchill and Gandhi leave me dumbstruck.














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