The ruthless killing of an African American named George Floyd in the US state of Minnesota by a white policeman has sparked anti-racist protests on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the toppling of a slave trader’s statue in Bristol was followed by the setting on fire and subsequent removal of King Leopold II’s statue in Antwerp. This monarch was responsible for the killing of 10 thousand Congolese in between the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Other statues were daubed in red paint and not for the first time. Francisco Franco on horseback comes immediately to mind. A statue of Indro Montanelli in Milan, a famous journalist who fought in Ethiopia as a fascist, was very recently smeared in pink by Italian feminists. Montanelli, remembered in Italy as a great intellectual and very critical later on in his life towards Silvio Berlusconi, took a 12-year-old Eritrean girl as a sex slave during his time invading Africa in the 1930s.
The breadth of the latest incursions has been astonishing. The debate on controversial monuments, which luckily never went too quiet, has regained dramatic momentum. As we’ve seen, from slavery to fascism is a really short step: fascists enslaved people too.
