istory is not being erased by those seeking to topple the statues of slavers and murderous white supremacists; it is being remembered. That is the real sin as far as the protesters’ detractors are concerned. They understandably fear what will happen if historical atrocities committed by the British state enter wider public consciousness. Their political worldview is founded on British exceptionalism, which relies on a whitewashed history of benevolence, tolerance and enlightened values – this is now under threat. They know, too, that if the crimes of the past are widely acknowledged, then it will empower demands to address the consequences: today’s entrenched racial injustices. Political struggles have long been rooted in contested claims about the past, and this is no exception; the backlash is not really about an assault on our cultural heritage, but about the potential to reimagine today’s Britain. The country has been dragged into a mass history lesson, and the lecturers standing at the front of class are young black protesters and their allies. When Edward Colston’s statue was dumped into Bristol’s harbour, he wasn’t erased from history: indeed, he is suddenly more famous than he was in his own lifetime, with many people for the first time becoming aware of the 84,000 slaves he transported from Africa to the Americas, 19,000 of whom died in the barbarous conditions on his ships. Similarly, the slave owner Robert Milligan wasn’t scrubbed from history this week when his statue was removed by Tower Hamlets council. In truth, he was plucked from relative obscurity to become a salient reminder that London did not amass its vast wealth through enterprise, grit and cultural superiority – this was achieved in large part through the mass subjugation and enslavement of black people. British exceptionalism likes to portray the country as a historic oasis of liberty, the slayer of foreign tyrants from Philip II and Napoleon to Adolf Hitler. The demands to remove statues of Robert Clive from Shrewsbury and Whitehall directly contradict this myth. Clive, who conquered much of India, plundered his many victims and created policies that led to the famine of 1769-1773, in which a third of Bengal perished. Indeed, as Mike Davis’ seminal Late Victorian Holocausts detailed, millions died under British rule because of famines driven by laissez-faire economic policies. The last such famine occurred in Bengal in 1943 under the rule of Winston Churchill – who declared he “hated Indians” and saw them as “a beastly people with a beastly religion” – as up to three million starved in large part because of his policies. If Soviet and Chinese famines are rightly attributed to Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, the British state should be similarly damned for the horrors of India. This is hardly unique to Britain, of course. The only violence Europeans widely acknowledge and mourn is that which they have committed against each other: champions of the European Union point to its role in suppressing the tendency of the continent to engage in bouts of colossal bloodletting throughout the centuries. Denial about the violence exported to the rest of the globe remains pervasive: Belgian protesters in Antwerp have challenged such a blinkered view by forcing the removal of a statue of King Leopold II, whose 23-year tyranny in the Congo free state resulted in up to 10 million deaths, or half its population. The Nazi project in Europe itself, meanwhile, was partly inspired by colonial violence, such as the German genocide of the Herero and Namaqua in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century; while Hitler looked to the British Raj as a template for Nazi rule of eastern Europe. What protesters are doing on both sides of the Atlantic is compelling entire nations to confront their present through a new understanding of their past. Our new history teachers are explaining that the vast wealth of western societies – unjustly concentrated in so few hands as it is – was generated through slavery, colonial violence and theft. This oppression required the dehumanisation of the populations who suffered the consequences – its legacy is the embedding of racism in institutions and entire societies. This explains why black people suffer disproportionate levels of stop and search by police and mass incarceration, higher levels of poverty and unemployment, discrimination in the workforce and drastic under-representation in industries from the media and politics to boardrooms. There will be those claiming that this week’s protests are merely the latest salvo in an ongoing culture war, but that is an unhelpful distraction. What we are witnessing are minorities battling for rights and dignity they have long been denied – and a weaponised backlash from the right against their progress. Resistance to this discourse undoubtedly contains a generational aspect, too: a fear of hordes of “woke” barbarians banging at the gates, partly driven by an anxiety that an entire younger generation left with very little to lose poses a potentially dangerous threat to those above them. This fight for justice is not about protesters “hating” their own country, as their more poisonous critics claim: any rethinking of our history should include lauding great collective struggles against injustice, such as the Levellers, those premature democrats of the 17th century; the 19th century Chartists, the world’s first great working-class political movement; the suffragettes, trade unionists and anti-racist and LGBTQ campaigners. Our sense of self is bound up with our interpretation of history; that is what makes this struggle uncomfortable for so many. But it is not supposed to be comfortable. As more statues fall, a new history is remembered – each one casting a disturbing new light on the present. Understanding this threatens our iniquitous status quo – that is what detractors truly fear, not the toppling of bygone racist tyrants. • Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist