Political correctness must fall (except Donald Trump's version of it)

Tony Abbott, deposed prime minister of Australia, the 'mad monk' (he had trained for the priesthood), seemed like an Australian version of George W Bush, except for being even more zany.  But he has recently come to the defence of the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel Colleage, Oxford, with an articulate and well-argued plea against its proposed removal (the College has already bowed to pressure and removed the name plaque beneath it).  Ntokozo Qwabe, a South African student, is the prime mover in the campaign.  A strange fellow who has compared the French tricolour to the Nazi swastika and sees racism everywhere he turns in Oxford, he is part of the 'Rhodes must fall' campaign in South Africa that saw the removal of statues of the former prime minister of South Africa and founder of the De Beers diamond empire as 'an architect of apartheid', like those of communist leaders post-1989.  It seems a long time since the BBC launched a £1m per episode miniseries of him starring Martin Shaw that spectacularly flopped (flying the Union Flag upside down didn't help).
The South African campaign was tacitly backed by the Jacob Zuma administration seeking to distract the populace from its own unpopularity (yet still confident of remaining a one-party state) - this backfired after Zuma sacked the only popular member of his government - the finance minister - and then sacked his successor within the week after a storm of protest.  He thus became the subject of the campaign 'Zuma must fall'.  Oops.
The right-on, left-wing student campaign is oblivious to nuance and context.  They would rather fight historical crimes with cheap stunts than current racism, such as why American grand juries, often guided by the prosecutor, fail to charge police officers who kill black people, including children (and let it be clear, this is just to charge the cops, not convict them).  Tony Abbott, a Rhodes scholar himself, said that in the 21st century, Rhodes may be considered racist, but he was "a man of his time."  Indeed.  The actions of the student campaign imply that anyone who has taken a Rhodes scholarship is guilty of association with dirty money.  Guess what, Qwabe is a Rhodes scholar.  Hmm.
Why stop at Rhodes?  Why not haul Winston Churchill down from outside Westminster for being partially responsible for a famine in India?  Why are there statues of Richard the Lionheart and Oliver Cromwell, respectively slaughterers of Arabs and Irish?  Tear them down!  Why not stop all productions of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who was a genocidal megalomaniac?  Why not stop all productions of Shakespeare full stop, given the anti-Jewish sentiment in The Merchant of Venice?  Let us ban all books of Charles Dickens who demanded vicious vengeance against Indians during the course of the Indian Mutiny.  Gandhi was an appeaser of Hitler - disgraceful (don't see too many statues of Neville Chamberlain).  And, of course, Nelson Mandela was a man of violence before his incarceration.  He may have been responding to the brutal apartheid state, but he firmly believed in armed revolution - the twinkly-eyed septuagenarian who emerged from prison in 1990 had come on a journey where he was unrecognisable from his former self, yet still called Colonel Gaddafi his friend - 'Mandela must fall'?
Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were racist by the standards of today, but progressives today often still cite them as role models.  Abraham Lincoln may have freed the slaves but he was still hesitant about extending the franchise to them as federal law.  Many of the Founding Fathers kept slaves themselves.  As with Rudyard Kipling, we call them 'men of their time' - ignorant of the sensibilities we have built up since then.  By contrast, the student union seem even more retrograde, the proposal to remove the Rhodes statue equivalent to one pope digging up a despised predecessor - Formosus - placing his corpse on the papal throne and subjecting the deceased to a litany of abuse.  Then again, the Russia of Putin likes to convict people who are dead.
Once again in this country, we see the intolerance of liberal self-righteousness rear its head.  Qwabe brings an anti-European authoritarian air and youthful fanaticism to this particular hand-wringing from a country steadily retreating from democracy.  Trying to make history tidy by sweeping uncomfortable bits under the carpet invokes the cliche that we are destined to repeat it.  I would be highly critical of Rhodes if he was alive and airing unreconstructed views about the 'destiny of the white man' - but he's not, he's been dead for over one hundred years.  And, ironically, there would not be a South Africa as it is constituted today if it were not for him.