The past few years have witnessed in these United States an orgy of something once thought confined to revolutionary dictatorships: the mass removal of all statues deemed ideologically offensive to the regime.

In our country, it began with the ongoing removal of Confederate statues and monuments – heedless of the fact that their erection had been a sign of national reconciliation after a titanic blood-shedding unlike anything North America had seen before (or thus far). Then it was the turn of Christopher Columbus, for the high crime of introducing European
civilisation to these shores.