The University of Winchester is spending over £23,000 ($31,500) on a statue of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, it has been revealed.
“The statue of Greta Thunberg was commissioned in 2019 and funded by the University as part of the West Downs Centre development,” a spokesman for the public research university confirmed in comments reported by The Hampshire Chronicle.
“The statue cost £23,760, within the overall £50m budget for the West Downs Centre,” the spokesman said of the large bronze, which was sculpted by Christine Charlesworth and is titled ‘Make a Difference’.
“The university wanted a sculpture of Greta because it is a very ‘green’ university, and they feel that Greta will be an inspiration to all the students,” Charlesworth explained.
Greta Thunberg is now cast in bronze and I will visit the foundry next week to see patination – Winchester want her…
Posted by Christine Charlesworth on Saturday, March 13, 2021
Winchester has commissioned the woke monument at a time when the United Kingdom continues to be wracked by so-called “statue wars”, with left-wing academics, politicians, and social justice activists seeking to have historic monuments, buildings, and place names removed, renamed, or “recontextualised” with new plaques and information boards detailing the supposed crimes of the figures they depict or are associated with.
The phenomenon is an outgrowth of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which spread across the Atlantic following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis but lacked a clear target for its ire.
Many prominent merchants turned philanthropists born prior to the abolition of slave trade, chief among them former parliamentarian Edward Colston, have fallen victim to the attempted purge, with anyone who held shares in companies linked to slavery or who inherited business interests in any way involved with slave labour being reduced to the status of “slave trader”.
Other targets have included Scottish Englightenment philosophers David Hume, whose alma mater has renamed buildings named in his owner, and Adam Smith, the “father of economics”, whose grave has become a subject of scrutiny.
Monarchs, prime ministers, and war heroes including Queen Victoria, Sir Winston Churchill, and ordinary officers and soldiers have also been targeted by campaigners (and vandals) merely for being linked to the British Empire and “colonialism”, or for making remarks considered politically incorrect by the standards of the 21st-century left.
Year of the Statue Smashers: How BLM Violence and Identity Politics Crossed the Atlantic in 2020 https://t.co/iTvdMW0zjC
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 3, 2021
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