But in recent years, Nelson has come under attack, and activists have urged that statues of him be destroyed–including the iconic one at the top of Nelson’s Column at Trafalgar Square. Why? The usual reason: he is alleged to have been pro-slavery.

In my opinion, this would be irrelevant even if true. Slavery was ubiquitous on every continent except Antarctica from the dawn of time until the 19th Century, when a coalition of Christians and Jews, acting largely through Nelson’s British Navy, managed to stamp it out across most of the world. Not the whole world–China didn’t purport to abolish slavery until 1910. The point is that if we erase everyone who had anything to do with slavery from history, there won’t be a lot of history left.

But it turns out that the claim that Nelson was pro-slavery is false. It is based on a letter that he wrote to a Caribbean planter shortly before his death, but we now know that the letter, in the version in which it became known, is a forgery.

[It won’t matter, perhaps especially in the UK these days. The point of this isn’t cosmic justice; the point is the dismantling of Western civilization, in part by smearing its leading lights. The British think they owe that to the world for their colonialism, and perhaps they owe some debt to those directly and recently impacted (Ireland comes to mind). But this wholesale nihilism has another purpose entirely. — Ed]