I’ve been trying to understand why some people are gathering round statues with spray cans and paint brushes and other people are gathering round them as “protectors” and “defenders” and it’s interesting that the cenotaph in Glasgow has been one of the monuments to attract attention because that particular memorial can help us unravel the madness. It can help us see who we really are.

What happened in Glasgow was that a few hundred people, organised by a group called the Loyalist Defence League, gathered at the cenotaph in George Square to, in their own words, defend it against far-left thugs who’ve been defacing war memorials. A similar group of “defenders” appeared around the cenotaph in London and more than a hundred people were arrested.

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In the event, no one actually turned up to threaten the war memorials in London or Glasgow, but, on the face of it, the action of the defenders was a response to earlier Black Lives Matter protests in which there had been damage. The statue of Churchill in Westminster was sprayed with the word “racist” and the memorial to Earl Haig in Whitehall was defaced with the letters ACAB (“all cops are b******s”). The London cenotaph itself was not damaged.

It’s interesting that a statue of Earl Haig was one of the memorials targeted because the Scot who commanded the British forces in the First World War is also strongly linked to the cenotaph in George Square and his story can help us get to the bottom of all this. Haig and all the other men of copper and bronze on their granite plinths can no longer change, or adapt, or have opinions, or be prejudiced about anything any more, whereas the men and women jostling at their feet can. It’s the protestors who are the problem, not the statues.

Haig’s link to the Glasgow cenotaph will help explain what I mean. It was Haig who unveiled the memorial in 1924 and the crowd was so big on the day that the people overflowed into the adjoining streets. The Glasgow Herald said it was another sign of the regard in which the great man was held: a few years before, he’d been awarded the freedom of Glasgow as a mark of respect and a few years later, after his death, huge crowds gathered to watch his coffin being taken through the streets of Edinburgh. He was without question a national hero.

And then things changed. The MP Alan Clark wrote a book called The Donkeys which excoriated the British war efforts and then Joan Littlewood did the same in Oh! What a Lovely War, and then Blackadder showed Haig sweeping up models of dead soldiers and chucking them over his shoulder and it doesn’t matter that most of it was historically inaccurate, the popular reputation of Haig changed from hero to incompetent, heartless buffoon.

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The first point to make is that all of that is perfectly fine in a way: we’re all entitled to our views of historical figures and many think Haig was a buffoon and Churchill was a racist and maybe some people think Robert the Bruce was a racist too (Bruce’s statue at Bannockburn was another of the memorials that was targeted). We’re also entitled to change our views and think that some men – because they’re almost always men – are worthy of statues at one point in history and not worthy of them at another point when attitudes change. That’s fine.

But the bigger point is that the protestors, on both sides, who gather in fury round statues are guilty of a few problematical ways of thinking. First, in the words of Churchill’s grand-daughter Emma Soames, many of us are prone to viewing history through the prism of the present rather than assessing people in the context of their times, which is surely the only fair way to do it.

It’s also obvious some people are looking at the memorials through the prism of prejudice. Some of the London protesters may genuinely believe the cenotaph is at risk, but it looked more like they were motivated by the prejudices of Tommy Robinson, whose name they chanted. It’s also fair to say some of the Glasgow "defenders" were probably motivated by the city’s age-old religious divide. And who knows what the motivation was for painting “racist” on Robert the Bruce’s statue. Some suggested it was done by unionists to smear the cause of nationalism but perhaps the people who came up with that theory are motivated by prejudices of their own.

There’s a lot we can learn from all of this and the mistakes of the “statue defenders”, but the main lesson is still being missed, which is that we are all taking a simplistic view of memorials. Earl Haig was a complicated figure with a complicated record. There’s no gainsaying the criticism that a different approach at the Somme could have lowered the casualty rate, but read his diaries and you’ll also see him arguing with French commanders who wanted to push harder and further. It’s also often forgotten that he riled the Tories after the war by campaigning for more support for ex-servicemen. It’s one of the reasons he became so popular.

READ MORE: WATCH: Police stop clash between protesters in Glasgow

The point is that Haig, like Churchill, and like Robert the Bruce, was a flawed human being with a variable record and neither the crowds lauding Haig as a hero in the 1920s were right but neither are the people condemning him as a villain. The real picture is much more subtle and nuanced and the same applies to almost all our statues.

I realise, in the end, this is probably an argument for refusing to put up statues in the first place and I get that: attacking a statue is a blunt instrument but so is erecting one. I also realise that explaining historical nuance to a person with a spray can in their hand is not easy.

But faced with the fact that these statues exist in our public places, the least we can do is to be fair and realistic about them. We can also acknowledge that when we talk about the statues, what we’re really doing is talking about ourselves and who we are. The statues are up there on their plinths, unblinking and unchanging, and we’re down here: divided, angry, and intolerant.

All columnists are free to express their opinions. They don’t necessarily represent the view of The Herald.