As a teenager growing up in Newcastle, I played a small role in a long campaign of attrition waged by my generation against the city council. Our single objective was to ensure that by the end of each weekend the statues of central Newcastle all had a traffic cone on their heads, or had been made to look silly in some other way. As well as providing them with traffic cone hats (the classic), we balanced empty beer bottles on the outstretched hands of those statues striking heroic poses. If that didn’t work, we’d try wedging cigarettes between their bronze lips.

Each week, the council would remove the traffic cones and clean up the monuments. Each weekend, we would pour out of pubs and clubs and, under the cover of darkness, climb up plinths again and put back the cones, bottles and cigarettes. The statue to the great railway engineer, George Stephenson, near the city’s Central Station, and much lower than most of the others, demanded less drunken climbing and so became our favourite target.

It was not that we had any issue with George Stephenson, or with any of the other figures from the past whom the good people of the city had chosen to memorialise. It was just that we instinctively found these memorials pompous, kitsch and ripe for ridicule and we revelled in making them look preposterous. Youthful disrespect, perhaps, but we found it amusing. Statues don’t seem so funny now.

In Charlottesville a young woman was killed while protesting against white supremacists who, alongside groups of neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan, chose a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee as the rallying point for their gathering.

In the US and the UK, drab, grey monuments that, just a few years ago, we might have paid little attention to are at the centre of heated and angry debates. More than 30 US cities are in the process of removing memorials to the Confederacy, or have already done so. Each removal is accompanied by a policing operation aimed at preventing violence. In Britain, serious violence has been avoided but tempers have frayed and divisions exposed over the fates of statues to Cecil Rhodes and Edward Colston, the Bristol slave trader.

Despite the anger and the violence, little of this is really about statues. They’re the focus, not the issue, which is probably why Donald Trump was so keen to talk about them rather than his refusal to denounce neo-Nazis. This, ultimately, is a battle of ideas. It is a new chapter in what the Australians call the “history wars” – political struggles in which versions of the past that have long gone largely uncontested are exposed and challenged.

Oriel college in Oxford was the scene of protests over its statue of Cecil Rhodes . Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images

As statues, along with the names of streets, schools and other institutions, have been one of the ways in which certain versions of the past have been given literal solidity and the hint of official recognition, they have become physical targets in a conflict that is otherwise about what is less tangible – ideas and history.

The great untruth around which everything pivots is the idea that the defenders of these statues are the defenders of history and truth; while those who want to see them toppled or contextualised are the Huns at the gate, who would destroy national histories and bring down great men.

Had Colston's statue gone years ago, the ugly details of his amoral life would never have become so widely broadcast

As a result of this positioning, we’re yet to have a proper debate about the contention that statues always represent some form of historical truth. Instead, we’ve had a torrent of near-identical “where do you draw the line”, “thin end of the wedge” arguments, the weakest of which are so formulaic that they could surely have been written by an algorithm. The faux innocence of the writers of such pieces is painfully disingenuous.

Yet something potentially positive and significant is emerging because, as the new history wars play out, the defenders of statues to slave traders and imperialists in Britain, and Confederate generals in the US, might prove their own worst enemies. By choosing to draw their lines and make their stands around the defence of statues, they are accidently allowing histories that might otherwise have remained hidden to be revealed.

Here and in the US, the back stories of the statues, and the shadowy organisations and individuals who paid for them, are being revealed. As are details of the murderous careers of the men memorialised in marble and bronze. The very aspects of history that these monuments were intended to conceal are now freely circulating.

By attempting to brush aside Edward Colston’s pivotal role in the early decades of British slave trading and directing all attention on to his philanthropy, his defenders have protested so much and for so long that more people know more about Colston and Bristol’s role in the slave trade than ever. By keeping the debate going, Colston’s defenders have achieved what historians like me never could. Had his statue been quietly removed years ago, the ugly details of his amoral life would never have become so widely broadcast. A bigger cat is out of the bag in the US, as millions are learning that many Confederate statues, around which the neo-Confederates and white supremacists are rallying, are not 19th-century monuments, but cheap, mass-produced, cookie-cutter memorials erected in the 20th century. Many date not from the 1860s but the 1960s, and are therefore younger than some of the white supremacists determined to defend them.

The implication in much recent reporting has been that, by becoming totems around which those white supremacists are rallying, these statues are being co-opted and misused. The truth is that they are performing the function for which they were erected. Paid for and erected by southern lobby groups, rather than local people, they were intended to reinforce white supremacy and shore up a romanticised and profoundly distorted version of the civil war and its causes.

If the motivation to build monuments to the Confederacy had really been about southern heritage, why did it take 80 years for the programme of memorialisation to get properly started? If history was the driver, surely the south would also be full of monuments dedicated to the slave system that made it the richest place on earth in the late 1850s? If this was about history rather than racism, why is it that the only Confederate general not to have been honoured with such a statue is General Judah Philip Benjamin, the only significant Jewish figure to have emerged from the Confederacy?

A monument dedicated to the Confederate women of Maryland is removed in Baltimore. Photograph: DDP USA/REX/Shutterstock/ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock

What about their locations? The four Confederate monuments that, until recently, loomed over Baltimore – a city that was never part of the Confederacy and in which African-Americans make up 64% of the population – were never intended to defend southern heritage but to assert power over black Americans. The defence of history argument is bunk. The fact that Donald Trump has regurgitated it should make that clear.

As the genesis stories behind these statues become more widely known, the myth that this is about history and heritage is beginning to collapse. These statues have a history all right, but one that has precious little to do with the civil war and everything to do with racism, and by defending them that history is being splashed across front pages. This was not the game plan.

What those who are fighting the history wars from behind these monuments have in their favour is that most of us, for understandable reasons, have an almost instinctual opposition to the removal of statues; we flinch at the idea of antiques of any sort being toppled or removed. The stones of the past have become almost fetishised – we are roused to anger when developers win permission to demolish Victorian buildings and moved to sorrow when fire or flood claims a slice of the past. Far more shocking are images of deliberate destruction – the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the zealots of the Taliban, the destruction of parts of ancient Palmyra by the thugs of Isis.

But we are growing more sophisticated as we come to understand that not all monuments were created equal and that some were erected for cynical reasons that have little to do with history or heritage. History, after all, is a process, not a position, and it is not best written in bronze and marble. It is complex, plastic and ever-changing; all things that heroic statues are not.

Historians spend their days engaged in the literally endless task of reshaping and expanding our view of the past, while statues are fixed and inflexible. Whatever we decide to do about them, here and in the US, we need to accept that statues are not delivery systems for the public understanding of history and that some were principally created to silence marginalised voices rather than commemorate events past.

David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster. His most recent book is Black and British: A Forgotten History