History and happenstance

Are we seeing a new kind of iconoclasm? That is, are statues being torn down, most notably in the UK and US, to erase the history of almost anyone without any kind of consent? Targeted cyberattacks are growing in frequency, most recently with medical research centres and hospitals being attacked by 'hostile state actors'. The country that is doing the most about this is Estonia. How? How did the Kim dynasty come to power and stay there in North Korea? By telling a powerful fiction and keep telling it and telling it and growing it. It's often thought that the Catholic Church and science are diametrically opposed, with Galileo being offered as the perfect example of this incompatibility. Is this really the case or might the Catholic Church have given birth to science?