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Jun 2020
10:02am, 8 Jun 2020
23,157 posts
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Sushi.
There’s been mass gatherings throughout lockdown before these protests.
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Jun 2020
10:10am, 8 Jun 2020
23,382 posts
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Johnny Blaze
I agree. I'm not going to lose a huge amount of sleep about this one ending up in the harbour, but I wonder about the mindset of people who will desecrate the Cenotaph to make their "point". My suspicion is that they are not terribly bright, and certainly not exactly nice people. I'm seeing a lot of apologist action going on at the moment from armchair Jacobins who are quite comfortably distanced from the action.
This subject has a long history in the US and I have thought about it a lot. My personal opinion is that "egregious" statues should be placed in a museum where they can form an opportunity to educate people. If some of them slowly find their way into "long-term storage" that would be a terrible shame.
The violent erasure of cultural artefacts doesn't have great associations for me - history tells us that - and I would rather people stopped and thought about where it can end up. It doesn't have to end up with the Taleban dynamiting buddhist statues (for instance), but historical and cultural erasure is a technique beloved of totalitarians, religious zealots and the mob, and as a general rule we should try to avoid it.
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Jun 2020
10:43am, 8 Jun 2020
2,626 posts
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um
JB - don't disagree, but what does 'egregious' mean and who decides?
The vast majority of our statues are monarchs or leaders who were 'responsible' for a lot more than 19,000 deaths - whether 'brits' send off to acquire & defend the empire in some form (often with life expectany of 3-4 months), the 100s of thousands send to die in the Somme, those children sent down mines, mills etc.
Life in the past doesn't sound very nice at all, and not many heros, when viewed though today's lenses.
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Jun 2020
10:47am, 8 Jun 2020
2,770 posts
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J2R
Well expressed, JB! I worry about this whole business of sanitising the past. Colston's actions as a slave trader were obviously vile (although not atypical of the mores of the time). But you will find very few historical figures who conform properly to modern thinking as regards racial and gender equality, etc., when you dig below the surface.
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Jun 2020
10:54am, 8 Jun 2020
2,554 posts
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Fellrunning
You'd have to demolish a good part of Bristol if you wanted to eradicate references to the slave trade. Far better to put Colston into storage and replace him with (Say) a statue of Thomas Clarkson (forerunner of Wilberforce in the anti slavery enlightenment).
I understand the anger. Even now the establishment fails to look at itself in the mirror.
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Jun 2020
10:54am, 8 Jun 2020
7,558 posts
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jda
In this case it wasn't a cultural artefact of any significance, just a statue put up by some victorians harking back to the days of empire and people had been trying for years to get a plaque with some historical context added to it.
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Jun 2020
10:59am, 8 Jun 2020
14,128 posts
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richmac
It should have been removed from outside public display years ago and put in a museum and given it's proper context, as various campaigns and petitions had requested.
You imagine being a black Bristolian and seeing, in the city you call home, a statue celebrating a slaver. How's that going to make you feel ?
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Jun 2020
11:16am, 8 Jun 2020
23,383 posts
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Johnny Blaze
Well quite. But wholesale erasure of the past isn't desirable either. There has to be a balance and "decision by the mob" is the antithesis of rational examination.
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Jun 2020
11:45am, 8 Jun 2020
16,652 posts
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Bazoaxe
I have no issue with demonstrations but I don’t like when they turn into nasty confrontations. That doesn’t help anyone.
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Jun 2020
11:45am, 8 Jun 2020
30,210 posts
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SPR
"Over the last few years many negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan, but the white liberal who is more devoted to "order" than to justice, who prefers tranquility to equality..."
- Martin Luther King Jr
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Fantasy General Election
Jul 2024