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Edward Colston: Bristol slave trader statue 'was an affront'

My surname suggests a Norse/Viking heritage so just about everywhere within reach of a longboat will have a historic gripe against me.
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I live in a place with far more open racial predudices and being white is not top dog, maybe no2 in the hierarchy
 
There's more today on concealing history

"In 2013 I discovered that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been unlawfully concealing 1.2m historical files at a highly secure government compound at Hanslope Park, north of London.

Those files contained millions upon millions of pages of records stretching back to 1662, spanning the slave trade, the Boer wars, two world wars, the cold war and the UK’s entry into the European Common Market. More than 20,000 files concerned the withdrawal from empire.

There were so many of them that they took up 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving at a specially built repository that a Foreign Office minister had opened in a private ceremony in 1992. Their retention was in breach of the Public Records Acts, and they had effectively been held beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/18/lying-history-britain-statues-slave-trade
 
Looks like Cecil Rhodes is on the way down (Independent).

PS ‘Little Mark Francois’ is now a thing (Twitter).
Love Cold War Steve’s tableau vivant - Battle of Bosworth, Gammon-style. I’m looking to start a pour-your-own fast setting cement Mark Francois garden gnome kit business. Choose from one of Mark in five unique and embarrassing poses ( not suitable for children).
 
This country can never be 'cleansed' of the many, many sins of its past. Everything is fruit of the poison tree. Our current prosperity is ultimately based on threatening / bullying / tricking / invading lots of countries around the world and taking what we liked. To expunge our sins would mean selling everything we own, demolishing all buildings and jumping in the sea.

Fine, take down a few of the easy targets but don't kid yourself that you're absolving yourself in any way or that you're doing what's right.

It's just another way of deflecting attention from the hard part, namely improving race relations in the here and now. A start would be more publicity for the Museum of Slavery in Liverpool and including the subject in the history curriculum.
 
Fine, take down a few of the easy targets but don't kid yourself that you're absolving yourself in any way or that you're doing what's right.

It's just another way of deflecting attention from the hard part, namely improving race relations in the here and now. A start would be more publicity for the Museum of Slavery in Liverpool and including the subject in the history curriculum.

I agree completely. I worry that taking the ugly revisionist memorials to these racists, human traffickers and tyrants down is actually brushing history under the carpet. I’d far prefer them to be brightly spotlit along with the politics and institutions behind them. Their full true history needs to taught and understood. Humans can be thoroughly nasty things and we need the unvarnished evidence of things like slavery, colonialism, the Nazi death camps, Stalin’s Russia etc to exist fully in the public consciousness as a warning as to where certain political ideologies would happily take us again given half a chance.
 
I never forget that we are where we are because of all the evil and the good that went before us.
There is no one with the conscience of a 21st century upbringing that could say slavery is good. Not even a Yaxley Lennon, I would wager.
There should be memorials to everyone, especially those that suffered, that created our world today and the resulting accumulated wealth that we now benefit from.
 
I agree completely. I worry that taking the ugly revisionist memorials to these racists, human traffickers and tyrants down is actually brushing history under the carpet. I’d far prefer them to be brightly spotlit along with the politics and institutions behind them. Their full true history needs to taught and understood. Humans can be thoroughly nasty things and we need the unvarnished evidence of things like slavery, colonialism, the Nazi death camps, Stalin’s Russia etc to exist fully in the public consciousness as a warning as to where certain political ideologies would happily take us again given half a chance.

Do we want to live in the kind of society gives visible public recognition to despicable characters?
 


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