[ianch99]

Originally Posted by Maggy

The problem now seems to be that we are arguing about statues and not about actually addressing the ways to deal with racial discrimination here and in THIS time.

This post summarises perfectly the current situation. The right are deliberately playing the emotive patriotism card:

the Prime Minister promises to fight "with every breath in his body" any attempt to remove the statue of Winston Churchill from Parliament Square

There is no mainstream campaign to remove Churchill's statue as far as I know. What this aims to do is to divert and water down any real discussion about racism in this country. The BLM inspired marches are not about tearing down statues, they are about the recognition of the real racism that black & asian people face in today's Britain. The fact that the Leave campaign, aided and abetted by the right wing MSM, played on these latent racist traits just adds to the problem.

Of course the Left never learn. While it was appropriate given the futile polite requests to remove the Colston statue over the years, that the statue was pulled down, it should have stopped there. Instead, the small in number militant Left chose to encourage a simplistic and childish approach to criticise any statue that had a link to slavery in the past. This naive thinking just plays into the hands of the right and allows them to misdirect anger & concern and escape the serious conversation they should be engaged in.

At the end of the day, statues are there to celebrate the life & achievements of the individual. If, in a modern context, that person has very little cause to be celebrated and moreover, is a visceral reminder of past evil deeds then there is a good case for it to be consigned to a museum.

Taking down a statue is not "whitewashing history". Many great men & women of history often have a dark side. This should be taken into consideration when put alongside the good. The judgement is, more often that not, nuanced and not the simplistic sloganing that the militant Left employ.

Take Churchill for example, he was, in his younger years a racist as were many of his peers. He was culpable in contributing to the causes of the Famine in Bengal in WWII. How much personal liability he had is very much debated by historians but he was involved. That said, you need to research and understand the history of the person and the period they lived in before you can make a serious judgment. Something the militant Left are incapable of doing it seems.

Going back to Colston, this quote from a letter to a newspaper sums up why his statue needed to be removed:

"I suggest Bristol replaces Edward Colston with a different statue every day to honour an individual whom Colston “shipped”. It would be 233 years before plinth became empty again. That is the enormity of the man’s inhumanity."