The statue of Colston in Bristol has been taken down by the protestors

[MrsPeacockInTheLibrary]

If you know anything of the history of Bristol and the slave trade - his name and legacy is deeply controversial. There are two sides to it at least.

I don't know who was responsible for it being torn down. But it is a big development for this city and its long history of protests.

Churchill next?

Let’s just destroy all history.

I’m from this part of the world and lived in Bristol at one point.

I’m glad about this - statues are for people we adore or commemorate. This hasn’t been the case with Colston for some time, and the people of Bristol have been campaigning for his removal for years.

People might say we need statues like this as a reminder but this needs context - far better addressed in other ways.

Hmmm is it destroying history or making new history?

If no one had ever 'destroyed history' we would still be sitting in caves wondering how to warm up our food.

The statue represents an unpleasant practice

History can’t be wiped or amended though.

Statues aren’t neutral - we never put a statue up to someone we don’t want to celebrate, do we?? This one was put up in the 1890s, just because people then wanted to celebrate a slave trader from 100 years earlier, doesn’t mean we have to keep it up just because it’s survived that long... and I love history & old stuff.

You can’t make new history - unless you’ve got a time machine. Viewing the past through the lens of 21st sensibilities is so revisionist.

Statues are for all sorts of purposes, not just reverence. If we try to airbrush history, we can’t learn from its lessons.

I can see why they did it.

Agree. No one puts a statue up to commemorate a bad person. Statues are for celebratoon. It's right it's come down and in its own way was a part of history.

Statues are a pretty useless way of learning about history, so i would argue that while learning about the slave trade is vital, the continuing presence of a celebratory statue of a slave trader is irrelevant to people’s education.

@alsohuman

Of course you can make new history. It's not changing what happened it's adding to it.

History will now say 'there was a statue to Colston who was a slave trader but it was pulled down in June 2020 by BLM protestors.'

Oh dear!

Will they just rename all Colston buildings, roads etc, or tear them down?

What about Wills?

And all the other historical figures?

If you airbrush them out then your history will have holes... it's bad enough as it is having to remember not to mention great swathes of white, English, British history without eradicating it altogether.

And if you think I'm showing my white prejudice/privilege think again.

Think about the way WWII is being re written, how much if a fucking theme park Auschwitz is becoming in the minds of some selfie taking, souvenir hunting twats. Year on year we don't remember, we forget.

Revisionists if all sorts need to be resisted.

I think maybe the country should start repatriating artefacts and "finds" that were looted and stolen back to their home countries and fill up the British museums with statues such as this. They are a part of history and can be contrxtualised as such in a museum, but they need to make space by returning a lot of things to their rightful owners (and none of that we are better caretakers for it nonsense-they survived hundreds if not thousands of years before being stolen and brought here)

well done them!
there was a petition up already about it.
Some of the streets in Scotland were said to be renamed, ie, Buchanan Street

Good on whoever did it. If you want to keep it for historical reasons, stick it in a museum, in the shameful things we celebrated in the past section.

I agree that you should not airbrush history, and there is a place for art but believe this was the right time to do this.

@curiousaboutsamphire

But history books will still stay the same.

It's just that people considered to have committed heinous crimes will no longer have statues up to show that as a society we no longer revere them.

I honestly feel that those who try and protect 'history' are usually harbouring some kind of ill placed pride in the history they feel is being erased/some kind of prejudice against those who want to instigate change

The bronze should be melted down and a black artist commissioned to make something to replace Colston IMO.

I'm glad it's gone. I also think it's a shame it wasn't removed years ago and took this direct action to get it down. Would have been far better to have it removed officially instead of it having to come to this.

Completely agree @CuriousaboutSamphire. Rewriting history has very unpleasant facist undertones. We’ll be burning books next.

Brilliant. Similar happened here in Ireland when statues to British colonists were blown up. Brilliant graveyard of communist leaders outside Budapest. It's not whitewashing history, they can put them in museums or statue graveyards. Good riddance to them. Here's to more.

I feel vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that, in the videos I've seen, the crowd appears to be almost entirely white. I can't articulate why I feel that way, though.

There has been years of campaigns to get rid or that statue or change the wording, all came to nothing. Images Ive seen do not show mostly white people.

As the old cliche says, do you see statues of Hitler in Berlin?

Our view of history is constantly changing. It is impossible to avoid seeing history through the lens of our own time and experience

I agree that this statue being pulled down during a protest is a historical moment in itself. I think that is much more powerful - and fitting - than it being pulled down by bureaucratic consensus.

Loads of history is very problematic to 21st century minds but the answer to that is neither to seek to erase it nor to pretend it’s not problematic, but to be brave enough to confront it.

How is is rewriting history?