The English started the slave trade

[Annamaria14]

I just saw a black American woman post online,

"The English started the slave trade. They caused all our problems, they hurt generations of people. I will never set foot in that country".

What do you think? I felt a bit guilty, because the English did cause a lot of problems around the world. Have we learned from our past. How can we do better in the future

I'm not ashamed of my heritage, I'm aware of it in the sense of not wanting the bad parts to happen again. Those who don't know their history being doomed to repeat it and all that.

Since someone mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall, if there's anyone who hasn't seen it Goodbye Lenin is a lovely film and I think did a good job of depicting the weird mix of rejection and nostalgia people can have for the past and how it's tied in to feelings about specific people.

(I remember the Berlin Wall coming down but for me the first big political event that really made an impact was the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, mostly because the students were just a few years older than I was. I have a feeling that the images of police firing rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protestors in the US will be this generation's Tiananmen moment.)

Indentured service mustn't be ignored when looking at slave labour:

Especially as with student "loans", it's all to easy to simply recreate that system so future generations never escape their "debt" and therefore have to live where they are told and work for who they are told until the "debt" is cleared.

Of course America is also allowed (by itself) to profit from prisoners. Which provides a very good incentive to successive legislatures to create more crimes to create more criminals so they can invest in private prisons that become money presses on the backs of human misery and suffering. Sound familiar ?

The only thing I can never forgive Madiba for is saying meeting the Spice Girls was the greatest day of his life.

Lying bastard.

Of course, indentured service had an end (if the person lived long enough to see it), but the point is, people in powerful positions have been using less powerful people as their workhorses for centuries.

Yes, the Thirteenth Amendment explictly retained slavery as a form of legal punishment by due process of the law.

To this day.

meanwhile, the Colston statue has ended up ... in the harbour.

History is just trolling us now. It's worth learning history just to appreciate the irony ...

What about the "criminals" transported to Botany Bay for very minor transgressions or the children who were sent to Canada after the war and were badly treated. The working classes were trampled on.

Have you ever watched Garrows law about 18 century justice

Cry Freedom (South Africa/Steven Biko)

The year of Living Dangerously (Indonesia during a coup)
The Killing Fields (Cambodia)

The Lives of Others (Stasi Germany)

The Motorcycle Diaries (Che Guevara's post med travels around Sth America)

@Invictus is good to watch

I have a feeling that the images of police firing rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protestors in the US will be this generation's Tiananmen moment

I have a feeling this generation's Tianamen moment is more likely to happen in Hong Kong.

If you want films that make you cry leaving the cinema, then "A Dry White Season" should be up there. ("Une saison seche blanc" if I recall it's alternate title). Horrific and not yet out of living memory.

What's going to happen in Hong Kong is going to be even worse than what happened in 89. The UK should have offered British citizenship to anyone from Hong Kong who wanted it before the handover, because it was always going to come to this eventually.

The destruction of a historic statue is cultural vandalism.

Adding to the film list, the man the mother lives with in Pan's Labyrinth is a chillingly accurate depiction of a fascist, and there's a definite emotional satisfaction in the scene where Maribel Verdu tells him that his son won't even know his name.

Frederick Engels “The Condition of the Working Class in England 1848” describes lives of adults and children that could be described as slavery. How we didn’t have a revolution, I’ll never know.

The destruction of a historic statue is cultural vandalism

Is that an absolute ?

And are you using "historic" for "old" ?

And i am pretty certain that view has been countered by people noting that we aren't awash with historic statues of black figures which would make a stance like that more valid. In fact the very preponderance of statues of white (mainly) men is simply perpetuating the attitudes of those that raised them.

Like the airbrushing from history of people like Mary Seacole (who I mention as an adopted Brummie) ?

(I might sometimes see how my internal monologue would sound like delivered by Brian Cox [not that one])

We had it suggested earlier that those Victorian Mancunians desribed by Engels were all beneficiaries of slavery because they put sugar in their tea.

No sugar. No tea. No cups.

Downton Fucking Abbey has a lot to answer for. It is how much of the world sees us.

Frederick Engels “The Condition of the Working Class in England 1848” describes lives of adults and children that could be described as slavery. How we didn’t have a revolution, I’ll never know.

If we had, would you have ?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kett%27s_Rebellion

I really can't bring myself to give a fuck about a statue of a man who did terrible things being dumped in the water. What exactly do you think your culture is, or want it to be, if that statue is something you feel protective towards?

Also note that statues cannot feel pain, unlike the people who are having rubber bullets and tear gas fired at them, being beaten with batons, etc.

We had Chartism. It was all very polite.

Mary Seacole was a Scot, and she is properly honoured by the Seacole rehab centre at Headly Court.

Don't call her a nurse.

@Wauden

There is no room for anything except Manichean certainties. That is a historical warning that the Year Zero enthusiasts have not learned.

People like to make childlike simplistic narratives. It is not clear where Colston made his fortune. He did have involvement with the slave trade, but he didn't start the African trade.

People will come out of the wordwork to defend Muhammad regarding his child bride, and his slaves, on the basis of 'historical context' but can judge certain people if we want to by contemporary mores. But only as it suits. Few historical figures are saints. Pulling down statues doesn't help.

Didn’t the Lancashire mill workers strike against slavery, even though for all intents and purposes, they were slaves themselves?There’s an episode of “In Our Time” about it I keep meaning to listen to..

@DGRossetti. Yes, it is a historic statue. It is listed by Historic England.

historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1202137