to think removing certain statues and renaming certain street names is not erasing our history?

[chomalungma]

It's just not celebrating people who are seen as controversial.
People can still learn about these people in books.
In films
At school.

It's just that they aren't being celebrated by having public recognition and the honour of a statue or a street name.

I would link to a story - but there would be so many of them as the Government (and certain media organisations) seem to think that it's a war on our history.

I guess a lot of it is down to the person being celebrated. And whether that celebration is still deemed 'worthy' 100s of years later.

Statues have been removed in the past for a range of reasons. I wonder how many of the Victorian statues will still be up in 200 years time?

Any British institution that has been around for centuries and involved with the elite is almost certain to have directly or indirectly benefited from slavery and/or colonialism.

Researching and publishing that information is an important step in acknowledging history. Someone can have been philanthropic but also a plantation owner making their fortune from the work of slaves. Giving both sides of the story is crucial.

Should all statutes come down or buildings be renamed? I don’t think so, but case by case should be explored and debated by people with actual links to that case. Each example should always be contextualised though, giving a true assessment and explanation of where and how any money was earned, and the true price of it.

[quote SarahAndQuack]@VinylDetective, it was necessary, though.

And how are people meant to show dissent when all other protest options have been exhausted, except by civil disobedience?

She did exactly what she should have done. For you to say you don't honour her for that is disgusting.[/quote]
Yes it was necessary. It shouldn’t have been. If I honour her - which I do - it makes no difference why. And that isn’t disgusting. It’s just different to you. I find your intolerance and readiness to accuse someone you don’t know of misogyny and racism pretty disgusting.

@vinyldetective - no, it makes a great difference why you honour someone.

Saying you won't honour a black woman for civil disobedience is racist.

I don't need to know you to be disgusted by that. In claiming I need to know you, you are asking for special pleading. 'Oh look at me, I'm not racist like the other racists! I'm nice, me!'

If you honour someone for making an entirely peaceful protest. then honour them. Don't start splitting hairs and say you think it'd be ok if only they weren't black.

Saying you won't honour a black woman for civil disobedience is racist

Of course it isn’t. I honour her for what she was, not what she did. That’s not remotely racist. And it has nothing to do with her being black.

You don’t need to know me. I’m glad you don’t. But you need to be very careful about calling strangers vile names with zero evidence.

Surely the point is it is our history, and without it we would not be where we are now. No lots isn’t good, with the knowledge we have now, at that time it was the norm

We have also a lot to be proud off, and we have learnt that what we did in the past could, and should ,have been done better, and can be used as a lesson on what not to do

Just as it can be for every county in the world

@VinylDetective

Saying you won't honour a black woman for civil disobedience is racist

Of course it isn’t. I honour her for what she was, not what she did. That’s not remotely racist. And it has nothing to do with her being black.

You don’t need to know me. I’m glad you don’t. But you need to be very careful about calling strangers vile names with zero evidence.

It is racist to say you won't honour a woman living when she did, for civil disobedience based on race.

She - and the movement around her - had no other option.

You are acting as if civil disobedience is a threat to others. All she did was to sit down on a bus! What is wrong with you that you cannot honour her for that?

I do understand that there could be acts of civil disobedience you might feel were excessive or hurtful.

But a woman sitting down on a bus?

Really?

We need to learn from history.
Do we need to publicly honour people with statues and road names etc whose history has been controversial

But who decides whether or not an historic figure was controversial? Some might think so, some might not

Oliver Cromwell, Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela could be called controversial by a minority of people but I'm not sure that's a good enough reason to tear their statues down

It is racist to say you won't honour a woman living when she did, for civil disobedience based on race.

Oh my goodness, please stop this. Racism is a specific phenomenon: prejudice against someone based on their race. If a person refuses to ‘honour’ people who break the law because they have a level of respect for law that prohibits this, and it has nothing to do with the colour of anyone’s skin, it’s not racism. It just isn’t. And using the word ‘racism’ to mean ‘people who disagree with Black people’ isn’t going to help this cause. It’s just going to annoy people.

I am not saying I don’t have sympathy with those disobedience campaigns, or that I disagree with them. But people who do disagree with them aren’t automatically racists. They might have other reasons for their position.

VinylDetective

For the hundredth time, from Collins......a celebration in memory of someone or something.

Commemoration and celebration are synonymous. The commemoration of someone or something is a celebration of that someone or something.

If Rosa Parks had not been as courageous as she was, if she had not acted against authority, she would not have been remembered today.

If more people in 1933 Germany had been brave enough to join together and act against the recently introduced restrictions and abhorrent emerging situation, history may have followed a very different pathway. Six million might not have been murdered if people didn’t turn away and blindly follow lawfulness.

Evil abounds when good people do nothing. When wrongs aren’t righted, for fear of standing up for what you know to be right.

This has taken an odd turn where there is an attempt to regulate what a person should or should not think. None of us can do that for other people. Societies that try are not free.

Cherry, I have never suggested that BLM involves malign forces or that it detracts from modern day slavery. The actual organisation BLM U.K. has raised a great deal of money which may well be put to good use.

I am making a distinction between people who take action to materially improve lives - Rosa Parks, the Suffragettes and people whose aim is to, as you put it, ‘change the narrative’ who have no material aim or plan like the statue defacers, capitol mob and most Twitter ‘activists’ of all political stripes.

This has taken an odd turn where there is an attempt to regulate what a person should or should not think.

Absolutely. We need much less of that as a society. I'm very sick of the extreme left and right implying that you are x, y or z if you don't agree with this exact thing. Its worrying territory.

like the statue defacers, capitol mob and most Twitter ‘activists’ of all political stripes.

It makes a lot of sense to me to pull these groups together. They're all one and the same, albeit that they have different motivations. My feeling towards them is the same.

The law applies to all those groups. One of the really perverse effects is that pulling down of statutes will mean a legal change which will punish people more harshly for doing so.

@ChristmasSexyTime

This has taken an odd turn where there is an attempt to regulate what a person should or should not think.

Absolutely. We need much less of that as a society. I'm very sick of the extreme left and right implying that you are x, y or z if you don't agree with this exact thing. Its worrying territory.

Glad to see sanity has returned to what had been a civilised debate. The assertion that if you disagree with me you must be racist and misogynist is new to me and took me aback if I’m honest. Perhaps I’m naive - or don’t hang about on Twitter enough.

It's definitely a Twitter-driven thing @VinylDetective

There's a great docu on Netflix at the mo called The Social Dilemma. It shows how social media has driven this polarisation, and the accompanying accusatory culture. As a society, we've largely lost our ability to stay centred and respectful in our discussions. We just leap to calling people names based on scant information, safe in the knowledge that we have the mob behind us.

It's vicious and tribal and I can't stand it. I don't do social media (except MN) and I think you can spot Twitter/FB addicts a mile off by their sloganeering and accusatory/ ad-hominem argumentative style.

It's all very 'BURN THE WITCH'.

I’ll watch that @ChristmasSexyTime, it sounds really interesting. As a second wave feminist, being accused of misogyny was a wtf moment! It’s a worrying trend, not least because it stifles debate so effectively.

fairynick
We have a lot to learn from Germany. They are genuinely sorry for the atrocities that happened, and do their best to move with the times. They’ve removed any nazi symbols, torn down statues of SS officers, and erected numerous memorials and museums so that the past is never forgotten, and the same mistakes aren’t made again.

(And have a large number of younger citizens who are sick to death of being preached at their words, not mine and have embraced a racist, neo-Nazi mindset in a very alarming and unpleasant way: more atrocities committed against Jews and Muslims and race-crimes in general, more hate-crimes, more Faragealikes preaching nationalism and getting elected... www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/06/germany-failing-to-tackle-rise-in-hate-crime/ )

I do like the German idea of setting into the pavement a small plaque on the site of the last free residence or work of every known Jew-killing during the war. Stolpersteine really bring it home to you just how many Jews from all over Germany were murdered during the Holocaust, as you walk around town. Westphalians would like to suggest that they never approved of the (not Westphalian! No, no, Bavarian, we don't like Bavaria!) Nazis, but there are a lot of those plaques in their streets even so.

And they will be a lot less easy than statues for people who have decided they are insulting to pull down, given that they are down already and hard to get back up out of their concrete.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime the Stolpersteine project is really poignant. It's also an excellent example of why commemorative public art isn't always synonymous with celebration. Nobody is celebrating the holocaust.

Your first point is also extremely pertinent. This is the other side of the coin that these twitter activists can't see, or don't correlate with their own behaviour. I think there's a strong correlation with the rise of the right across Europe and the brexit referendum with the #NoDebate ethos that seems to be ruling everything. It's a wider issue than statues but the Momentum lot infuriate me because they refuse to see that their actions and behaviour is fomenting the rise of the far right. You can't just shut conversations down because you don't like them. The results speak for themselves.

The Stolpersteine aren't just for Jews, now I think about it; they are also for homosexuals, Romani, JWs, the mentally or physically disabled, Communists, black people, Freemasons, the "wrong sort" of Christians, conscientious objectors, and anyone else the Nazis murdered not for their actions but for what they were or what they believed.

Yes; shutting down debate is dangerous. No platforming is to me a symptom of being unable to debate against the person no-platformed. I wouldn't even no-platform Trump: I would want him to be shown up rather than shut down, debated rather than just allowed to bellow undisputed. (Forcing him to debate Biden rather than just over-ride and intimidate as he did Clinton was a good move.)

[quote ChristmasSexyTime]@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime the Stolpersteine project is really poignant. It's also an excellent example of why commemorative public art isn't always synonymous with celebration. Nobody is celebrating the holocaust.

Your first point is also extremely pertinent. This is the other side of the coin that these twitter activists can't see, or don't correlate with their own behaviour. I think there's a strong correlation with the rise of the right across Europe and the brexit referendum with the #NoDebate ethos that seems to be ruling everything. It's a wider issue than statues but the Momentum lot infuriate me because they refuse to see that their actions and behaviour is fomenting the rise of the far right. You can't just shut conversations down because you don't like them. The results speak for themselves.[/quote]
Absolutely. Although, I would argue that statuary of individuals was always celebratory; its where the term to put someone on a pedestal comes from.
To celebrate can also be defined as 'to honour or praise publicly' and that is why the Stolpersteine project is a celebration. It honours those who were murdered and tortured. It is not about celebrating the perpetrators of atrocity.

The Stolpersteine Project does not celebrate the Nazi Oppressors; it remembers and celebrates those who were murdered. Stolpersteine are also placed for people who died, but also for “survivors” and that is a celebration as we would generally consider it - of survival over tyranny.

I wouldn't even no-platform Trump: I would want him to be shown up rather than shut down, debated rather than just allowed to bellow undisputed.

That would be 100% healthier. I remember Nick Griffin of the BNP going on Question Time about ten years ago and after his appearance, the BNP went into rapid decline. Hung himself by his own petard, and all that. Perfect.

Imagine if the BBC had no-platformed him. Would've turned him into a martyr and I'd bet that membership would've gone up.

The Prince Andrew interview was a great example of that. I loved the way Emily Maitlis played the rope out until he’d got plenty to hang himself with. It’s one of the reasons I never report posts here - far better to let them stand.

I've never sat through that @VinylDetective because I think I'd cringe inside and out. But I'm sorely tempted. Great example of the benefits of letting unsavoury people speak.

Give in to temptation. Maitlis is bloody wonderful, it’s a masterclass in forensic journalism. He didn’t even realise he was digging his own grave.