Neighbour has put up huge Unite the Kingdom flag

[UrticaDioca]

I am gutted. I haven't seen a single flag in my town, and suddenly this union jack goes up two doors over with the words 'Unite the Kingdom' printed on it in capital letters. The flag is huge and flying from a pole on top of their shed, but it's in their own garden so nothing can be done.

I am the daughter of an immigrant mother and therefore mixed race. Now I have to see this fucking flag waving at me every time I look out of my kitchen or living room windows.

Oh of course the old “look around” as evidence.

You seem to be taking comments from a handful of people on social media as evidence of some widespread thought process (with exception of campaigners for reparations for slavery (for the descendants of victims - the descendants of slaveowners were already compensated) which has been about for awhile but which will never happen.

The rest suggests you need to stay off social media for a while?

But they did it?
They united 150, 000 people....

Good conversation. Thanks 🤣

I wonder when people like Tommy Robinson will act like proper leaders and condemn this kind of thing?

That is shocking.

How is what I said patronising? D'you not see these things?

I said most people missed that Sir Thomas is a slave owner so of course I want it pointed out - that's why I pointed it out. But though 'Our Island Story' sort of history had its own biases what has replaced it is far more than just analysis and re-evaluation; it frequently gives the impression that the presenters hate their country and see only bad things about it and also (to my dismay as a historian) contains moral anachronism: judging the past using the morals and mindset of the present, utterly improper. And many young people have imbibed this. I have listened to friend's young adult offspring saying that things like grooming gangs and removing our history are what we deserve because of what we did to others. This is not healthy, rational or true.

I am looking at CRT, which posits both white fragility and white supremacy as elements of white racism. CRT uses the oppressed/oppressor narrative which purveys victimhood on all the global majority, whilst reserving guilt and opprobrium for Europeans and European culture. This worldview led to many on Oct 8th 2023 to praise and vindicate Hamas' actions in southern Israel as an act of rebellion against colonization - notwithstanding the Jews living in Israel for the most part are indigenous (several hundred thousand having taken refuge in the new state when expelled by the Moslem countries in which they had lived for hundreds of years).

That rape, murder of children and infants and the killing of the innocent were applauded by many in the West is appalling - and shows total historical ignorance.

Never. They will never condemn violence against those they hate. That is Tommy Robinson's first objective.

You can't really "unite" people who are already in agreement. You can bring them together by organising an event, but it isn't the same thing.

The far right will only ever divide the nation, because decent people will never accept their hateful ideology.

He will never condemn it. He is too busy whipping it up.

It is utterly abhorrent that anyone should applaud or otherwise celebrate the atrocities that were perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th 2023. But you make it sound as if this was a "normal" mainstream view, which it wasn't. I know a lot of people who have supported the plight of the Palestinian people for decades. Every single one of them expressed nothing but horror in response to the Hamas attacks. Yes, there will always be an extreme minority who celebrate evil acts, but they are not influential voices in our society.

To be honest, I find it hard to relate to the concerns that you're expressing because I just don't recognise the issues that you're raising as being particularly relevant to the society that I am living in. As a white person, I don't feel that I'm vilified or asked to constantly feel guilty and I don't see an issue with learning about the less glorious aspects of our history. I just don't really understand exactly what you're concerned about.

There’s something very ironic about this thread (the neighbour has erected a United Kingdom flag and this thread shows how even on a parenting website - we are very very far from United)

MN is the only social media I go on, in fact, and mainly the feminist boards. I follow a couple of education blogs (I support SSP and explicit teaching having seen the damage the altrnative brings) and several GR feminists e.g. Milli Hill, Helen Joyce. That's it. Probably no more social media than you.
Re reparations for slavery, you seem to not understand that no-one now living is responsible for any slavery unless they are currently involved in it, in e.g. the continent of Africa (c.9M slaves of various sorts e.g. slaves, forced marriage, child soldiers, child workers in colbalt mines etc.) in India (debt slaves) etc. No living person owes anyone, whoever they are descended from, reparations for slavery - and who gets paid? Ancient Sumeria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Turkey...slaved, so did the Vikings, the Saxons, the Arabs. Slavery has existed for millenia and until c.1750 was considered normal, though unfortunate for slaves (and there were charities in many European countries dedicated to raising ransoms to pay the Barbary Pirates for enslaved Europeans). A handful of people during those thousands of years stood up and said slavery was wrong - the brave - but not until Europe in the eighteenth century (where slavery had been outlawed between the 11th and 13th centuries) began to have anti-slavery campaigns did anyone manage to do anything about ending the scourge upon humanity: one which still continues.
The UK constitution has, since 1215, mandated that no-one should be deprived of legally owned property. In 1833 the UK government borrowed £20M to buy the slaves mostly from West Indian plantations in order to free them (they remained bond servants until 1838 mainly for economic reasons). The slaves were owned by the banks who had funded their purchase in the first place, under a regime that made slave owning legal (we may not like that, but that was the legal situation in the W. Indies, though not the UK). Not to pay the banks the money owed by plantation owners would have caused possibly world recession (20M was one-fifth of the UK's GDP in the 1830s) and certainly bankruptcy in the West Indies, which meant there would be no work for the freed slaves or anyone else.
It was not 'compensation' it was staving off recession by paying for legally purchased property - it sticks in our craw (and probably the craw of the British at the time) but it had to be done. The UK repaid the (rolled-over) loan c. 2015.
I have answered your 'oh, look around' point in another post but it irked me that you acccused me (a historian with several degrees) of getting information from social media, so I have bothered to refute you.

I think this is true. My late DH was a youth worker in the 70s. He had regular complaints from local w/c parents that their daughters were being targeted by some immigrants. He, and his colleagues, dismissed this as racism - i.e. they don't want their daughters having non-white boyfriends. When he heard about the grooming gangs and the trials he was contrite at this dismissal.

I think it's mostly academia - and only in certain places. E.g. some at Goldsmiths today apparently are celebrating the uprising by Palestinians against Israel - but that is rumour, I think, or a misreading.
I don't think most people applaud the acts of 7/10 but some did. And many discounted them at the time (including my late DH, who only came to realise the horror after a few weeks) and some have not changed their minds e.g. are callin git a false flag opperation.

Yeah, I worked in HE for a while. I don't dispute that it can be a weird environment - it is its own bubble and often divorced from what's going on back in the real world. I've been out of it for a while now, but I can understand how spending a lot of time in certain institutions might give you a somewhat warped perspective on our society. I just don't think that perspective necessarily reflects what is happening outside of the HE bubble.

As for the fuckers who celebrated the Hamas atrocities on 7/10, there will always be extremists who thrive on hate, but I genuinely believe that they are a small minority.

@Grammarnut

You are brilliant and my hero/heroine on this thread 😊

I find the conflation of progressive politics and celebrating acts of appalling terrorism more offensive than I can possibly say. And I have a couple of degrees too. Not “several” though-so there’s that.

I agree. It horrifies me. One thing I have noticed is that education does not confer common sense and sometimes no understanding of evidence, which is sad.

The bubble extends to LAs and to the museum service, unfortunately.

Hi, I was thinking of the pro-Palestinian protests in London (nearly every week and apparently one is planned for today, 7th Oct) and those at university campuses mainly in the US and there have been anti-Israel demos in Spain lately. Almost everyone I know is horrified by the Gaza war and blames its inception on Hamas' actions on 7th Oct. I don't support the conitnued bombing, of course, and nor does anyone I know. I do know a few people who don't believe that Oct 7th happened (or that the Israelis did it themselves); they mostly come from London, oddly, and are certainly well-educated. This worries me a lot.

Well, I agree that it's worrying when people start denying basic facts, but there is a long tradition of holocaust denial so perhaps we shouldn't really be surprised.

I also think the protests today are in very bad taste and I would far rather that they didn't go ahead. I would not personally attend any of the pro-Palestine protests anyway, as already stated, because I would not want to align myself with some of the people on them. That said, I do really understand the horror that people feel about the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and about the UK's ongoing sale of arms to Israel, and the feeling that they need to speak out about these things. It is not inherently antisemitic to do so.

What happened on Oct 7th was horrific and unforgivable, and no decent human being can possibly try to justify it. But I also think it's a bit too simplistic to suggest that the current conflict all started with the Hamas atrocities two years ago. As a historian, you will be well aware that it is much more complex than that. Not that the history in any way excuses the abhorrent terrorist acts which were perpetrated by Hamas on that day, but I think we have to acknowledge that the conflict didn't just start there.

I haven't really seen that tendency in either of the LAs that I've worked with. But I appreciate that the culture will differ around the country.

I know nothing about museums, I'm afraid.

Who said it was? 🤔