Tearing down statues

Efour said:
Cant you not see slavery was just the JCB excavator of history?

Is it morally repugnant now? Yes it is.

Was it morally repugnant in the time? Apparently not for 1000s of years, until in Western Europe a bunch of Christians come along and decided that we are all gods children and its easier to subdue and convert them to religion whilst exploiting their homeland.

People need to get a grip. There's millions still involved in modern slavery all over the middle east, Asia and northern Africa but we dont give a **** about them.

Its much easier to pull down a 10 foot statue than actually do anything to help real people alive today.
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Indeed, they did it for attention on the crest of a movement, they probably have clothes made by children in the far East and have iPhones and love to go on holiday to exotic places where human rights are worth nothing.
 
I guess there are three camps with skin in this game.

One being the people who don't want to see statues of slavers in their home town, or places they might like to visit. They might also think that these statues normalise what is now considered a crime against humanity. They find the statue horrifying or at least unpleasant. Then there are people who consider it so important to have memorials to history that having a statue of a slaver in the middle of a modern British city means they'd rather see it standing, regardless of any affront it gives to group 1 (even though there's been no attempt to make the statue into a memorial). Then there is the last group who want a statue of a slaver in the middle of a modern British city because it somehow validates their identity and they're at least a little bit racist/supremacist/rule Britannia.

Lastly, there is another group who don't really care either way. I suppose it's up to us as individuals to decide which group they feel at home in.
 
MadMossy said:
But the statue of Edward Colston wasn't there to honour him for his slavery antics, it was to honour him for his contribution to the city of Bristol, of which many landmarks are attributed to him.
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I know this, but he made his money to pay for these things by trading human beings like they were objects.

It's the worst of the worst, even if it was accepted at the time.
 
MadMossy said:
There are dozen's of statues in the UK of prominent figures pre-dating the ban on slavery, I wouldn't at all be surprised if most of them had ties to slavery at some point in their history.
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Yeah, there are. There's also history of them being moved around into places that are less or sometimes even more contentious and provocative. There's also history of them being torn down by the public.

Here's one from 1982. https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...-recalls-toppling-of-liverpool-statue-in-1982
 
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Just remove Bristol. Nuke it. Liverpool, probably Southampton too. Dig around them a hole and remove them.
Their bloody history is never going to be scoured from their business with slavery that a handfull of people got wealthy from.
Just destroy everything built before 1850 to be safe.
We can shout "god is great" as we push the detonator plunger thingy if it helps.
 
i-bert said:
I know this, but he made his money to pay for these things by trading human beings like they were objects.

It's the worst of the worst, even if it was accepted at the time.
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Slavery wasn't illegal at the time, it was a commonly traded commodity (as wrong as that sounds today, it wasn't 400 years ago), I would guess that anyone with an ounce of wealth had slaves or ties to slavery.
 
Efour said:
Just remove Bristol. Nuke it. Liverpool, probably Southampton too. Dig around them a hole and remove them.
Their bloody history is never going to be scoured from their business with slavery that a handfull of people got wealthy from.
Just destroy everything built before 1850 to be safe.
We can shout "god is great" as we push the detonator plunger thingy if it helps.
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It goes a fair bit deeper than just Bristol, Liverpool and Southampton.
 
MadMossy said:
Slavery wasn't illegal at the time, it was a commonly traded commodity (as wrong as that sounds today, it wasn't 400 years ago), I would guess that anyone with an ounce of wealth had slaves or ties to slavery.
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And where are all the statues of them?

We can all indulge in whataboutery.
 
C Kent said:
indeed it looks as if not many individuals funnelled that wealth back into their home city in an effort to improve the conditions of its citizens
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Yeah, you see I get why these people have statues. But I also get why where they got their wealth from, regardless of what they did with it, means that public statues of them and the way they are presented is in extremely poor taste to say the least.

I come from Liverpool so grew up with this stuff and paid attention. Most people don't.
 
inogen said:
Yeah, you see I get why these people have statues. But I also get why where they got their wealth from, regardless of what they did with it, means that public statues of them and the way they are presented is in extremely poor taste to say the least.

I come from Liverpool so grew up with this stuff and paid attention. Most people don't.
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If an element of someone's past offends then go through the proper legal channels to remove/amend monuments built to celebrate the good they did rather than take the law into your own hands, that's the issue folks not drenched in an ideology have with this ruling. Arbitrarily removing/destroying a statue through mob rule just leads onto removing other statues of polarising figures in history - what's to stop folks from tearing down a statue of Churchill due to his treatment of Indians during and after WW2? You already have people in the US move from removing statues of Robert E Lee to tearing down statues of George Washington.
 
C Kent said:
If an element of someone's past offends then go through the proper legal channels to remove/amend monuments built to celebrate the good they did rather than take the law into your own hands, that's the issue folks not drenched in an ideology have with this ruling. Arbitrarily removing/destroying a statue through mob rule just leads onto removing other statues of polarising figures in history - what's to stop folks from tearing down a statue of Churchill due to his treatment of Indians during and after WW2? You already have people in the US move from removing statues of Robert E Lee to tearing down statues of George Washington.
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Yeah, I agree. It would be better for society if these monuments were properly recontextualised rather than torn down. But also consider that the "proper legal channels" are not helpful in this regard and have no history being so. In fact the opposite is true.

This https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...-recalls-toppling-of-liverpool-statue-in-1982, being a prime example. The statue being "recontextualised" by moving it to Toxteth, a primarily black slum.
 
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inogen said:
Yeah, I agree. It would be better for society if these monuments were properly recontextualised rather than torn down. But also consider that the "proper legal channels" are not helpful in this regard and have no history being so. In fact the opposite is true.

This https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...-recalls-toppling-of-liverpool-statue-in-1982, being a prime example. The statue being "recontextualised" by moving it to Toxteth, a primarily black slum.
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I dont think the 2 instances are comparable personally (Toxteth riots and a BLM march), without getting into something other than the thread topic. Although this paragraph from the guardian article was amusing

The plinth has remained empty, except when, in 2004, an artist placed an abstract sculpture there of the Native American activist and peace campaigner Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of the deaths of two FBI agents in 1976
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C Kent said:
I dont think the 2 instances are comparable personally (Toxteth riots and a BLM march), without getting into something other than the thread topic. Although this paragraph from the guardian article was amusing
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I take it you don’t know anything about Peltier. It’s hardly amusing. He was extradited from Canada using later retracted witness statements obtained under duress and convicted by similar despite the authorities later admitting the evidence was inconclusive and incomplete. This was done under Nixon and the fella is still in jail.

And I wasn't making a comparison. As I said, it's an example of how the "proper legal channels" have dealt with recontextualising controversial statues in the past.
 
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inogen said:
I take it you don’t know anything about Peltier. It’s hardly amusing. He was extradited from Canada using later retracted witness statements obtained under duress and convicted by similar despite the authorities later admitting the evidence was inconclusive and incomplete. This was done under Nixon and the fella is still in jail.

And I wasn't making a comparison. As I said, it's an example of how the "proper legal channels" have dealt with recontextualising controversial statues in the past.
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No I know nothing about the fella, just the juxtaposition between peace activist and convicted murderer struck me as amusing. But seeing as Obama denied his clemency appeal I don't think it's as black and white as you are making out.
 
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