Every country takes a selective view of its history, France very much included. Complete honesty and frankness can be painful and destructive and, if the delusions which are necessary to create and maintain the “imagined communities” are to be revisited, it needs to be done sensitively and gradually. We can move on from the Churchill legend at some point but not in the space of 3 weeks and not by deliberately provocative posts on social media.
Winston Churchill
- Thread starter Cascarino
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change doesn't happen gradually and the winston ship has sailed at this point, i'm never going to unsee those videos from Kenya and neither are the significant number of people that also saw it.
the fact is there's just no way to reconcile the man of churchill with the myth of churchill and the British state with the myths of the British state. this is what's really causing a lot of the polarisation in society, i and too many other people have zero interest in being party to what the state does in our name and we have little alternative representation so we're going to support the fringes because what we're asked to support isn't conscionable
the myth doesn't even match up to todays action, we talk about heroic stands against fascism and our heros killing the nazis while we help commit atrocities throughout the middle east, it's comical how brazen the lies are and how obviously corrupted and needlessly violent our current and past leaders were and are. and we're somehow asked to respect these people and give them public displays of prominence. no thank you.
the fact is there's just no way to reconcile the man of churchill with the myth of churchill and the British state with the myths of the British state. this is what's really causing a lot of the polarisation in society, i and too many other people have zero interest in being party to what the state does in our name and we have little alternative representation so we're going to support the fringes because what we're asked to support isn't conscionable
the myth doesn't even match up to todays action, we talk about heroic stands against fascism and our heros killing the nazis while we help commit atrocities throughout the middle east, it's comical how brazen the lies are and how obviously corrupted and needlessly violent our current and past leaders were and are. and we're somehow asked to respect these people and give them public displays of prominence. no thank you.
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I say in my post that most countries have a biased view of their history - and yes Napoleon is quite a national figure in France. It is not the space of three weeks, what about the last 80 years or earlier history was it OK to not have the truth up till three weeks ago? I've been frustrated with lies for decades.
It is more than something that just snowballed in “3 weeks”. It has been in the making for decades and it is high time we deal with it.
For the majority of the population (the ones you need to persuade to support your cause), it is the last few weeks. Focusing on statues is playing on the other team’s turf - it may increase majorities in already safe seats in London and other big cities but in the rest of the country it will deliver another big majority to the Tories in what is becoming a one party state. If you fight on the basis of enabling minorities to benefit In practice (rather than just in theory) from the same advantages as the majority white population, it’s very hard to oppose that objective without effectively admitting you are a racist (or, at best, in denial). If you focus the debate on the likes of Churchill, you can spend 40 years in utterly impotent protesting like Corbyn.
You will also never unsee videos of Bengal famine. Very rare as its 1943, but some images exist. This is dubbed in an Indian language, but the images tell the story well enough.
This is just willfully ignorant. Because immigrants have known this for most of their lives. Arguments such as these are just insensitive towards BAME. I thought the rise of Trump, Boris would help usher a new understanding when it comes to issues like this. But clearly, we are stuck in repeating old worn out rhetorics that only aim to scare minorities instead of listening to them.
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If that were true the tories wouldn't win every damn election despite being about as useless as a tory government can be. Even if a majority of people want it to be taught truthfully, they don't buy into the idological package that comes with it.
The majority of brits, and especially Englishmen, still seem to value their traditional national identity.
I wonder how many posters in here are going to take down old photo’s of their ancestors because they were racists? The horrible truth is that white UK nationals were racist pre 1960’s and were educated to believe they were superior above other ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, you could argue that the US committed plenty of atrocities in North Africa and the Middle East during the Obama administration depending on what your point of view is.
So to just color Churchill as an evil racist is far too simplistic and completely ignores the context of the times he lived in.
Going forward I think it would be far more constructive if the school curriculum focused more on the slave trade and colonialist past as well as the white Anglo Saxon population starting to accept and embrace the positive effects immigration has had to our society.
So to just color Churchill as an evil racist is far too simplistic and completely ignores the context of the times he lived in.
Going forward I think it would be far more constructive if the school curriculum focused more on the slave trade and colonialist past as well as the white Anglo Saxon population starting to accept and embrace the positive effects immigration has had to our society.
Maybe rather then tearing down statues we should be constructing new of people from different ethnic backgrounds.
Why do people find this guy funny?
The problem with the occasionally valid 'context of one's time' argument is that certain things are timeless: for instance, humane treatment of living creatures. Without referencing instruction from religious teaching or even laws, positive morality on this matter is surely natural beyond even ingrained and in-built evolutionary necessities. More simply put I believe that we somehow know that harming other creatures is wrong - harmful to all parties involved - and this knowledge is independent of context, of mere intelligence, and of an era's particular moral customs and attitudes. If others, in Churchill's own age, considered his actions to be appalling, then the excuse of time's especial context is invalid. This 'protest' wasn't a matter of political fashion or holier-than-thou posturing; instead it was the deeply-felt knowledge of what constitutes natural and unnatural behaviour by a fellow being.
We could melt down the statues of the racists to make the news one. Capital idea, Rams!
oh boy. here we go.
I don't have any racist ancestors that I know of. This is yet another example of the deprivation inflicted upon the working class by the Tories. I know a bloke who's on the dole yet he can afford to have THREE racist ancestors...and a widescreen six-pack of lager.
I think your mistake is you believe that only things you think are beneficial are timeless. In fact the nature of humans good and bad is timeless.
As you self flagellate about the racism of Churchill born in 1874 I see Modi ruling in India in 2020.
Thanks for assuming I'm insincere; a convenient dismissal, to say the least.
Tbf the whole debate is based around convenience. The convenience of ethno-national identity, the convenience the imperialists brought to world order, convenience of having racist ancestors who influenced society last week - because last week was a whole week ago.
I think you are sincerely wrong.
Well that's something at least, and fine with me. I may well be wrong, after all.
James Cleverly, Priti Patel and Sajid Javed. Yay. problem solved.
This argument would be far less tedious if those who complain about 'rewriting the past', 'erasing history', or 'whitewashing' would actually read a history book by a proper historian at some point in their lives.
Doesn't even need to be a history book about the people on these statues, pretty much anyone half decent would expose how absolutely facile those lines of argument are.
Doesn't even need to be a history book about the people on these statues, pretty much anyone half decent would expose how absolutely facile those lines of argument are.
I don't think every Tory is a far right racist! I've met lots of centrist Tories who know the truthful history, have educated me about the horrors of Churchill and the empire and are embarrassed by it. If I had to take an educated guess, I think the 'Rule Britannia' constituency is only 15-20%. They are most likely passionate Brexiters, and voted or considered voting for UKIP. They tend to be older white men of the north.
Do you live in UK? Perhaps you are not clear on our demographic profile, I wrote a post on this a few pages ago. At least c.30% of current UK population has no family history or emotional attachment relating to whitewashed Churchill or Empire history, and those from former colonies have sadistic and painful memories instead. Ditto urban millennials and GenZ only know of a digital, cosmopolitan, multi racial world, and would have been open to new discussion on Churchill and Empire. This constituency will keep getting bigger, and will soon become larger than those with family or societal history that ties into British WW2 experience.
Defenders of the Empire, Churchill and the rest are a dying breed.
Did he starve 3 millions Bengali's to death? Damn, I missed that. Maybe our resident Indian posters can post a link?
The opening ceremony for the London Olympics was about as representational of British opinion as these statues of Churchill everyone is so obsessed with. The failures of multiculturalism need to be addressed before embracing any such naive visions which are as idealistic (if well intended) as you can imagine.
Genuine request: could you please tell me what the 'failures of multiculturalism' are?
Yeah. I think I'm done with your commentary on this subject. Thats for popping by though.
Apparently I'm not allowed to hate people because of the colour of their skin or use racial epithets anymore. feck your multiculturalism, Steve.
It would be a very long post. The best I can do is try source a nuanced article second hand. But chief among them are working class divisons, ill-considered immigration policies (mostly in the north), and so on. London and other cities have been success stories but you've seen reactionary politics rise since the Blair years partly in reply to mutliculturalism tied to a poltics of liberal globalisation which willfully neglected the poor and set them at each other's throats.
Jesus, all you Canadians are xenophobic. All of you, even the beavers.
That's fine with me.
I think your style of posting is so confrontational as to be of service to the very elements (racists, far right) you apparently most oppose. You somehow manage to create divisions among people who are, for the most part, completely like-minded. You're go to response is "go have a pint with Tommy whateverthefeckhisnameis". Well done.
Well negative responses to a policy don't necessarily mean that the policy is flawed.
And, sadly, it seems that any wide-ranging policy results in the same old, same old: the poor still struggle, while the rich get wealthier. So there's nothing exceptional, in that respect, to the policy of multiculturalism.
Boris Johnson says we shouldn't edit our past. But Britain has been lying about it for decades
George Monbiot Tuesday 16 Jun 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
If we really shouldn’t lie about our history, as the prime minister says, let’s finally open up about the atrocities of empire
When Boris Johnson claimed last week that removing statues is “to lie about our history”, you could almost admire his brass neck. This is the man who was sacked from his first job, on the Times, for lying about our history. He fabricated a quote from his own godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, to create a sensational front-page fiction about Edward II’s Rose Palace. A further lie about history – his own history – had him sacked from another job, as shadow arts minister under the Conservative leader Michael Howard.
But, Johnson tells us: “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history”. Yet lies and erasures are crucial to the myths on which Britain’s official self-image is founded, and crucial to hiding the means by which those who still dominate us acquired their wealth and power.
Consider the concentration camps Britain built in Kenya in the 1950s. “What concentration camps?” you might ask. If so, job done. When the Kikuyu people mobilised to reclaim the land that had been stolen from them by British settlers and the colonial authorities, almost the entire population – over 1 million – were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. One of these camps, as if echoing Auschwitz, had the slogan “Labour and Freedom” above the gates. Even Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the colonial administration in Kenya, who was complicit in these crimes, remarked that the treatment of the inmates was “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany”.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of prisoners died. Many succumbed to hunger and disease, including almost all the children in some camps. Many others were murdered. Some were beaten to death by their British guards. One, as the governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, acknowledged in a secret memo, was roasted alive. Others were anally raped with knives, rifle barrels and broken bottles, mauled by dogs or electrocuted. Many were castrated, with a special implement the British administration designed for the purpose. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one of the killers boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket”. Some were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound until they bled to death. If you know nothing of this history, it’s because it was systematically censored and replaced with lies by the British authorities.
Only in 2012, when a group of Kikuyu survivors sued the British government for their torture and mutilation, was an archive, kept secret by the Foreign Office, discovered. It revealed the extraordinary measures taken by colonial officials to prevent information from leaking, and to fend off questions by Labour MPs with outright lies. For example, after 11 men were beaten to death by camp guards, Baring advised the colonial secretary to report that they had died from drinking dirty water. Baring himself authorised such assaults. In implementing this decision, Griffith-Jones warned him, “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly”. When questions persisted, Baring told his officials to do “an exercise … on the dossiers”, to create the impression that the victims were hardened criminals.
As it happens, Baring was the grandfather of Mary Wakefield, the wife of Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Last month, her own truthfulness was called into question as an article she wrote in the Spectator, discussing her experiences of coronavirus, created the strong impression that she and Cummings had remained in London, rather than travelling to Durham, against government instructions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baring’s family fortune was made from the ownership of slaves, and the massive compensation paid to the owners when the trade was banned.
The hidden Kikuyu documents that came to light in 2012 were part of a larger archive, most of which was systematically destroyed by the British authorities before decolonisation. Special Branch oversaw what it called “a thorough purge” of the Kenyan archives. Fake files were inserted to take the place of those that were expunged. “The very existence” of the deleted files, one memo insisted, “should never be revealed”. Where there were too many files to burn easily, an order proposed that they “be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast”. So much for not editing or censoring our past.
The same deletions occurred across the British empire. We can only guess at what the lost documents might have revealed. Were there more details of the massacre of civilians in Malaya? Of Britain’s dirty war in Yemen in the 1960s? Of the catastrophic famine the British government created in Bengal in 1943, by snatching food from the mouths of local people and exporting it? Of its atrocities in Aden and Cyprus? One thing the surviving files do show us is the British government’s secret eviction of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, to make way for a US airbase. The Foreign Office instructed its officials to deny the very existence of the indigenous islanders, so that they could be removed without compensation or parliamentary objections.
The erasures and deletions continue. In 2010, the disembarkation cards of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean were all destroyed by Theresa May’s Home Office. Many people suddenly had no means of proving their right to citizenship of this country, facilitating May’s cruel and outrageous deportations. In 2013, the Conservatives deleted the entire public archive of their speeches and press releases from 2000 to 2010, and blocked access to web searches using the Wayback Machine, impeding people trying to hold them to account for past statements and policies.
This week, the prime minister asked the head of his policy unit, Munira Mirza, to set up a commission on racial inequalities. She is part of a network of activists whose entire history is, in my view, confused and obfuscated. It arose from the Revolutionary Communist party and Living Marxism magazine. As these names suggest, they purported to belong to the far left, but they look to me like the extreme right. In 2018 I discovered that one of its outlets, Spiked magazine, had been heavily funded by the US billionaire Charles Koch. Other sources of funding remain obscure. In common with some of her comrades, Mirza has cast doubt on institutional racism. Her new role has caused dismay among anti-racist campaigners, who fear yet more editing of history.
Lying about history, censoring and editing is what the political establishment does. The histories promoted by successive governments, especially those involving the UK’s relationship with other nations, are one long chain of lies. Because we are lied to, we cannot move on. Maturity, either in a person or in a nation, could be defined as being honest about ourselves. We urgently need to grow up.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
George Monbiot Tuesday 16 Jun 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
If we really shouldn’t lie about our history, as the prime minister says, let’s finally open up about the atrocities of empire
When Boris Johnson claimed last week that removing statues is “to lie about our history”, you could almost admire his brass neck. This is the man who was sacked from his first job, on the Times, for lying about our history. He fabricated a quote from his own godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, to create a sensational front-page fiction about Edward II’s Rose Palace. A further lie about history – his own history – had him sacked from another job, as shadow arts minister under the Conservative leader Michael Howard.
But, Johnson tells us: “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history”. Yet lies and erasures are crucial to the myths on which Britain’s official self-image is founded, and crucial to hiding the means by which those who still dominate us acquired their wealth and power.
Consider the concentration camps Britain built in Kenya in the 1950s. “What concentration camps?” you might ask. If so, job done. When the Kikuyu people mobilised to reclaim the land that had been stolen from them by British settlers and the colonial authorities, almost the entire population – over 1 million – were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. One of these camps, as if echoing Auschwitz, had the slogan “Labour and Freedom” above the gates. Even Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the colonial administration in Kenya, who was complicit in these crimes, remarked that the treatment of the inmates was “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany”.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of prisoners died. Many succumbed to hunger and disease, including almost all the children in some camps. Many others were murdered. Some were beaten to death by their British guards. One, as the governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, acknowledged in a secret memo, was roasted alive. Others were anally raped with knives, rifle barrels and broken bottles, mauled by dogs or electrocuted. Many were castrated, with a special implement the British administration designed for the purpose. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one of the killers boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket”. Some were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound until they bled to death. If you know nothing of this history, it’s because it was systematically censored and replaced with lies by the British authorities.
Only in 2012, when a group of Kikuyu survivors sued the British government for their torture and mutilation, was an archive, kept secret by the Foreign Office, discovered. It revealed the extraordinary measures taken by colonial officials to prevent information from leaking, and to fend off questions by Labour MPs with outright lies. For example, after 11 men were beaten to death by camp guards, Baring advised the colonial secretary to report that they had died from drinking dirty water. Baring himself authorised such assaults. In implementing this decision, Griffith-Jones warned him, “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly”. When questions persisted, Baring told his officials to do “an exercise … on the dossiers”, to create the impression that the victims were hardened criminals.
As it happens, Baring was the grandfather of Mary Wakefield, the wife of Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Last month, her own truthfulness was called into question as an article she wrote in the Spectator, discussing her experiences of coronavirus, created the strong impression that she and Cummings had remained in London, rather than travelling to Durham, against government instructions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baring’s family fortune was made from the ownership of slaves, and the massive compensation paid to the owners when the trade was banned.
The hidden Kikuyu documents that came to light in 2012 were part of a larger archive, most of which was systematically destroyed by the British authorities before decolonisation. Special Branch oversaw what it called “a thorough purge” of the Kenyan archives. Fake files were inserted to take the place of those that were expunged. “The very existence” of the deleted files, one memo insisted, “should never be revealed”. Where there were too many files to burn easily, an order proposed that they “be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast”. So much for not editing or censoring our past.
The same deletions occurred across the British empire. We can only guess at what the lost documents might have revealed. Were there more details of the massacre of civilians in Malaya? Of Britain’s dirty war in Yemen in the 1960s? Of the catastrophic famine the British government created in Bengal in 1943, by snatching food from the mouths of local people and exporting it? Of its atrocities in Aden and Cyprus? One thing the surviving files do show us is the British government’s secret eviction of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, to make way for a US airbase. The Foreign Office instructed its officials to deny the very existence of the indigenous islanders, so that they could be removed without compensation or parliamentary objections.
The erasures and deletions continue. In 2010, the disembarkation cards of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean were all destroyed by Theresa May’s Home Office. Many people suddenly had no means of proving their right to citizenship of this country, facilitating May’s cruel and outrageous deportations. In 2013, the Conservatives deleted the entire public archive of their speeches and press releases from 2000 to 2010, and blocked access to web searches using the Wayback Machine, impeding people trying to hold them to account for past statements and policies.
This week, the prime minister asked the head of his policy unit, Munira Mirza, to set up a commission on racial inequalities. She is part of a network of activists whose entire history is, in my view, confused and obfuscated. It arose from the Revolutionary Communist party and Living Marxism magazine. As these names suggest, they purported to belong to the far left, but they look to me like the extreme right. In 2018 I discovered that one of its outlets, Spiked magazine, had been heavily funded by the US billionaire Charles Koch. Other sources of funding remain obscure. In common with some of her comrades, Mirza has cast doubt on institutional racism. Her new role has caused dismay among anti-racist campaigners, who fear yet more editing of history.
Lying about history, censoring and editing is what the political establishment does. The histories promoted by successive governments, especially those involving the UK’s relationship with other nations, are one long chain of lies. Because we are lied to, we cannot move on. Maturity, either in a person or in a nation, could be defined as being honest about ourselves. We urgently need to grow up.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...britons-integration-rivers-blood-enoch-powell
Weary of going off topic in a thread that's really an off topic off-shoot of the BLM protests, but that's a relatively decent introduction. It wasn't so much a centralised policy as a matter of economic disparities seen all over the globe. Cities absolutely thrived and smaller industrial towns/centres were left behind.
The bold is largely the point. Racism in various parts of the world seems to be as uneven as the economic success of globalisation itself. Integration failed in so many places because economic disintegration set in. The failures of multiculturalism are really the failures of economic parity but in the mind of sizeable minorities this nuance is lost. So attitudes differ so much between LA, New York, London, as opposed to Michigan or an equally depressed northern English town.
The point I'm making is that it's easy to say embrace multiculturalism but that belies the fact that those areas most problematic are the ones which are typically most economically depressed. Uneven is the perfect term, as Lowles says.
Also, https://cla.umn.edu/geography/research/specialties/globalization-and-uneven-development.
That's not exactly unexpected though and, again, surely not exclusively the fault of a multiculturist policy. Well anyway, that's my opinion merely. Thanks for the info, BTW.
No. My original post was poorly worded as the "failures of globalisation" would be more accurate, only the globalised process of capital and labour is so often conflated with multiculturalism, as the two are related in various ways, that I didn't think to make a distinction. Basically, people have been perplexed at the rise of the right and the little Englander types in the US and UK over the past decade or so but these movements are driven in part by mass economic depression and uneven distribution of capital. Michael Moore is a good voice on this issue, largely talking about Flint Michigan in Fahrenheit 11/9. He predicted Trump would win and from viewing the documentary it wasn't because everyone in Michigan was a racist but because Trump used this uneven distribution of labour and wealth and distorted it so that "liberalism" took the hit for what was, in truth, an inexorable global process whereby manufacturing and similar jobs disappeared overseas or to automation.That's not exactly unexpected though and, again, surely not exclusively the fault of a multiculturist policy. Well anyway, that's my opinion merely. Thanks for the info, BTW.
And, in turn, it's these same movements, the right in the US, the little Englanders in Brtain, who most oppose the removal of statues and multiculturalism in general. Often for reasons I don't believe they've even properly considered.
It's a complex topic and not easy to represent very well on a discussion forum but I'd advise anyone to read up on the literature of globalisation in general if they have an interest.
I will have ago at,
Poverty for the newly arrived cultures.
Ghettoization.
Internal division and strife.
Breakdown of native cultural institutions.
Decision making paralysis.