So - and believe me, I'm not trying to make out that I am right & others are wrong - it sounds rather like the typically negative results of a longstanding uneven distribution of wealth (as per usual)?
Winston Churchill
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Yes, but it isn't a timeless issue as the rate of inequality has accelerated in the past thirty years. So not as usual in the sense that Marx was writing about labour inequalities in the mid nineteenth century. Many of the issues @Don't Kill Bill highlights are exactly the ones you'll see cited if you read diaspora studies of the globalised process.
Me living rent free in your mind is cool, but I’d rather start paying rent from next month so I have no obligations. Please PM me your bank digits.
Only something you said completely without merit close to the beginning of this discussion. It stood out.
Only point I would make, and I don't believe in dragging people's previous posts up as it doesn't allow for personal change, is that if you have changed your opinion so drastically, which most people will as they grow up, how can you be so closed minded, relatively, about why other people might think the way they do. Surely we should try and understand that?
There's ten years between this and today but it demonstrates my point. If you'd posted that in here recently you'd, maybe rightfully, be hounded out (by yourself most likely). And yet if you can change your views so completely is there really value in treating other people the same?Im wondering what motivation and pleasure these so called 'militant' types, who supposedly have nothing to do with the protest, get from pissing on Churchill's statue and smashing upto the place.
I can rationalise why students might do it, they are venting their anger, I might not agree that that is the most civil way to express anger but i understand it. EVen stuff like football hooliganism, I can understand, the need for belonging, 'bro-mance' and boys being boys and wanting to show who is stronger, there is some kind of primal thing going on there
But just what do these unrelated folk, who just turn up for fun and wreck their capital city and defile parts of their identity and culture get out of it? Whats in it for them?
Any ideas?
Is that all you’ve got? A post from 10 years ago that proves I’m not sure what
I really have gotten to you haven’t I. Prickled those nerves on the right hand side. Job done I’d say.
Imagine someone else saying that today. That's my point. We've seen people wade in with similar sentiment and others have called them racist or bigotted when clearly there's more to it. You've changed your stance in a way that many will have, so surely you see the value in not deriding other people's point of view. You might intuitvely know that they're misguided but what does personalising the issue and making the discussion polarised really achieve?Is that all you’ve got? A post from 10 years ago
Your style of posting is more belligerant than it need be, but we largely agree on the issue. I'm just perplexed that you can't see this from the other side when you were once on that side. There's more grey to the issue than polarised black/white interpretations admit.
My only problem with you is your style of posting which does sometimes read, literally, as if you try to rile people up. As if you consider that to be "job done". That's problematic if so, and if not then just ignore me.
I have no idea what ‘expose’ you are going on about and wont waste my energy trying. I stated earlier that I was done with your snide and baiting. Please stop projecting your butt hurt feelings in an attempt to ‘win’ whatever it is you are after.
You are detailing this thread. Would be good if a mod could clean up these stupid posts, for which I apologise to the Modmin on my part. Hope thats the end of it.
There's nothing to win. I was trying to point out that whilst we agree on most issues here we disagree in how to discuss them. Was trying to bring the temperature down but replies like these are snide and designed to bait:
This whole thread is a mess but I'd only clarify that anyone who really wants to go through it should see that I haven't once tried to rile anyone up. Especially as I tend to agree with the consensus, more or less. I only resent being told that I'm being snide or baiting when in the face of comments which are the textbook definition of both those things I've genuinely tried to elicit a response that went beyond personal hostility.
Again, I wasn't trying to derail the thread. I was replying to what seemed like purposefully snide remarks in a way that tried to deescalate things. This has since become a meta discussion which has no value aside from an opinion on the way in which these matters should be debated, with an open mind and without malice/reactionary tendencies.
Back to the issue (agree on cleanup).
It’s ironic you should argue this because it’s actually historians who are dead against tearing down statues because one of the first things you learn when doing a PhD in history are the dangers of messing with history and it’s landmarks as well as not judging history within the context of the time it took place. Basically the British Empire was built on a racist ideology and if we are going to take down statues of racist leaders then the City of Westminster should be flattened because it was built on wealth generated from our slave trading and colonial past.
I don’t know if there are any historians in da house, but I cannot imagine them being in favor of tearing down statues or not judging history within the context of the time it took place!
Anyway, let’s tear the Colosseum in Rome down whilst we’re at it, or destroy the inner city of Amsterdam.
Bravo, well put.
Any point by posters like the ones quoted are muddied by their purposefully aggressive and provocative posting style. From the outside looking in it honestly looks like @sammsky1 wants to provoke a response so he can continue to perpetuate the myth that all British people are racist whether they realise it or not.
This is a stupid argument. Mainly because history as a subject, has long moved past this type of thinking. If anything, identifying as a historian doesn’t actually mean much if you don’t specify which lens you’re viewing the subject from. Thanks to the work of people like Dubois, Stuart Hall, Fanon, Edward Said, etc(list is endless) we not only have a better understanding of the subject but also can view these events from a different lens. This is also the reason why, over the last few decades we have seen more calls to decolonize our education system and rectify it on a fundamental level.
This notion that history is something that exists in vacuum and should remain untouched is just a lazy argument that aims to reinforce hierarchies.
Which is again, stupid and impossible to sustain, because history, if anything, is a record of evolving racial cognizance.
Do you really believe those things to be equivalent to wanting to remove a statue of a racist from the near past, or are you on a complete wind up?
Every nation does it. The US has slave owners on their banknotes. India's banknotes feature a man who hated black people every bit as much Churchill. South Africa's national hero spent a chunk of his career leading a group that made it's name blowing people up. You'd struggle to find a prominent figure from the past with an unblemished record. We can't pick and choose which ones we want to make excuses for.
Inequality has increased in practically every society from "Communist" China to Russia to India to Western countries incuding the Nordics over the past few decades. Putting increased inequality as a primary effect of multicultralism is quite clearly wrong.
The architect of the current state of politics in the UK wasn't an enthusiastic multiculturalist, it was Thatcher - a supporter of Apartheid. When asked about multiculturalism, Thatcher, who in the economic sense denied the very existence of society, lamented that a multicutural society could not be a united one and she would not want to live in it.
Her mass privatisations, destruction of unions, liberalisation of housing stock, and tax cuts were "economic methods" that succeeding in "changing the soul" (quoting her). This changed soul was visible in her ideological successor - New Labour. Again quoting her, Blair was her "greatest achievement." New Labour did openly embrace multiculturalism but obviously that is not why they they she was so proud of them, it is because economically they were closer to her than to other postwar Labour governments.
This neoliberalism of course is a worldwide phenomenon, and can probably be traced back primarily to the decay of the postwar welfare state in the west, facilitated by the opening up of China. What unites Thatcher, Reagan, Manmohan Singh, Yeltsin, Modi, Deng Xiaoping, Gerhard Schroder, Blair, Clinton, and the other neoliberals isn't their stance on social issues, the core of their agreement is about expanding the role of markets into more aspects of life, and using the state to facilitate the smooth running of markets rather than to undo the effects of market outcomes.
As both Marx and Thatcher would tell you, it is usually worthwhile to look first at the economic basis of things.
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I’m a historian. I’m not against tearing down statues as a matter a principal. Majority of the historians I know wouldn’t be either, although there is of course no one historian’s view on the matter.
We can look back across history and recognize that statues have risen and fallen again and again, and it’s actually these events which are of more value for us than the worth of the statue in informing us on the life of the figure being commemorated (which is zero), as they bring into sharp relief the significance and mood of that particular moment in time.
In any case, I don’t think being a historian right now gives us any particular insight on the subject of this thread, since it’s more related to current issues in society rather than actual history.
Surely what's happening now is future history...erm...current history...history in the making. Whatever.
Yeah that’s kind of my point in terms of the value of this moment - the statue itself tells us nothing about anything, but this moment in time will tell future historians a hell of a lot about Britain in 2020. But right now we historians are onlookers and in some way participants, like everybody else, so I’d say we are lacking the proper distance and sense of grand context to be able to use our skills to assess the moment reliably as historians .
I was reading that the man who built Downing Street was a chaplain on a slave ship. Awkward.
For sure, I agree with all of that. There are also avenues where the education systems and museums can intertwine to benefit both. I think that the accountability suffers from the generation issue too and is shown with something like the Churchill argument. Gen Y (Maybe a wee bit younger) and Gen-Z are born into a society past his death and into a society that's more conscious to issues like colonialism/racism whereas the boomers were living through Churchill so have that opinion of him and Gen X will have seen their parents opion of that and be influenced. We are at a point now where Gen Y and Z are just starting to rise up so could help with diversity/education issues. Feels like younger people are gaining more influence too if you look at how well Greta has done in terms of Climate Change awareness.This is a great post, thanks for the insight.
It's tricky, I used to believe that representation in every industry at the top level will bring about more equality, and to an extent I still believe that to be true, but then I think that is a parallel argument to the idea that 'in 50 years everyone is going to be mixed race, so racism wont exist anymore' - which of course isn't true because there are mixed race societies where racism is still heavily present - such as brazil & ultimately it's an attempt to wipe a slate clean without addressing how the dirt got there. (that was a terrible analogy, i've been awake since 5am so forgive me
In theory more representation could work on a wide scale and in most industries, we haven't seen it to really know whether or not it's the best solution.
But I think no matter what method we use, ultimately education and accountability is at the forefront - and that means that even if an institution is 99% white, the confidence is that the people within that institution aren't complicit in allowing discrimination to fester, and hold each other accountable, so in your example about the BM joke, that situation wouldn't have come about at all, regardless of your race, you know?
White people account for 80-85% of the population in this country, there's no reason to believe that, that will change drastically in the next 3, 4, 5 generations at least - so ultimately black and other ethnic minorities will always represent a small percentage in most industries because of numbers.
But yeah ultimately i'm here for education, I actually enjoy visiting museums and learning about various civilisations and lost history - digital archives is a great shout, I think education in school should be addressed first & foremost, and museums should be an extension of that education.
Not really sure if that made sense, and I kinda waffled too.
Very sensitive these history deniers. Give them another ten or twenty years to get used to the idea that they may believe in myths.
On the other hand the truth has always been there, they just don't want to be told about it. Illusions shattered.
Don't read one history book, read loads of them from different perspectives , by different nations, they might come across the truth, no matter how painful it is.
Hi Rams, I'm currently finishing writing up my PhD in history focussing on, hey get this, the memorialisation and commemoration of the past.
So when I tell you that if you'd done your reading you'd realise how facile those arguments are you can trust me, I've done the reading so you don't have to. I can also tell you with absolutely certainty that the vast majority of historians that I know are massively in favour of removing statues. I doubt many would argue for their outright destruction, (although frankly, I suspect most would cream their pants about how historically interesting such destruction would be) but they would tell you that the removal of the Colston statue, for example, is history and is significantly more informative about out attitudes and relationship to the past than a contextless (ironically) whitewashed commemoration of the man as a an unproblematic hero of Bristol ever was. If our aim is to preserve these monuments as historical sources, then they serve a far better job of that in museums.
It depends what you mean by 'particular insight'. For me, I think the historian's voice in this debate is to counter the lazy invocation of 'history' as an opposition for the statues removal. You and I both know that writing history is rewriting history, and that these debates are hardly novel in the historical record. What does strike me as novel, however, is our society's failure (I think, actually a failure driven by historians of recent generations past) to realise that we do not sit aloof and unaffected by history and we are, in fact, a part of it. Our actions, our decisions to preserve, and to conserve monuments, commemorations and celebrations to slavers, racists, and mass murderers or not do so (if we so decide to) are not neutral or somehow reflective of a noble pursuit in historical objectiveness, but are actually themselves active decisions which reflect our values as a society and our attitude to the past just as much as destroying or removing them would be.
By all means debate whether a statue of Churchill is a suitable memorial in the 21st century (I'd be surprised if even given everything the majority decision would be in favour of removing his right now anyway) but let's not pretend that it's a battle ground fought out between ahistorical hooligans hellbent on wrecking the past and virtuous paragons of said past, because such a battleground is utterly impossible.
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Don't want to derail, but I agree with all of this. I meant the globalised process moreso than multiculturalism, which I tried to clarify a bit. The new agrarian shift to the city. Multiculturalism is more a corallary of globalisation anyway, which is why they're so easily conflated.
London and Birmingham aren't really representative of England. The ethnic composition of the country is still 87 % white (2011, so maybe changed a bit now), despite what you see in the streets of major cities and certain urban parts of the country. The more radical the urban elites become, the more estranged, conservative and regressive the rest of the country is going to become. As long as the electoral system is the way it is, the country won't become the politically cosmopolitan and multiracial utopia you dream of. Same reason why massive progressive majorities in California and the East coast doesn't translate into government power for the Democrats.
Every young generation is touted as the The generation that will really change things and make a better and more inclusive world, and yet somehow the sections of society that make up conservatives and factions of social democracy/socialism/progressivism doesn't really change that much.
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God, it's always the same old brutal 'solutions' with that Party: 'Put 'em in the army - that'll sort them out!'
I agree but the people doing the vandalising of war memorials are sub human scum.
You can’t re-educate that level of ‘human.’ It’s untrainable, feral.
There’s a debate to be had on Churchill and individual statues of a singular person but memorials for people who were forced into war to protect their country and made the ultimate sacrifice are sacred. It’s a basic mark of humanity to respect such a thing, regardless of your views on the war itself, the dead it represents didn’t have the first world luxury of deciding if they agree with a war, they were thrown in as kids.
The act of forced enrolment and subsequent mass death of that generation is ironically far worse than anything these people are protesting for today. I’m sure the majority of the protesters would be disgusted at this, all it does is allow the news coverage to focus on the negative.
'kinell!
Bit of an exaggeration there... What should we punish them with? Death by guillotine?
No, commission a statue.
What the actual feck?
Yeah this was basically what I was thinking, you’ve just fleshed it out a lot better than me. The idea that as historians we’re somehow uniquely immune to the passions of the moment, that we have frozen the interpretation of certain symbols, events, individuals etc., in time so that any challenge to them represents an attempt to “undo” history is, well, bollox.
On racism, not really true. At least I don't think that was the expectation of my generation when in the 1990s. The likes of Malcolm X knew that they were catalysts and that the real change was many years ahead.
Looking back, it's pitiful what we we were were prepared to settle. Perhaps others of the same generation also comment.
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This is the kind of narrative from 'historians' that indoctrinated them in first place. It's impressive fiction.
"RAJ will provoke debate, for it sheds new light on Mountbatten and the events of 1946-47 which ended an exercise in benign autocracy and an experiment in altruism." Book back cover description of The Making and Unmaking of British India
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Great post.
I've been reading Simon Schama on the French Revolution recently. He states that many historians often have themes or implicit biases (in their books), and frequently avoid 'negative' incidents that might upset the validity of those themes or biases. Could it be the case that some historians aren't so much guilty of dismissing/downplaying Churchill's various errors and personal faults but rather that they're afraid the alternative would spoil their 'bigger picture'?
The onus thus far has been to have to prove somebody were a racist. I think British society needs to go through a period where people have the prove their comments, behaviours and decisions are not racist. That's the only way to unlearn culturally ingrained, systemic and institutional racism and replace with a totally neutral set of behaviours. Yeah, it's a tough gig if you're a native victim of 400 years of white supremacy propaganda.
Ooh Steve, Schama, you sexy bastard.
But your blanket, all British are inherently racist is simply not true and the onus is on you to prove it. Not liken anyone who doesn't agree with you with Tommy Robinson or other racist dickheads.
You kind of proved your agenda yesterday when it was pointed out to you that in later life Churchill reflected on his racist views and accepted they were never acceptable, but apparently that still isn't good enough and his whole life should be expunged from history.
As many others have pointed out that if you go far enough back into a nation's history you will inevitably find horrible things, I am yet to see anyone condone colonialism. It was abhorrent, but to ignore that it happened or rewrite history because of previously held beliefs is both insincere and IMO disrespectful for any person that had to be subjugated and treated as a lesser person because of the colour of their skin.