National Guard called into Minneapolis
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The statue as was already hid history on behalf of cowards who don't want to face up to it.
These statues remember past glories of favoured sons and daughters. But they're all about the good things they did, and none of the ill - because people don't like to be reminded of it and don't want to deal with it. It's cherry-picking the bits of history to remember. The Colston statue was erected in 1895 and the plaque chooses to call him "wise" and "virtuous", quietly ignoring much of his wealth derived from slavery, even long after abolition and the recognition of how vile slavery was. And to the modern day, people have not wanted that dirty laundry aired. It's easy enough to repurpose these statues: it could have been as simple as a new plaque, and indeed campaigners in Bristol spent thirty years trying to get a new plaque for the Colston statue, only to meet constant prevarication and obstruction. If it had been done, the statue might still be there.
This is nationalism, though. People associate with their country, assume it as part of their identity. It's strangely irrational in a way to feel pride over what other people did and somehow think that some of their accomplishment should grace oneself, but that's the way humans are so we may as well work with it. However I would say to anyone that if they want their nation, community, etc. as part of their identity, at least have the honesty and bravery to accept all of it, not the just the chickenshit whitewash. A Briton can have pride that their ancestors, from their little island off the NW European coast, somehow conquered a huge amount of the world... but also humility for the atrocities carried out in the process. Keep the memorials to businessmen, generals, prime ministers to celebrate their achievements, and also have those memorials acknowledge the terrible things they did too.
1) It's a stupid idea to suddenly tell people to stop using a gesture that is extremely common just because some assholes decided to also start using it because it's giving them power and saying they can take over any gesture (and they will) to force people to stop doing it. It's giving them power to co-op whatever symbol or gesture they want.
2) Except as we've seen it won't be "Stop using the handsign" it will be "Dear Mr Terminal Blue's manager, your employee Mr Terminal Blue was seen making this White supremacist hand gesture, I am shocked and applauded your store supports the Nazi ideology and me and my 50 friend have no intention to buy from your store again until action is taken. Yours Sincerely AntiFA Karen" The plan is to use more extreme people on the other side to go after people and drive them to said White supremacist groups that's the plan. The plan is to get extremist group opposing them to do all the work by hounding people and trying to ruin their lives so the only place said people can turn would be white supremacist groups.
3) Hell it may not even be about getting people on the side of Nazi. But just alienating them from the site vehemently yelling about fighting the Nazi by getting people who are not Nazis attacked by them and showing said people that the supposed new age Nazi hunters are incompetent and more likely than not going to harm 10 innocent people at least just in the hopes 1 of them might be a Nazi.
You literally get Wikipedia lists a 4chan prank as starting the modern free bleeding campaign right. Wikipedia itself. You get that right?
People took seriously the Iphone being waterproof or being able to charge their phones using the microwave too. They were also 4chan pranks.
Hell Qanon was likely a joker on 4chan and look at that now?
Is Qanon a super serious thing people should believe in or just a people who got fooled?
Black guy whose a known troll tells people drinking milk is a sign of white supremacy.
Suddenly people who seem to be white supremacists turn up drinking milk on stream.
A stream where Shia Labeouf gets easily upset at anything resembling Nazi dogwhistling.
Does that not seem like a huge set up to you?
Getting people to believe it and getting them to then go after others for it.
Jenny McDermott for one lol.
Also again it relies on people accepting things as absolutely truth and getting the narrative locked in so suddenly going forward those symobols etc have always been secret signs of White supremacy. That they weren't suddenly made up and people fell for them it was somehow people didn't know about them.
Because the name means so much. It could be any troll using a fake name. Honestly it probably is a channer it seems like their style
You think the people who need to know about this stuff will do that?
Read a book? Go to museum?
Or might they see a statue and in their lack of knowledge pull out their cellphone and google the name of the person there?
And I'm hoping the differences don't escape people here.
How far back are people planning to go?
Do we pull down all Roman statues too (they kept slaves) do we pull down every statue of everyone deemed oppressive (goodbye Florence Nightingale)
Boudicca ander her revolt pulled down 1 statue symbolic of the leader or person who started the campaign in Gaul.
We as a collective learned about the history based on what is left to find. Would a lay person in medieval times know of those events? Maybe some scribe might have a dusty old volume on it but a lay person?
We don't have a statue of serial killer Howard shipman because he was never seen as having done anything good worth celebrating in the first place.
We live in a world where the inventor a dynamite which likely lead to so many weapons of war is also the person the peace prize is named after and previously ran and arms manufacturer.
We now have these magical pocket sized devices you can put a name into and connect to the worlds largest collection of human history all compiled to views.
Do you not think having a statue could allow people to google the name and learn the history from it in a way that is more accessible and open than hoping they go to a museum?
We don't live in the previous age where the only way to learn history was requiring to go after different sources be it teachers, library books or museums. We have tools that allow people to literally pull out a small device which can connect to the internet and look it up. So yes statues can teach that history now just from being there for people to google the names from them.
And does the internet not help reveal it?
Internet available on say a mobile phone?
They're about the good they did because people are often complex individuals. I mean people are calling to pull down statues of Gandhi FFS. I'm sure once some of her problematic stuff gets out Florence Nightingale will face calls for her statue to be pulled down too.
We're at a a stage where to "fight the NAzis in society" people are calling for the removal of a statue of the first world leader to stand up the the actual Nazis......... think about that for a moment.
And here I was thinking I could use the internet regardless of the number of statues around.
There is no attempt of any significance to remove the statue of Gandhi, or Churchill. No political party of any relevance called for it to happen; no huge protest turned out and tried to pull it down.
Johnson said he would defend it because he wanted a distraction, a culture war, and it whips people up. Not because it was actually under threat.
And yet having the statue there gives a name and gets people willing to look further to google it.
Having no name means no info to start and look.
That means if a place was built on the back of funds from a slaver then that slaver's involvement is erased and the place just magically emerged and has no problematic past at all lol
There is a petition going round for the Gandhi statue.
Also Churchill wasn't pulled down but they sure as hell gratified the statue and I'm sure would like to give it a go pulling him down.
How many Roman statues do you think are actually left standing my dude? How kind do you think the last two-thousand-odd years have been to them? Most Roman statues have been long gone for a while now, and you'll notice history hasn't forgotten about them one little bit.
As for Nightingale, sure, why not. She was more of a statistician than a nurse, if we want to celebrate woman in healthcare give me Mary Seacole any day
If this is how little you know of history, you have no place to be lecturing other people on it
Do you have any idea just how many historical or cultural references appear in the works of Shakespeare? Who, I remind you, was writing for the common man. You don't do yourself any favours with this kind of elitist attitude, assuming everyone in the past was an ignorant fool while only you hold the truth of knowledge
He was a doctor so he did in fact heal people. Made the sick better with his sage wisdom and well earned knowledge. You know, those he didn't discreetly murder. Arguably more than Edward Colston did. But you're actually agreeing with here anyway; statues are just monuments to a persons greatness. So what happens when we think those people aren't so great?
...it's named after him because he created it, specifically as a means of seeking out and rewarding peaceful inventions after seeing how a thing he had invented to try and make mining and engineering safer got repurposed into a weapon. Maybe stop getting your history from statues and try a book if you are going to either misunderstand or misrepresent things like that
Trajan’s Column
Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius
The Four Tetrarchs
There's 4 for you. I'm sure a number of others still survive.
We however know most of the history about then due to digging through the stuff and finding the remains. We don't know this stuff from knowledge passed down from the Middles ages etc
Sorry that was your argument for it lol.
I do know she and her supporters did take part in a pretty large campaign to push the Romans out of Britain but you decided to focus it down to 1 statue being pulled down lol.
Yes because clearly the White supremacists are going to be the ones engaging with Shakespeare lol.
It's not an elitist attitude to point out that the lay person most likely only engaged with Shakespeare during their schooling and maybe the odd play at some point. Not much more.
Not deemed worthy of extra recognition though.
Also
So yeh schools, housing for the poor and hospitals. He's reported to have given £70,000 in total which n todays money is £6,230,546
And is that not the problem demonstrated clear as day with going after statues due to one point in their history?
Funny how people will go after statues of people due to problematic statements but ignore times they changed their minds or tried to do some good despite all the ill they did......
Technically true, yet with pretty much no relevance to how most people actually behave.
No, they're not at all about them being complex individuals, exactly the opposite is true. The statues are solely and explicitly in commemoration of their "good" deeds, despite the fact they potentially did a great deal of harm to other people that the people who erected the statue don't care about.
There's no significant pressure to remove statues of Winston Churchill. Just because some journo found a couple of random people who did does not make it worth discussion.
A) That is in fact 3 not 4
B) Your second one has in fact already been taken down and placed in a museum, where it has been for about 40 years now
C) Your third one isn't in its original place or serving its original purpose. What history will you be learning from it?
Because that statue emphasised that removing statues does not remove history. To which you give a flippant response about only one statue being removed (when several cities were utterly destroyed) and seemed to think Claudius had anything to do with the conquest of Gaul which just shows how little respect you actually have for history. Don't try and use it as a shield when you clearly have no other interest in it
I'm sorry what do white supremacists have to do with anything? First time either of us have mentioned them.
Dude, Shakespeare was the Michael Bay of his time. He wanted his plays to appeal to the masses so he filled them full of dick jokes, flashy action and pop culture references. Mentioning past battles, fragments of ancient cultures, old mythologies, those are his pop culture references. Things he could slip in knowing everyone would get it. Thats the point I'm getting at here, not that people in the past were cultured just because they'd heard of Shakespeare. You assuming the folks of ye olden times were pig ignorant of their past reflects poorly on no-one but yourself
Hence why I said "arguably" because he didn't do any of that himself, he just splashed cash around. Is that morally better than personally healing the sick?
And I'm once again going to point out this doesn't actually effect my argument in any way. You don't make statues to learn from mistakes or highlight errors, you make them because you think a dude is rad enough to deserve one. You're quibbling over the cherry on top in the hopes we'll overlook your cake being stale
Alfred Nobel devised an explosive more stable than the ones currently used in mining and engineering in the hopes that it would make mining and engineering safer. Other people took that and went "Huh. Bet I could kill people with this." Its not like he invented a particular form of gun and was amazed it got turned to murder, he was making pre-existing methods safer. This doesn't demonstrate any problem except your willingness to ignore basic facts to try and make a gotcha point
True but you can still look up info on them. As you just did lol
Question. Did you choose Boudica for the ironic value in picking her?
We likely know who the person is because of other statues of them about or references to him likely on coins found about or other such artefacts.
Again it's not thanks to middle age peasants we know about the Romans it's mostly historians excavating and piecing together history. For a while that history was lost to most of the world. Much of what remained and was built by the Romans was allowed to crumble to ruin over time.
I mean did you know we only recently re-discovered how to make Roman concrete after the recipe was lost for centuries?
In centuries prior to him there' wouldn't have been schooling on such matters for many commoners. So again for a good while much of the history was lost.
It's how most philanthropists got statues just think in a century or two there might be Bill Gates statues.
And are not human beings complex people not all good or bad?
Who gets to decide who is good enough.
Again people are upset and Gandhi
Calls to remove 'racist' Gandhi statue in Leicester
A petition accuses the man who fought for Indian independence of being fascist and racist.
www.bbc.co.uk
Nobel literally owned an arms manufacturer lol
Bofors - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
If you google Jefferson, if the top 5 results only one goes into detail on slavery and race. It excuses his owning of slaves by saying he was a kind master and that everyone at the time owned slaves. It then brushes over the the criticism of this pointing out that excessive punishment did occur at the time and doesn’t mention the founding fathers who never owned slaves or freed them in their lifetime. They say he thought that blacks were inferior then excuses it by saying everyone thought that (obviously untrue). They say he believed in abolition eventually but only spend a single sentence on the Hatian revolution (WHICH OCCURRED DURING HIS PRESIDENCY) and state that it actually hardened him against abolition due to the violence against whites. His reaction to the violence against Hatian slaves, who had a life expectancy of two years upon reaching Haiti, were brutally abused, and during the Revolution were summarily executed and fed to dogs, is left unstated. It does not mention that his focus on running a plantation with a hundred slaves did not maintain his wealthy status, it actually made him destitute. He abandoned his his profitable legal practice to be the ideal plantation owner he believed fostered liberty by owning a hundred slaves and raping them. He found lawyers unethical you see, and owning slaves and raping them was not as unethical. Yes, google is such a great way to learn about statues.
In short, Thomas Jefferson can suck my dick. Fuck Jefferson all my homies hate Jefferson.
See, if you're going to say yourself that info can be looked up without the need to see it on statues, you're just proving my point that its not the statues teaching history
You've lost sight of the argument. I didn't pick Boudicca, I picked the statue. Because of the parallels I could draw with modern activism. See, this is what happens when you just say "au contraire!" to everything people say to you, you lose sight of the context
Nope, guess again. It's mostly writing. Romans loved writing about themselves. Tacitus' description of Boudicca is just fantastic
Which is not the same as forgetting about the Romans. Everyone still knew they had existed, no history has been erased. So your argument that statues hold the key to remembering history still falls flat
And how much schooling do you think the common man got in Shakespeare's time? I am providing contemporary evidence that people who you are attempting to label as ignorant would absolutely have understood historical references and context, you're going to have to do better than just insisting that knowledge was lost.
Oh and once again, if you're point is about schooling then once again you're making my point for me and making it clear its not the statues doing the teaching.
So they're not really teaching any history or merit, are they, just telling you how rich someone is.
The people of the time. Hence me picking an old statue in my original posts, to try and demonstrate to you that this is not some static, eternal thing. Statues are not there forever, statues may not even be gone forever. History is a thing constantly in flux
Okay. Some people want a statue of Gandhi removed. So what? Why not? Take him down and replace it with a sculpture of India, or a representation of an Indian citizen. Same as how our war memorials depict the soldiers not the generals. What is this pearl clutching you're doing supposed to prove or demonstrate?
Yep, which he tried to focus more on chemical engineering, being fairly indifferent towards the actual weaponry. I believe the interpretation is that he assumed that indifference would isolate him from the aspects of his work he felt clashed with his pacifism (though not enough to actually stop manufacturing weapons, you'll note), hence why it upset him so to be labelled a merchant of death.
Though going back to why you originally started this tangent, many people have found this problematic throughout the years, the juxtaposition has always been noted. But whereas a statue offers a nice tangible target you can physically act against, what are you supposed to do about an immaterial title?
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Statues give you a start.See, if you're going to say yourself that info can be looked up without the need to see it on statues, you're just proving my point that its not the statues teaching history
the example you brought up was the actions of those supporting Boudica.
Was it a pick for the Irony value of picking her considering parallels that could be drawn?
and we found the statues and artifacts and writings etc
So you're arguing medieval peasants would be hugely educated in history?
More than they got centuries before lol
More that they had an impact on the area as such.
Normally they got moved due to damage or them decaying or conquerors wishing to erase past history etc.
That no person will never be deemed good enough most likely so we might as well pull down every damn statue and ban ever putting more up because no-one is a perfect being.
Well Silence is violence and all that
Demand it be changed and push winners to reject the prize........
1 source mentions slavery at all and mostly says he wasn’t that bad. Cool standard you have there. Methinks you don’t actually care about recognizing that these were horrible people.
Not "no person". Just no person who has held much power in the context of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, slavery, and so on.
I think it's a stretch to call these people "horrible" just because they lived in a different time period and don't share the same 2020 values that we have. Chances are, people in 2120 will be calling us all horrible people for some unforeseen reason.
If humanity makes it that far.
HAITI HAPPENED WHILE JEFFERSON WAS PRESIDENT. FRANKLIN FREED HIS SLAVES DURING HIS OWN LIFETIME. THEY KNEW SLAVERY WAS BAD THEY JUST DID NOT CARE.
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