Bristol fashion
This happened today.
Bristol was the biggest slave trade port in Britain.
There are many cries of “Disgraceful!”
The thing is, toppling statues of tyrants has a long history. It’s just silly to call it “vandalism” as if there were nothing more to it.
Does selling slaves count as tyranny? I think the question answers itself.
People seem to think that once a thing is commemorated, with a statue or street name or whatever, it must remain commemorated for all time.
Cries of disgraceful and the wailing of quotes from 1984!
And yet I’d wager that many of those same people were cheering when statues of Lenin were pulled down all over eastern Europe in the eighties.
I didn’t hear anyone cry “Disgraceful!” when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled.
Even in something like this I can see a several ways forward. Not all equally good.
Times and perspectives change. We could tear down statues to slavers, colonisers, war criminals and rebels. That can be seen as a triumph of good over evil. It can also enable a large chunk of the population, now and in the future, to go on being assholes in blissful ignorance. We could also leave the statues up, but add a plaque or immediately adjacent monument that provides historical commentary and re-evaluation. That needs to be done with the involvement and consent of representatives of the party harmed of course. The worst case is to leave the monuments up, with no commentary, leaving the impression that the person and their beliefs and actions is still in good standing with society now.
Similarly with buildings and institutions founded or funded by such people. If they are doing good or are useful now. Acknowledge the bad at the root of the funding or actions of the founder, but emphasise the change in attitude and harms caused.
Individuals, their motivations and their context are rarely as shallow as is the case with DJT.
Rob, I like that. Erasing the memorials is erasing the past. People forget quickly enough as it is, or we wouldn’t see the rise of groups such as Greece’s Golden Dawn, France’s National Front, The US Tea Party, UKIP, et al.
The only thing I would disagree on is that history does not require the consent of victims in order to be told.
You’re right of course Roj, history doesn’t require the consent of victims to be told. Indeed there are good reasons why history should be told through multiple lenses, so to speak, provided that these at least stay vaguely moored to facts and reasonable interpretation. The benefit of involving victims in the reinterpretation isn’t about getting the history ‘right’ though. It’s about the separate issue of acknowledging the wrongs and giving others the opportunity to heal at both a cultural and individual level. It’s an exercise in listening as much as retelling.
As an aside, the thought occurs to me that just as all nations have their particular legend they tell about themselves (US being the exceptional, the land of the free, the American Dream etc), One of NZ’s legends is that we are good at race relations. We’re not particularly. But just as America desires to be the Shining City on the Hill, NZ desires to be the nation that listens to the grievances of its indigenous peoples and attempts to make amends. We succeed in fits and starts and are otherwise much like everyone else.
Rob, I think NZ does it better than US or Aus.
I lived there from 2001 -2013, earthquakes and all, and found on a whole Maori far more integrated into society that back in Oz with Aborigines. It was impossible to go a day in NZ without having some sort of interaction with Maori, be it a workmate, the checkout at The Warehouse, or the bloke pulling my beer.
Sad to say, in Aus it is possible to go days, weeks, even months, with out having any interaction with Aborigines.
Like I say, we aspire to that. To be fair to Australia (grudgingly), Aborigines now make up a tiny percentage of your population. A year ago I was in Aussie for work and attended a ceremony where a local women representing the people of that land talked to us bluntly about history from her tribes perspective, welcomed us to the land and encouraged us to ‘bathe’ in smoke from a fire she lit for us (small one thankfully – it was about 40 degrees). It was interesting and also heartening to see my Australian colleagues so into it. I remember when I was there back in the 90’s a group of people I had thought to be very liberal and progressive turned pretty nasty when the subject of race relations came up.
Societies can change if the people have the will and their politicians give them the breathing room to do so.
The spectacle of the very unPriti (in her manners and political beliefs) Patel, who is thoroughly unpleasant and thick as brick, rabbiting on in that pained and ‘sincere’ way (rather in the manner of Ivanka Trump)… well, I shall say no more. Colston made benefactions out of his malefactions, though of the nature of the latter he remained, as most people people of his time in England did, oblivious. You didn’t see what was happening yourself, it was all very far away, and it made a lot of money, which could be used for charitable purposes well as for living well, so why be concerned?
In which connexion, I do recommend the recently published ‘The Ratline: Love, Lies & Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive’, by Philippe Sands – there fugitive was Otto Freiherr von Wachter (umlaut missing in last name), Governor of Galicia, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands Jews & Poles (including many of Sands’ family). It follows his first book, ‘East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide & Crimes against Humanity’. He is Professor of Law at University College of London, and has been involved in many important human rights cases. They are remarkable books, because he got to know, and gained the trust of, the sons of both Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland, and Wachter. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, subtle, and almost preternaturally perceptive books that explore the moral complexity of all of our lives.
It’s not really debatable with the statues put up by the monsters to commemorate the traitors though…
Longstreet might be the notable exception (he made efforts to redeem himself, unlike the others, which is why he only ever had one statue).
BKiSA, the only time I’d ever debate the issue with a community would be if it were an act of forgetting, rather than re-evaluating history.
Rob, that’s sort of like what FFRF did in Dayton. There is a large statue of William Jennings Bryan so they had a statue of Clarence Darrow sculpted (I think someone else arranged the sculpting and paying part) and erected it near the Bryan statue. John DeLancie did the unveiling of the Darrow statue.
Article about the Colston statue, which, like the Confederate statues in the USA, was put up well after it would be sensible to ‘commemorate’ its subject, in order to represent the city’s power relations in concrete, visible form.
https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/myths-within-myths/
Moving the statue to the local history museum or putting up an explanatory plaque have been discussed for decades, but consistently blocked by a certain faction of the city administration.
@14, then I guess it belongs in the harbour :-)
Quote from Twitter just now: “They’re saying we should’ve gone through the proper channels to get im down. Well we tried that for years and were ignored, so now e’s in the proper channel.”
Thank you, guest, for the information about the statue, and that wonderful twitter (what an improvement on the Donald’s shrieks!).
Another post from the same site, on the history of the ‘corrective plaque’:
https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/the-edward-colston-corrective-plaque/
Well done, guest: well, that puts the seal on it doesn’t it? Greenacre (what a thoroughly comfy, echt-english name – is he a hobbit, I wonder?) & the Cold-stonians – what horrid holes these people inhabit.
We hear this story so often, in so many contexts…’why do you have to be so MEAN about it? Why can’t you ask nicely/go through proper channels/just vote?’ This is the story of the Luddites as well–they didn’t start breaking frames until after years of pursuing their legal rights of employee protection through the courts, which of course went nowhere because the government was corrupt.
Decades ago a friend told me about one night when her boyfriend rang her and asked to visit. After declining several times, she finally agreed, saying ‘OK, but I have an important meeting early tomorrow, so you’ll have to leave by 10.’ So he comes over, and around 9:30 she suggests that he might want to think about leaving. She asks again at 9:45, 10, 10:30, etc. etc. and finally around midnight she screams at him to get out. ‘Well you don’t have to yell at me,’ he answers sulkily. Um, yeah, I guess she kind of did have to.
I understand that it is often important to have a statue to remind us of a particular part of history, but why does it have to be the one commemorating the bad guys? Why can’t the statue be replaced by one portraying the people most affected by the slave trade?
I was literally just having this conversation with my neighbours–I pointed out that the purpose of public statues is didactic. Who wants to teach people about the people most affected by the slave trade? No one with any money. They want to teach people to know their place, and that’s what statues of Edward Colston and Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest do.
It does look like a couple of years ago someone did a powerful piece of public art near the statue:
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/100-human-figures-placed-front-2122990