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British Protestors teardown statue of 17th Century Slave Trader.
- Thread starter Midgarian
- Start date
I gotta say, as an American, these protests are giving me quick lessons in European history. Did not know about Leopold II before and now I know about Edward Colston.
Whether people think it was the right way to go about removing it, I find it telling that some seem more upset about a statue being torn down than what the protestors are actually protesting about.
At least a lot of the media (and I'm just basing this on Sky/BBC/ITV) are prefacing coverage by pointing out that he was a slave trader.
At least a lot of the media (and I'm just basing this on Sky/BBC/ITV) are prefacing coverage by pointing out that he was a slave trader.
I would love to see this.
I saw some people talking about throwing Oliver Cromwell's statue in the Thames - this I am less keen for. He did some atrocious things to Ireland but his impact on British history is too important for him to be thrown in the river. Random slave owners and Thatcher i am totally down for, but historical figures (no matter how controversial) I find a bit questionable.
We learned about slavery when i was in a school in England around 10 years ago, but only ever American slavery, I know nothing about the slave trade in the UK and definitely not about statues like this one.
The curriculum really whitewashes Britian's awful history. We learn about the good stuff like the British spirit during the Blitz and how heroic we were in wars but all the bad stuff is completely glossed over.
No wonder people become obsessed with nationalism and voted for shit like Brexit
This is one of the statues of our beloved king Leopold II.
The scene on the left is titled as: Thanks from the Congolese people to Leopold II for freeing them from slavery under the Arabs.
I wish I was making this up but I'm not.
It's going to be recovered and put in a museum according to the Mayor of Bristol.
www.google.co.uk
Mayor gives update on future of Edward Colston statue
It was thrown in the water during a Black Lives Matter protest
www.google.co.uk
I implore people to read this entire thread, it is fucking brilliant
It's going to be recovered and put in a museum according to the Mayor of Bristol.
Mayor gives update on future of Edward Colston statue
It was thrown in the water during a Black Lives Matter protest
Rather have it there than on the street to be honest.
This is one of the statues of our beloved king Leopold II.
The scene on the left is titled as: Thanks from the Congolese people to Leopold II for freeing them from slavery under the Arabs.
I wish I was making this up but I'm not.
Holy shit that is some Doublethink right there - "we enslaved these people and chopped their hands off in order to free them".
Also, any bets on how long until Marvin Rees becomes the right-wing press' new favourite punching bag?
I think you mean the opposite. People SHOULD know more about him other than his whitewashed Hero of WWII image. Unless you mean despairing at the endless praise he gets despite all the shit he did.
You know, I wasn't really for reparations (because of how complex it is to implement), but I have really warmed up to the idea over the last few years. The amount of blood that was spilled just so a few people and many institutions profited from forced captives is pretty astronomical. I'm not an expert on the subject but I reckon that at least a third of the wealth of this country from its founding to present was a direct result of that for-profit captivity.
I know that the people alive today did not do those abhorrent practices but they are for sure reaping all its rewards plus the continued economic inequality that is both alive and well today. We have the technology and bureaucracy now to determine who is eligible to get it so now is the time to have a serious conversation about.
For example, we can use genetic profiles of people to figure out if they descended from slaves and then give them reparation payments to households if they are a certain income level today. Continue the payments until Census says that African-Americans and Native Americans households are at parity when it comes to wealth versus the average person. If these types of evidence are good enough for the courts, then it's good enough to redistribute wealth and finally pay the blood that was spilled.
Of course, the best way to do this is UBI but that's not gonna happen. Reparations will at least have strong justifications.
If people are that worried about the historical value of these statues then they should be in a museum, not out in public to glorify the person without any form of context or note to say who they are and what they did.
I hope someone tears down the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square next. Fuck him.
I hope someone tears down the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square next. Fuck him.
what the fuck? you have statues of this monster in belgium?This is one of the statues of our beloved king Leopold II.
The scene on the left is titled as: Thanks from the Congolese people to Leopold II for freeing them from slavery under the Arabs.
I wish I was making this up but I'm not.
Well, think about it. For American slavery to exist, before there was a US, Europeans had to bring these people over to their new colonies. The fact that this is often relegated as a US issue in the 1800s is very hypocritical.
They don't point out the noble act of abolition came with a 16 billion (in today's money)pounds payout for the slave owners either.
There's no extrabiblical evidence Jews were actually enslaved in Egypt, especially not en mass. We have plenty of records that show the pyramids and all were not constructed by slaves but paid workers, they even recorded injuries.
User Banned (3 Months): Rationalizing colonialism and racism, prior bans for dismissing concerns over antisemitism and racism
There's no such thing as a good Empire. Ours was no different. It may seem like a point of pride to say our little island once conquered three quarters of the known world, but it's nothing to be proud of when we did so by stealing anything that wasn't nailed down and killed everyone that got in our way.
Even so, we can't ignore that Empires were necessary for the proliferation of technology and knowledge - every single Empire contributed to the development of humanity as a species and we wouldn't have the kind of knowledge and technology we have now if it weren't for the "strong" teaching the "weak" (as it were) - but that does not mean we can ignore the atrocities that those same Empires performed.
For example we can't understate how revolutionary something as simple as roads were, which of course we have the Roman Empire to thank for, but we similarly cannot understate how many people were killed or how many lives were ruined by the Roman Empire to build those roads.
So as with everything to do with humans, you have to take the good with the bad. You have to acknowledge our successes as much as our mistakes so we know what we did wrong, what we did right, what we can improve upon and what we can ensure never happens again.
Someone should get up there and fix his extra hand.This is one of the statues of our beloved king Leopold II.
The scene on the left is titled as: Thanks from the Congolese people to Leopold II for freeing them from slavery under the Arabs.
I wish I was making this up but I'm not.
Don't feel too bad. Most people in the UK, outside Bristol, don't really know who Colston was.
Perhaps this is because I'm on the older side, and because I lived outside the UK for several years, but I actually think my education did a decent job of instilling in me how awful the slave trade was and how it built a lot of the wealth we benefit from today.
I know a lot of people don't feel that way, though, so either the curriculum changed massively, or I just had a very good history teacher in high school.
I guess you are right. It might make some people reassess their idolisation of him if they knew his history. But given the sort of people who do seem to deify him, I doubt whether knowing of his responsibility for the deaths of a few million innocent 'brown skinned' people, would dissuade them.
I'm aware of that.
Exodus is the foundational myth of Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple. It makes perfect sense that a group of people who were constantly ousted from their homes have an origin story of who they are and how they came to be in order to cope with such violence. It seems most likely that the story of Exodus was a combination of historical events and influences, often centuries apart, that somehow became amalgamated into a single coherent story (my aunt is an Archaeologist with a minor in Egyptology and my cousin teaches Archaeology at Bar Ilan Univeristy in Tel-Aviv). The importance of the story of Exodus is in its existential meaning for the individual and the people. Exodus is liberation from bondage for the Jews, but its purpose is also to shape the life of the individual: In each and every generation a person is obligated to see himself as if he went out of Egypt. To us this means that every person should see themselves, on Passover and all year round, as one who left slavery. In the Torah, the requirement to 'Remember that you were slaves in Egypt' is the most common reasoning for the moral commandments. Those who were freed from slavery must remember the taste of it so they can have empathy for those who are in bondage now.
That being said I'd rather not detract further from the actual topic of the thread, because this ain't the topic that matters right now, but rather Black Lives and how fucked it is that there was a statue commemorating a slave trader.
How
How about Nancy Astor's? Probably shouldn't have a statue celebrating a Nazi sympathizing anti-semite.
How about Nancy Astor's? Probably shouldn't have a statue celebrating a Nazi sympathizing anti-semite.
I just want anyone who reads the above to know that it's nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Empires did not spread technology to the ignorant natives. Christ...
Which taxpayers were still paying off until 2015. Yes, taxpayers including the Afro-Caribbean diaspora of Britain who are descended from those same slaves.
yeah, you got to hand it to these people, they really are good at fucking people over, i wonder what the slaves got on their last day.
How does that pole work?, could they get the titanic up the same way
It feels like the opposite of how a lever should be used.
Like that lie that brought the railways to India. What they did was take the railways to India so they could steal resources out of India. It was not done to benefit the Indian people.
British history is... interesting.
He made a fortune off slave trading but invested a lot of it into the local area and had many landmarks named after him as a result. People tend to ignore parts of history that paint certain people in a bad light.... but a lot of history does that.
I think you can see this even this day and age in Africa. Just take a look at African railroad tracks maps and there's a clear pattern of railroads having a big focus of going from inland towards the sean, less of them criss-crossing all over the continent, and this is mostly because they've been built and, to this day, mostly used to transport stuff from inland to harbors so they can be shipped to western/richer countries, not to help African people travel for business & leisure.
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The slave owner's belt buckle, ledger, one of his baby teeth, his big toenail clipping are historical artifacts that can go in a museum
Not a statue explicitly made to honor him. Who wants to look at that irrelevant shit in a museum. Melt it to scrap
Not a statue explicitly made to honor him. Who wants to look at that irrelevant shit in a museum. Melt it to scrap