Statues and our tolerance of history

[saaby93]

It used to be Eastern bloc countries that would take down one set of statues and replace with another depending on the current political mood.
The UK has all sorts of statues with a chequered history with degrees of good and bad that we respect as a sign of our past.

Should we try to cleanse history by only having statues of those we find acceptable against today's current standards?
Is it a benefit not to remember what has happened in the past?
Who is to decide?

[Mojooo]

I don't think removing statues is re-writing history

As someone said, a statue is normally considered a celebration of someone.

So the question is do we want to celebrate them and does that change over time with the public mood ?

[saaby93]

Mojooo said:

I don't think removing statues is re-writing history

As someone said, a statue is normally considered a celebration of someone.

So the question is do we want to celebrate them and does that change over time with the public mood ?

With celebration there are degrees of good and bad and opinion
Do we celebrate say Oliver Cromwell or regard them as figures in our history?
Margaret Thatcher Winston Churchill etc
Should there be a list of plusses and minuses against each?

[BrassMan]

Pretty much everyone worth erecting a statue to was an arse of some description. If we take down everything that someone could object to, there'll be a lot of empty plinths.

[Phud]

Mojooo said:

I don't think removing statues is re-writing history

As someone said, a statue is normally considered a celebration of someone.

So the question is do we want to celebrate them and does that change over time with the public mood ?

Ah and here you get to the issue, what do you do when the reason for celebrating the person is not the reason for tearing down the statue?

do you accept the reason for raising the statue or not.

Who gets ot decide what stays what goes?

[rxe]

BrassMan said:

Pretty much everyone worth erecting a statue to was an arse of some description. If we take down everything that someone could object to, there'll be a lot of empty plinths.

This is the problem with the social media driven identity politics today. It's unarguable that Churchill was a bit of a racist, certainly by today's standards. In fact, everyone born before about 1900 must have been a racist. Nelson almost certainly said/wrote something that would be unacceptable today.

And as for the French, they came over in 1066 and shot my king in the bloody eye. Then made a tapestry of it. bds, that should definitely come down.

[Type R Tom]

How do we weigh up the good and bad that happens in a person's life? Should we judge people by today's standards. How will we be judged in 500 years?

How do we gauge public opinion when generally only people against something make their voices heard?

Will historians in the future look back at us and think we got it all really wrong? Are we focusing on the wrong things? Will climate change affect black lives in Africa far more than slavery or racism ever could for example. I really don't know. Not that we should ignore these issues of course but it does make me think.

[Johnniem]

Presumably Bristol residents will now want to bulldoze the historic buildings that the slave trader built with his ill-gotten gains as it reminds them that, if they are living in the historic parts of the city, they are probably living in the proceeds of the slave trade, which is obviously not right. Just sayin'.

Oh, and of course the statue should be taken down. It's a nonsense for it still to be there. It is an obvious thing to do but perhaps just not in the way it was done. The council should have heeded the cries of the towns residents years back when they petitioned for it to be removed.

[Roofless Toothless]

There is a statue of Julius Caesar in front of part of the Roman wall on Tower Hill. Statues of other Roman emporers can be found within the British Museum. These guys were pretty good at the old slavery business.

[saaby93]

Johnniem said:

Presumably Bristol residents will now want to bulldoze the historic buildings that the slave trader built with his ill-gotten gains as it reminds them that, if they are living in the historic parts of the city, they are probably living in the proceeds of the slave trade, which is obviously not right. Just sayin'.

Oh, and of course the statue should be taken down. It's a nonsense for it still to be there. It is an obvious thing to do but perhaps just not in the way it was done. The council should have heeded the cries of the towns residents years back when they petitioned for it to be removed.

Surely - it's some of the towns residents? Bristol's in a similar position to many other cities.
Without the trading history of the past many of the residents may not be living there - that's the trouble with history.
It swings from one era to the next - life's rich tapestry -did someone mention Bayeux.

[i4got]

What I think some of the protesters fail to recognise is that they/we are just as guilty in the present day of doing and thinking things that will become abhorrent to future generations.

Those people who buy cheap clothes/goods produced by child labour and exploitation in under-developed parts of the world. It's not unreasonable to think that our grand-children will look on that with horror and will be condemning it as akin to slavery. How different is the mindset of someone in the 17th century who was looking for a cheaper way to produce cotton and cared not for the lives of those they abused to achieve it, and those who want to be able to buy their trainers at a certain price point and give no thought to the human cost in their production.

Its not unthinkable that todays standards on food production/animal welfare may have changed to that those who were in the meat production business (as well as those who eat it) may be seen as barbarians.

Judging people from prior generations by todays standards means that we will be on a constant merry-go-round of re-writing and cancelling parts of history.

I don't think a status in Bristol is responsible for making anyone today any more racist than they already are and removing it will not make anyone less racist or improve one iota the live of black people in Britain.

[anonymous-user]

You go to a place and see a statue does it look nice maybe add some gravitas to the surroundings. Maybe you look at a plaque and read who it was, maybe you’ve heard of him maybe not.

If you then look them up on wiki and find out they had a dodgy past in 1750 or whatever is that honestly going to affect your wellbeing.

If you disagree with the person depicted in the statue‘s world view are you really going to want it taken down?

Not me.

[Quickmoose]

This particular reason...specifically makes sense no?
I can't imagine a future humanity thinking.... slavery and double standards based on a skin colour...yeah! great idea!

And I think there enough people that have lived and are alive that CAN be celebrated without a minority/majority pointing out a character flaw that might one day be frowned upon...

I'm not moved to take down stuff like that, but then I'm yet to be directly and personally affronted by whatever it represents... I can easily understand why a sizeable part of society would think otherwise...I can support that.

Edited by Quickmoose on Tuesday 9th June 13:40

[motco]

Nelson Mandela did a bit of insurgency I seem to recall. Incitement to violence and all that.

[Frank7]

rxe said:

And as for the French, they came over in 1066 and shot my king in the bloody eye. Then made a tapestry of it. bds, that should definitely come down.

Not all the French, I have it on good authority that my ancestors from Nord and Pas-de-Calais, on hearing through the grapevine that Guillaume, Duc de Normandie, was asking around if anyone wanted to join him in crossing La Manche, and taking over England, pursed their lips and said collectively, “Nourriture anglaise, et cuisine anglaise? Merci mais, non merci.”

[2xChevrons]

i4got said:

What I think some of the protesters fail to recognise is that they/we are just as guilty in the present day of doing and thinking things that will become abhorrent to future generations.

Those people who buy cheap clothes/goods produced by child labour and exploitation in under-developed parts of the world. It's not unreasonable to think that our grand-children will look on that with horror and will be condemning it as akin to slavery. How different is the mindset of someone in the 17th century who was looking for a cheaper way to produce cotton and cared not for the lives of those they abused to achieve it, and those who want to be able to buy their trainers at a certain price point and give no thought to the human cost in their production.

Its not unthinkable that todays standards on food production/animal welfare may have changed to that those who were in the meat production business (as well as those who eat it) may be seen as barbarians.

Judging people from prior generations by todays standards means that we will be on a constant merry-go-round of re-writing and cancelling parts of history.

But that's how history goes? It changes and what was acceptable now is not necessarily acceptable in the future and vice versa.

I'm sure there are things we do now that future generations will be appalled by. There are things we do now that current generations are appalled by.

It's up to those in the future to decide who is celebrated and lauded in their contemporary public space.

I'm going to cook up what - as far as I'm aware - is an entirely fictional and OTT example. At the moment there is a statue of Frank Whittle in the middle of Coventry. It was put there in 2007 to mark his incredible engineering acheivement and his contribution to Coventry, Britain and the world by conceiving and developing the jet engine.

In 2120 it may be that the jet engine is seen as a (literal) engine of evil, and Whittle's invention of it opened up the era of globalisation, mass long-range air travel and a massive increase in the emissions of greenhouse gases, the burning of fossil fuels and frivolous long-range holidays which are, in the 22nd century, seen as unacceptable and immoral. This is not a condemnation of Whittle personally, but a re-evaluation of his legacy and the sort of people we want to honour in our public space.

Then it's up to the people of the 22nd century to decide whether they want to remove the statue and what to do with it - pop it in a museum as a learning tool on the important people of the Carbon Age and how terrible it was that in the 1940s they developed new internal combustion engines without a care for fossil fuel reserves and in blisfful ignorance of greenhouse gases or something.

That's the future's prerogative, just as its our prerogative to decide that we don't want statues celebrating certain people from the past in our present because they shouldn't be people we admire today.

[chrispmartha]

So The Jimmy Saville statue in Scotland, should have stayed, yes or no?

[jtremlett]

George Washington had slaves so does than mean tearing down the Washington Memorial and burning all US currency?

Slaves weren't only black. Slavery was common in England before the Norman Conquest so do we pull down Westminster Abbey or whatever?

You cannot rewrite history and nor should you apply all modern morals to figures from history. They were judged in their own times and statues were erected or not. History is something you study and learn from not try to change or erase.

I absolutely do not approve of people defacing war memorials or statues or anything. Quite often the people who do things like that are purely jumping on some bandwagon purely to justify their destruction.

[Derek Smith]

rxe said:

This is the problem with the social media driven identity politics today. It's unarguable that Churchill was a bit of a racist, certainly by today's standards. In fact, everyone born before about 1900 must have been a racist. Nelson almost certainly said/wrote something that would be unacceptable today.

And as for the French, they came over in 1066 and shot my king in the bloody eye. Then made a tapestry of it. bds, that should definitely come down.

The Normans were slavers. They enslaved the majority of England, and did the same in Wales. They were brutal. They were few of course, 8000 against 2m of 'us'.

[i4got]

chrispmartha said:

So The Jimmy Saville statue in Scotland, should have stayed, yes or no?

Is that a similar situation? Was the whole country involved in child rape as an acceptable activity, and we've since decided it was unacceptable?