UK Politics: Black Lives Matter Here Too

[The Marquis de Leech]

Tangentially relating to the UK...

The New Zealand town of Cromwell is currently addressing the merits of its name. While everyone remembers the Irish massacres and the chopping off of Charlie's head, it's also worth remembering that Oliver Cromwell let the Jews back into England. The guy had his positives. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

44 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Tangentially relating to the UK...

The New Zealand town of Cromwell is currently addressing the merits of its name. While everyone remembers the Irish massacres and the chopping off of Charlie's head, it's also worth remembering that Oliver Cromwell let the Jews back into England. The guy had his positives. 

Some might list Charles among the positives

[Luzifer's right hand]

48 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Tangentially relating to the UK...

The New Zealand town of Cromwell is currently addressing the merits of its name. While everyone remembers the Irish massacres and the chopping off of Charlie's head, it's also worth remembering that Oliver Cromwell let the Jews back into England. The guy had his positives. 

Did he unban the Jews because he was a "good" guy or because he had exhausted all other lines of credit?

[The Marquis de Leech]

12 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Did he unban the Jews because he was a "good" guy or because he had exhausted all other lines of credit?

Part economics, part his general policy of religious tolerance (for anyone not Irish), and part religious fundamentalism. He thought that allowing the Jews back would hasten the Second Coming.

[The Marquis de Leech]

23 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Some might list Charles among the positives

And anyone who bans Christmas can't be all bad...

[Luzifer's right hand]

3 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Part economics, part his general policy of religious tolerance (for anyone not Irish), and part religious fundamentalism. He thought that allowing the Jews back would hasten the Second Coming.

I see. A very practical dude. 

[Fragile Bird]

9 hours ago, ants said:

As someone whose Dad watched Fawlty Towers extensively, I had seen all the episodes multiple times before I reached my teens.  What you've described wasn't clear at all to a youngster growing up.  That the major was senile slash crazy, yes.  That he was racist? No. 

To be able to make that distinction you need to have it shown during the show, or similar behaviour in other shows, that that behaviour is wrong.  Otherwise, its just part of the background.  But then, I remember we used the "N" word instead of Tiger in eenie meenie miny moe.  Nobody had told us what it meant, or that it was wrong (remembering this was rural Australia, no African Americans hardly in the country).  Unless children are told something is wrong, why would they think what the Major said was an issue?  

I can understand why putting a comment at the start would make sense.  

I love Agatha Christie (I love mysteries). I read all of the books my local library branch had when I was a child. And once the BBC had this project of filming every Hercules Poirot book and short story I was hooked on the tv shows. The Miss Marples too. 
 

A couple of years ago I got a library card again, once I realized they had audio books. And omg! Listening to them has highlighted the casual racism of British society in the 20s, 30s and 40s. When I was a teen I remember noticing some of it, but it just made the characters similar to the Anglos I knew here. No big thing, right?

[Blue Roses]

35 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I love Agatha Christie (I love mysteries). I read all of the books my local library branch had when I was a child. And once the BBC had this project of filming every Hercules Poirot book and short story I was hooked on the tv shows. The Miss Marples too. 
 

A couple of years ago I got a library card again, once I realized they had audio books. And omg! Listening to them has highlighted the casual racism of British society in the 20s, 30s and 40s. When I was a teen I remember noticing some of it, but it just made the characters similar to the Anglos I knew here. No big thing, right?

Read Greenmantle by John Buchan. I seem to remember the first 20 pages was just an unending stream of racial abuse, some of it so obscure I had to look it up. Not great on google!

[Fragile Bird]

12 minutes ago, Blue Roses said:

Read Greenmantle by John Buchan. I seem to remember the first 20 pages was just an unending stream of racial abuse, some of it so obscure I had to look it up. Not great on google!

I know him for The 39 Steps, but from the old movie, I haven’t read the book.

He was the Governor General of Canada!

[Heartofice]

10 hours ago, ants said:

But then, I remember we used the "N" word instead of Tiger in eenie meenie miny moe.  Nobody had told us what it meant, or that it was wrong (remembering this was rural Australia, no African Americans hardly in the country).  Unless children are told something is wrong, why would they think what the Major said was an issue?  

Yeah we used to sing this song when I was younger too. The odd thing was we also knew the N word was bad and would never say it, but i never made the connection to the song till much later. 

[SeanF]

On 6/14/2020 at 8:43 AM, Ran said:

From what I've read of Picton, he was deliberately and extravagantly cruel as a governor and was a scandal for it in his own time. That he was clearly also extravagantly courageous and died in a noble cause seems to have washed clean his reputation in the aftermath of Waterloo, but I admit I'm not sure that the British people need to hold to that today.

One of the articles I read about the Colston statue had a art historian (IIRC) remarking that there was in his or her mind some danger in attempting to compartmentalize monuments and honors ("Picton is honored as a good soldier, not as a bad governor") because just imagine someone trying to argue that a statue of Hitler beside a stretch of the autobahn was there to honor him for having championed the highway system and everything else he did need not be brought into it.

 

 

All heroes have feet of clay.  Saladdin, Alfred the Great, Spartacus,  Boudicca, Elizabeth I are probably all thought of as being among the "good guys" of history, but all were pretty brutal.   I think one has to distinguish between the heroic but flawed, and those who were rotten to the core. I'd place Hitler and Leopold II among the latter, but everyone will draw the line in different places. 

[Ran]

14 minutes ago, SeanF said:

All heroes have feet of clay.  Saladdin, Alfred the Great, Spartacus,  Boudicca, Elizabeth I are probably all thought of as being among the "good guys" of history, but all were pretty brutal.  

As I said, he was scandalously cruel even by the standards of his own time, which I think makes him distinct from, at least, the individuals you name. (Though I've always heard that Baibars was much more of an Islamic hero than Saladin, who was more romanticized in the West.)

 

[SeanF]

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

As I said, he was scandalously cruel even by the standards of his own time, which I think makes him distinct from, at least, the individuals you name. (Though I've always heard that Baibars was much more of an Islamic hero than Saladin, who was more romanticized in the West.)

 

According to Sir Steven Runciman "he proved himself to be a statesman of the highest calibre, untrammelled by any consideration of mercy, justice, or honour."  As you say, he's a hero to Muslims. He completely eradicated the crusader states. Qutuz, who he murdered, truly was a hero IMHO.  He saved the Islamic world from the Mongols. 

[Zorral]

The thing is in the US concerning those confederate 'hero' monuments -- they are erected deliberately as conspicuous threats to African Americans. A new spate of erecting these monuments and memorials goes into operation every time African Americans make progress towards observance of rights and achieve some prosperity.  These are monuments that HONOR the traitors who were seeking to take over the United States of America to preserve slavery and their right to own, torture, use, murder people of color as they so chose.  This is why we demand those damned statues and other tributes such as university facilities named for these damned traitors to come down and be removed.

It may be a different context in the UK, but this is how it is in the USA.

 

[Heartofice]

4 minutes ago, Zorral said:

It may be a different context in the UK, but this is how it is in the USA.

That's not really the case in the UK, which is why I think it's always good to be cautious before blindly following the US in anything.

[OldGimletEye]

16 minutes ago, Zorral said:

It may be a different context in the UK, but this is how it is in the USA.

The other problem with confederate monuments is there is just a whole bad history of trying to change the story, which seriously undermines the credibility of any justification given because of the bad faith dealing.

Just as an example of how crazy and twisted things got. Before the Civil War, southern plantation owners were running around saying that the end of slavery would wreck the US economy. 

But then just about two to three decades later they turned around and in a complete reversal changed their story. The new story was slavery wasn't even profitable, which was part of a larger cover up for the causes of the civil war and during this era is when many of those statues went up, all of which was an attempt to rehabilitate southern secession.

[Rippounet]

So it seems you Brits are turning communist or something:

https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/p54plx0gh9/NEON_PostCovidPolicy_200508_w4.pdf

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

On 6/12/2020 at 6:21 PM, The Marquis de Leech said:

Slavery had been abolished by Rhodes' time. Not to say he wasn't a racist, imperialist arsehole, but he was actually closer to us in time than he was to Colston.

Oops, yeah, mixed him up. I stand corrected.

[Hereward]

11 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

So it seems you Brits are turning communist or something:

https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/p54plx0gh9/NEON_PostCovidPolicy_200508_w4.pdf

 

No. The Tory Party traditionally wasn’t a free market party. That was the Liberals. The Tory Party’s raison detre was the continuation of the status quo, whatever that was. 

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Hereward said:

No. The Tory Party traditionally wasn’t a free market party. That was the Liberals. The Tory Party’s raison detre was the continuation of the status quo, whatever that was. 

This begs the question though: how did Thatcher (and all the subsequent free market fuckery) happen?