Few words on this week’s hot topic of: statues, relics, emblems and perceptions

What has unfolded last week and is ongoing, lay bare the meaning of bias, privilege and lack of understanding or even the willingness to try to understand

I do not personally know anyone who is a direct descendant of slaves or a direct descendant of the holocaust to ask how they feel. The world expect descendants of slavery and those affected by the aftermath to just move on, forget about the past, not seek reparation etc. BUT when it comes to the rest of history associated with all that e.g. statues, we want to keep them: “afterall, you can’t undo the past” people say. So, are we saying it is ok for Germany to stick up statues of Hitler and that the swastika can become a popular pattern on Christmas wrapping paper? Afterall, it’s all part of their history and we shouldn’t try to rewrite or undo history? Why do we hurriedly knock down locations of mass atrocities? to avoid some turning them into shrines right? Otherwise statues of Pol Pot and others will be smiling down at us..

The argument that history should not be rewritten or undone is a daft argument. History that remains harmful or negatively impactful must be addressed and if part of that is to remove some statues, that is what needs to be done. How it is done, is what must be addressed respectfully. Defacing statues or monuments is disrespectful regardless of what we think or what we feel they represent. They may mean something different to others e.g. relatives of those individuals. There needs to be a visible process in place, to listen to argument and where accepted (by independent committees with fair representation) those statues need to be moved into museums, where those who like them can visit and those opposed to them can avoid them.

If it embarrasses us to teach the history of slavery, leaving the younger generation to only learn about such brutality from movies such as ‘12 years a slave’, we end up with societies that lack an understanding and the outcome of that, is exactly what is happening in America right now, with lopsided laws that lead to mass incarceration of one group and situation such as George Floyd’s killing, which is quite rampant out there. If you look at it, for every other type of crime, we are told if you cut out the demand, you deal with the supply e.g. if you catch the ‘fence’ (i.e. the guy who buys the stolen painting etc.), you kill off the need to steal paintings. But when it comes to drugs in America, they only target the drug-dealers (perhaps because they are predominantly….) and fill their prisons with those folks, but we all know the colour of the folks who can afford to buy those drugs and they are the demand; they are the only reason drug-dealers exist. But we look the other way and the war is always on the cartels and dealers. Any guesses why?….

As for relics such as merchandise named with connotations of slavery e.g. uncle ben’s or aunt jemima, if these are deemed to cause offence, what is the debate about? Keep the photos so that those attached to the brand can remain attached, but rename them using the real names e.g. if Uncle Ben was actually Benjamin Smith, change Uncle Ben’s to “Benjamin Smith” and the same for Aunt Jemima. If we are unable to establish their names, run a public competition to find new names for them, get those new names on and move on!!!! It is absolutely baffling that anyone would argue against such a simple process: if people are offended, we sort it out. It is that simple. Thousands of similar renaming have been done over the years to ease the pain of adverse historical events such as the holocaust. Over the years hundreds of pubs and other establishments in Britain have been renamed even though those who named them thousands of years ago could not have assumed that those words would cause offence hundreds of years later. If/when they do cause offence, the common sense action to take is to rename them. We cannot be so bloody insensitive!!

Things change and we change with it. Retaining tradition is great, and we have means of doing so. But common sense must always be brought to bear: if you look at the very simply matter of names: years back many men were happy to be addressed as ‘Dick’ if their name is Richard as back then, association of the word ‘dick’ with what we now see it to mean today, was not the case. Many would refrain to call ‘cats’ pussy-cats these days, but look back a few decades and the word ‘pussy’ was more associated with puss in boots and cats than otherwise. We move on, we adapt to today’s reality and get on with it.

None of us is going to be here forever! Learn to let go!!

The hypocrisy of it all, is what is most staggering! The number of native burial grounds and monuments that meant a great deal to people in places like Egypt, which today’s civilisation casually bulldozed to build roads, towns, cities etc. But now we are so precious about dropping the name on a can of pancake mix or rice sauce, when some may find such names offensive?

Seriously???!!

Enough said!

Here’s a short excerpt from a renowned UK journalist: Ian Cobain, author of The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation, in The Guardian 

on the destruction of Britain’s dark historyLying about our history? Now that’s something Britain excels at 

“It was inevitable that some would insist that ripping the statue of slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth and disposing of it in a harbour in Bristol was an act of historical revisionism; that others would argue that its removal was long overdue, and that the act itself was history in the making. After more statues were removed across the United States and Europe, Boris Johnson weighed in, arguing that ‘to tear [these statues] down would be to lie about our history’. But lying about our history – and particularly about our late-colonial history – has been a habit of the British state for decades. In 2013 I discovered that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been unlawfully concealing 1.2m historical files at a highly secure government compound at Hanslope Park, north of London… The operation – and its attempts to conceal and manipulate history in an attempt to sculpt an official narrative – speaks of a certain jitteriness on the part of the British state, as if it feared that interpretations of the past that were based upon its own records would find it difficult to celebrate the ‘greatness’ of British history.”