The great philosopher John Stuart Mill probably did more than anyone to map out the proper boundaries of the individual and the state in the western model of political democracy. Furthermore, he talked not just of the state but of societal behaviour as it impacts on individuals. Through the power of thought his influence on the development of the modern world has been enormous, even if many have never heard of him. He was four generations ahead of his time; but that is in part true because his own writings helped shape the future. This from the New Yorker is a fine example of the received view of Mill among the modern liberal intelligentsia:
Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind. He led the fight for due process for detainees accused of terrorism; argued for teaching Arabic, in order not to alienate potential native radicals; and opposed adulterating Anglo-American liberalism with too much systematic French theory—all this along with an intelligent acceptance of the free market as an engine of prosperity and a desire to see its excesses and inequalities curbed. He was right about nearly everything, even when contemplating what was wrong: open-minded and magnanimous to a fault, he saw through Thomas Carlyle’s reactionary politics to his genius, and his essay on Coleridge, a leading conservative of the previous generation, is a model appreciation of a writer whose views are all wrong but whose writing is still wonderful. Mill was an enemy of religious bigotry and superstition, and a friend of toleration and free thought, without overdoing either. (No one has ever been more eloquent about the ethical virtues of Jesus of Nazareth.)
Yet for a living John Stuart Mill was Secretary to the Political Committee of the East India Company, and actively involved in the rapacious colonisation of India and the enforced opening of China to opium sales. How do we cope with this? Mill has possibly influenced my thinking more than any other political writer. I would start any political education with a reading of Mill’s On Liberty and J A Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study. But how do we process Mill’s involvement with the East India Company? Should Mill’s statue be ripped from Victoria Embankment Gardens and dumped in the Thames?
I do not ask that as a rhetorical question. It is a dilemma. Historians of thought have tended to deal with it by ignoring Mill’s day job. I have read three biographies of Mill and I have a fourth, by Timothy Larsen, waiting to be started. Richard Reeves comes closest of Mill’s biographers to addressing Mill’s work for the East India Company but tells us almost nothing on the subject that is not from Mill’s own Autobiography. In his Autobiography, what Mill mostly tells us about his work for the EIC is that it did not take up too much of his time.
If Mill were a dentist, for biographers to ignore his day job and concentrate on his philosophy would make sense. But Mill’s day job was governing a very significant proportion of the world’s population. He did not just work at the East India Company, he was perhaps, as Secretary of the Political Committee, the most important civil servant there. Mill wrote and signed off detailed instructions to Governors General. He issued advice – which was expected to be followed – on trade and military affairs, and on governance. It is fascinating to me that in his Autobiography Mill systematically downplays his role in the East India Office, both in terms of his commitment and his importance within the organisation.
There has been much more written about Mill and the East India Company by Indian researchers than by western researchers, because it is of course an excellent illustration of the hypocrisies of western liberalism, that its figurehead was so enmired in the colonial project. Unfortunately, many of these studies lack nuance and tend to accuse Mill of being things he definitely was not, such as a racist. East India Company policies are ascribed to Mill which Mill was demonstrably and actively against, such as the anglicising project of Trevelyan and Macaulay. Mill did not view British culture as superior, and he was horrified by initiatives like the ending of communal land ownership in Bengal and the British creation of a Bengali landlord class there. I broadly recommend this article by Mark Tunick, though like almost everything published on the subject it suffers from the drawback of discussing what Mill wrote about governing India rather than the much harder task of discussing what he wrote in governing India. The subject needs solid analysis of Mill’s thousands of minutes and despatches in the East India Company records.
Mill worked with Burnes to try to avoid the First Afghan War, but like Burnes he did not resign over it, nor over the appalling war crimes committed by the British in its prosecution. Mill had been the guiding hand behind the long Governor Generalship of Lord Bentinck and its policy of avoiding war and expansion; but Mill was still there administering when that ended, through the annexations of Sindh and Nepal and Baluchistan and the most aggressive period of Imperial expansionism. Mill was there for the opium wars.
So how do we come to terms with our past? If slavery is the touchstone of good and bad, Mill is fine. He was a dedicated an effective lifetime opponent of slavery, including in EIC territories, and was highly influential in assuring the UK did not recognise the Confederacy in the US civil war. But if you look at the atrocious crimes of British imperialism, the financial and economic rape of whole continents, the killing, torture, terror and physical rape, why would slavery be the only criterion to judge people?
I have chosen Mill because he was a demonstrably good man, and yet I perfectly understand why a person of Indian or Chinese heritage might want to dump him in the Thames. There are others Imperialists, like Napier, Gordon or Wolseley, with statues all over the country, whose deeds are not admirable to a modern eye, particularly as our society is now a great deal less homogenous and contains descendants of those whose cities were pillaged and people raped and slaughtered by these military prodigies.
I don’t have all the answers. My life of Alexander Burnes tried to find a way to treat a remarkable man who lived by the mores of times not our own. The answer lies not in glorifying nor in destroying our past.
Monuments do not stand still. They are, ultimately, all of them Ozymandias. Destruction of historical artifacts is a bad thing; they are valuable tools for understanding the past, and of artistic and cultural value in themselves. But it is perfectly natural that in public spaces we wish to have public objects that reflect the mores of our own times. The important thing is to understand that the mores of the times do change; our great grandchildren will undoubtedly think we were quaint and had weird beliefs.
A thought on Edward Colston. His involvement in slavery was as a director of the Royal African Company. The Royal in that title is not meaningless; the company was set up specifically to make the monarch rich. A far more practical way to honour the memory of the slaves would be to abolish the monarchy. That would be a meaningful action.
A further thought. Living here in Edinburgh I find it absolutely infuriating that we have a major street named after the genocidal sadist the Duke of Cumberland. (Yes, Cumberland Street is specifically named after him). Respecting the past does not mean our society cannot move on. Street names and statues are signs of honour. There are plenty that should be removed from the street and placed in museums, where they can be explained and contextualised.
When Horatio Nelson helped to “free” the Kingdom of the Sicilies from Napoleon and restore its appalling autocratic monarchy, Neapolitan writers and intellectuals were shot and hung on Nelson’s flagship, anchored off Naples so the mob could not intervene to save them. Nelson watched some of the executions between bouts of shagging Lady Hamilton. I do not recommend toppling Nelson’s column; but I do advocate some real information about him in an education centre under the square.
UPDATE: I see that Liverpool University have just agreed to rename Gladstone Hall because Gladstone’s father was a slave owner. That is, I think, an appalling act of stupidity from what is supposed to be an institute of learning.
Very many thanks to the 700 people who have applied to follow virtually the criminal proceedings against me which start tomorrow. It is just a procedural court hearing tomorrow and I am worried that nothing much may happen. I do hope you will not get bored and give up on the rest of the case when it comes. In Julian Assange’s case, the behaviour of the judge has been outrageous even in the procedural hearings, but we should not take for granted that the same will happen here.
The court has been informing people they are not allowed to record, or to publish while the court is in session. That is true; but you can take notes, and you are allowed to publish factual accounts of what happened once the court closes.
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May God go with you today and all the way to independence
very crackly transmission – unless that was my phone. I suppose that’s virtual reality for you
‘Crackly transmission’ – now there’s a metaphor for you.
That was not crackly transmission – that was James Wolffe QC breaking wind with savage ferocity.
it is the re writing of history which has muddled the waters and every generation has done so and is doing it now. How can education possibly keep up? and how will the increasing closure of our libraries and a future concentration on electronic media enable individuals trying to educate themselves, without biasing history? By taking over head to toe what was redacted and rewritten in the past we are committing a historic delusion,imho.
Are we not trying to bury history at every step, whilst at the same time look pious and excuse our current dirty deeds?
PS: procedural hearings can bore the pants of you…:)
Crackly transmission for me too – and a dodgy sounding excuse for missing paragraphs in the original complaint
I dialed in at 09:57 to a hearing already in session which didn’t sound like it had any relation to Craig’s case.
What was all that about a jury? I likewise thought I was listening to a different case. Could it not have been thrown out due to the admittedly messed up complaint? Is this not giving the prosecution a second chance to get their act together? ‘Maybe you should send the revised version in Word instead of pdf’ appeared to be the instruction! That seems rather like a student being asked by a lecturer to keep on re-submitting an initially weak (i.e. fail) essay in the hope they might eventually get it right.
Yeah, its like – its rubbish, you could try changing the font .. 🙂
More seriously though, here is my experience of it: The session clearly had started early so it was bewildering I could not work out who was who but I assume the woman ‘Mi’Lady’ was the judge in the Salmond case as there was some discussion about how she had instructed the jury. There was the bit about the ‘missing sections’ due to format conversion (utter nonsense) – which was the only indication that we were indeed on the right call, and then there was a long silence followed by an unitelligeble apology/explanation for the fact that the speaker had put themselves on mute. Then we were all thanked for attending.
I have replied to the original email pointing out the above. The only thing I got from it was: they would continue with the ‘petition’, and it would start on 7th July? Whether available online or not depends on the lockdown-easing program.
Those of us attempting to support Craig by penetrating the murk of the online proceedings might need our own forum to help each other!
Lady…. said that she advised/directed the jury not just once, but she said that she revised her first advice and instructed them again.
Hi Andy, if it was early then it was only by a minute or so. The principal judge was Lady Hail, but there were three present. A procedural hearing is usually pretty dull since it is exactly that – it is about the procedure. All this decided was that the next procedural hearing will be in early July and both sides have to get their initial arguments, list of witnesses, etc lodged by then. Early July will not be that actual case either, but it may be when they set a date for the trial. It is though quite likely it will just be continued to another procedural hearing.
I once sat through a morning in the Edinburgh sheriff court and I think there were maybe 30 cases and not one was actually decided, They were all just continued to a later date. The one I was involved with was the eviction of a tenant from a business workshop and while you might think that was very simple it actually took 2 years to reach a result (and a £100,000 bill for the landlord for a unit with an annual rent of £4000). My friend (the tenant) defended himself and thus had no costs, then declared himself bankrupt when he lost and left Scotland completely. Bit of a lesson for the landlord! 🙂
Memory was wrong – it was Lady Dorrian not Lady Hail.
Thank you — this article fulfills the admirable function, amongst others, of making me want to go off at once and try to fill some of the most egregious gaps in my rational education. Better late (75) than never.
Most interesting thing about the hearing was the remedying of the ‘glitch’!
The fairly modest memorial to Samuel Plimsoll on the Thames embankment was erected 31 years after his death and was funded by the National Union of Seamen. I guess saving the lives of countless thousands of working class sailors gets you a big fuck you from the establishment.
There is, or was, a pub near Finsbury Park called The Plimsole or Plimsole Line. Never went inside, but the sign outside clearly shows a shi and its plimsole line.
Silly me, Plimsoll obviously.
“Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” we are taught as children. Now there are those who do not alone want to forget, but to destroy, bury for all time. The statues of those who committed crimes of enormity should remain in their prominence, but with the description on the base corrected to show the truth of the crimes they committed – in their and the nation’s name. A history lesson and a rebuke for every one who stops at which ever relevant historic site, street, monument. And at the base of Churchill’s should be his feeling towards the Kurds: “I do not understand this squeamishness about using poisonous gas on uncivilised tribes.” (Quotes from memory, so if minor hiccoughs, apologies.) Changing names, hiding statues, simply buries history and a country’s woeful, murderous past for all time. How convenient. NO – a movement to correct the memorial plaques with the truth not bury the crimes is of paramount importance and a small, mega- belated apology and mea culpa.
Felicity, I would not want my grand child to see an illustrious Bronze statue of opulent height and then read that he was a mass murderer and slave driver in the Queens service. Followed by a rewritten historical record presented of this person at school really?
How about using the plinth for more worthy causes to instill minds. I’m sure you can come up with some.
H.G.Wells would get one from me, as would J.D. Sallinger and Rosalind Franklin, Kathryn Johnson, Rachel Carson….its not that we are short of good thinkers and learned individuals today
They tried that in Bristol, and it got nowhere, thanks to the undue influence of the rich and powerful. There have been many explanations of how people want change and it is thwarted. Putting plaques on the bottom of statues doesn’t work. Let’s just get rid of them. David Olusuga has been very eloquent and entirely persuasive on the matter. I suggest you look him up.
I cannot believe what I am seeing going on now, the violence, the destruction, the iconoclasm, when you start the act of trying to correct the history, erase it, cheerfully destroy a statue – you are on the same path ISIS and other extremists that have used the same actions.
The Liverpool uni. renamning of Gladstone is idiocy, totalitarian.
When all this is carried out by certain fringe violent groups it play well into the hands of Brexit-voters and in the US it play right into the hands of Trump.
The killing of Floyd was just a “justification” to carry this mess out it seems. Daunting development.
People in Bristol, especially black Bristolians, should not have to endure a statue honouring a slave trader in the 2020s. There were endless efforts to have it removed going back years, all thwarted by Colston glorifiers. The police chief made the sensible decision not to intervene when it was pulled down as he knew it would be a hideous look for his force to be batoning youths in defence of a slave trader. Maybe you’d have fought to defend it but you seem a very easily frightened individual, so I doubt it
Dom
Yes I am frigthened, I was afraid when ISIS did it and I am afraid when fringe liberals do it in the west.
I am afraid of this identity politics, the political correctness sweeping the world.
If you study polls on removing statues you would quickly see you are in the minority of supporting these measures so I am indeed frightened when small fringe liberals rule with no respect for the public opinion believing they are somehow doing something good. Same mentality ISIS had when they destroyed the monuments.
You are absolutely obsessed with race based identity politics and posturing as an oppressed victim because the statue of a slaver has been pulled dow, It’s pathetic.
Dom
You, not me, were the one that brought up black victimhood to justify destroying statues.
One just have to ask you the following questions to pinpoint the dangerous tribalist double standard you use:
Do sunni muslims have the right to destroy shia monuments since many deem them heretic?
Do east europeans have the right to destroy Soviet statue/memorials in europe considering many believe they are a sign of oppression?
Do christians in the middle east have the right to destroy mosques because of oppression by muslims?
What possessed the boss class of 1895 to put it up?
German and Japanese tourists in Athens shouldn’t have to endure a statue honouring Harry S. Truman at Mt.Athos, nor should the Greeks.
Bill Thomson
What about Churches, crosses? Should they be removed too? The crusades offends alot of muslims after all.
What about Buddhist statues in Japan? Offend muslims?
What about Greece statues i.e. Alexander the great – not offensive to alot of ethnic groups?
What about Mosques? And islamic symbols, very offending for alot of people of christian faith.
What about soviet war statues/memorials? Highly offensive to alot of people in eastern europe.
Jack; “What about soviet war statues/memorials? Highly offensive to a lot of people in eastern Europe.”
You might be surprised how many liberated Eastern Europeans hanker for the days of full employment.
My Truman comment was a little dig at Dom though Dom and I appear to agree on the point.
However, I won’t be demolishing any craven images unless a Mrs Murrell statuette mysteriously appears in the town square. It is all bollocks.
Again, one of the last people who should be honoured with a statue.
Churchill is the ‘biggie; once Winston falls it is game over!
@ Susan A June 10, 2020 at 12:49
I worked from a small office as a mini-cab driver, and one of the other drivers had been party to an attempt to pull down a statue of Churchill in Woodford, not for political reasons but for the scrap metal value. The chain they used to try to pull it down with a truck broke, and they had to give it up as a bad job.
That story couldn’t be more East London/ Essex. Love it!
Winston looks pretty solid and grounded,
Will Boris defend his beloved Winston? Or will he allow him to be torn down and thrown in the Thames?
@ Susan A June 10, 2020 at 12:51
Or better still, would he offer himself as an alternative sacrifice?
Ideally chain Boris to the churchill statue and then throw both in the Thames
Statues of people who killed others who were racist who were not good people but were people of power should not be dotted around our towns and cities
Show me the statues of the good poor people
I’m glad they are being taken down
Only the wealthy have statues of themselves erected
They aren’t erasing or ‘correcting ‘ history. They aren’t fringe violent groups. They are doing something long overdue and have a lot of support. It isn’t the end of the world, but a positive, optimistic development. Just as the taking down of Robert E Lee statues are in your country. Nothing to be scared of. The past is always being reassessed and quite right, too.
There is no statue to L E O Charlton who refused orders to bomb and drop poison gas on Iraq..
‘Transferring to the Royal Air Force on its creation, Charlton served in several air officer posts until his retirement from the air force in 1928. Most notably, Charlton resigned his position as the RAF’s Chief Staff Officer in Iraq as he objected to the bombing of Iraqi villages.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Charlton
Nor will there be one of Ft Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith who refused to return to Iraq, knowing that he would be required to participate in torture of Iraqi prisoners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Kendall-Smith
Many streets in Glasgow city centre are named after tobacco barons who profited from slavery in the British colonies. There’s Cochrane street, Glassford street, Wilson street, Buchanan Street and many more, infact many of what’s left of the architecturally interesting building in Glasgow’s city centre (the city father’s didn’t do a good job of preserving them) were built off the backs of slaves in distant lands.
Do I want them pulled down, of course not, do I want the street names changed no, though I welcomed the changing of Royal Exchange Place, to Nelson Mandela Place, and to see the faces of the South African embassy staff which had its embassy located there, as they received mail with the address on the front as Nelson Mandela Place, what an initial shock that must have been to them.
Anyway, as someone said though I can’t recall who, if we forget history, we end up making the same mistakes, we need people to see these statutes, of times gone by when slavery was seen by some as acceptable, we need to keep it fresh in our minds, in order that we can move forward and not backwards. The history of slavery of each and every country should be taught in schools all around the world, of that particular countries role in it, and not just of black people but of all people who suffered under the lash of oppression, racism and exploitation.
And while we are at it you would also need to raze the entire motorway network – built off the sweated backs of Irish slave navvies. And let’s not mention the railways 😉
or the canals.
yes Susan, to a German design, after 256 county surveyors and planners/spads attended the olympics watched Hitler shake hands with Mussolini and then had a good look at the motorways.
And what of those Germans who worked the british sugar boilers in London, Would you erase Tste&Lyles for that?
The Irish navvies weren’t actually slaves – did not have the legal status of slave. That’s an important difference.
Robert Mugabe was also a freedom fighter who fought to liberate his native Africans, let us name a street and erect a statue.
No doubt activists will want a Historical Brownie Point Committee and to criminalise dissent.
Control is just a game humans play, any excuse will do.
You welcomed the changing of Royal Exchange Place to Nelson Mandela Place but you want the main thoroughfares named not in honour of slaves but big capitalists who made their fortunes from slavery.
Dom.
The street names are a reminder of those who made their fortunes off the backs of slaves, they must be preserved so that we don’t forget what happened, renaming streets doesn’t change the historical facts, it merely leads us to forget what that street was called previously and why, we must keep the names to keep
the suffering of those whose forced toil helped build them fresh in our minds.
The city of Glasgow embraced Mandela and his people’s struggle with apartheid, so much so that he visited the city and gave a speech to a packed out George Square crowd, but that doesn’t mean that people of the city don’t know their history of the city or its street names.
If you want to remember people put the statues in remembrance halls or museums you might be happy to look at them but there are people and their ancestors who died because of the things they did it’s just plain wrong for our towns and cities to have statues and streets named after these people
The equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow’s Royal Exchange Square has for as long as I can remember been permanently adorned by a traffic cone. I’m sure the majority of the population in Glasgow only know the figure on the plinth as “the dude wi’ the traffic cone oan his heed”. I had to look up the identity just to be sure (though it wasn’t hard to guess).
The Lonely Planet guide lists the statue on its “top 10 most bizarre monuments on Earth”.
The Anglo-Irish Duke was (allegedly) in denial of his Irish identity and he was no friend of the Irish (‘though much is exaggerated and fabricated). In a city substantially populated with those of Irish ancestry perhaps the Green Brigade should get creative.
Yes Vivian the cones a permanent fixture, even a Christmas styled cone appears in December, I’ve read that veterans of the Battle of Waterloo used to stand beneath it to mark the annual date of the battle. An interesting note is that Wellington’s horse Copenhagen is said to have died from eating to many cakes and buns.
Wellington was born in Ireland. But when someone suggested to him that being born in Ireland made him Irish, he retorted that being born in a stable would not have made him a horse.
Craig the British propaganda machine the BBC has an article up on your appearance already. It claims you’re back up on the 7th of July.
https://archive.is/9ykUx
It also confirms some details of persons involved in the Salmond trial. I’d previously only surmised some of these.
Jake, yes so it does, let’s see if any action is taken against the BBC, for “jigsaw” identification, very unlikely I think.
It certainly uses some terms of reference which I do not recall reading previously.
Indeed! From this BBC article alone I have gleaned the identities of all ten ‘alphabet women’.
Lord Brougham, who was more appreciated by France than the UK, having a statue in Cannes,the town he put on the map, is in little danger in having having it taken down.
Sometimes it s more sensible to trust foreigners than your own, as my father too bitterly learned
Craig,
I appreciate the careful thoughtfulness which you applied to the article which you wrote. I have had a few friends exchange their thoughts with me on the same issue. One, a Professor in a US college, expressed himself and I replied.
“In the 1970s twice as a student I visited Germany.
The first visit was to compete in a three way competition against the British Army on the Rhine track team, a local German club, and my own London University team. As the team was making a rail connection, my head was down while I sat on a railway station bench with the other fellows ( all white). I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up and saw an older German man who had put his hand on my shoulder and said, with a broad smile on his face, “ Jesse Owens”. I looked up at him and smiled back and said, “I wish”. We had a little chuckle. Just to lay the foundation that obviously he was recalling the 1938 Olympics at which Adolph Hitler stormed out after Owens won all his medals.
Now, my visits to Germany did convince me that significant numbers of Germans were deeply embarrassed by what happened during the Second World War. In consequence I cannot conceive that in modern Germany to this day ( 2020) any city or town or village would be funding and installing a statute of Adolph Hitler.
What happened to Africans in circumstances of their arrival in the so-called ‘New World’ has no equivalent in human history over the past 500 years of such genocide and exploitation; a historical fact and not my mere emotional comment.
For my stint in England, I came very quickly to understand that the English/British simply did not understand or largely know their own history; they did not know why me from the Caribbean or Asians from Hong Kong ( the opium trade) of Indians ( the 1857 Indian Mutiny) – all parts of the British Empire – were in Britain as the metropolitan centre of much that had been occasioned and developed in both educational and economic advancements from the days of Empire. We were there – because they were over here. They ( the majority British then) simply had not thought about, in an expansive way – ‘their history’. Anyway – time marches on and so does human consciousness.
Back to Adolph Hitler. The majority of German people do not embrace and/or support genocide; Adolph Hitler did. The Germans have distanced themselves from Hitler and so would not honour his memory in effigy – a statue – anywhere in Germany.
So, why has it been so hard for the largest Empire up to the time of the Second World War – the British Empire – not to accept that the slave traders ought not to be honoured; understood in their own true historical context – yes as cruel, vicious, exploitative, genocidal – but – surely not honoured.”
Craig,
Closing thought: It is one thing to have a place in Madame Tussaud’s; quite another to be hoisted on a plinth in a place of public honour.
Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher consigned to the ‘Chamber of Horrors’?
With all due respect CB and I am sure no harm was intended but to put forward America in post war Germany as a counter to British national amnesia is outrageous. German opinions have been prescribed by legislation for the last 75. As for American awareness of what occurred under the occupation in the post war years, it is surely far less than British awareness of slavery and colonial plundering.
Earlier I mention Truman and Greece. I made no mention of the use of napalm. James Van Fleet for Madam Tussaud’s?
@ Bill Thomson June 10, 2020 at 15:09
‘…As for American awareness of what occurred under the occupation in the post war years…’
Brits are also oblivious of it. See ‘Other Losses’ by James Bacque.
A man or woman lives on this earth a short time.We should never ever erect statues to commemorate people because there s not a single person on this planet who has never ever wronged another .
We do not need statues.
The majority of people know very little about the people who’s statues surround them , why should they know these people ? how can they know if they were good people ? are the books we read about these people giving honest truthful and correct descriptions of events and of the behaviours of those we have monumented , I doubt it , as Craig says people in India and China see it differently because they suffered by things Mr Mill represented, he may have been a good honourable man but he represented an evil , did he do so unknowingly ? possibly but I don’t think so I’m sure all those involved to his degree knew of wrongdoing to many and over a long period of time there’s no excuse and campaigning for freedoms and fairness back home whilst representing organisations doing exactly what you campaign against is not acceptable.
If it were my decision I would have every statue taken down.
Sure you can put them in museums with a proper explanation of who the person is and why they were monumented but having them in our towns and cities when we know that people pass bye who hate the monumented individual because they or their country were violated is just plainly wrong.
We do not need monuments if we are interested ads individuals we can read about people or visit a museum
Statues are built to last. What we need is cardboard cut-outs which will perish with the changing mores of the time.
We just have to learn to look at statues and monuments in a different way: all those honoured have been imperialists and capitalists. All the truly great lives have been marked by their official neglect.
If a man is the subject of a statue in a prominent place it is almost certain that he was an enemy of the people, wherever he was active.
On the other hand, let it not be forgotten, there were those who made great contributions generally by their implacable opposition to the ruling classes of their times.
Such are Tom Paine and William Cobbett, for example. Tom Mann, William Morris and John Maclean. But for the most part those worthy of remembrance have been entirely forgotten, their lives obscured by deliberate oversight, their deeds the subjects of sneers from on high.
And most of them are collective persons, too, not Generals but armies; not leaders but the rank and file.
Did not Grey write an elegy on the matter?
Well said
If people want monuments and statues of people let them erect them in their own garden and pay for them too.
Why should we have to see a statue or commemoration of someone we think did terrible things in our towns and cities ads we go about our daily business
Bevin
James Clerk Maxwell. – statue in Edinburgh. Was he a bad man?
Thanks for those names Bevin. I only know a little about William Cobbett and that is thanks to a biography by Richard Ingrams, previous editor of Private Eye. He mentioned in the book’s introduction that he sourced a lot of his information from a private library, probably the largest private library in its time, once owned by an ancestor of Michael Foot, ex Labour leader.
Hope everything goes well for you Craig, totally undeserved and unwarranted. A bit like another case I was involved with recently! Will be watching closely as this progresses. Take care and good luck.
Izzy Zambonini
Some interesting thoughts posed on here about history. The removal of statues should not be seen as an attempt to rewrite history but an attempt to re calibrate our relationship with it. I would advocate against the destruction of statues. They would have value in a museum of slavery where they would retain value as testaments to the truth of our (or our county’s past). Failing that the bronze would be worth a few bob down the local scrappy’s.
The Colston statue in the Avon must highlight the genuine frustrations of so many campaigners who would have exhausted all legitimate routes for it’s removal. I wonder to what extent this mirrors the frustration of some independence supporters?
Colston’s dunking does not change or rewrite history but it empowers those who up until now had no voice. Their actions are a punctuation mark in the narrative now, and will show that at some point we stopped celebrating the achievements of robber barons and mass murderers and instead spoke up for their victims instead. In my opinion it is a sad testament that it has taken so long for this particular page of history to be “edited” in such a way.
Here’s hoping we make more rapid and genuine progress as a human race over the next 125 years.
Like those protesting against the statue of Rhodes most of the people involved in Colston’s early bath were white and I spotted at least one guy sporting dreadlocks. Many black people find this offensive so you wonder how committed they were and how much was just wanton vandalism.
Especially offensive since dreadlocks are always accompanied by a middle-class plummy voice!
Kempe
Great point, here is the Colston statue video, majority of these people that lead the vandalism are white.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oS75r4RetU
Absurd for many reasons.
Same in the US
White girls spray-paint BLM, black woman tell them not to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbTOcVJgM8
That’s a good thing. Funny how nobody wants it back.
Vandalism? White people put it up, white people put it down, nothing to complain about….
What starts with erasing white statues and white history ends with erasing white people.
We’ve seen this kind of insidious zealotry before throughout history, it starts small and quickly snowballs out of control into a sociopathic purity spiral.
The Jacobins reign of terror during the French Revolution,, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Mao’s cultural revolution, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields. The Taleban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas, ISIS laying waste to the ancient artefacts of Palmyra. Step out of line with any of these people and their ideologies and you were quickly eliminated via guillotine or a bullet in the back of the head. There is no room for debate.
Whatever you think of BLM’s modus operandi now – keep in mind the way to hell is paved with good intentions.
c’mon now, there’s a wide old difference between statues of white colonial overlord supremacists and ordinary working class people (white or otherwise). Mind you don’t out yourself as the other type of nationalist.
Fnar!
Extraordinary hysterical paranoia about a long overdue change which many people, and most of Bristol welcome. Calm down, dear.
My wife and I both emailed the court for internet access to the hearing. She, weeks ago, and has heard nothing. Me, last night, and got an email today with a number to ring “if urgent”. Rang the number. Informed by lady that they had email problems for first time ever. I told her I thought that a big coincidence. The call ended with her saying she had complete confidence in the Justice system. I don’t think she was
impressed when I mentioned Stalin. She said 200 people had viewed online.
When Scotland becomes independent and a republic I hope that we copy India and dispatch all the statues of ‘the monarchy’ to one out of the way place and forget about them. Maybe bulldoze a piece of ground next to the M74 at the border and dump them there?
I don’t get it, you claim to be “progressive” yet you c;ling to democracy the established and failed system. Further you and Mill separate man from nature through the use of discredited old myths made up by people with the lust for power uppermost in their desires.
There are deep flaws in Western Civilization, and Mill represents that as clearly as Descartes or Spinoza there is no separation between nature and man, nothing man does is “un-natural”
As long a yahweh and the after market jesus add on or the Mohamed bolt on for purposes of factional power – they still all worship the pathological fiction known as yahweh, we are all Jews we all worship the Jewish god of Yahweh.
If you want to interject the politics of religion fine just don’t pretend it is anything but a method of accumulating power over the lives of other people and nothing else, in short religion is just politics, the politics of oppression and domination for the pleasures of the few.
Is god willing to stop evil but unable?
Then he is not powerful.
Is he able but unwilling?
Then he is not good.
Is he both willing and able?
Then there can be no evil.
Is he neither willing nor able?
Then why call him god?
Epicurus (300 BCE)
The phony claims of Yahweh was exposed a long time ago.
To this day Britain reserves its highest honours for the worst people. Just look af the House of Lords or recipients of knighthoods. A statue of one of these villains got thrown into a harbour. So what?
Yet people still vote Tory !
@ Stevie Boy June 10, 2020 at 16:57
No, not people. A farmer tipped me off – Conservative Central Office had surreptitiously bribed all the British sheep farmers to convince their sheep to send in postal votes. The farmer didn’t tell me how it was done, but as their was a bonus for each vote, most farmers managed it.
Great minds Craig…. My first thought on waking to the news that the Colston statue had been trashed and that various intelligent people actually approved of this, was to march straight up the hill from my house to Cumberland Street and get busy! In reality of course, anyone claiming an ancestral right to annihilate the Duke of Cumberland from ‘respectable’ memory would subjected to scorn and ridicule.
Statues and street names are not important, apart from artistic merit and the ability to navigate our towns and cities. However, the rule of law and democracy are important. If our past is to be trashed and rewritten, I believe, as a citizen, I should have a right to say whether statues should be toppled, art destroyed and streets renamed. I would expect, in a democracy, that a process would be enacted whereby all can ‘vote’ on what should be kept and what shouldn’t. At the moment we have mob rule, and although the intentions may be good, I am not comfortable with decisions being made via social media based on ‘feelings’ rather than facts or democracy.
Sure Black Lives Matter, but so do white, brown, yellow and red lives, let’s not replace one bigoted apartheid system with another. I have no more reason to love Colston or Rhodes or any of these rich establishment figures. My working class ancestors in the shires lived and died in servitude to these people just as surely as the slaves they were. But, I’ve no desire to destroy or rewrite my past so what I can do and do do is to not continue to support the establishment system that continues the inequality that got us to where we are now, ie. I exercise my vote. The people, all of them, need to identify where we go from here, not the mob.
You should familiarise yourself, then, with the history of the Colston statue and the years’ worth of attempts to get rid of, and why that didn’t happen. There have been numerous comprehensive articles about it.
Rhodes statue sits in a recess over the top of the entrance to the building. How many people even notice it? You have to actually make the effort to look up to notice a lot of statues, gargoyles and architecture. Most people look down.
Rule of Law, unevenly applied based on race, is not sacrosanct. And in case you hadn’t heard, “all lives matter” is a ridiculous assertion in response to the declaration that Black Lives Matter. As one eloquent woman put it, be glad Black people are demanding equality and not seeking revenge. That Black Lives Matter evokes for you a new apartheid speaks volumes.
Why the reverence for “history” as written in the past, as if authors used to be objective and truthful, somehow immune to subjectivity? When people use “revisionist” (not that you did) as a criticism I wonder whether they wouldn’t prefer to have their surgeon learn a procedure from a first edition of a textbook rather than the revised and corrected 56th edition published most recently.
My only reservations about the statue tossed in the river have to do with not wanting to further pollute the river.
Give even the most inoffensive seeming sanctimonious would-be do-gooder, even a whiff of power over another person, including the vulnerable, the elderly, children, the sick, whoever and such warriors will in the name, in the boundless cause of social-justice, they’ll turn into monsters in two shakes of a lambs tail. Give a whole group, class or occupation, such power legislated, however well-meaning, and they’ll stretch and interpret as they will to legitimise anything they choose, and as ex post facto excuse for criminal excesses, using specious justifications that don’t stand scrutiny, but they’ll tear lives, families, society itself apart on some wicked power-trip against which the long arm of the law becomes the dumb facilitator of evils even when personally, institutionally they’re squeamish and they know wrong when they see it, but being tenuously legal, orders are orders, even when they’re implicit orders to do nothing, but facilitate wrong-doing, moral wrong on the part of other state agencies, for whom they are the backup if anyone should however justified, resist.
There are plenty of statues, street names etc. littering and insulting Scotland that are at present though not seen as such by many, used to having their noses rubbed in the outrageous shit that has been done to their kind and their clan ancestors, and continues to be done to them, to their nation, grave wrongs, symbols which will in the coming independent Scotland become beyond intolerable, so offensive that they will have to go. These are for actual crimes done to us and our nation, our country-folk and kin, but let others look out for themselves and for wrongs real and imagined done to them, we can’t put the world to rights, only our small part of it.
In Aberdeen there are some amazing statues, some famous some infamous.
It depends on ones point of view.
It depends on how one is educated or uneducated.
A, for instance, being the Wallace memorial, to me, It makes me proud, to those of the establishment an aberration, a deviation in the anglicisation of the school taught Scottish history
But can I point out the obvious, Wallace and his part in our history isn’t taught in Scottish Schools.
Why worry about a statue.
Yes – the lack of education is terrible. You know, there are some movies that depict the battle of Stirling bridge – WITHOUT A BRIDGE!!!
James
That would be because as you rightly say they are movies – vehicles of entertainment not historical documentaries.
Cubby – Yes – but – the movie would have been much more interesting if they had had the bridge. The bridge was crucial to some brilliant battle tactics.
Lanchester came up with his square law in 1917 (the fighting force is proportional to the square of the number of troops), but Wallace came up with exactly the same thing a good 620 years earlier. They waited until the English were exactly half way across, precisely when they were at their most vulnerable …..
There were some *really nice* battle tactics there, which would have made *great* entertainment if they had tried to put them into the movie.
Disgraceful vandalism in France when statue of slave abolitionist destroyed
https://twitter.com/BasedPoland/status/1270567615828639744
“Living here in Edinburgh I find it absolutely infuriating that we have a major street named after the genocidal sadist the Duke of Cumberland”
There is of course the infamous son of Scotland Henry Dundas, the 1st Viscount Melville whose name is used on many streets throughout Scotland. Dundas was notorious for keeping the slave trade going, and was shrewd enough to change his political stance on a sixpence, by successfully defending a runaway slave in 1778, Joseph Knight (the runaway slave) vs John Wedderburn, who claimed ownership of him. However Dundas who on one hand pushed for the abolition of slavery, in 1792, bowed to rich merchants pressure with the other hand to end slavery gradually, which lasted for roughly another fifteen years.
Interesting to see the opinions expressed here. If you only went by broadcast media, you would think nobody at all was out of step with the BLM ideology. Today on the BBC R4 Media Programme, a leading broadcast journalist said that “This is not the time for objectivity”.
I think prejudice, abuse and exploitation of any person is wrong, but those promoting the specifically “black cause” have almost won in their effort to make everyone else feel guilty and side with them (we don’t hear much about the annihilated native Americans, for example).
Nietzsche provided an explanation for the phenomenon: ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ (1887): those who feel unfairly treated by society will seek power over their perceived oppressors by making a new morality in which all others are made to feel guilty and immoral. Nietzsche was explaining that Christian morality is in fact a psycho-social weapon created and used by slaves (of the Roman Empire) against their masters and that Christian slaves gained victory by encouraging their masters to adopt the new morality and punish themselves for their guilt. It worked, of course. Now, much aided by social media and a very powerful herd mentality, various interest groups have learned (from each other) the enormous power of guilt to influence society (at least in western democracies). The suppression of rational and objective thought follows the toppling of statues.
Pro-slavery apologia, racism, apologetics for police brutality has been very evident in parts of ruling-class print media and all over social media. No shortage of “free thinking” going on, dont worry.
A lot of white people live in ‘mixed communities’ especially in ‘social housing’ a lot of them elderly. A lot of them are now very frightened. What is going to happen when it become ‘socially acceptable’ to kill white people with no consequences? Because that is where we are heading if this race-baiting shit-stirring continues. The media, the BBC especially who are egging this on are playing a very dangerous game. We all know what happens in South Africa, Zimbabwe…
It is ludicrous to claim that BLM, who don’t have an ‘ideology ‘, want to make others feel guilty. That is your perception of it, and is a baseless fear which you are converting to a denial of justice for others, based on their skin colour. The heartening thing about the situation is the support of white and other groups, who are hearing and understanding the insidious and damaging effects of racism which pervade our civil life.
@ Tamara June 10, 2020 at 18:53
Guilt is a healthy and natural reaction to moral individuals – those who don’t feel guilt when they seriously wrong others we generally call sociopaths.
Pity Bliar, Bush Cheney, Rumsfeld, Thatcher etc. don’t (or didn’t) feel guilty – if they did, we would have less wars and a more decent society.
“Christian slaves gained victory by encouraging their masters to adopt the new morality and punish themselves for their guilt. It worked, of course.”
That’s nutcase talk.
Those who scream loudest about being “objective” and “rational” are usually anything but.
“(T)hose promoting the specifically ‘black cause’ have almost won in their effort to make everyone else feel guilty and side with them (we don’t hear much about the annihilated native Americans, for example).”
Seems you could do some work on your understanding of what makes an “example” and how to support claims with premises and logic.
Tamara June 10, 2020 at 18:53 projects a ‘straw person’ complaint onto “those promoting the specifically “black cause” …”
Same old thinly disguised abuse projected onto others with a serving of lazy rhetoric garnished with logical errors, over and over, again and again. Tamara, where are these so very “specific” singular one dimensional creatures? Do they actually exist in the real world? No. Of course not in any significant numbers, if at all. This is because it’s illogical to assume the many other factors that make up a person’s life and experiences, should be automatically rendered invisible and axiomatically impotent when only one in particular is spotlighted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality