Protests following the killing of George Floyd

Was Churchill racist, yes, but he was also a product of his time, environment and Britain's role in the world as a empire. People can be righteous about it now but would you have be as so if born 100 years ago in Britain, doubtful....
 
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sammsky1 said:
You are only looking at this purely through an English and Rule Britannia point of view. Again, assuming your lived experience is superior to the majority on this planet.

How many people did Churchills decisions kill? How many people in the world utterly despise his acts vs the Brits/Euro's that think he is great?
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I agree with you on this. British white people would look at him as a hero because he was their leader against Hitler. He didn't kill millions of his own white people.
His decisions led to the starvation of millions of brown people though they were part of the British Empire and was already fighting for the Empire against Nazi Germany.
What made it worse is that there were British Colonial officials who warned Churchill and wrote to him about the starvation and begged him to divert some grain ships from Australia but he refused. He wanted to feed the Greeks after the future invasion of Greece which never came out at that time.
The worst part is that he wrote on the letter sent by the Colonial official, " if so many millions are dying why hasn't Gandhi died yet"?
He also wanted to gas the Iraqis during his time when they rebelled. Man maybe a hero to the British but to many others he was a racist who let so many millions of brown people starve to death.
 
ClaytonBlackmoorLeftPeg said:
the point is this - to proclaim that if you don’t challenge every abhorrent view/ comment/ perspective makes you complicit is utterly absurd.

do you think that makes me a racist? A tax evasion sympathiser etc? Because that’s the implication I’m getting from you and @PepsiCola?
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I understand not everyone can protest or keep up with everything bad happening in the world. However, the basic and the absolute minimum for any decent human being is to feel sympathy or hurt in their hearts.

PS: I'm not suggesting you are not sympathetic to these causes.
 
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Sultan said:
I understand not everyone can protest or keep up with everything bad happening in the world. However, the basic and the absolute minimum for any decent human being is to feel sympathy or hurt in their hearts.
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I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.
 
Pexbo said:
There’s long been talk of that Statue being removed. In that area you also have the Colston Hall, Colton Tower and a bit further up you also have Colston Arms Pub, all of which there has been a campaign to rename. It’s very fitting that the stature came down in such a symbolic way though with echoes of Saddam.
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Exactly. I live near Bristol, so well aware of the history. Getting rid of the statue should have been the first, obvious, thing to do. I’m glad that people have decided to act when politicians have ignored them for years on this issue.
 
Foxbatt said:
I agree with you on this. British white people would look at him as a hero because he was their leader against Hitler. He didn't kill millions of his own white people.
His decisions led to the starvation of millions of brown people though they were part of the British Empire and was already fighting for the Empire against Nazi Germany.
What made it worse is that there were British Colonial officials who warned Churchill and wrote to him about the starvation and begged him to divert some grain ships from Australia but he refused. He wanted to feed the Greeks after the future invasion of Greece which never came out at that time.
The worst part is that he wrote on the letter sent by the Colonial official, " if so many millions are dying why hasn't Gandhi died yet"?
He also wanted to gas the Iraqis during his time when they rebelled. Man maybe a hero to the British but to many others he was a racist who let so many millions of brown people starve to death.
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As a brown person myself, I'm not defending Churchill but does that mean we bring down Queen Victoria's statues too? I'm sure she was far worse in her half decade of looting and pillaging. And all the other kings and queens and prime ministers? All that achieves is diluting the real cause which is the message that BLM.
 
sammsky1 said:
That's only because Churchills racist acts have been whitewashed out of officially taught British history. They are arguably as heinous as Hitler's.
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First parts of Churchill's life are far from good but he was never as bad as Hitler. There isn't even an argument to be had.

Churchill also has little to nothing to do with the current situation. If the movement becomes stuck on nonsense like this they may as well disband because it won't achieve anything.
 
starman said:
Was Churchill racist, yes, but he was also a product of his time, environment and Britain's role in the world as a empire. People can be righteous about it now but would you have be as so if born 100 years ago in Britain, doubtful....
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People often use this as a justification for the acts of the past, but is that really the case? It’s not difficult to imagine that you would still feel empathy for your fellow human and view their oppression as wrong, even if you were born 100 years ago.

I mean, even in those times there were people that viewed slavery etc as wrong. Even if it wasn’t the dominant mindset, it does show that it was not impossible, people simply didn’t want to.

Having a conscience and empathy is universal and timeless, regardless of what era you’re born in or what the dominant mindset is at the time.
 
fergies coat said:
No it wasn't quite a jump to make. The poster said churchill was on par with Hitler and Stalin.




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please read below @fergies coat . Maybe you can get some context for what he stated, or sentiment rather.

Foxbatt said:
I agree with you on this. British white people would look at him as a hero because he was their leader against Hitler. He didn't kill millions of his own white people.
His decisions led to the starvation of millions of brown people though they were part of the British Empire and was already fighting for the Empire against Nazi Germany.
What made it worse is that there were British Colonial officials who warned Churchill and wrote to him about the starvation and begged him to divert some grain ships from Australia but he refused. He wanted to feed the Greeks after the future invasion of Greece which never came out at that time.
The worst part is that he wrote on the letter sent by the Colonial official, " if so many millions are dying why hasn't Gandhi died yet"?
He also wanted to gas the Iraqis during his time when they rebelled. Man maybe a hero to the British but to many others he was a racist who let so many millions of brown people starve to death.
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What the feck, are people actually comparing Churchill to Hitler?

Why do people need to take such a black and white view of things? It seems pretty self explanatory to me that you can rightly think he's a racist scumbag who thought of non-whites as inferior and committed some atrocities (especially if you're from the subcontinent) while also surely understanding why he's still a hero to many British people? And I would hope the opposite would be true as well.
 
neverdie said:
First parts of Churchill's life are far from good but he was never as bad as Hitler. There isn't even an argument to be had.
Churchill also has little to nothing to do with the current situation. If the movement becomes stuck on nonsense like this they may as well disband because it won't achieve anything.
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Thats only your opinion, informed by your education and exposure to historic incidents.
I suspect more on this planet think otherwise.
As requested by our mods, that'll be my last post on this subject in this thread.

NB: Churchill's quote in full:
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”
and that was after 300+ years of Britain looting, pillaging and raping India.

The crimes of Winston Churchill: https://medium.com/@write_12958/the-crimes-of-winston-churchill-c5e3ecb229b3
 
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All racism is wrong. Let me get out of the way right away. To protest around the world to show support that poor mans family and to show every racist that its not acceptable is also a good thing.
To vandalise and riot, to attack police is also not on. Some of the things we are seeing on tv are without doubt damaging the legitimacy of the protests.
I dont know enough about the guy whose statue was torn down but if he was a slave trader then he was an arsehole by all our standards. Does that give a mob any right to tear it down without due discussion? Absolutely not. What kind of message does this send out? Any time we disagree with something we just do as we please because we are morally in the right? Ive seen police being assaulted on tv, by thugs protesting about police brutality. How fecked up is that?
@PepsiCola do you think these protesters are going about things in the right way, and is the way they are behaving justified?
 
Glad at least one of the right wing nutjobs seems to have been banned if only temp.

There's certain posters who you know to be the kind of right wing asshats we see on Twitter yet they tread the line or think the way they pose viewpoints masks intention. Their consistency across subjects gives them away.

Tearing down that statue will have done far more in spreading an anti-racism message than it staying up for several decades more would have in 'education'.
 
Foxbatt said:
I agree with you on this. British white people would look at him as a hero because he was their leader against Hitler. He didn't kill millions of his own white people.
His decisions led to the starvation of millions of brown people though they were part of the British Empire and was already fighting for the Empire against Nazi Germany.
What made it worse is that there were British Colonial officials who warned Churchill and wrote to him about the starvation and begged him to divert some grain ships from Australia but he refused. He wanted to feed the Greeks after the future invasion of Greece which never came out at that time.
The worst part is that he wrote on the letter sent by the Colonial official, " if so many millions are dying why hasn't Gandhi died yet"?
He also wanted to gas the Iraqis during his time when they rebelled. Man maybe a hero to the British but to many others he was a racist who let so many millions of brown people starve to death.
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I have to arrest you one one element here. The gas in question was tear gas. Not gas chambers, which you make it sound like. Also, in all these sudden attacks on everyone, where do we stop? Do we go back 200 years? 1000? 2000? Should Nelson Mandelas statue in London be teared down due to the bad things Mandela did also? Should we burn down the Colosseum because slaves were made to fight there for the entertainment of the Romans?
 
starman said:
Was Churchill racist, yes, but he was also a product of his time, environment and Britain's role in the world as a empire. People can be righteous about it now but would you have be as so if born 100 years ago in Britain, doubtful....
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Well there were active dissenters from the type of racial thinking which characterized the worldview of the officials who ran the British Empire. And many more who simply didn’t emphasize it. That said, a racial approach to the question of relations between the various subject peoples of the empire was the prevailing orthodoxy. What I’ve found reading some of Churchill’s writings of the late 19th/early 20th centuries is that he often expressed this approach with more bluntness and regularity than some of his contemporaries that I’m familiar with. It didn’t prevent him from (at times) writing with genuine empathy and even admiration for non-European peoples (to some degree anyway). But my impression is that the significance of race played a relatively greater role in his worldview than it did for many others of his time and place.
 
Dumbstar said:
As a brown person myself, I'm not defending Churchill but does that mean we bring down Queen Victoria's statues too? I'm sure she was far worse in her half decade of looting and pillaging. And all the other kings and queens and prime ministers? All that achieves is diluting the real cause which is the message that BLM.
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Again, no ones talking about bringing down statues in this particular discussion.
 
Cloud7 said:
People often use this as a justification for the acts of the past, but is that really the case? It’s not difficult to imagine that you would still feel empathy for your fellow human and view their oppression as wrong, even if you were born 100 years ago.

I mean, even in those times there were people that viewed slavery etc as wrong. Even if it wasn’t the dominant mindset, it does show that it was not impossible, people simply didn’t want to.

Having a conscience and empathy is universal and timeless, regardless of what era you’re born in or what the dominant mindset is at the time.
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You have no idea how people centuries from now will view us. We eat meat. We kill animals for fun. We lock people away for life sentences. We drive around in polluting cars and happily buy TVs brought across the world on oil burning container ships.

It's very arrogant of us to think we are doing it the right way now, and look down at those who lived in a different time. They thought they were doing it the right way too.
 
How exactly does defacing the cenotaph in London and attempting to set the flags on top of it on fire bring justice for someone killed by a cop in America?

What exactly do Britain's war dead have to do with it?
 
Tiber said:
How exactly does defacing the cenotaph in London and attempting to set the flags on top of it on fire bring justice for someone killed by a cop in America?

What exactly do Britain's war dead have to do with it?
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It's about more than police brutality.
 
Tiber said:
How exactly does defacing the cenotaph in London and attempting to set the flags on top of it on fire bring justice for someone killed by a cop in America?

What exactly do Britain's war dead have to do with it?
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Have you maybe thought they are protesting something wrong in Britain as well not just in America? Or do you think Britain is racism free?
 
syrian_scholes said:
Have you maybe thought they are protesting something wrong in Britain as well not just in America? Or do you think Britain is racism free?
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Have you maybe thought that even if that is true it has feck all to do with memorials to our war dead?
 
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