This is just willfully ignorant. Because immigrants have known this for most of their lives. Arguments such as these are just insensitive towards BAME. I thought the rise of Trump, Boris would help usher a new understanding when it comes to issues like this. But clearly, we are stuck in repeating old worn out rhetorics that only aim to scare minorities instead of listening to them.
Winston Churchill
- Thread starter Cascarino
- Start date
If that were true the tories wouldn't win every damn election despite being about as useless as a tory government can be. Even if a majority of people want it to be taught truthfully, they don't buy into the idological package that comes with it.
The majority of brits, and especially Englishmen, still seem to value their traditional national identity.
I wonder how many posters in here are going to take down old photo’s of their ancestors because they were racists? The horrible truth is that white UK nationals were racist pre 1960’s and were educated to believe they were superior above other ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, you could argue that the US committed plenty of atrocities in North Africa and the Middle East during the Obama administration depending on what your point of view is.
So to just color Churchill as an evil racist is far too simplistic and completely ignores the context of the times he lived in.
Going forward I think it would be far more constructive if the school curriculum focused more on the slave trade and colonialist past as well as the white Anglo Saxon population starting to accept and embrace the positive effects immigration has had to our society.
So to just color Churchill as an evil racist is far too simplistic and completely ignores the context of the times he lived in.
Going forward I think it would be far more constructive if the school curriculum focused more on the slave trade and colonialist past as well as the white Anglo Saxon population starting to accept and embrace the positive effects immigration has had to our society.
Maybe rather then tearing down statues we should be constructing new of people from different ethnic backgrounds.
Why do people find this guy funny?
The problem with the occasionally valid 'context of one's time' argument is that certain things are timeless: for instance, humane treatment of living creatures. Without referencing instruction from religious teaching or even laws, positive morality on this matter is surely natural beyond even ingrained and in-built evolutionary necessities. More simply put I believe that we somehow know that harming other creatures is wrong - harmful to all parties involved - and this knowledge is independent of context, of mere intelligence, and of an era's particular moral customs and attitudes. If others, in Churchill's own age, considered his actions to be appalling, then the excuse of time's especial context is invalid. This 'protest' wasn't a matter of political fashion or holier-than-thou posturing; instead it was the deeply-felt knowledge of what constitutes natural and unnatural behaviour by a fellow being.
We could melt down the statues of the racists to make the news one. Capital idea, Rams!
oh boy. here we go.
I don't have any racist ancestors that I know of. This is yet another example of the deprivation inflicted upon the working class by the Tories. I know a bloke who's on the dole yet he can afford to have THREE racist ancestors...and a widescreen six-pack of lager.
I think your mistake is you believe that only things you think are beneficial are timeless. In fact the nature of humans good and bad is timeless.
As you self flagellate about the racism of Churchill born in 1874 I see Modi ruling in India in 2020.
Thanks for assuming I'm insincere; a convenient dismissal, to say the least.
Tbf the whole debate is based around convenience. The convenience of ethno-national identity, the convenience the imperialists brought to world order, convenience of having racist ancestors who influenced society last week - because last week was a whole week ago.
I think you are sincerely wrong.
Well that's something at least, and fine with me. I may well be wrong, after all.
James Cleverly, Priti Patel and Sajid Javed. Yay. problem solved.
This argument would be far less tedious if those who complain about 'rewriting the past', 'erasing history', or 'whitewashing' would actually read a history book by a proper historian at some point in their lives.
Doesn't even need to be a history book about the people on these statues, pretty much anyone half decent would expose how absolutely facile those lines of argument are.
Doesn't even need to be a history book about the people on these statues, pretty much anyone half decent would expose how absolutely facile those lines of argument are.
I don't think every Tory is a far right racist! I've met lots of centrist Tories who know the truthful history, have educated me about the horrors of Churchill and the empire and are embarrassed by it. If I had to take an educated guess, I think the 'Rule Britannia' constituency is only 15-20%. They are most likely passionate Brexiters, and voted or considered voting for UKIP. They tend to be older white men of the north.
Do you live in UK? Perhaps you are not clear on our demographic profile, I wrote a post on this a few pages ago. At least c.30% of current UK population has no family history or emotional attachment relating to whitewashed Churchill or Empire history, and those from former colonies have sadistic and painful memories instead. Ditto urban millennials and GenZ only know of a digital, cosmopolitan, multi racial world, and would have been open to new discussion on Churchill and Empire. This constituency will keep getting bigger, and will soon become larger than those with family or societal history that ties into British WW2 experience.
Defenders of the Empire, Churchill and the rest are a dying breed.
Did he starve 3 millions Bengali's to death? Damn, I missed that. Maybe our resident Indian posters can post a link?
The opening ceremony for the London Olympics was about as representational of British opinion as these statues of Churchill everyone is so obsessed with. The failures of multiculturalism need to be addressed before embracing any such naive visions which are as idealistic (if well intended) as you can imagine.
Genuine request: could you please tell me what the 'failures of multiculturalism' are?
Yeah. I think I'm done with your commentary on this subject. Thats for popping by though.
Apparently I'm not allowed to hate people because of the colour of their skin or use racial epithets anymore. feck your multiculturalism, Steve.
It would be a very long post. The best I can do is try source a nuanced article second hand. But chief among them are working class divisons, ill-considered immigration policies (mostly in the north), and so on. London and other cities have been success stories but you've seen reactionary politics rise since the Blair years partly in reply to mutliculturalism tied to a poltics of liberal globalisation which willfully neglected the poor and set them at each other's throats.
Jesus, all you Canadians are xenophobic. All of you, even the beavers.
That's fine with me.
I think your style of posting is so confrontational as to be of service to the very elements (racists, far right) you apparently most oppose. You somehow manage to create divisions among people who are, for the most part, completely like-minded. You're go to response is "go have a pint with Tommy whateverthefeckhisnameis". Well done.
Well negative responses to a policy don't necessarily mean that the policy is flawed.
And, sadly, it seems that any wide-ranging policy results in the same old, same old: the poor still struggle, while the rich get wealthier. So there's nothing exceptional, in that respect, to the policy of multiculturalism.
Boris Johnson says we shouldn't edit our past. But Britain has been lying about it for decades
George Monbiot Tuesday 16 Jun 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
If we really shouldn’t lie about our history, as the prime minister says, let’s finally open up about the atrocities of empire
When Boris Johnson claimed last week that removing statues is “to lie about our history”, you could almost admire his brass neck. This is the man who was sacked from his first job, on the Times, for lying about our history. He fabricated a quote from his own godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, to create a sensational front-page fiction about Edward II’s Rose Palace. A further lie about history – his own history – had him sacked from another job, as shadow arts minister under the Conservative leader Michael Howard.
But, Johnson tells us: “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history”. Yet lies and erasures are crucial to the myths on which Britain’s official self-image is founded, and crucial to hiding the means by which those who still dominate us acquired their wealth and power.
Consider the concentration camps Britain built in Kenya in the 1950s. “What concentration camps?” you might ask. If so, job done. When the Kikuyu people mobilised to reclaim the land that had been stolen from them by British settlers and the colonial authorities, almost the entire population – over 1 million – were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. One of these camps, as if echoing Auschwitz, had the slogan “Labour and Freedom” above the gates. Even Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the colonial administration in Kenya, who was complicit in these crimes, remarked that the treatment of the inmates was “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany”.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of prisoners died. Many succumbed to hunger and disease, including almost all the children in some camps. Many others were murdered. Some were beaten to death by their British guards. One, as the governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, acknowledged in a secret memo, was roasted alive. Others were anally raped with knives, rifle barrels and broken bottles, mauled by dogs or electrocuted. Many were castrated, with a special implement the British administration designed for the purpose. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one of the killers boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket”. Some were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound until they bled to death. If you know nothing of this history, it’s because it was systematically censored and replaced with lies by the British authorities.
Only in 2012, when a group of Kikuyu survivors sued the British government for their torture and mutilation, was an archive, kept secret by the Foreign Office, discovered. It revealed the extraordinary measures taken by colonial officials to prevent information from leaking, and to fend off questions by Labour MPs with outright lies. For example, after 11 men were beaten to death by camp guards, Baring advised the colonial secretary to report that they had died from drinking dirty water. Baring himself authorised such assaults. In implementing this decision, Griffith-Jones warned him, “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly”. When questions persisted, Baring told his officials to do “an exercise … on the dossiers”, to create the impression that the victims were hardened criminals.
As it happens, Baring was the grandfather of Mary Wakefield, the wife of Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Last month, her own truthfulness was called into question as an article she wrote in the Spectator, discussing her experiences of coronavirus, created the strong impression that she and Cummings had remained in London, rather than travelling to Durham, against government instructions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baring’s family fortune was made from the ownership of slaves, and the massive compensation paid to the owners when the trade was banned.
The hidden Kikuyu documents that came to light in 2012 were part of a larger archive, most of which was systematically destroyed by the British authorities before decolonisation. Special Branch oversaw what it called “a thorough purge” of the Kenyan archives. Fake files were inserted to take the place of those that were expunged. “The very existence” of the deleted files, one memo insisted, “should never be revealed”. Where there were too many files to burn easily, an order proposed that they “be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast”. So much for not editing or censoring our past.
The same deletions occurred across the British empire. We can only guess at what the lost documents might have revealed. Were there more details of the massacre of civilians in Malaya? Of Britain’s dirty war in Yemen in the 1960s? Of the catastrophic famine the British government created in Bengal in 1943, by snatching food from the mouths of local people and exporting it? Of its atrocities in Aden and Cyprus? One thing the surviving files do show us is the British government’s secret eviction of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, to make way for a US airbase. The Foreign Office instructed its officials to deny the very existence of the indigenous islanders, so that they could be removed without compensation or parliamentary objections.
The erasures and deletions continue. In 2010, the disembarkation cards of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean were all destroyed by Theresa May’s Home Office. Many people suddenly had no means of proving their right to citizenship of this country, facilitating May’s cruel and outrageous deportations. In 2013, the Conservatives deleted the entire public archive of their speeches and press releases from 2000 to 2010, and blocked access to web searches using the Wayback Machine, impeding people trying to hold them to account for past statements and policies.
This week, the prime minister asked the head of his policy unit, Munira Mirza, to set up a commission on racial inequalities. She is part of a network of activists whose entire history is, in my view, confused and obfuscated. It arose from the Revolutionary Communist party and Living Marxism magazine. As these names suggest, they purported to belong to the far left, but they look to me like the extreme right. In 2018 I discovered that one of its outlets, Spiked magazine, had been heavily funded by the US billionaire Charles Koch. Other sources of funding remain obscure. In common with some of her comrades, Mirza has cast doubt on institutional racism. Her new role has caused dismay among anti-racist campaigners, who fear yet more editing of history.
Lying about history, censoring and editing is what the political establishment does. The histories promoted by successive governments, especially those involving the UK’s relationship with other nations, are one long chain of lies. Because we are lied to, we cannot move on. Maturity, either in a person or in a nation, could be defined as being honest about ourselves. We urgently need to grow up.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
George Monbiot Tuesday 16 Jun 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
If we really shouldn’t lie about our history, as the prime minister says, let’s finally open up about the atrocities of empire
When Boris Johnson claimed last week that removing statues is “to lie about our history”, you could almost admire his brass neck. This is the man who was sacked from his first job, on the Times, for lying about our history. He fabricated a quote from his own godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, to create a sensational front-page fiction about Edward II’s Rose Palace. A further lie about history – his own history – had him sacked from another job, as shadow arts minister under the Conservative leader Michael Howard.
But, Johnson tells us: “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history”. Yet lies and erasures are crucial to the myths on which Britain’s official self-image is founded, and crucial to hiding the means by which those who still dominate us acquired their wealth and power.
Consider the concentration camps Britain built in Kenya in the 1950s. “What concentration camps?” you might ask. If so, job done. When the Kikuyu people mobilised to reclaim the land that had been stolen from them by British settlers and the colonial authorities, almost the entire population – over 1 million – were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. One of these camps, as if echoing Auschwitz, had the slogan “Labour and Freedom” above the gates. Even Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the colonial administration in Kenya, who was complicit in these crimes, remarked that the treatment of the inmates was “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany”.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of prisoners died. Many succumbed to hunger and disease, including almost all the children in some camps. Many others were murdered. Some were beaten to death by their British guards. One, as the governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, acknowledged in a secret memo, was roasted alive. Others were anally raped with knives, rifle barrels and broken bottles, mauled by dogs or electrocuted. Many were castrated, with a special implement the British administration designed for the purpose. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one of the killers boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket”. Some were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound until they bled to death. If you know nothing of this history, it’s because it was systematically censored and replaced with lies by the British authorities.
Only in 2012, when a group of Kikuyu survivors sued the British government for their torture and mutilation, was an archive, kept secret by the Foreign Office, discovered. It revealed the extraordinary measures taken by colonial officials to prevent information from leaking, and to fend off questions by Labour MPs with outright lies. For example, after 11 men were beaten to death by camp guards, Baring advised the colonial secretary to report that they had died from drinking dirty water. Baring himself authorised such assaults. In implementing this decision, Griffith-Jones warned him, “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly”. When questions persisted, Baring told his officials to do “an exercise … on the dossiers”, to create the impression that the victims were hardened criminals.
As it happens, Baring was the grandfather of Mary Wakefield, the wife of Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Last month, her own truthfulness was called into question as an article she wrote in the Spectator, discussing her experiences of coronavirus, created the strong impression that she and Cummings had remained in London, rather than travelling to Durham, against government instructions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baring’s family fortune was made from the ownership of slaves, and the massive compensation paid to the owners when the trade was banned.
The hidden Kikuyu documents that came to light in 2012 were part of a larger archive, most of which was systematically destroyed by the British authorities before decolonisation. Special Branch oversaw what it called “a thorough purge” of the Kenyan archives. Fake files were inserted to take the place of those that were expunged. “The very existence” of the deleted files, one memo insisted, “should never be revealed”. Where there were too many files to burn easily, an order proposed that they “be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast”. So much for not editing or censoring our past.
The same deletions occurred across the British empire. We can only guess at what the lost documents might have revealed. Were there more details of the massacre of civilians in Malaya? Of Britain’s dirty war in Yemen in the 1960s? Of the catastrophic famine the British government created in Bengal in 1943, by snatching food from the mouths of local people and exporting it? Of its atrocities in Aden and Cyprus? One thing the surviving files do show us is the British government’s secret eviction of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, to make way for a US airbase. The Foreign Office instructed its officials to deny the very existence of the indigenous islanders, so that they could be removed without compensation or parliamentary objections.
The erasures and deletions continue. In 2010, the disembarkation cards of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean were all destroyed by Theresa May’s Home Office. Many people suddenly had no means of proving their right to citizenship of this country, facilitating May’s cruel and outrageous deportations. In 2013, the Conservatives deleted the entire public archive of their speeches and press releases from 2000 to 2010, and blocked access to web searches using the Wayback Machine, impeding people trying to hold them to account for past statements and policies.
This week, the prime minister asked the head of his policy unit, Munira Mirza, to set up a commission on racial inequalities. She is part of a network of activists whose entire history is, in my view, confused and obfuscated. It arose from the Revolutionary Communist party and Living Marxism magazine. As these names suggest, they purported to belong to the far left, but they look to me like the extreme right. In 2018 I discovered that one of its outlets, Spiked magazine, had been heavily funded by the US billionaire Charles Koch. Other sources of funding remain obscure. In common with some of her comrades, Mirza has cast doubt on institutional racism. Her new role has caused dismay among anti-racist campaigners, who fear yet more editing of history.
Lying about history, censoring and editing is what the political establishment does. The histories promoted by successive governments, especially those involving the UK’s relationship with other nations, are one long chain of lies. Because we are lied to, we cannot move on. Maturity, either in a person or in a nation, could be defined as being honest about ourselves. We urgently need to grow up.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...britons-integration-rivers-blood-enoch-powell
Weary of going off topic in a thread that's really an off topic off-shoot of the BLM protests, but that's a relatively decent introduction. It wasn't so much a centralised policy as a matter of economic disparities seen all over the globe. Cities absolutely thrived and smaller industrial towns/centres were left behind.
The bold is largely the point. Racism in various parts of the world seems to be as uneven as the economic success of globalisation itself. Integration failed in so many places because economic disintegration set in. The failures of multiculturalism are really the failures of economic parity but in the mind of sizeable minorities this nuance is lost. So attitudes differ so much between LA, New York, London, as opposed to Michigan or an equally depressed northern English town.
The point I'm making is that it's easy to say embrace multiculturalism but that belies the fact that those areas most problematic are the ones which are typically most economically depressed. Uneven is the perfect term, as Lowles says.
Also, https://cla.umn.edu/geography/research/specialties/globalization-and-uneven-development.
That's not exactly unexpected though and, again, surely not exclusively the fault of a multiculturist policy. Well anyway, that's my opinion merely. Thanks for the info, BTW.
No. My original post was poorly worded as the "failures of globalisation" would be more accurate, only the globalised process of capital and labour is so often conflated with multiculturalism, as the two are related in various ways, that I didn't think to make a distinction. Basically, people have been perplexed at the rise of the right and the little Englander types in the US and UK over the past decade or so but these movements are driven in part by mass economic depression and uneven distribution of capital. Michael Moore is a good voice on this issue, largely talking about Flint Michigan in Fahrenheit 11/9. He predicted Trump would win and from viewing the documentary it wasn't because everyone in Michigan was a racist but because Trump used this uneven distribution of labour and wealth and distorted it so that "liberalism" took the hit for what was, in truth, an inexorable global process whereby manufacturing and similar jobs disappeared overseas or to automation.That's not exactly unexpected though and, again, surely not exclusively the fault of a multiculturist policy. Well anyway, that's my opinion merely. Thanks for the info, BTW.
And, in turn, it's these same movements, the right in the US, the little Englanders in Brtain, who most oppose the removal of statues and multiculturalism in general. Often for reasons I don't believe they've even properly considered.
It's a complex topic and not easy to represent very well on a discussion forum but I'd advise anyone to read up on the literature of globalisation in general if they have an interest.
I will have ago at,
Poverty for the newly arrived cultures.
Ghettoization.
Internal division and strife.
Breakdown of native cultural institutions.
Decision making paralysis.
So - and believe me, I'm not trying to make out that I am right & others are wrong - it sounds rather like the typically negative results of a longstanding uneven distribution of wealth (as per usual)?
Yes, but it isn't a timeless issue as the rate of inequality has accelerated in the past thirty years. So not as usual in the sense that Marx was writing about labour inequalities in the mid nineteenth century. Many of the issues @Don't Kill Bill highlights are exactly the ones you'll see cited if you read diaspora studies of the globalised process.
Me living rent free in your mind is cool, but I’d rather start paying rent from next month so I have no obligations. Please PM me your bank digits.
Only something you said completely without merit close to the beginning of this discussion. It stood out.
Only point I would make, and I don't believe in dragging people's previous posts up as it doesn't allow for personal change, is that if you have changed your opinion so drastically, which most people will as they grow up, how can you be so closed minded, relatively, about why other people might think the way they do. Surely we should try and understand that?
Im wondering what motivation and pleasure these so called 'militant' types, who supposedly have nothing to do with the protest, get from pissing on Churchill's statue and smashing upto the place.
I can rationalise why students might do it, they are venting their anger, I might not agree that that is the most civil way to express anger but i understand it. EVen stuff like football hooliganism, I can understand, the need for belonging, 'bro-mance' and boys being boys and wanting to show who is stronger, there is some kind of primal thing going on there
But just what do these unrelated folk, who just turn up for fun and wreck their capital city and defile parts of their identity and culture get out of it? Whats in it for them?
Any ideas?
There's ten years between this and today but it demonstrates my point. If you'd posted that in here recently you'd, maybe rightfully, be hounded out (by yourself most likely). And yet if you can change your views so completely is there really value in treating other people the same?
Is that all you’ve got? A post from 10 years ago that proves I’m not sure what
I really have gotten to you haven’t I. Prickled those nerves on the right hand side. Job done I’d say.
Imagine someone else saying that today. That's my point. We've seen people wade in with similar sentiment and others have called them racist or bigotted when clearly there's more to it. You've changed your stance in a way that many will have, so surely you see the value in not deriding other people's point of view. You might intuitvely know that they're misguided but what does personalising the issue and making the discussion polarised really achieve?Is that all you’ve got? A post from 10 years ago
Your style of posting is more belligerant than it need be, but we largely agree on the issue. I'm just perplexed that you can't see this from the other side when you were once on that side. There's more grey to the issue than polarised black/white interpretations admit.
My only problem with you is your style of posting which does sometimes read, literally, as if you try to rile people up. As if you consider that to be "job done". That's problematic if so, and if not then just ignore me.