No. Some comparative equivalence would be necessary for that, and I don't see it.
You are behaving exactly like those that decided to erect those statues in the first place:
"Sure he may have threatened the life of an unborn child and its mother thereby acting in a morally reprehensible and illegal way but he changed his life around and died in horrible circumstances - I see no issue with memorials to his legacy."
You've lost me there, looks like you need some documentary sources to back up the thinking behind those erections.
You're judging Floyd's crimes based on the lens of 2020 as people did to others in whatever year.
Unless one's a Rees-Mogg then that's exactly the year we should judge by. Society is fluid, thinking is fluid, collective morality is therefore fluid. That's people for ya.
You are, however, also judging countless other men's crimes (and society's views on them) committed over a century ago by that same lens.
Certainly. See the above.
There are things that I could very well have said and done in the 1980s that I would not dream of saying or doing now. We evolve, we learn, we are society.
Please note that I was referring to the
commission that is to review statues in London. Let's look at what Sadiq Khan said about its purview:
When asked if he would consider taking down a statue of Winston Churchill which had the word “racist” sprayed on it during protests last weekend, Mr Khan said: “No – nobody’s perfect, whether it’s Churchill, whether it’s Gandhi, whether it’s Malcolm X.
Sorry?
So someone whose policies are thought to have
contributed to a famine that killed over 2 million people and was an unabashed imperialist is "safe" yet
Thomas Guy could be in the firing line?
You're misunderstanding your own words there, although in my opinion it wouldn't be the first time. Khan thinks he won't remove the statue of Churchill, but you think that means it's "safe". I won't be robbing a post office in the next few weeks but I don't imagine they're all "safe".
I think the problem is that you're misunderstanding the meaning and purpose of statues. Remembering a person is one thing, venerating some of their actions is another, but holding them up in public view as statues suggests that veneration is mandatory. Any questioning of those memorial installations is, as I see in your own posting, considered by some to be unbroachable. Churchill, Gandhi and Malcolm X were all figures who had great success in some ways but were also quite mad racists in others. We should remember - they're part of our cultural heritage and we should learn from them. That isn't the same as the authorities casting them in bronze so that we can shove them into peoples' eyelines.
Will we need to re-review all statues all over again in 2040 once we have more "enlightened" views on racists and their roles in government?
Yes. Society evolves. I doubt the Queen does many Nazi salutes any more. Things change, norms change, society's view of "acceptable" changes. That's people for ya.
The fact is people decided to erect those statues to celebrate people with complicated lives and we should use them as a talking point of the person rather than protest for their removal.
That's not a fact, you're really twisting history now. The fact is that those statues were erected, mostly as part of an authorised discourse, to venerate specific acts or legends about specific people. You claim that the intention was to "
celebrate people with complicated lives" but that seems nonsensical to me. The white, christian discourse in Britian's official histories has very much tried to scrub out Churchill's atrocities, for example.
What I garner from your replies is that you continue to venerate Churchill, a terrible minister, a terrible prime minister, and a terrible person. The thing that made him famous (winning the war, huzzah!) neatly ignores the fact that he remained one of the least popular PMs in British history, that he didn't "win the war" (because Britain was unable to without the USA deciding which side to come down on), that he killed millions of British citizens (as you pointed out), and that if his recommendations had been followed in the late 1930s we'd have been at war by '37 and destroyed by '39.
Do we need a statue to remember that? No, because a statue tells us that this is somebody to be celebrated. He isn't. He's somebody to be remembered.
