Digby wrote:Stom wrote:Digby wrote:Supposing they can move them, also supposing the plinths would support them to begin with. Possibly more expensive to replace too, and that will be an interesting question now in Brizzle, what goes up to replace what was?
Steve Lansdown probably wants a statue of Steve Lansdown...
Maybe they can do a faceless man to represent Bristol's most famous celebrity...who no-one knows the identity of.
Or is he too anti-establishment for them?
On the continued defense of "we need to remember our history", you can remember without erecting memorials. I'm very much in the camp of "this statue should have been taken down a long time ago".
It would seem unlikely a new Colston statue goes up because it would draw such criticism, but I do have some reservations about taking things down because by the standards of modern times the values that went into their construction/celebration is just plain wrong. I mean where does it end? Because I don't see many bigger vanity projects around constructed on the back of much worse than Colston than say the Great Pyramids. Our history is our history, not all of it is good, but I don't have a problem with keeping things people find offensive, just because something is offensive doesn't mean you get to be more than offended. And actually if we're willing to take down something symbolic like a statue should we be willing to take down the actual fruits of slavery, things like (or at east much of) Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, London... Or why stop at buildings, there's a well known tapestry that speaks to the abuse of the average man by kings that details the Norman conquest of England, burn it? Why not burn Magna Carta whilst we're at it?
Which isn't to say nothing can be changed/removed, but there's a democratic process to go through, people deciding their entitlement is enough to remove stuff they don't like ad-hoc seems very similar to the entitlement they're critical of in some of the behaviour of people like Colston.
In the nicest possible way and with all due respect, that's specious tosh.
A statue in a town square has a sole function, which is to celebrate a person. It is not in a museum as art or history, with context and explanations - it is simply a memorial stating that that person is considered special and great by society. When that person's main function in life was kidnapping, torturing, and selling black people (but being very generous with the proceeds), what does that advertise about the values of our society?
The only one of your examples I'd have any truck with is the pyramids, as they were also monuments to slavers, but them being 5,000 years old and there being no identifiable descendants of the slaves in question changes the question slightly. As usual, the slippery slope argument is fallacious, cause it turns out it's not that slippery at all and cases can always be judged on their own merits.
Puja
