Statue of Edward Colston Toppled by Protestors in Bristol
I well understand why some people in Bristol wanted to pull down the statue of the Tory slave trader, Edward Colston, and I won't lose any sleep over that . But where does the toppling of statues lead to? Certainly, it will lead to counter protests from the far right defending the statues, and the far right demanding the removal of monuments connected with the left, such as that of Karl Marx, in Highgate Cemetery. I believe it already gets regularly vandalised.
And are we going to have ritual book burnings next, of books that contain racist, sexist, imperialist, colonialist, transphobic, homophobic, themes? If we do, authors like Dickens, Trollope, Orwell, Conrad, and Waugh, had better watch out.
This trying to turn the clock back in order to transplant modern views onto the past to rewrite history, can set a dangerous precedent. Are we trying to bury the past, hide it, and sanitize it? It's not just the English imperialist Cecil Rhodes that they want to remove after taking his scholarships for donkeys years, but there is also a campaign by feminists to remove a bust of Arthur Koestler, from Edinburgh University, because they've accused him of being a 'rapist'. I gather that vegans and vegetarians are also trying to get a statue of 'Cow Pie' Desperate Dan, removed in Dundee.
There are also demands to remove a statue of the journalist, explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, (real name John Rowlands), which was unveiled in Denbigh in March 2011. Robert Aldrich, his biographer, says Stanley's birth certificate describes him as a 'bastard' who was abandoned by his mother and family and dumped in the St Asaph Union Workhouse, for ten years from the aged of six to sixteen. He emigrated to the US in 1859 aged 18, arriving in New Orleans, and after working in various jobs and having fought in the civil war, he became a journalist working for the New York Herald.
I watched the unveiling of his statue on youtube, and there was a delegation of black people from the Congo. One of them said that they realised that the name of Stanley was controversial (he was accused of being a slave trader and of using indiscriminate cruelty against Africans, including shooting them, which is all true), but they came and spoke at the unveiling ceremony. I also know that William Morris and members of the Socialist League wrote pamphlets against Stanley and demonstrated at meetings.
Stanley is best known for finding Dr Livingstone and the source of the Nile. But he also worked as an agent for King Leopold II of Belgium. It was the Afro-Arab slave trader Tippu Tip, that helped Stanley to find Livingstone. It is said that on one occasion, Tippu Tip, raided 118 villages, killed 4,000 Africans, and had 2,300 slaves, mostly women and children, bound in chains and transported to the markets of Zanzibar.
As regards the question of slavery, it's not just whites like Colston who were slave traders. We must not forget the Muslim Barbary pirates who abducted people to sell them in slave markets all the time and who felt it was their religious duty to do this to the infidel. This went on for centuries and in 1631, they abducted 107 people from the little village of Baltimore, in West Cork, Ireland, for a life of slavery in Algiers. Today, this is known as the 'Sack of Baltimore'.
And should we start a campaign to remove the plaque in Ashton to the famous travel writer, H.V. Morton, who was born in the town? It is alleged that he was a Nazi sympathizer and an antisemite. In a diary entry from February 1941, he confessed:
'I must say Nazi-ism has some fine qualities', and, 'I am appalled to discover how many of Hitler's theories appeal to me.' Another diary entry describes the US as 'that craven nation of Jews and foreigners.'
Let me know what you think.
Let me know what you think.
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5 comments:
I am surprised at the writer's attitude on the matter of statue toppling.
I thought that the proprietors of Northern Voices were anarchists. What then has become of the doctrine of propaganda by deed?
Those Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol, descendants of slaves, many of whom will have been trafficked by Colston's company, were not erasing history they were making history.
Statues are not history - they are an obfuscation of history. History is about deeds, causes, class interests, ideas, struggle, conflict, resolutions of contradictions.
Statues - are usually flattering depictions of historicals characters, erected by the cotemporaneous ruling classes, are about the lie that history is about "great men". They are about according civic honour to some extremely dishonourable, criminal, murderous characters whose role on the histotical stage was a reactionary role.
When statues re toppled by progressive historical forces and escpecially by working class mass action, it is veritably a cause for celebration.
I very much hope that this article turns out to have been an aberration and that the ageing anarchists of Northern Voices are not treading the same route as Prince Kropotkin, who, in 1916, went soft on the imperialism of his own nation.
THe British ruling class can take lessons from no-one on efforts to "bury the past, hide it, and sanitize it".
This is amply demonstrated in this article in the Guardian by George Monbiot https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
So far as I can see the only people involved in ‘sanitising’ the transatlantic slave trade are those who decline to acknowledge the role of fellow Africans in supplying slaves to be transported across the Atlantic. One cannot understand contemporary slavery without appreciating that fact. Many of the people who are enslaved today are victims of people physically indistinguishable from themselves. Until about 1880 when the ‘Scramble for Africa’ began Europeans had made little penetration into Africa. European presence was mostly around the periphery and slave traders relied on local rulers to supply them with captives.
Cities are being scoured.for offending masonry and brass and any obscure imperialist lacky can now pay the price. This is an attempt to sanitize history it is an attempt to make the nasty history go away and remove memory of it, when clearly we should be doing the opposite. They were erected within a social and political context and thankfully that context has now changed , the statue though is a reminder of social attitudes and politics of the past , as long as there is adequate information boards alongside there is no reason why they need to be removed.
Perhaps we shouldn't allow any statues to be put anywhere public lest they offend someone?
But maybe even if not in public, in your home or in a museum, someone somewhere would still be offended.
Recall the statues plonked all around Tameside on pavements and on the way into Ashton being for many a pointless waste of money.
Soon a reason will be found to pull down every statue. After all who among us is pristine perfect.
Let he who is without sin cast the first statue!
Perhaps Islam is onto something by not using imagery, art or sculpture, to elevate some people above others as if god/goddess-like?
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