by Dave Douglass
VERY good, you will note we have not pulled down the statue of the
murdering mine owner union buster and general bastard Lord Londonderry
during the annual Durham Miners Gala when 250,000 of us could have
smashed it to bits and taken it home
any year over the last 160 years. Not because we want to honour him we
would at many points in our history have smashed him up and shot him in
person. But that statute shows us what he thinks of himself, I use it to
demonstrate talks and lectures on the coalfield
struggles particularly those of the 1830's and 40s when virtual
insurrections swept the coalfields.The statue serves a useful purpose to show what those who put it there, and those of us whose families suffered under him think about him and the events which he lived through and to an extent was responsible for, the story how its told demonstrates the class division of history. We do not want to forget this, him or this history and while we would portray him in a radically different manner than the dashing cavalry officer he is represented as, this statue does not stop our history being told, indeed it is as good a platform for that tale .
I have in mind that we should through our miners banner society organise a 'verbal' demolition of the statue, where we, march to it with the miners banners and expose his history in contrast to ours, it will be a public denunciation in the style of the Chinese red guard , and call upon miners to join us in it. We will not be trying to pull it down physically as apart from anything we would like to do the public historic demolition every year, whats ye all think ?
Of course miners boys were bonded to the mine and the miner owner from the age of 6 , they worked 18 hours a day, were gassed, blown up, drownd, crippled, and sat in the total dark, as families had to buy their own candles and the wee laddies wage didn't run to that. If they ran away their families would be jailed, if anyone tried to employ a run away pit lad they would be jailed.
When the miners struck they were charged by cavalry, clubbed and shot, leaders shackled into stables, families from the new born to dying evicted onto the streets, but some will still talk of 'white privilege' not that with only six hours between shifts to eat and sleep a laddie would have any change to actually wash the black off of course so the white in white privilege would not have been visible, not least because they and millions like them didn't experience any.
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3 comments:
Dave Douglas makes some very interesting and useful points about leaving a statue of a mine owner in place in order that people can see the villain close up.
However such an observation should not be used to derogate from or criticise the Black Lives Matter activists who pulled down the statue in Bristol. Where someone like Edward Colston is put on a pedestal and Black people and other have to walk past this mass murderer every day then his place is in a museum or better still in the waters where Black slaves once journeyed.
Where there is a campaign to remove this idolatrous worship of these mass murderers we should support it wholeheartedly and not succumb to the BBC's moral strictures. In Brighton today there were maybe 20,000 mainly young kids - of all colours and this is impressive in a time when trade unionists are still on the defensive.
Likewise the statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed or better still blown up.
As part of the right-wing counter narrative about the 'danger' to our history from statues being demolished (is that what history depends on) there were a handful of fascists at the war memorial 'protecting it'. If the Police hadn't protected them they would have joined Edward Colston. Of course the war memorial was in no danger but that is the BBC narrative.
Incidentally I agree with John Cleese. Utterly pathetic of the BBC. It is as if their action was taken to deliberately discredit BLM. Fawlty Towers is not racist. There were no 'racial' stereotypes either. There were generalisations about Germans which were very common years ago and which are simpy amusing today. No one takes them seriously. No Germans get attacked because of them. This is the po faced attitude of those who defend the Apartheid state in Israel with their every breath.
I also used to enjoy Till Death Us Do Part. Yes Alf was racist but the author Johny Speight portrayed him as the biggot he, Warren Mitchell was, even if sometimes he came over as credible. Alf represented a good section of the working class and this was a better portrayal than most
Either way today's marches were amazing and of course the BBC agenda was 'violence' from a handful of the pathetic far Right
tony
This very interesting piece by Dave Douglas deserves more than being dismissed in three lines of patronising comment. It ‘hits the nail on the head’ about why many of us refuse to accept without comment the idea of ‘white privilege’.
Compared with a vast majority of people in this world I do enjoy a great deal of privilege, e.g. clean water, a full belly, a decent health service, a pension when I get old, an income which exceeds my daily needs, etc. (And as I willingly admit, a degree of privilege compared with many people in Great Britain.) But, and this is an important ‘but’, so do the people who invented the term ‘white privilege’ and seem ready to throw it around to stifle debate or when they disagree with someone else’s point of view.
This ‘privilege’ accrues to me not because of the colour of skin I happen to have been born with, but because I had the good fortune to have been born in a ‘first world’ country. It is to share in this good fortune that people are willing to travel halfway across the world often suffering appalling hardship. We call them ‘economic migrants’.
As for the people who have taken to the streets I do not see them as heroic figures eager to take a leaf from the book of the Taliban and blow up monuments which do not fit into their own narrow ideology. It is likely that their behaviour will lead to new clusters of Covid 19 disease appearing which makes a mockery of the ‘lives matter’ bit in the BLM acronym.
it would be good to infuse mass BLM demonstrations with Palestinian Lives Matter slogans and posters, because the mass and ongoing killing of palestinians suggests there lives matter the least in the world
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