Quote of the day 10th June 2020
"This is all going completely nuts. When will it stop?"
(Bim Afolabi, Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, on the news that the University of Liverpool has agreed to rename Gladstone Hall, named after former Prime Minister William Gladstone, following an open letter from a group of students highlighting that Gladstone's father had an interest in slaveholding.
I agree. If we've moved from removing someone's statue or other forms of Damnatio Memoriae because of something the person commemorated did, to the point where we're now taking down statues or renaming buildings not because the historical figure concerned did anything wrong but because of something their father or ancestor did, there is not a single human being in history we can commemorate.)
(Bim Afolabi, Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, on the news that the University of Liverpool has agreed to rename Gladstone Hall, named after former Prime Minister William Gladstone, following an open letter from a group of students highlighting that Gladstone's father had an interest in slaveholding.
I agree. If we've moved from removing someone's statue or other forms of Damnatio Memoriae because of something the person commemorated did, to the point where we're now taking down statues or renaming buildings not because the historical figure concerned did anything wrong but because of something their father or ancestor did, there is not a single human being in history we can commemorate.)
Comments
Its a strange way of thinking that never did make much sense to me. North Korea has punish all rules so if someone commits a crime the entire family is guilty by association, which can last for 3 generations.
Even as a kid in a christian school I thought the concept of "origional sin" I was taught was daft.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.” – George Orwell, 1984
Don't think many ports in any part of the world which were operating before 1807, certainly not in Britain but we were very far indeed from being the only offenders, have completely clean hands where slavery is concerned.
Equally it ought to count for something that it was the British parliament which was one of the first to ban the slave trade and later slavery, and the Royal Navy which stamped it out.
But they might not have got the act which abolished slavery through without promising to pay it.
Achieving massive social reforms often requires messy compromising - watch the Daniel Day Lewis film "Lincoln," which is far more accurate than most of Hollywood's output,for a good depiction of the messy compromises and outright dirty tricks which one of the noblest men in history had to stoop to in order to pass the constitutional amendment which abolished slaver in his country.
And of course even Lincoln himself, though enormously enlightened in comparison to the standards of his time, can easily be made to look terrible by digging up some of the things he said which do not pass muster by 21st century standards.
I wrote on another thread that this was one of the strongest cases for moving a statue from its present location to a museum - provided the decision was taken by proper democratic channels, not a self-appointed mob.