YUM YUM, COMPO GALORE, ME ME ME!

It makes as much sense as jailing Fred and Rose west and all their children and grandchildren too.

And whatever you do, don't look at the poor buggers who are held in slavery right now. (no money in it)

It's a very bourgeois 'have your cake and eat it' sort of strategy. If someone bought you a nice big house, and then you later discovered you didn't like them, keping hold of the house while burning a piccy or two of them is not exactly a hardship. The Oxbridge colleges that are completely or partly in existence because of benefactors now deemed less than liberal - it's a bit cheeky just carrying on but taking down a statue or two. They should knock the whole thing down - that would remove all the nasty remnants! And yet they're happily renaming places after Chinese, Korean and various other shady characters who've got lots of money and even bigger egos. How consistent.

Tom wrote:
It's a very bourgeois 'have your cake and eat it' sort of strategy. If someone bought you a nice big house, and then you later discovered you didn't like them, keping hold of the house while burning a piccy or two of them is not exactly a hardship. The Oxbridge colleges that are completely or partly in existence because of benefactors now deemed less than liberal - it's a bit cheeky just carrying on but taking down a statue or two. They should knock the whole thing down - that would remove all the nasty remnants! And yet they're happily renaming places after Chinese, Korean and various other shady characters who've got lots of money and even bigger egos. How consistent.

I loathe this modern attempt to deny history and reality. If we are wise we learn from History and do not pretend it never happened.

Keep the statue and teach children the complexities. It prepares them for life. It is the unprepared who are more likely to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The statue-tumblers make modern-slavery more likely, not less.

As an aside I am re-reading "Mansfield Park" by the genius Jane Austen. Every year that passes sees more bubbling disapproval of her and this novel because she did not mention or condemn the slavery that The Bertram's sugar wealth was built on.

We must all be explicitly on message; and on message through the eyes of future generations as well. Novels must become condemnatory lists of any "wrong" taking place at that time.

How dare the author choose the subject matter, and not act as servant to future moral outrage.

I wonder what in 200 years time writers of contemporary fiction who dare to write about real life (surely it will be safer if they all write fantasy novels?) will be criticised for not condemning?

My starter: humans who eat animals.

there's something to it.

Great Britain looted the world and it's colonies for aeons.. it literally stole the wealth of numerous countries and their people which helped make GB "great".

The positives of financially assisting former colonies or the Commonwealth are that it would encourage citizens to stay there.

hedda wrote:
there's something to it.

Great Britain looted the world and it's colonies for aeons.. it literally stole the wealth of numerous countries and their people which helped make GB "great".

The positives of financially assisting former colonies or the Commonwealth are that it would encourage citizens to stay there.

The argument is very sound. I just don't agree that Jane Austen should be judged as a person or writer because she fails to mention the problem. It's not like she has characters make self-satisfied references to the slaves that sustain their houses and carriages...

hedda wrote:
there's something to it.

Great Britain looted the world and it's colonies for aeons.. it literally stole the wealth of numerous countries and their people which helped make GB "great".
.

That just leads to several more backward recriminations. Britain had its own imperial oppressors and exploiters. Loads of statue and pillar smashing, renaming and - cor! - money due for that. The combined Irish, too, should start a nice historic complaint against the Scots, who brutally wiped out large sections of indigenous people and denied the identity of those they let remain.

Then there's the exploitation of which the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the various Italian cities, the Americans, etc etc etc, are guilty.

The one distinction is that the British have an exceptional capacity for self-flagellation and feelings of guilt, while most other countries seem quite happy about their dirty pasts. It's quite admirable in a way...

Billy wrote:
hedda wrote:
there's something to it.

Great Britain looted the world and it's colonies for aeons.. it literally stole the wealth of numerous countries and their people which helped make GB "great".
.

That just leads to several more backward recriminations. Britain had its own imperial oppressors and exploiters. Loads of statue and pillar smashing, renaming and - cor! - money due for that. The combined Irish, too, should start a nice historic complaint against the Scots, who brutally wiped out large sections of indigenous people and denied the identity of those they let remain.

Then there's the exploitation of which the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the various Italian cities, the Americans, etc etc etc, are guilty.

The one distinction is that the British have an exceptional capacity for self-flagellation and feelings of guilt, while most other countries seem quite happy about their dirty pasts. It's quite admirable in a way...

it's complicated and I'm not sure what can be done.

Much talk in Australia of the dreadful treatment of indigenous Aboriginals only officially but at least overwhelmingly decreed citizens by a referendum in the 1960s.

I've had this argument with many people..that having generational history of living in the middle class as my family has had (a few peasants inducted into here and there) creates a feeling of security and definitely advantages someone over a black race treated as nothing, slaves, patronizingly or at times attempting to wipe them out, disadvantages those people many who still today have Grandmothers turned into cheap servants and often stolen as children from their family.

We owe them.