Ave_IT - yeah, it's all too easy for the usual suspects to make a confected song and dance of outrage over something they actually don't care about very much at all - viz. Trump and chums in that earlier Confederate statue non-furore.

Trouble is, when people like Trump and Johnson cynically make "vandalism" and "history" centre stage to distract from the much deeper underlying issues, and then all their supporters pick up on it, their often absurd arguments still need to be addressed for fear that they'll just get off scot free otherwise. It's just one of the many dilemmas we social justice warrior snowflakes have to deal with!

Vive le Revolution ..... it’s all the rage you know

There’s an underclass of whites and there’s an underclass of blacks and Muslim Asians.

Who stood up for the white so called privileged underclass ?

All this Social Justice warrior BS and virtue signalling by white liberals will amount to nothing.

Where were they when Lee Rigby was beheaded in broad daylight on the streets of the capital after two decades of Islamic atrocities ?

But GF the drug dealer and 5x visitor to US prisons who stuck a gun into the belly of a lone pregnant women during an aggravated burglary with 5 accomplices and out come all the Social Justice Warriors.

The difference in the 2 incidents was GF was murdered by an agent of the state. Surely you can understand that cant you?

On the matter of statues, and the general subject of our being kept blissfully unaware of our own often shameful history: I did know that the British had pretty much invented concentration camps in the Boer Wars (not that I found that out until many years after leaving school) but until today I was certainly not aware that we were still at it, and on a huge scale, as late as the 1950s, just a few short years after the horrors of the Nazis' camps had been revealed to a shocked world. (Not out-and-out death camps in our case, but concentration camps nonetheless.)

Prompted by Johnson's ever-creepier mendacity, George Monbiot writes in today's Guardian:

Boris Johnson says we shouldn't edit our past. But Britain has been lying about it for decades

It seems we imprisoned over a million Kenyans and treated them appallingly, including subjecting them to horrific torture and murder, and have spent decades doing our best to cover it all up. It's quite a shocking read but it's clear that it's just the tiniest tip of a huge imperial iceberg.

In the final paragraph Monbiot makes a very powerful point:

Lying about history, censoring and editing is what the political establishment does. The histories promoted by successive governments, especially those involving the UK’s relationship with other nations, are one long chain of lies. Because we are lied to, we cannot move on. Maturity, either in a person or in a nation, could be defined as being honest about ourselves. We urgently need to grow up.

This is the problem. We're supposed to be a "mature democracy" but the attitude of so many Brits is shockingly immature, planted firmly and seemingly immovably in a supposedly glorious imperial past. I think it's time we all confronted reality.

It's like when you're young and perhaps your dad seems a god-like creature who can do no wrong. Then as you get older you learn more about him and start to see all his faults and realise that he isn't so great after all, but he's still your dad and you love him to bits anyway. It's as if we've all been stuck in a permanent pre-adolescence where "Dad" is still the absolute bee's knees because we never get to learn of all the faults. It wouldn't mean we'd all stop being patriotic overnight if we knew of all the horrors perpetrated in our ancestors' name, but it would mean that we'd have a more nuanced and mature relatonship with our own country, and the world at large.

I can't help but notice how the Germans are far more mature as a people than we are. Is that because they were forced to confront their own country's history in a way that we never were, I wonder?

Thank god for the Guardian and Google!
I remember covering these topics at school in the sixties, so perhaps it's more about the standard of education these days.

Thank god for the Guardian and Google!
I remember covering these topics at school in the sixties, so perhaps it's more about the standard of education these days.

I went to school in the sixties too - mainly Irish Catholic nuns and Christian Brothers, so you'd think they'd be all for telling us Brits how awful we were - and god knows we were to them - but no, not in my experience.

Beside that, are you really suggesting that most people "of a certain age" already know all about this kind of thing?

There’s an underclass of whites and there’s an underclass of blacks and Muslim Asians.

Who stood up for the white so called privileged underclass ?

All this Social Justice warrior BS and virtue signalling by white liberals will amount to nothing.

Where were they when Lee Rigby was beheaded in broad daylight on the streets of the capital after two decades of Islamic atrocities ?

But GF the drug dealer and 5x visitor to US prisons who stuck a gun into the belly of a lone pregnant women during an aggravated burglary with 5 accomplices and out come all the Social Justice Warriors.

The difference in the 2 incidents was GF was murdered by an agent of the state. Surely you can understand that cant you?

With GF it’s manslaughter due to negligence .... there’s no way DC intended to kill GF in broad daylight in front of witnesses. If he gets the death penalty will you be happy, will justice be done ?
IDGAF about the policeman he’s a complete Rsole. It just goes to show how lucky we are to have the police force we have in the UK.

It’s the “agent of the state “ that I have a problem with just like you have a problem with the executioners of Lee Rigby are agents of Islam which I firmly believe them to be. There is nothing I would like more than to see them swing from a tree or put against a wall and shot / riddled with bullets.

On the matter of statues, and the general subject of our being kept blissfully unaware of our own often shameful history: I did know that the British had pretty much invented concentration camps in the Boer Wars (not that I found that out until many years after leaving school) but until today I was certainly not aware that we were still at it, and on a huge scale, as late as the 1950s, just a few short years after the horrors of the Nazis' camps had been revealed to a shocked world. (Not out-and-out death camps in our case, but concentration camps nonetheless.)

Prompted by Johnson's ever-creepier mendacity, George Monbiot writes in today's Guardian:

Boris Johnson says we shouldn't edit our past. But Britain has been lying about it for decades

It seems we imprisoned over a million Kenyans and treated them appallingly, including subjecting them to horrific torture and murder, and have spent decades doing our best to cover it all up. It's quite a shocking read but it's clear that it's just the tiniest tip of a huge imperial iceberg.

In the final paragraph Monbiot makes a very powerful point:

Lying about history, censoring and editing is what the political establishment does. The histories promoted by successive governments, especially those involving the UK’s relationship with other nations, are one long chain of lies. Because we are lied to, we cannot move on. Maturity, either in a person or in a nation, could be defined as being honest about ourselves. We urgently need to grow up.

This is the problem. We're supposed to be a "mature democracy" but the attitude of so many Brits is shockingly immature, planted firmly and seemingly immovably in a supposedly glorious imperial past. I think it's time we all confronted reality.

It's like when you're young and perhaps your dad seems a god-like creature who can do no wrong. Then as you get older you learn more about him and start to see all his faults and realise that he isn't so great after all, but he's still your dad and you love him to bits anyway. It's as if we've all been stuck in a permanent pre-adolescence where "Dad" is still the absolute bee's knees because we never get to learn of all the faults. It wouldn't mean we'd all stop being patriotic overnight if we knew of all the horrors perpetrated in our ancestors' name, but it would mean that we'd have a more nuanced and mature relatonship with our own country, and the world at large.

I can't help but notice how the Germans are far more mature as a people than we are. Is that because they were forced to confront their own country's history in a way that we never were, I wonder?

You make a good point but the so called horrors of Empire are callous decisions based on what was best for Empire.

Hindu’s and Muslims slaughtering each other by the trainload in 1947 and Rwandan Hutu’s and Tutsi’s slaughtering each other at the rate of 8,000 a day in 1995 is a whole new world of barbarity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... _massacres


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

What direction would you genuinely like us to take Terry ?

To look for a better way? Possibly a more civilised world ? May be search every avenue for making life better for us all ?

Or perpetuate an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, stick it to each other world, till we hate each other to oblivion ?

You make a good point but the so called horrors of Empire are callous decisions based on what was best for Empire.

Hindu’s and Muslims slaughtering each other by the trainload in 1947 and Rwandan Hutu’s and Tutsi’s slaughtering each other at the rate of 8,000 a day in 1995 is a whole new world of barbarity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... _massacres


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Nobody is arguing that other countries and groups aren't guilty of appalling barbarity. I just think it would be a huge step in the right direction if many Brits, who seem to live in total denial, accepted that we are also capable of appalling barbarity, and the only way to do that is to be more open and honest about our past.

This denial and government-curated ignorance over many years are exactly the kind of reason why we live in this fantasy world of British exceptionalism - we think that we're "more civilised" than everyone else, and therefore somehow innately superior. That in itself leads to xenophobia, racism and a totally unjustified general sense of entitlement.

There’s an underclass of whites and there’s an underclass of blacks and Muslim Asians.

Who stood up for the white so called privileged underclass ?

All this Social Justice warrior BS and virtue signalling by white liberals will amount to nothing.

Where were they when Lee Rigby was beheaded in broad daylight on the streets of the capital after two decades of Islamic atrocities ?

But GF the drug dealer and 5x visitor to US prisons who stuck a gun into the belly of a lone pregnant women during an aggravated burglary with 5 accomplices and out come all the Social Justice Warriors.

The difference in the 2 incidents was GF was murdered by an agent of the state. Surely you can understand that cant you?

With GF it’s manslaughter due to negligence .... there’s no way DC intended to kill GF in broad daylight in front of witnesses. If he gets the death penalty will you be happy, will justice be done ?
IDGAF about the policeman he’s a complete Rsole. It just goes to show how lucky we are to have the police force we have in the UK.

It’s the “agent of the state “ that I have a problem with just like you have a problem with the executioners of Lee Rigby are agents of Islam which I firmly believe them to be. There is nothing I would like more than to see them swing from a tree or put against a wall and shot / riddled with bullets.

What?? A policeman kneels on an unarmed man’s neck for 9 minutes as he slowly suffocates to death (wilfully ignoring his pleas of “I can’t breathe!, I can’t breathe!”) in broad daylight and surrounded by other police officers – and you call that “negligent”?? WTF ? You don’t have to ‘mean’ to kill someone for it to be murder. A terrorist who puts a bomb in a pub may not ‘mean’ to kill you but it is still murder. Minnesota law defines third degree murder as “causing the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard to human life”. IT WAS MURDER.

Comparing GF’s murder with Lee Rigby is quite preposterous. That policeman was an agent of the state. That’s what policemen are - by definition. They are sanctioned by and given special powers by the state. In complete contrast the murderers of Lee Rigby were two totally deranged individuals on the fringes of society, operating on their own (who had converted from strict Christianity to radical Islam) - both barking mad and well known to the police & secret services. The very fact you and others seem to see no difference between the two crimes (indeed appear to use language that seeks to lessen the murder GF) shows exactly why the Black Lives Matter campaign is so important.

Both heinous crimes with no excuses but if GF had been white would there have been the same outrage/demonstrations ?

Both heinous crimes with no excuses but if GF had been white would there have been the same outrage/demonstrations ?

Errr... I think that's rather the point. Had he been white his neck would never have been crushed under a policeman's knee in the first place.