Ex-British MP George Galloway opined that the monument-toppling cultural revolution does not absolve Britain’s imperial crimes, historical or modern. He is definitely correct. On the surface, removal of statues of various controversial figures may not signify much to ameliorate the injustice perpetrated on the blacks but it does serve as an admission of guilt and goodwill gesture to pave the way to rectify the wrongdoings of the past.
Removal of statues does not obliterate these abominable personalities from the annals of history but simply puts them in the place where they belong i.e. history books; these despicable people don't need to be glorified in public arena built at the expense of taxpayers' money. We should / can question why those statues were erected in the first place - with whose consent?
A prevailing opinion is that all statues should be removed that have been erected by the ruling class. They represent only that class and not the working class. There are however, notable exceptions that have been erected by working class solidarity such as Nelson Mandela.
Removal of statues does not obliterate these abominable personalities from the annals of history but simply puts them in the place where they belong i.e. history books; these despicable people don't need to be glorified in public arena built at the expense of taxpayers' money. We should / can question why those statues were erected in the first place - with whose consent?
A prevailing opinion is that all statues should be removed that have been erected by the ruling class. They represent only that class and not the working class. There are however, notable exceptions that have been erected by working class solidarity such as Nelson Mandela.
In the UK, London mayor Sadiq Khan posted video on Twitter on Tuesday of officials in East London removing a statue of 18th-century merchant and slave owner Robert Milligan from its place in the city’s docklands. “It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade but this does not have to be celebrated in our public spaces,” he wrote on Twitter. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has acknowledged that it was “a cold reality” that people of colour in Britain experienced discrimination.
Karma catching up?
At weekend protests in London, demonstrators scrawled “was a racist” on a statue of Winston Churchill. Britain’s wartime prime minister is revered as the man who led the country to victory against Nazi Germany. But he was also a staunch defender of the British Empire and expressed racist views.
A statue of Christopher Columbus has been dragged down by protesters in Minnesota, while another in Boston has been removed after being beheaded. The protesters, including Dakota and Ojibwe Indians, said they consider Columbus a symbol of genocide against Native Americans.
The protest followed a similar incident on Tuesday night in Richmond, Virginia, and another in Boston, where a statue of Columbus located in Waterfront Park in was removed after being beheaded.
Karma catching up?
At weekend protests in London, demonstrators scrawled “was a racist” on a statue of Winston Churchill. Britain’s wartime prime minister is revered as the man who led the country to victory against Nazi Germany. But he was also a staunch defender of the British Empire and expressed racist views.
A statue of Christopher Columbus has been dragged down by protesters in Minnesota, while another in Boston has been removed after being beheaded. The protesters, including Dakota and Ojibwe Indians, said they consider Columbus a symbol of genocide against Native Americans.
The protest followed a similar incident on Tuesday night in Richmond, Virginia, and another in Boston, where a statue of Columbus located in Waterfront Park in was removed after being beheaded.
The Statues of White Supremacists. Why Were They Erected in the First Place? Take Them Down? Preserve the History of Their Ugly Past?
By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, June 14, 2020
By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, June 14, 2020
The only thing controversial about taking down statues of white supremacist US and other Western figures is why they were erected in the first place, and why it took so long for a campaign to remove them.
In Britain, over two dozen Oxford city councillors, students, and thousands more Brits called for removing the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford University’s Oriel College.
He’s one of the most odious symbols of Britain’s white supremacist, imperial, colonial past.
Founder of Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe), he once called Anglo-Saxons “the first race in the world.”
He called for Britain to colonize new lands “to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines,” praising the scourge of imperialism in the pursuit of this agenda at the expense of exploited people.
In Richmond, VA on Wednesday, the confederacy’s former capital, protesters took down a statue of confederate president Jefferson Davis.
A statute of Christopher Columbus was removed in Camden, NJ, a statement by the city saying its presence “long pained residents of the (Farnham Park) community.”
Overnight Wednesday in Boston’s North End, a statue of Columbus was beheaded.
Other Columbus statues came down in Minneapolis, Richmond, VA, and reportedly elsewhere in the US.
The late historian, anti-war, anti-imperial activist Howard Zinn explained the “real Columbus” in his People’s History of the United States, other writings, and public addresses.
His arrival with a crew of brigands chosen for plunder in what’s now the Bahamas, then Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Cuba over 500 years ago was followed by the mass slaughter of around 100 million indigenous people for centuries, an unprecedented genocide ignored or glossed over by establishment Western history.
“Arawak men and women…swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat” they spotted.
“When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.”
They “were remarkable…for their hospitality, their belief in sharing” — polar opposite Western civilization’s ruling class.
Columbus sought gold, other riches and slaves for Spain. A second voyage followed the first. Native people were slaughtered throughout the Caribbean.
Scant gold was found, just hundreds of human beings taken captive, those surviving the journey to Spain sold like sheep or goats.
Zinn: “In return for bringing back gold and spices (to Spanish royalty, he was) promised 10 percent of the profits, governorship over newfound lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”
“He was a merchant’s clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor.”
Heading to Asia from Europe, “he came upon…unchartered land…the Americas.”
He didn’t discover it as US school children are taught. It was there, inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years before his arrival.
His first voyage was followed by a second one in search of gold and slaves.
There were plenty of the latter. “The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams,” Zinn explained.
Columbus first arrived in 1492. By 1650, “none of the original Arawaks or their descendants were left,” said Zinn.
An estimated eight million people perished from overwork, neglect, and other forms of cruelty as slave labor.
Knowledge of what happened came Bartoleme de Las Casas, a “priest (involved) in the conquest of Cuba (transformed into) a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty.”
The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades,” he wrote.
Indigenous people “suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help.”
“(M)ountains (were) stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times.”
“They d(ug), split rocks, move(d) stones, and carr(ied) dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash(ed) gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it br(oke) them.”
The women were “forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants,” Zinn explained.
Separated for months and worked to exhaustion led to their deaths.
From Columbus’ arrival to 1508, “over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines” — millions more in subsequent years.
“Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it,” said Las Casas.
Zinn: “What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.”
“They used the same tactics, and for the same reasons — the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call ‘the primitive accumulation of capital.’ ”
It was the beginning of how the West and most other countries were run from the time of Columbus to today.
In his book titled “Columbus: His Enterprise,” Hans Koning said the following:
“For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer.”
“It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars.”
“They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.”
Zinn explained that “the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas (was the) beginning (of) conquest, slavery (and) death.”
No “heroic adventure” by Columbus occurred, just “bloodshed,” plunder, and human misery, the legacy of so-called Western civilization.
History is told “from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats (and) leaders.” No one speaks for victims.
Earlier belligerents had swords, then rifles and cannons.
Today they have WMDs and delivery systems able to end life on earth if used in enough numbers.
Humanity’s ability to kill and destroy has come a long way through the ages, scant attention paid to surviving the destructiveness of today’s super-weapons.
Nothing has been done to curb the rage of the powerful to dominate or to minimize mass slaughter, vast destruction, and human misery from their deadly pursuits.
This monument-toppling cultural revolution does not absolve Britain’s imperial crimes, historical or modern
George Galloway
RT : 13 Jun, 2020
Britain is in the grip of a revolution. Much to the relief of the country's ruling elite, it is a cultural
revolution, and not an economic or political one.
Facing an economic recession of historic dimensions and presiding over some of the grimmest Covid-19 statistics on the planet, Britain is convulsed over whether the peccadilloes of Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell were sufficiently ugly to justify his likeness taking a dip in Poole Harbour, like the slave trader Edward Colston did in Bristol Harbour.
Of course the hypocrites bewailing Colston suffering the same fate as tens of thousands of his victims tossed overboard – usually, but not always, dead – from his slave ships as “undemocratic” miss the point that hardly anybody in England even had the vote when the statue was erected.
And Baden-Powell's chief offence, cosying up to Adolf Hitler, was the norm rather than the exception amongst the ruling caste in the 1930s. His attitude to imperialist wars in Africa was par for the course in Britain in his era, too.
Cecil Rhodes, who still towers over Oxford University, is certainly an egregious example of racist venality. He wasn't just a brutal racist and imperialist; he systemised racism, paving the way to apartheid – nowhere more so than in the country which for a time bore his very name: Rhodesia.
But if anything sums up the triumph of identity politics over class politics, it is the extraordinary verve with which millions of people around the world have poured their courage and energy into the Black Lives Matter protests, while Britain CONTINUES to be up to its neck in imperialist crimes which are largely unprotested.
Lives don't seem to matter in Yemen, for example, where plague and famine of biblical proportions are exacerbated by British- and American- enabled attacks which have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Not in centuries gone by, but now.
Arab lives in Syria haven't mattered to more than a handful of people in Britain throughout nearly a decade of explicit military, political, financial and propaganda support to fanatic hordes seeking to destroy the secular Arab Republic.
When black people hung like strange fruit from Libyan trees following the UK/US/French invasion of the country and the sodomising with a bayonet of its leader, liberals like Hillary Clinton and David Cameron laughed – literally, in Clinton's case.
In Britain, where around 60,000 excess deaths were reported by the Office of National Statistics and the Financial Times over just a few months in 2020, a hugely disproportionate number of those deaths were suffered by BAME citizens. Those black lives don't seem to have mattered much. Not enough to protest about, at least.
Were disgust – entirely justified – at the crimes of British imperialism in previous centuries translated into a determination to end the default British position of interfering in every part of the world – up to and including actual invasion – that would be a good thing of course, however unlikely.
Unlikely because the British crimes of the past didn't happen because the criminals were British. They didn’t happen because the criminals were, psychologically speaking, sociopathic and often possibly psychopathic individuals – although many of them were, judging by their actions. Captain Cook didn't slice off the limbs of recalcitrant natives in the antipodes because he loved the sight of blood (though he might well have) but because he was about the business of conquest and empire. And empire is about the business of business. Britain conquered much of the world not to hand out bibles but to loot everything they could carry – including, in the form of slavery, the very people of the invaded lands themselves.
Imperialism is ineluctably a development of our capitalist model, the need for captive markets and cheap (preferably free) sources of labour, basic commodities and raw materials.
It was not the British working class who benefitted from the British Empire – not the wage-slaves of the slavers.
The colonised peoples and the slaves all had the same enemy, which fed on the blood, sweat and tears of us all. The enemy is at home. Not in the 17th century, but now.
- - -revolution, and not an economic or political one.
Facing an economic recession of historic dimensions and presiding over some of the grimmest Covid-19 statistics on the planet, Britain is convulsed over whether the peccadilloes of Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell were sufficiently ugly to justify his likeness taking a dip in Poole Harbour, like the slave trader Edward Colston did in Bristol Harbour.
Of course the hypocrites bewailing Colston suffering the same fate as tens of thousands of his victims tossed overboard – usually, but not always, dead – from his slave ships as “undemocratic” miss the point that hardly anybody in England even had the vote when the statue was erected.
And Baden-Powell's chief offence, cosying up to Adolf Hitler, was the norm rather than the exception amongst the ruling caste in the 1930s. His attitude to imperialist wars in Africa was par for the course in Britain in his era, too.
Cecil Rhodes, who still towers over Oxford University, is certainly an egregious example of racist venality. He wasn't just a brutal racist and imperialist; he systemised racism, paving the way to apartheid – nowhere more so than in the country which for a time bore his very name: Rhodesia.
But if anything sums up the triumph of identity politics over class politics, it is the extraordinary verve with which millions of people around the world have poured their courage and energy into the Black Lives Matter protests, while Britain CONTINUES to be up to its neck in imperialist crimes which are largely unprotested.
Lives don't seem to matter in Yemen, for example, where plague and famine of biblical proportions are exacerbated by British- and American- enabled attacks which have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Not in centuries gone by, but now.
Arab lives in Syria haven't mattered to more than a handful of people in Britain throughout nearly a decade of explicit military, political, financial and propaganda support to fanatic hordes seeking to destroy the secular Arab Republic.
When black people hung like strange fruit from Libyan trees following the UK/US/French invasion of the country and the sodomising with a bayonet of its leader, liberals like Hillary Clinton and David Cameron laughed – literally, in Clinton's case.
In Britain, where around 60,000 excess deaths were reported by the Office of National Statistics and the Financial Times over just a few months in 2020, a hugely disproportionate number of those deaths were suffered by BAME citizens. Those black lives don't seem to have mattered much. Not enough to protest about, at least.
Were disgust – entirely justified – at the crimes of British imperialism in previous centuries translated into a determination to end the default British position of interfering in every part of the world – up to and including actual invasion – that would be a good thing of course, however unlikely.
Unlikely because the British crimes of the past didn't happen because the criminals were British. They didn’t happen because the criminals were, psychologically speaking, sociopathic and often possibly psychopathic individuals – although many of them were, judging by their actions. Captain Cook didn't slice off the limbs of recalcitrant natives in the antipodes because he loved the sight of blood (though he might well have) but because he was about the business of conquest and empire. And empire is about the business of business. Britain conquered much of the world not to hand out bibles but to loot everything they could carry – including, in the form of slavery, the very people of the invaded lands themselves.
Imperialism is ineluctably a development of our capitalist model, the need for captive markets and cheap (preferably free) sources of labour, basic commodities and raw materials.
It was not the British working class who benefitted from the British Empire – not the wage-slaves of the slavers.
The colonised peoples and the slaves all had the same enemy, which fed on the blood, sweat and tears of us all. The enemy is at home. Not in the 17th century, but now.
George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on Twitter @georgegalloway
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