Great summary Nads. Education is a massive leveller and sorts things in many countries. In blighty you still have the 'privileged' factor, which remains annoying, but compare to the inequality of the US, we have it good here.
My son just sent me this. "Dad, just finished reading "the washing of the spears" Very interesting and probably will be banned soon." He's a lay preacher, involved in the church, works for various charities, etc ... ... he's also very interested in history and can read about the British without glorifying our behaviour. I've just reminded him that life in Africa was brutal before we arrived and is no better since we left. I'm all for progress and equality but progress is best made slowly and calmly imo. Rapid change, and mob rule, rarely results in anything worthwhile or permanent.
If I could give you a 100 likes for this post, I would sir, you have nailed it. plagarism (on my part) at its best/worst.
Part of it is though ... ... and that's where well meaning people will lose their own argument. There's absolutely no comparison between Fawlty Towers and The Black and White Minstrel Show .... ... none whatsoever.
You sure about that? ...The sacking of Rome, the storming of the Bastille, The Civil Rights Marches in USA, bringing down the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and peaceful change in other Eastern European States. Do you want me to go on? Where change is not always a force for good, rapid change does not necessarily mean we spiral into anarchy
So you're advocating mob rule ... ... fair enough, you're entitled to your opinion. Personally I wouldn't say The US Civil Rights Marches were mob rule but you're entitled to disagree.
Not sure you can include the sacking of Rome in that (presuming you mean the sacking of AD410) as the Roman Empire did pretty much thereafter spiral into anarchy.
The lot of the French peasants was actually worse after the revolution, it did them no good for decades ... ... didn't they end up with Napoleon as an emporer, dictator or summat?
"The US Civil Rights Marches were mob rule" So what, they were a force for human progress and hailed a wave of change to foster a fairer world. People may have been a bit naughty, like that upstart Emmeline Pankhurst or the disobedient Rosa Parkes. The civil Rights Movement may have had an anarchic exterior, but it lead to global change that demanded fairness to religious groups, ethnic groups, women etc, going beyond rights for African Americans, and peaceful protesters were beaten, shot at and killed. So, blatant thuggery isn't confined to public mobs Those glass ceilings are still ever present and most of them are far from see-through. They represent an ugly stain on our society and people have every right to be very angry about it.
Historical Note. Rome was 'sacked' many times from 387 BC onwards. Eventually the Empire fell as indeed has every empire throughout history. In the lifetimes of most of us we will have seen both the British and Russian empires fade, more or less gently, away. The Bastille was stormed but the attackers found that it only had seven inmates.
On reflection I'd say the Romans were a pack of bastards ... ... but did quite a lot of good stuff despite being an early form of the Mafia.
After 386/7 it wasn't sacked again AD410, the period during which the Empire was its height. It was sacked repeatedly after that but had already ceased to be the capital of the Empire.
you forgot to mention the oppressive empire of the people of colour the Ottoman empire, murder rape pillage slavery, well before we even thought about it, these were the experts on the subject,
I think it's super depressing the way the narrative has been changed. First off, I fully support getting rid of the Edward Colston statue. The man was a ****ing slave trader and it's not 'airbrushing history' to say that we shouldn't have statues up of someone who literally kidnapped tens of thousands of human beings and sold them to be worked to death. Second, I understand - but don't agree - why people feel Churchill is a repulsive figure. Not only was he a racist, but he was a very vocal and prominent racist who was in a position to allow those prejudices to become policy. My position on Churchill can be summed up as not minding if people build a statue to him and appreciating that without him we would have been in danger of losing the war, but also not minding if someone feels he was a massive ****, a failure in almost all other aspects of his career and a huge eugenicist who was partly on Hitler's side until he realised that would instigate conflict with Europe. It's a complex one, but I feel that in the Confederate South, it is worth pulling down statues of Lee, Forrest and Jackson because they fought vociferously to deny black people freedom and are still euologised by the Southern right. The same prejudice they supported directly impacts millions of people in America and has never truly been addressed. Here? Not so much, because people are largely not still living with colonial decisions the way they are in the US (although I understand the debate about systemic racism is valid here too). As for the banning of TV shows, what I dislike is that so much of it is done by corporations in the guise of being woke. **** that. It distracts from the main and very serious aims, and leads to easy discussions like this, when really, the targeting of the cenotaph and others is just people piggy backing onto a valid cause.
Rome at the time, as with your reply below re: the French, was run by an elite who openly and lavishly flaunted wealth and dictated subservience on the masses. That was my point. In the case of the French revolt, it resulted a fairer system of justice for all and a restructuring of taxes so they could no longer filter up to the elite as it was public funds for all.
As the son of a miner I hate Churchill ... ... but admire him because I speak English not German. I absolutely love Mrs Smug but hate her attitude on certain things. People need to realise none of us are perfect and we can celebrate Baden Powell despite his debatable views. Me Dad was an alcoholic madman who'd fight people for pints at Durham Big Meeting and spend his pit wages on his way home ... but he'd done his bit in WW2 and helped his country. He always used to say he'd done quite a bit of fighting in Italy. "With the DLI Dad?" "No, on me holidays son"
The thing that you have to remember about Eugenics is that, at the time that Churchill was interested in it, it wasn't some fringe theory espoused only by crackpots like the Nazis. It was a cornerstone of scientific thinking and almost every European country, the US, Canada had Eugenic policies of one kind or another and these were espoused by people from across the political spectrum. To refer back to an earlier thread, these ideas were behind theories about the existence of Atlantis. Just like Atlantis, and the idea that non-Europeans were incapable of developing sophisticated societies, we now know that Eugenics and the idea that some 'races' were superior to others is a massive pile of steaming ****e that no one should even consider credible. But there have been plenty of scientific theories that have been proven to be totally inaccurate and some that we believe today will, eventually, be shown to be wrong. While it is deeply regrettable that people believed these things, there has to be some understanding of the way in which people such as Churchill were told the world worked when passing judgement on them.
