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| Source: Twitter |
Of course black lives matter, all lives matter. Not that one would think so after Thousands join Black Lives Matter protests around the UK, ignoring restrictions on gatherings and warnings about social distancing to avoid spreading the Covid-19 virus.
Demonstrations have spread like a rash, invaded by various groups regardless of the facts as articulated by this courageous lady.
On the 80th Anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill's statue in Parliament Square was defaced as thousands took part in a Black Lives Matter rally. Police and police horses were attacked. The Cenotaph was vandalised.
On the 80th Anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill's statue in Parliament Square was defaced as thousands took part in a Black Lives Matter rally. Police and police horses were attacked. The Cenotaph was vandalised.
This has nothing to do with the death of George Floyd, just one of many appalling incidents throughout the world, most of which go unreported.
Protect the NHS has been a Government cry from the start of the pandemic. Their strategy avoided the NHS being overwhelmed but tragically many lives have been lost among NHS staff and carers. There has been growing concern about the disproportionate deaths among BAME people.
If the demonstrations results in another spike in Covid-19 cases, the NHS will have to pick up the pieces with many more Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people in the front line.
For the demonstrators it seems that black lives do not matter.
Postscript
Tweet from Toby Young: "I was in Minneapolis last year. Loved it. Such a beautiful city. It now looks like Aleppo." Footage here.
From Jack Montgomery: "Lincoln's statue vandalised even worse than Churchill's at the #BlackLivesMatter protest in London. Lincoln, of course, is the President who freed the slaves – and got an assassin's bullet in the back of the head for doing it. That still wasn't enough?" Image here.
Utter madness.
Postscript [08.06.2020]
London police 'on the run' from 'peaceful' protestors here.
The ultimate disgrace, police officers having to move in with riot gear to defend the Cenotaph as rioters attempt to set fire to our flag. The day after we commemorated D-Day, when our troops, those the Cenotaph honours, liberated Europe from *actual* fascists. Scumbags. Here.
No doubt these demonstrators will be first in the queue for treatment by the NHS if they become infected with Covid-19, demanding their rights as victims.
Postscript [15.06.2020]
Channel 4 News: "It turns out that the Leader of the Independent Police Advisory Group, who we must assume has a degree, doesn't know that Winston Churchill is dead. Why interview someone without knowledge? What do universities teach?"
Absolutely right. I cannot understand the sheer stupidity of people. All the evidence shows that BAME people are twice as likely to die of the virus. Homemade face coverings are also not much use in these situations. If there is a surge in infections in the next 7 to 14 days, it will be too late to listen.
ReplyDeleteLyn
The seemingly baffling large demonstrations throughout the world are as much about (consciously or unconsciously) being in lockdown for so long, as of the loss of a black life. People were longing for something to demonstrate about.
ReplyDeleteRob
This is not an anti-racism protest,it is led by anarchists whose aim is to destroy government and the structure of society. Some attended because they are persuaded and misled by a false altruistic notion.
ReplyDeleteIt is an insult to the doctors,nurses and allied professions who have risked their own health and life to care for people during this pandemic. Now this thoughtless crowd are ensuring we are all at further risk.
If perhaps singing in choirs is to be curtailed due to the risk what about spouting ignorant vitriol whilst being close to another hundred people for hours? There was even the toppling of a statue in Bristol; the evil of the mob
ReplyDeleteI have a further thought, as I am so angry that some to whom I have talked about this, appear to think the protest response is justified. As you say AB “all lives matter”; although it does seem that our own U.K. government view us all as merely part of their statistics!
ReplyDeleteThis response of vandalism throughout our country is simply mass hysteria.
I understand that the arrest of the American Floyd, went wrong, but we do not know the facts: did Floyd have a gun and was the officer preventing the death/injury of several other policemen.
This arrest went wrong,but Floyd’s break-in and attacking a woman with a gun in the past,may also have ‘gone wrong’.
This is an American issue who are quite capable of dealing with their problem. It must be understood that the police Officer now arrested, was acting in restraining Floyd using and legitimately applying methods of so doing that the Officer had been taught to use in his work.
We have a problem with a pandemic here and I am more than irritated by this crowd putting us all in further danger.
What about the 434 black men killed by other black men this year? Do their lives not matter? Why no protests about that? Ant-white racism!
DeleteDave from the West
Where were the Police in Bristol?
ReplyDeleteThe mindless thuggery demonstrated says it all.
Policing by consent is dead and the streets have been surrendered to the Mob by spineless politically correct senior police officers like Cressida Dick.
Bristol - St Paul's in particular, have a very high population of anarchist's. Does that surprise you Exodus?
DeleteEnforcer
To change the subject somewhat: The Venerable Peggy Jackson is leaving St Fagans in July, and what in the past has been firmly a traditional parish on the catholic side is to have another woman to succeed her as 'vicar'.
ReplyDeleteBob
Didn't see that advertised - I must be losing my sight as well as marbles.
DeleteIn the more local context, I see that the lord mayor of Cardiff has written to the leader of the city council calling for the removal from the city hall of a statue of Sir Thomas Picton, who was killed at Waterloo in 1815, and also that upwards of 1,000 people have signed a petition asking for the removal of the rather gloomy obelisk erected in his memory just west of Carmarthen town centre.
ReplyDeletePicton had previously been the first British governor of Trinidad after the island had been seized from Spain in 1797. He was alleged to have enhanced his income by land speculation and investment in the slave trade and - being a man of notoriously irascible temper; the Duke of Wellington described him as "a rough foul-mouthed devil as ever lived" - to have ordered the torture of a fourteen-year-old mixed-race girl in pursuit of evidence in a criminal charge against her lover, to have sanctioned excessive cruelty in the punishment of slaves, and to have authorized the execution of suspects without due legal process. He ended up being tried on the torture charge at the Court of the King's Bench in 1806, with the girl herself being brought to London to give testimony. The jury found him guilty.
However he demanded, and was granted, a re-trial on the ground that in the absence of legislation to the contrary Spanish law still applied at the time in Trinidad, and his counsel produced witnesses to attest that Spanish law had tolerated torture in some circumstances. The new jury therefore found him not guilty, but added a rider to their verdict that torture of a free person was so repugnant to the laws of England that Picton must have known he could not permit it, whatever Spanish law authorised.
So he 'got off on a technicality', as they say, and returned to his military career. Slave owners and wealthy army colleagues contributed to a fund to help meet his legal costs, but - in what must have been a rate instance of generosity towards colonials! - he donated what they gave to the relief of those affected by a major fire in the Trinidadian principal town of Port-of-Spain.
I suspect that the 'toppling of Colston' will trigger a number of other such stories over the next few weeks.
The scum running amok on our streets unchecked by the Police have very selective memories when it comes to the shameful history of Slavery.
DeleteLittle or no attention is paid to the fact that huge numbers of black people were not captured and imprisoned by Slavers but sold into Slavery by their fellow tribesmen and Chieftains who wanted to enrich themselves.
The Arabs and Islam in particular have been by far the world's biggest Slavers and yet no protests, demonstrations, violence or looting is directed towards them.
I wonder why that might be?
The British colonial activities in Africa are condemned by the PC-fascists, but no mention of the continuing Arab occupation of all of North Africa. We pulled out after 200 years leaving law and order and democracy; the Arabs are still there, with FGM, stoning gays etc - but no mention from the white-hating hypocrites.
DeleteEvangelical Ed
'Scum' strikes me as an overly loaded word, but your point's nonetheless wholly well-made. Slavery's not some once-off phenomenon uniquely perpetrated by Europeans against Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it has a vast and complex history right across time.
DeleteThe very word 'slave' itself is said to derive from 'Slav', due to the time during the early middle ages when there was a large market for European Slavs sold as slaves by later waves of conquering tribes who had more recently arrived in the lands which the Slavs had conquered earlier. And Roman pope Gregory I's famous comment 'Non Angli sed angeli' quoted by Bede was supposedly made when he saw pale blonde blue-eyed English boys at a Roman slave auction. Presumably some other European lot had captured them!
And as you say the whole 'triangular trade' depended absolutely on African kings and tribal leaders attacking and capturing neighbouring tribes - or maybe their own clan rivals - and keeping them penned intil the next slave ship arrived from Europe loaded with the commodities which would pay for them.
So the peculiar focus on the early modern European slave trade is indeed highly selective in light of the historic universality of enslavement. My own theory - for what it's worth! - is that it's arises from an unconscious sort of racism: that its real subtext is 'we're Europeans, we're British, we're a civilized and a compassionate people who are above such barbarity', and the fact that 'we' clearly haven't been arouses the righteous indignation!
Whereas the sober reality is that we've been - and in many ways still are - pretty much like the rest of the world. Exceptionalism's a fond myth!
Cobblers!
DeleteSlavery was endemic millenia before the concepts of 'Britain' or 'Europe' had been conceived.
Slavery began with prisoners of war and the poor civilians left behind following a battle or War lost. To the Victors the spoils!
I wonder how long it will take the scum vandalising Bristol to turn their erudite intentions to dismantling the Pyramids of Egypt built by Jewish slaves?
Or the Colosseum in Rome built by white slaves captured in the Roman conquests of Gaul, Germania and Britannia?
Or the Taj Mahal?
What about the Agia Sophia in Istanbul? Good luck with that one!
And the Great Wall of China?
John Ellis - an interesting point about the British. BUT why then are we painted not as 'like everyone else' but instead 'the main culprits'. The world, it seems, would be full of peace and love were it not for the wicked Brits and their evil spawn across the Atlantic!!!!!
DeleteDave from the West
My argument is precisely that we are 'like everyone else'. Neither better nor worse.
DeleteIt's strange that the protesters don't go mad about human right abuses daily in China, or the treatment of the Rohingya Muslims. Don't those lives matter?
ReplyDeleteThis was in the paper two days ago which shows the irony of Anti racist protests:
In Los Angeles’s Jewish Fairfax district during the George Floyd protests last week, Antifa thugs channeled Kristallnacht spirit, spraying “Free Palestine” and “f*** Israel” on a synagogue, daubing anti-Semitic slogans on on a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, damaging three more synagogues up the road, and smashing up a number of Jewish shops, including a kosher deli. Jewish shops and buildings were attacked in other US cities too.
If churches called their services demonstrations would they be able to continue unmolested by the secular authorities?
ReplyDeleteA journalist in an opinion piece which I read a couple of days back suggested that 'the point about statuary is that it is generally a consensual mark of honour, not a wind up, insult or a focus for violence'. I think, at least in modern times, that he's correct, and that the emphasis lies in the word 'consensual'.
ReplyDeleteAn instance is Winston Churchill. He wasn't universally admired across most of his career, even within the two political parties with which he at different times aligned himself. In the years up to 1938 he was considerably suspected, and some cases even detested, by many parliamentary colleagues, and by considerable numbers of his fellow-citizens. My father, who served in the navy throughout the war, held him in total contempt. And in today's terms though not, perhaps, in those of his own era he was arguably a racist.
But his role as the UK's political leader in war trumped all of that. Not enough to ensure his party's re-election to government in 1945, of course; but way more than enough to ensure that monuments in his memory would not just be overwhelmingly accepted, but generally applauded. Which strikes me, at least, as entirely appropriate.
Whereas, at least to my knowledge, there's no public statuary - I exempt the Houses of Parliament because it isn't in the usual sense of the term a public place - in commemoration of Margaret Thatcher. Except maybe in Grantham and in Port Stanley, erecting such a statue wouldn't meet that journalist's very sensible suggested criteria.
PP. ThankTThank youryou AB, for such a strong unbiased article, with such poignant comments. As we are aware,
ReplyDeleteof the person's being remembered many have other more fitting historical significance.
Recently on Facebook there was a UK map of target monuments by this BLM movement. I was surprised to find St Deniol's Library in Harwarden buildingtbuilding,G memorial nearby on the list and the HM Stanley memorial at St Asaph ThisiThis questionable, given that Gladstone in particular was a notable philanthropist and his successors patrons of the CiW. The William Booth memorial in Whitechapel too is on the list!
Speaking of Church/Cathedral buildings, does this BLM movement seek similar removals of suspect statuary from our buildings? One example being Gladstone's tomb in Westminster abbey and)or his memorial tomb at Harwarden?
The Victoria memorials in Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester, were recently targeted and damaged, does this mean all statues of her are removed because of her presiding over our colonial past?
The war memorial in Rhyl was protected by ex servicemen during the North Wales BLM Rally for fear of damage, why? It beggars belief.
How far does a 21stg century British state have to atone and recompense for these acts?
No doubt General booth may have said something 150 years ago which the wokest could object to but this is staggering; there are two memorials in Mile End road to him and a 21st century one facing him of his wife Catherine. Shows how evil these zealots are to be so ignorant of history; but obviously no-one is without sin and stones must be thrown in their minds.
DeleteI see today a curatrix of a museum was giving advice about which household chemicals to hurl at bronze statues to damage them irreparably; let's hope she is sacked from her museum before she lets the mob into her own museum
PP Since you mention the 'atonement', then which atoning view would you apply? The objective, subjective or the Latin? It appears recent UK images favour the 'objective' approach which is one of 'satisfaction'. Would Calvinism be religiously best suited for such mindset?
DeleteEnforcer
Enforcer
The statue of Henry Morton Stanley is in Denbigh where he was - in somewhat unfavourable circumstances - born, and not in Llanelwy.
DeleteAnd it was still there, and apparently unscathed, when I ventured onto Denbigh at the end of last week. And given that the top of the town was completely deserted, presumably due to 'lock-down', its chances of survival look reasonable.
Though someone in the town has started a petition calling for its removal, because of Stanley's involvement, at one point in his exotic career, with king Leopold's project in the Congo. Given that Stanley seems to have been pretty much on the periphery of the more appalling aspects of Leopold's exploitations, I'm not sure whether the petition's really all that justified.
But then I'm not a particular fan of statues.
Looks like the Gladstone Library in Hawarden is the latest victim of the racist purge. I personally hope the demonstration planned there does not end up in public book burning.
ReplyDeletePP. It's just so very sad that ppl can't see that this extreme purge if left to muster will cause untold damage to our societal heritage. I have to agree with Pete and Jon.
ReplyDeleteThese destructive elements know no bounds as is the case with all rampaging mobs. Already they are extending their choice of targets. Soon it will become our portrait galleries and any other institution that their distorted thinking identifies as a target. The social workers masquerading as police officers must act decisively to keep us all safe.
ReplyDeletePP. Since mentioning that En Gladstone was targeted. Today, Sky News reports, that Baden Powell statue in Poole is now under threat. What are we coming too.
ReplyDelete'Rolling news' is reporting this morning that Dorset police have advised the local council to remove a statue of Robert Baden-Powell which was erected on Poole quay just over a decade ago. The statue apparently looks out towards Brownsea Island, where Baden-Powell took a group of twenty boys on a camp back in 1920, which was the beginning of the 'scouting' movement. It was placed there to memorialize scouting's beginning.
ReplyDeleteThe police advice is based on information that in the aftermath of Colston this statue has been listed by some group or other as a target, on the grounds that Baden-Powell was an acknowledged homophobe who admired Hitler. The police suggest that as the statue's close to the sea a copycat attack is very likely, and they'd prefer to pre-empt that by removing the statue, at least for now.
I can see the point of toppling Colston, who unambiguously built his vast wealth on his participation in the slave trade - especially given that years of attempts to get his statue and its unctuously offensive plaque shifted have proved fruitless. And I can see the argument for removing the memorials to Picton in Cardiff and Carmathen because in honesty he doesn't seem to be the sort of guy we should be portraying as some sort of Welsh national hero.
But Baden-Powell? He'd died not long before I was born, but he was still a well-remembered public figure while I was growing up and I don't ever recall hearing the slightest suggestion that he'd been a Nazi sympathizer. And in the 1950s there was a very real sensitivity about that, and all the more so when it might touch on influencing the ideas of young folk.
Having rooted around on-line I can find no indication of any Nazi sympathy beyond a brief diary acknowledgement that he'd read 'Mein Kampf' and thought it contained some sound ideas but that Hitler didn't seem to him to personify them creditably. Arguably half of Britain - especially the Conservative half! - thought similarly in the mid-'30s, when the revolutionary communism of the Soviet Union was seen as the major threat. As for 'homophobia' I discovered no evidence whatever of that, but surely that comes over as no surprise for someone of a generation in which it was thought indelicate even to talk at all about such things!
I see the point of Colston in the local context, but to broaden the purge out to include the likes of Baden-Powell is mere hysteria and wholly ridiculous. The outrage of local Poole folk is understandable, and might even put a stop to the proposal.
Picton died fighting for his country against a foreign despot who threatened to dominate all Europe.
DeleteA fate well merited, to judge from his reputation and the judgements of contemporaries.
DeleteJohn: I'm not sure what I think about B-P, to be honest, so I don't know if I agree with you or not. But I do thank you for adding - as often - some well-considered thoughts to the debate.
ReplyDeleteThank you, kind sir!
DeleteThe grapevine hereabouts reports that the Bishop of St Asaph has come out in support of the removal of the Stanley statue in front of Denbigh public library.
ReplyDelete