I posted this in response to Bonzo in the Black Lives Matter thread. I worry about making that thread, spurred by the murder of George Floyd, too anglocentric. I suppose my post belongs more here.

" Here's the thing about statues, Bonzo. The people who are represented by statues in public places are people who we are supposed to celebrate, who are supposed to have achieved great things. But the people who decide who's worthy of the accolade are generally the establishment. So the statues are put up, often with a little plaque telling us of the great achievements. Any plaque accompanying any statue of Churchill will say what a great war leader he was. What it won't tell us is that he was also a racist, a little Englander and an arch-misogynist who was responsible for the Dardanelles fiasco that killed tens of thousands of our young men (including my great uncle Jimmy, so call me biased). The statue of Colston in Bristol had four plaques depicting various heroic scenes, but one of them bore the words "Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city". Well he founded schools and almshouses and was generally a fine philanthropist (so was Jimmy Savile, I should like to remind you). What the plaque doesn't tell you was that he made his money to pay for those things via his slaving company, an enterprise that enslaved at least 100,000 people into misery and killed around 20,000 of them who were unceremoniously pitched overboard when they died. For years there has been argument in Bristol as to how the plaque should be reworded, but nothing has happened. There has also been a petition signed by tens of thousands to have the statue removed. No response to that either. Frustrating, innit.

So to those people who bleat that tearing down statues is destroying history, etc., I'd say that real history is a damn sight more honest than those statues which are essentially saying that the good that men do lives after them but the evil is oft interred with their bones. You'd take your child out of any school that proudly insisted on teaching history in that extremely partial way. It's a thoroughly disingenuous claim propagated by mostly people on the right. I've repeatedly asked about what you thought of Saddam's statue being torn down. I wonder what you might have thought if those huge street portraits of Mao or Stalin, confronting you round every corner, had been vandalised or torn down by protesters. They would have needed to be a damn sight braver than the Bristol protesters. And that's something to contemplate as well."