George Floyd Protests in Hyde Park

Grandad, once again I totally agree with you. As I've said previously we were not the only country to have colonies, or an Empire or to exploit the population to the point of mass murder. Every country in Western Europe were racing for Africa, complicit in the slave trade and more besides, the Belgians behaved appallingly in the Congo, Brussels built on the back of exploitation, but this is never even mentioned, let alone condemned! It is always Britain in the dock, and never one other country and I for one resent that!

Whilst thinking it’s a good thing to remove statues of those who were engaged with the slave trade ( should have been done lawfully before now) I really hope that other statues and buildings/monuments will be left alone, or we really will be in George Orwell territory.
Drake, Churchill, Nelson and others are part of our history and at their various times did their utmost for their own country.
Britain was no different to France or Germany when it came to colonising, but we have to remember that ‘the past is a different country, they do things differently there’.

However, Whitewave, Churchill didn't make as many what you call tactical errors as Hitler.
Or set out with the deliberate intention of eliminating those whom he considered to be inferior races or those with disabilities.

You have posted previously you admire Nordic politics but Sweden was practising eugenics up until relatively recently.

gg13 I know you quoted Orwell to prove your point about how alarmed you are at the rewriting of British history, but unfortunately Orwell was writing about exactly what the protestors are protesting against.

Those in power write the narrative of history.

Grandad 1943 you're completely wrong in your opinion that those who survived WW2 held Churchill in high regard. My Nan hated him and called him the old dog because of the lives lost. Don't confuse your opinion with fact.

How lucky your family were WW2 that neither of these wars affected them and that they were able to dissect the rights and wrongs after these events. My grandparents, although gassed and shell shocked in the first war, and my parents plus an uncle and a cousin killed or wounded in the second, never mind the rights or wrongs, were after these events just thankful to be alive!
I too was grateful to have been born in Britain and not war torn Europe, and I still am, warts and all!

Queen Victoria's Statue in Leeds.

Grandad1943 yes I agree with you. As I said in an earlier post; we all have feet of clay. I would suggest that no country has ever behaved impeccably in its dealings with others.
How do we feel about the treatment of First Nation People BTW? What do you think should happen to improve their lives?

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right

George Orwell 1984

Sorry I should say some aspects of America and its institutions.

The whole protest started as a criticism of America.

I find it puzzling that British History is criticised while the history of other nations is rarely mentioned.

That Bastion of liberty and freedom. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, America, allowed the genocide and forcible wholesale lifestyle change to be carried out against the North American ethnic Indian population.

Similar occurred in South America to the endemic population when whole civilisations were destroyed by Spain in pursuit of nothing else other than the outright pursuit of riches and wealth.

In more recent times the French were to brutally re-impose their imperial control on Vietnam even after the United States had agreed with its independence movement that it should be free to rule itself at the conclusion of the Second World War.

The above was to bring about a conflict that lasted almost thirty years in which many hundreds of thousands of French, American, Australian and the Vietnamese people themselves would die.

When judged in the light of the above Britains history is certainly no worse than many other nations.

All nations have skeletons in their closets

Anyway, it is back to work for me and with our offices now fully open again a section of normality seems to be slowly creeping back into our lives. ?

Someone once said “struggle is necessary for progress”

Yes it can be very scary for people when their code is threatened. It happens to all of us at some point.

I think reading the contributions on this thread, it is clear that the popular narrative of history is always written by those with power to do so. And it is done very successfully indeed until we begin to question what has been written and said over the years and how true this popular narrative is.

Of course people will be alarmed and push back against this questioning because they feel it threatens the culture in which they have been brought up and the code that governs their lives.

But it will be questioned and successfully so as it is the way societies develop and move forward.

sorry , word= work.

I didn't feel very privileged when I was growing up in absolute poverty.
I suppose I will be told that the very fact that I am white ( although actually other ethnicities contributed to 'me') made me privileged. Sigh.
If I got anywhere it was by doing my work at school, passing exams and hard word. Nothing else.

BTW VE Day was held on 8 May 1945.

The 1945 election took place on 5 July 1945 and the counting of votes was delayed until 26 July 1945, which is when Attlee became Prime Minister.

My grandparents - solid Labour supporters certainly didn’t hold him in high regard.

They thought that he made some very poor tactical errors during the war resulting in unnecessary deaths. I can remember my grandfather talking about them over the dinner table with my parents in agreement.

They accepted he had “the gift of the gab” but abhorred his politics and world view.

Grandad1943 you have as much right as anyone on GN to post, please continue to do so.

BAME people are protesting now about the fact that the United Kingdom's history is offensive to them and their heritage.

Whilst I acknowledge that mistakes have been made in the pasts it is not feasible to judge what happened in the past by 2020 standards. It is our collective history, statues/ memorabilia should not be consigned to storage facilities.

PS. Nobody suggested that Churchill was not elected due to his attitude to racism. That's a strawman argument.

Grandad It is absolutely not true that all who lived through the war years held Churchill in high regard. It really isn't.

In 1945, Churchill took it for granted that his adoring public would vote for him. He rejected the continuation of a coalition and actually tried to smear Attlee during the election campaign.

He didn't realise that his public wasn't quite so adoring as he thought. They knew about the Beveridge Report and wanted it put into practice. There were signs that Churchill was already trying to wriggle out of some of the promises in the report.

Attlee really hated Nazism and had never tried to appease Hitler, whereas some of the Conservative Party had views not that dissimilar from Nazism.

It's a myth created in the post-war years that Churchill was some kind of idol, adored by all. He certainly was the right man at the right time. He was lucky.

Many statues throughout the U.K. now seem to be on shaky ground. From Cardiff to Plymouth, Shrewsbury to Edinburgh the councils are considering their removal at last understanding how insulting and symbols of white privilege they are to so many in the U.K. and that public consciousness is at last changing.

In Oriel College, the statue of Rhodes described as a genocidiare by a PhD student is under threat. Rhodes committed an assault in Africa from which its inhabitants have yet barely managed to recover.

Whitewavemark2, in regard to your post @07:06 today, all who survived throughout the war years of 1940 until 1945 held Winston Churchill in very high regard. The foregoing was the reason he was selected to address the nation on VE day (Victory in Europe) and not the new prime minister by that time Clement Atlee.

It has to be remembered that the Second World War had come about only twenty years after the First World War. Many who fought in the trenches of that first terrible conflict returned to a Britain of unemployment, slum housing and poor health conditions by way of the nations thanks for all they had done.

The general election vote for a new government in 1945 was held while Britain was still fully mobilised for war, and all those serving in the armed forces were very aware of what had occurred on demobilisation in 1919. Those serving did therefore want something very different for themselves and their families after all they had sacrificed and given.

The Labour Party under Clement Atlee expressed exactly those fears to all and promised that a very different Britain would await those returning from the conflict they had been engaged in.

Therefore Whitewavemark2, you are correct in stating that Churchill was not elected due to passed attitudes, but that was not I feel due to his approach to racism or anything else. It was that he was attached to a party that had allowed unemployment and all else to greet those returning from that earlier conflict, and so Clement Atlee and the Labour Party were elected.