Vandals gather in Bristol, attack 19th century statue as "protest", hundreds stood by and passively watched (One News Page/ Wochit Business video still) |
Arms of the British Royal African Company 1660-1752, on which a lot of British wealth was built |
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Posted on You Tube by
Guardian News 7 Jun 2020.
Demonstrators attached a rope to the grade II-listed statue on Colston Avenue on Sunday before pulling it to the ground as crowds cheered. They then jumped on it and rolled it down the street to the harbour before pushing it into the river Avon.
"Stay alert": Colston's tomb in All Saints church, the next target for British mob violence? |
The 18ft bronze statue, erected in 1895, has long been a focal point for anger at the city’s role in the slave trade and the continued commemoration of those who were involved in it. A petition to remove it had garnered more than 11,000 signatures.In a city of 724 thousand people (equivalent of 1.5% of the city's population) which has not been a focus of any particular bouts of institutionalised violence against the 4% black population.
What I found exceedingly difficult to understand was the number of archaeologists on my Twitter feed applauding this action, "the people taking their past into their own hands" as one of them put it ("Like the metal detectorists you lot also support" is my thought on reading that). Some of the 'socially woke' archaeological commentators were from the other side of the Atlantic who, it transpires, had very little idea where and what Bristol was. Some of these archaeologists got rather aggressive when their jubilation was challenged in the terms of the wider heritage debate.
Trying to erase a past (brown folk version) |
The whole underlying premise of the Brexit over half the population of Britain supports is exactly the same backward-looking "Make Our Country Great Again" junk ideas as MAGA. In both cases, this requires a whitewashing of the uncomfortable bits of the past. What many Britons brought up in a previous generation want is a recognition of some kind of British Exceptionalism - "we had an Empire on which the sun never set" type logic. The fact that this Golden Age of British supremacy was built on oppression, exploitation and human trafficking is why you'll see colonial history NOT being taught properly in British schools, and an attempt to whitewash the past. People are praising this vandalism not because it in some way actively improves the lives of ethnic minorities in Little Britain, but because it represents the removal of an uncomfortable reminder, not only of Restoration and Jacobian British exploitation, but also its continuance into the Victorian era, when this statue was erected and the townscape it formed an integral part of were also created as part of Bristol and Britain as a whole continuing to benefit from the Scramble for Africa. Are the mobs in Britain going to take the bull by the horns and eradicate all traces of the processes (The Kop, Pepys' Diary, Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, Koh-i-nor, Gibraltar, Falkland Islands included), or will there be instead a deeper self-examination about the context of British racism and xenophobia?
UPDATE 8th June 2020
Those of them who were wearing masks will have less chance of having their faces recognised from the many photos and videos that were made during that event, I hope that those responsible for the destruction, for whatever "reason", of a Grade II historical monument are identified, caught, named and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We have planning and conservation bodies in place to decide what is to be preserved and how taking into account a wide range of factors, a lynch mob should not take matters into their own hands and begin destruction of cultural property just because it does not suit their own personal tastes.
Avon and Somerset Police have now issued a statement from Bristol Area Commander Superintendent Andy Bennett
In the George Floyd case this whole rampage was supposed to be about, not only Derek Chauvin, should be being charged for what he did in Minneapolis, but also Thomas Lane, J. Kueng, and Tou Thao for aiding and abetting second-degree murder. In the same way here, it is not the few that actually laid their hands on the statue who are culpable, but every single person that stood by and let it happen. The organisers of this march should also be arrested and charged for failing to prevent criminal damage (in Poland when anti-government demos are organised, there are also sizebaable groups of wardens precisely to prevent such trouble, I did not see anyone here acting as such, which is simply irresponsible of the organisers).
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