“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight” – Jean Cocteau
I thought from the start that most of the “solutions” the Black Lives Matter protesters demand would make the lives of black people worse, but (as with the Me Too movement before it), the BLM movement would never have got off the ground if there were not justifiable anger at real abuses.
To fight real abuses is hard. It might require thought. It might require compromise. To fight images of dead men is much more exhilarating. Don’t worry, you still get to crack heads.
The Leicester Mercury reports,
Gandhi statue campaign ‘a distraction’ from Black Lives Matters – Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe
Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe says a campaign to remove the statue of Mahatma Gandhi risks being a distraction to the Black Lives Matter movement.
A 6,000 name petition is calling for the sculpture of the Indian leader and civil rights campaigner to be taken down from the plinth in Belgrave Road where it has stood since 2009.
The petition was launched after a statue of Bristol slaver Edward Colston was toppled during a recent Black Lives Matters protest and dumped in the city’s harbour.
The organisers of the Gandhi statue petition said he was a “fascist, racist and sexual predator” who brought “inconsolable suffering” to millions of people during the partition of India before his assassination in January 1948.
That has enraged many people from the Indian community in Leicester East.
You don’t say!
Ms Webbe spoke out on the issue of the Gandhi statue after her predecessor as MP Keith Vaz arrived with city councillors and community volunteers to throw up a symbolic human ring around the piece of art.
Mr Vaz, who stood down as an MP after more than 30 years representing his city constituency prior to December’s General Election, had vowed to “defend it personally”.
Tribalism and “inclusion” (despite the frequently contradictory nature of those things) are apparently the only “progressive” solutions to all our troubles. So in the spirit of both, let’s allow the former into every nook and cranny of our lives, and make sure to be inclusive about bringing every tribe into the melee while we’re at it. What could possibly go wrong?
Let the feeding frenzy begin.
It will be a frenzy, particularly when the supply of dead white British male statues starts to run short.
We are seeing a re-run of the Münster Rebellion, which Rothbard brilliantly chronicled, TL Do read.
TCALSS
As always with the Left, it comes down to primitive urges.
and theft and lies
We all like happy endings, but:
Quia non est Pastor ovium eius.
Presumably – hopefully! – the Hutterites and Mennonites all over the Dakotas here are from that passive wing of Anabaptists. “Peaceful anarchocommunists” does quite nicely describe them.
So, like rape then.
I suppose that’s one nice thing to say about the 20th century monster descendants of these anabaptists: they weren’t that much into the whole compulsory promiscuity thing. Small comfort for the tens of millions killed by the communists of the 20th century.
Actually i think it good to have a debate about Gandhi’s flaws, and to what extent his activism was a net positive for India, given that India was on the path to independence anyway. (Or was it? one more subject for debate.)
Even more beneficial is the long-overdue debate in Belgium on Leopold II.
Here we have had our own troubles with removing statues, back in 2007. I think it did a lot of good for the government to show some backbone, back then.
How much was Ghandi responsible for India’s decades long and futile attempt to make Socialism work?
Look what happened to Savonarola when the Florentines tired of his Bonfires Of The Vanaties.
All ‘new’ countries try to make socialism work! It’s probably a belief that things should start equally for all, a new beginning. And some countries adopt it to spite their neighbours- Cuba has a sad history of having the USA invade whenever it feels things are going wrong, so they might have supported socialism/communism precisely because America wouldn’t like it.
And, of course, Americans love socialism because of their can-do attitude. Nobody else has made socialism work? Americans can do Anything! Even make socialism work!
Although Ghandi led the fight for Indian independence, it was Jawaharlal Nehru that led the government during the post-independence period from August 1947 to May 1964 and he was somewhere on the spectrum between committed socialist and Marxist.
So yeah. I blame Nehru, not the “seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace” as Churchill was alleged to have described Ghandi.
I do not know what to say about this – it is all very odd.
“the BLM movement would never have got off the ground if there were not justifiable anger at real abuses.”
That is specially disingenuous. The case of Floyd is not demonstrated to have any racist base, second BLM exist to stir racial hatred and subjugation to the Left.
And Floyd died also because journalists did have not made any big case of white people murdered by police in dubious circumstances. And that can be said to be racially motivated.
I’ve had a sudden revelation. Possible that many others have had this already but it struck me a hammer blow between the eyes.
The real danger is this: by insisting that a given HISTORICAL figure is beyond the pale for [fashionable reason du jour], you can denigrate everything – including any good and important and valuable but inconvenient things – that that person has done. Crucially however, THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY FOR THAT PERSON TO MAKE AMENDS (because they are long dead). You can then fatally undermine, for example, the US Constitution and/or any of its amendments because it cannot ever be made “not racist” or whatever.
That’s why they’re going after these historical figures – to kill off the valuable bits of their work that stand in the way of the wreckers.
Niall pedant Kilmartin notes that, as a logical statement, this is not correct. The Global Warming movement did not require actual global warming to establish its power. (The climategate emails showed insiders talking about the “scandal” that they could not find the warming, had to hide the decline, etc.) Real oppression is more typically inversely correlated with the ease of complaining about it; when people are oppressed, it is safe to be rude about them.
The situation here is more complicated. The often-white intellectuals who oppress free speech do so to prevent non-white people complaining about off-narrative oppression, or suggesting off-narrative solutions to on-narrative oppression, not just to prevent white people complaining about absurd or excessive accusation against them.
As regards details, the thread of the recent samizdata post that Natalie’s post links to has critique of that post’s specific proposals.
Since we’ve got a few empty plinths these days, anyone want to contribute to a statue of Edmund Carson?
And here is evidence of the British government buying back British citizens taken into slavery by pirates then traded in the Barbary slaving markets.