Friday 26 June 2020

Yank Them All Down

I have said a few times that i am not in favour of statues and when i become ruler of the World i will remove the whole lot of them anyway but as my doomsday device isn't quite up to speed yet, i have to look at then the same as everyone else, or those that havent been yanked over yet anyway.
It is quite right that anyone with an evil past is removed but i expect you could name anyone from history and find something about them that isn't very favourable.
If nothing else the movement has made us more aware of the statues in our vicinity where previously there was  a kind of blindness to the people we saw memorialized on plinths but now we look at statues of long-ago luminaries and wonder about the people in these urban monuments that we barely noticed.
How many people knew of the grim backstory of Edward Colston, i certainly never and a surprising amount never knew of Winston Churchill's less than glorious past and i have never understood why Oliver Cromwell has a statue in Westminster, he massacred 41% of the Irish population just for being Catholic.
I would be hard pushed to name a single historical British figure who i want want to see immortalised, certainly nobody related to the military or the British Empire, i can think of no politicians worthy and certainly not any Royals, musicians or sports stars.
Probably just easier to either remove all statues altogether (my solution) or just have fictional characters like the one of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens or Paddington Bear in London but as Paddington was from Darkest Peru, he would upset the Little Englanders with his coming over here, eating all our marmalade.

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