RadcliffeRick
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 27 Oct 2011
- Messages
- 10,222
- Location
- Kuala Lumpur Via Radcliffe
- Team supported
- Manchester City since 2008 Chelsea before that :-)
I agree wholeheartedly with your post with the exception of the slave trade was first started by the Portuguese, They may have started the export to the America's but slavery has, unfortunately, existed since man first walked the earth. I don't think the pyramids, for one example, were built by a willing workforce who all received a days pay for a days graft, the same can be said of the building of Stonehenge and any other ancient structures. Slavery is/was evil and is a stain on mankinds history but to say it was started 300 (?) years ago is wrong.I wouldn't say it's something that has been removed from history because I know I was taught it. Ask people whether they know of the slave trade and whether it was wrong and 99% will say yes it was all wrong with the other 1% being knuckle dragging idiots or just thick.
I think what you want is to expose the British part of it but still it isn't something that was uniquely British or a product of British imperialism specifically. The slave trade was the doing of the entirety of Western Europe and then the US, first started by the Portuguese.
I've been to Barcelona and in La Rambla stands a massive statue of Christopher Columbus, remembered fondly for discovering the new world yet he also saw the new world as an import opportunity for slaves..... Should that statue be pulled down? God, even Colombia as a country was named after him, should they rename their country?
What I'm trying to say is this all seems an act of symbolism but is this now a trigger to confiscate and knock down everything that had any relation whatsoever to the slave trade or anything at all related to imperialism? A simple history lesson tells us who these people were and why we shouldn't look so nicely at their statues.
It's not a problem to me but I can see why some will see this as an undemocratic and highly politicised attempt to censure the past.