The Politics Thread 2020

[DarkFruitsRam7]

Just now, Eddie said:

It could most definitely be looked upon as a revenge mission, almost five years after the bombing of Coventry, yet equally it was a major distribution hub for troops and supplies. Even Churchill was moved to remark "(the) destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing."

Fair enough. I still think it was unjustifiable; but, as I say, it probably would have been more helpful if I removed that part from my argument.

[i-Ram]

22 minutes ago, GboroRam said:

That's why Malcolm X took his name rather than Malcolm Little, his birth name.

A little known fact is that Stuart X changed his name to Little, and he went on to great film success. Funny old world.

[TramRam]

9 minutes ago, Eddie said:

It could most definitely be looked upon as a revenge mission, almost five years after the bombing of Coventry, yet equally it was a major distribution hub for troops and supplies. Even Churchill was moved to remark "(the) destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing."

True, Also if memory serves(after watching the World at War series)Churchil Bollocked Air Marshal "bomber" Harris for should I say...his Carpet Bombing of Dresden and Potsdam.

[Gee SCREAMER !!]

47 minutes ago, ariotofmyown said:

That would be a good point if @JuanFloEvraTheCocu'sNesta had been defending the destruction of homes and businesses all over Bristol that had any connection to the slave trade.

You response should have been "would you say the same if some mindless thug had unscrewed a plaque praising the slave traders who heroically gave a fraction of their profits to Tissington. And then threw said plaque into a pond".

the fitzherberts made a lot of money from plantation ownership . Tissington is built from that money as are many places .   You advocate the destruction of one thing, it opens the floodgates to the rest .

[i-Ram]

57 minutes ago, SchtivePesley said:

Unbelievable really that some people appear to have more of a problem with the statue of a slave master being torn down than they have with the reason people were protesting in the first place

The statue should be salvaged and put in a museum with it's full history (including it's dip in the Avon - and why) so that people can learn the truth

Sadly I suspect the people who tore it down will end up being disproportionately punished (like vandalism is the big problem we have to solve as a society...)

Or we can remember we live in a democracy and the people of Bristol can have another vote on the status of the statue. I hope too it gets consigned to a Bristol Museum before you get a touch of the vapours.

As for the vandals, quite happy to see them appropriately punished and so will a good many law abiding citizens.

 

[Gee SCREAMER !!]

32 minutes ago, GboroRam said:

That's why Malcolm X took his name rather than Malcolm Little, his birth name.

 

Interesting that he turned against the nation of Islam as he believed there tactics became money orientated rather than people orientated and got assassinated.  If you actually asked a thousand people at these protests what they were arguing about they'd all start arguing amongst themselves.

[ariotofmyown]

15 minutes ago, Gee SCREAMER !! said:

 You advocate the destruction of one thing, it opens the floodgates to the rest .

It doesn't. It was just a statue. Shouldn't have done it, but you can see why it happened. It was a pretty symbolic image all the same. People are reacting as if a hospital was fire bombed.

[Highgate]

1 hour ago, TramRam said:

Or pull down the statue of Queen Victoria, Who was head on the Country while we disembowled India, Or Nelsons Column where there's a Black Face on one of the Plates below.

Now that really would be progress.  Some museum somewhere would be glad of it I guess. 

[ramit]

1 hour ago, DarkFruitsRam7 said:

I think a glorified revenge mission that killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians when the war was almost won was morally reprehensible. I probably should have left that out of my argument though, as I concede that it's open for debate.

If the whole act of war is morally reprehensible, it gets hard to distinguish what action is worse than some other.  Is it alright to kill masses of civilians at an early point in a war, but not at it's end?  This is the dilemma that i have when applying ethics to warfare. 

[Gee SCREAMER !!]

20 minutes ago, ariotofmyown said:

It doesn't. It was just a statue. Shouldn't have done it, but you can see why it happened. It was a pretty symbolic image all the same. People are reacting as if a hospital was fire bombed.

Sorry, it does.  There just advocating more destruction.  I'm sure that image was being shown on social media in seconds. That will lead to someone spray painting other statues elsewhere or trying to burn flags on the cenotaph as the antes been upped.

[Eddie]

29 minutes ago, ariotofmyown said:

It doesn't. It was just a statue. Shouldn't have done it, but you can see why it happened. It was a pretty symbolic image all the same. People are reacting as if a hospital was fire bombed.

The plans are that the monstrosity will be raised from where it lies and eventually end up in the Bristol museum.

The Mayor of Bristol shed no tears over its forcible removal, describing its very presence as an 'affront'.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-52962356

[i-Ram]

4 minutes ago, Eddie said:

The plans are that the monstrosity will be raised from where it lies and eventually end up in the Bristol museum.

The Mayor of Bristol shed no tears over its forcible removal, describing its very presence as an 'affront'.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-52962356

Such an affront, that it appears he hasn’t done anything about it since taking office in 2016 other than argue about the wording of the plaque because he wanted it to mention that Colston was a Tory. 

[Archied]

1 hour ago, ariotofmyown said:

I don't feel like anyone is calling me racist for not doing enough to eradicate all forms of racism, or because one of my ancestors may have been a slave trader.

I feel like we have been correctly reminded that there is still lots more to do, and as a society, we can do much more.

For example, society just gave a huge majority to a Primeminister that has used openly racist language. Society should have been more like @maxjam who whilst supporting Brexit, refused to vote for Johnson's party.

We have recently seen prominent Brexiteer Steve Baker criticise Cummings for going too far in the Brexit referendum with sending leaflets about Turkey. And as recently as this year, an advisor to Cummings only had to resign for repeating terrible racist opinions.

Maybe in the future, people like Steve Baker or others in politics might now speak up at the time, even when it's inconvenient.

 

Really ? ,,, take a look back a few pages at the pic posted by someone of demonstrator Plackard duck the police ,, right next to that you will see the plackard stating WHITE SILENCE IS VIOLENCE,, now that’s not a one off , we are seeing that and hearing it from a large swathe and to be honest a lot from bloody young spotty middle class sham pain socialists who have not the first clue that being a decent non racist human being was a bloody dam sight harder for those of us that did it 30 years ago than it is in today’s far better and more pampered environment so yes I do take offence ,

vote boris and be a racist , vote Corbyn and be an anti Semite ,,, mmmm what’s a man to do ,,,,,, perhaps don’t vote for any of them

duck history , it can’t be changed and as a species is riddled with shame ,, deal with racism for what it is today and start from the premise that people are decent people no matter race , religion or sexual orientation until they show different 

[A Ram for All Seasons]

1 hour ago, TramRam said:

Why was Dresdon fire bombed? we were at War with Germany and it's allies, Germany Bombed Coventry, What should he have done, Gone to Berlin and pulled down the Otto von Bismarck Statue?

I used to live opposite a German WW2 air raid bunker in Mannheim. There is a row of concrete rings on the front where the swastikas have rightly been chiseled out. Symbols glorifying fascism and slavery have no place in the public domain. There is nothing to stop Bristol council from fishing the slave trader out of the water if they want to put him in a museum.

Bismarck died 40 years before WW2 and had nothing to do with Coventry.

[WhiteHorseRam]

14 minutes ago, Gee SCREAMER !! said:

Sorry, it does.  There just advocating more destruction.  I'm sure that image was being shown on social media in seconds. That will lead to someone spray painting other statues elsewhere or trying to burn flags on the cenotaph as the antes been upped.

Vandalising the Cenotaph would be going to another place.

That would be a really bad idea.

Last week certain elements tried to discredit the BLM protests by recycling some 2011 Student demo pics showing an onanist swinging from one of the flags attached to it.

They realized the power of the public's reaction to such an act and tried to set it off.

[Archied]

56 minutes ago, Gee SCREAMER !! said:

Interesting that he turned against the nation of Islam as he believed there tactics became money orientated rather than people orientated and got assassinated.  If you actually asked a thousand people at these protests what they were arguing about they'd all start arguing amongst themselves.

It’s pretty much accepted the Nation of Islam we’re behind the assassination too

[TuffLuff]

To have a statue of Edward Colston in the centre of Bristol is like if the town of Osweicim had a statue of Rudolf Hoss, the commandment at Auschwitz, to remember the history of what happened there.

Maybe if we listened, and not just listened but looked to understand other people’s perspectives rather than get defensive and react, there would probably not be a statue there to take down in the first place. I’m not sure if the rights or wrongs that happened this weekend, I am left uneasy by a lot of it truth be told, but I know to have that the statue itself was wrong.

Hopefully they replace the statue with one that commemorates those who died during the slave trade.

[Gee SCREAMER !!]

1 hour ago, DarkFruitsRam7 said:

Fair enough. I still think it was unjustifiable; but, as I say, it probably would have been more helpful if I removed that part from my argument.

You make a reasonable point. My grandma moved to Coventry just before the war.  According to my aunt the things she saw there were horrific.  Stalin pushed for the bombing of Dresden and there was very much an element of rolling over for him at the end of the war, as everyone was probably a bit tired and America were keen to turn there attention to the war with Japan . Case in point, we went to war with Germany when Poland was invaded then handed it to the Soviets at the end .

The problem with Dresden is that was used very much as an exercise to verify how well phosphorus would burn in mass bombing . The answer was too well. The arming and designing bombs at the end of the war, was huge.  If America hadn't designed the atomic bomb first, someone else would have in a few months.  The same scientists that created the V2 rocket were smuggled out of Germany quick smart by the Americans to build Saturn v rockets for NASA in the space race.

[Gee SCREAMER !!]

6 minutes ago, WhiteHorseRam said:

Vandalising the Cenotaph would be going to another place.

That would be a really bad idea.

Last week certain elements tried to discredit the BLM protests by recycling some 2011 Student demo pics showing an onanist swinging from one of the flags attached to it.

They realized the power of the public's reaction to such an act and tried to set it off.

Unfortunatly, someone attempted to do this yesterday.  Till the police intervened.  I've seen it before of course.  I remember the son of a member of Pink Floyd pissing on a war memorial a few years back on a protest . 

[TramRam]

11 minutes ago, A Ram for All Seasons said:

I used to live opposite a German WW2 air raid bunker in Mannheim. There is a row of concrete rings on the front where the swastikas have rightly been chiseled out. Symbols glorifying fascism and slavery have no place in the public domain. There is nothing to stop Bristol council from fishing the slave trader out of the water if they want to put him in a museum.

Bismarck died 40 years before WW2 and had nothing to do with Coventry.

I am fully aware of that...the fact he had a statue in Berlin and we have people pulling statues down I was being...facetious!