The last couple of weeks have been absolutely shocking!
And for good reason.

The Black Lives Matter campaign, spurred on by yet another black death in police custody and every day, a new video of white privilege being recorded and released onto the internet for the whole world to see.
It actually makes me sick to my stomach.

Anyway, with the BLM campaign at the forefront of the news, it has now highlighted other areas that have been campaigned for and ignored for years.
Statues that honor men and women for their achievements, are now having those achievements questioned, and rightly so.

It all started with the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, being torn down by protestors and dumped in the harbor.
Edward Colston was honored as a ‘philanthropist’ because he donated money to charitable causes which supported those who shared his political and religious views.
What it doesn’t do, is tell you how he was a merchant and Tory member of parliament, involved in the slave trade.

There’s a whole list of statues that are in question.

Local authorities in London have already taken down a statue of Robert Milligan from West India Quay. Robert Milligan was a Scottish merchant, ship-owner and slave-factor, and was the driving force behind the construction of the West India Docks in London.

A statue of King Charles the II in Soho Square is on the list.
The monarch “founded the Royal African Company which transported approximately 212,000 slaves, of whom 44,000 died en route between the years 1662 and 1773”.

Christopher Columbus in Belgrave Square.
Columbus’s voyages are considered some of the most important events in world history, kickstarting modern globalism. This is why we have statues of him, however, what is not commonly known or taught in schools was that he was a colonizer and slave trader. He may have found the Americas but he became an abuser and exterminator of Native American indigenous communites.

These are just a handful of examples. There are statues, monuments and place names all over the country that need to be seriously looked at.

As the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan stated “It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade – but this does not have to be celebrated in our public spaces.”

Very true, but I have to ask…… AND PLEASE HEAR ME OUT

What is going to happen to all of these statues?
Yes, after educating myself, I know exactly why these statues and monuments need to be removed or re-named, BUT, they are inexorably part of history.

Are we not doing a disservice to ourselves and our youth by eliminating them from history. I’ve always been taught that if we forget our past, we are destined to make the same mistakes in the future and history is always written by the ‘winner’.

Personally, I think that these statues should be collated into one place. A hall of shame, so to speak.
They should be surrounded by a full historically correct telling of each person’s life and exactly why the statue was removed from it’s pedestal.
School history books should be changed to reflect a more accurate telling of an individuals mark on history.

There are going to be a lot of changes in the coming weeks or months and the news is going to continue to be hard to watch.
I just hope that we find balance at some point and the need for these protests subsides.