Tuesday, 30 June 2020
There was a poster in a friend's room at college (many, many years ago) featuring the words of Pastor Niemoller; 'First they came for...'
I have recently come to recall this almost daily, and completely agree with the author that it's high time people who believe in Enlightenment values stand up to anybody whose response to history is tear it down or smash it, whose response to dissent is to tear at it and smash it, whose response to people whose opinions differ from their own is to.. well, you get the idea.
Where I'd part company is the comments that seem to imply that a line should be drawn that indicates some statues should be torn down, and others not. To the Taliban, the Bamiyan Buddhas (idolatry) were as offensive those of slave traders are to us. The solution is not to erase and destroy, but to learn and build, not to forget. Slave-trader statue? Build a bigger statue of Wilberforce close by with a plaque on both statues explaining what happened. Build a Martin Luther King statue opposite the confederate general.
A principled stance here is not to define what statues you (personally, and in this period of your life) like and don't like, it is to define whether or not society is best served by destroying its symbols and erasing its past, or not.
I have recently come to recall this almost daily, and completely agree with the author that it's high time people who believe in Enlightenment values stand up to anybody whose response to history is tear it down or smash it, whose response to dissent is to tear at it and smash it, whose response to people whose opinions differ from their own is to.. well, you get the idea.
Where I'd part company is the comments that seem to imply that a line should be drawn that indicates some statues should be torn down, and others not. To the Taliban, the Bamiyan Buddhas (idolatry) were as offensive those of slave traders are to us. The solution is not to erase and destroy, but to learn and build, not to forget. Slave-trader statue? Build a bigger statue of Wilberforce close by with a plaque on both statues explaining what happened. Build a Martin Luther King statue opposite the confederate general.
A principled stance here is not to define what statues you (personally, and in this period of your life) like and don't like, it is to define whether or not society is best served by destroying its symbols and erasing its past, or not.
If you cannot defend say Tommy Robinson’s right to freedom of speech you do not believe in freedom of speech and you aren’t a liberal.
JK Rowling and Suzanne Moore would never have defended anyone they disagreed with, had such a person been cancelled. Neither of them had anything to say about what happened to the girls in Rotherham etc. Their defence of women is a very particular defence of a particular kind of leftish feminism. They helped made the beds they are now lying in, much more comfortably than all those child victims of rape, torture and prostitution, for whom they were not prepared to speak out.
Those who still occupy their exalted positions and refuse to condemn outright, not just the shutting down of free debate, but the shutting up of victims of violence have no right to complain when their turn comes.
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