The haters of history have taken out their knives. And they’re becoming bold.
Lord Horatio Nelson’s column is in Trafalgar Square and is one of the most recognizable sights in London. And it’s friggin’ YUGE.
Here is a close-up of the statue:
The man earned his place in history. His homeland was threatened by the great foreign powers of the day (France and Spain) and, with a daring and unprecedented move, he broke the back of the Spanish fleet in one of the most famous naval battles in history.
That’s a sort of feat worth celebrating, isn’t it?
Fun fact: Captain Kirk of Star Trek was based on ‘Horatio Hornblower’ who was based, in turn, on Lord Nelson.
And yesterday, Sky News journalist Afua Hirsch said it was time to ‘look at our own landscape’ and tear down Nelson’s Column following campaigns to remove similar statues in the US.
She said the monument in London’s Trafalgar Square was a prime example of one which should be felled because Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson defended slavery. —Dailymail
That’s not the only statue they’re after.
Captain Cook’s statue in Sydney, Australia is in the crosshairs of activists, too:
Oh no! He didn’t discover Australia… people already lived here!
Right… and your point?
Having led the ‘First Fleet’ of British ships to Australia in 1770, the statue of Captain Cook unveiled in 1879 is inscribed with: ‘DISCOVERED THIS TERRITORY 1770.’
But in an opinion article written for the ABC, the respected Indigenous advocate told how the claims on the statue were a sore point for Indigenous people.
While saying he didn’t want the statue pulled down, Mr Grant called it a reminder of ‘the violent rupture of Aboriginal society’ – one he claimed they are still enduring.
‘This statue speaks to emptiness, it speaks to our invisibility,’ he said.
‘It says that nothing truly mattered, nothing truly counted until a white sailor first walked on these shores.’ —Dailymail
What a whiny, self-absorbed thing to say. Grow a pair!
Merely living — whether you are nomadic hunters in Australia, farmers on some hardscrabble plot of land in Europe or Asia, or some Bedouin Shepherd in a desert somewhere — are not the sorts of things people raise monuments for.
There is nothing particularly newsworthy in the continued process of living. It’s what we ALL do. Everywhere.
It’s the common human experience. There is no participation prize for ‘the common human experience’.
Does he seriously NOT understand? When those ships arrived, love it or hate it, life in Australia changed. And that new relationship with the wider world is what is being commemorated, dumbass.
Did THE native Australians get on ships, establish trade routes, and connect Australia to faraway continents? No. Then quit whining, because THAT is the achievement and risk-taking we saw celebrated in that monument to Cook.
There are people who dislike the Western culture. They can’t destroy it all at once.
We must first be must be made to forget our history and the great achievements of those who came before us. Then we can be supplied with a new interpretation of that history. And be given a new identity.
Where else did we see the erasing of history? The French Revolution, the Russian revolution, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and a lot of others…
Maybe we should stop and ask a few more questions before we rush ahead with pulling down these monuments. There may be something in our history still worth remembering.
Here is a plaque that is on display at the former British fort in Port Royal, Jamaica that sums it up well:
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