Yes, just fuck off, you vile little creep. You and the nag you rode into town on.
Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next
Admiral Lord Nelson was a million times the man you will never be. He fought the evil of Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire.
While the US argues about whether to tear down monuments to the supporters of slavery, Britain still celebrates the shameful era
Oh, go fuck yourself with the rough end of a pineapple wrapped in razor wire. Nelson’s column is commemorating a man who fought and died for his country. Someone who was courageous enough to stand on the quarterdeck in the thick of the fighting. Horatio Nelson was one of this country’s great heroes. It has fuck all to do with slavery.
One of the obstacles all these abolitionists had to overcome was the influence of Nelson, who was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist. While many around him were denouncing slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it.
So what? He was a man of his time. Wilberforce was, arguably, ahead of his time. But whatever Nelson’s views on slavery, Trafalgar eclipses everything. That is worth celebration.
It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials – more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas – have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past. But when these statues begin to fulfil their intended purpose of energising white supremacist groups, the issue periodically attracts more mainstream interest.
Oh, here we go. A few hundred nutters get wound up in the southern states and the vile Antifa crowd go on a mass counter rally. Both are as bad as each other. The statues, however, should stay. They are reminders of men who fought and died for their country. They are reminders of a past that was different. If we erase the past, we will never learn from its mistakes.
But when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward. The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised: despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious slaver Edward Colston. When I tweeted this weekend that it’s time we in Britain look again at our own landscape, the reaction was hostile.
I’m not surprised. I am pleased that you received a hostile response. Colston should remain, too. He is a part of this city. I resent you and your fellow travellers attempting to erase our history – good or bad.
“I don’t want that nonsense spreading here from America. Past is past, we have moved on,” one person said.
Precisely.
Another accused me of being a “#ClosetRacist” for even raising the question.
They’ve got you sussed, then.
But the most common sentiment was summed up in this tweet: “Its History – we cant & shouldn’t re-write it – we learn from it. Removing statues would make us no different to terrorists at Palmyra.” Therein lies the point. Britain has committed unquantifiable acts of cultural terrorism – tearing down statues and palaces, and erasing the historical memory of other great civilisations during an imperial era whose supposed greatness we are now, so ironically, very precious about preserving intact.
See above.
The people so energetically defending statues of Britain’s white supremacists remain entirely unconcerned about righting this persistent wrong.
We live in one of the most (if not the most) tolerant nations in the world. So there is no persistent wrong. Britain today is not the Britain of two hundred years ago. So leave our statues alone, you vile little racist fucktard.
Ah, I should have realised it was someone of an ethic extraction writing in the Guardian. How dare he want part of my culture and heritage destroyed because of what he thinks about it. Nelson was a great military hero and not just at Trafalgar. He defeated the greatest threat to these islanmds of his times, Napoleon Bonaparte, the man who had Europe in chains. Thank God for Nelson and Wellington. If he doesn’t like it then he truly can, as you say, go away.
No statue should be torn down until these people agree to the pulling down of all statues of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Apart from the 100 million plus people who have died as a direct result of their evil political ideology, they were both racists, with a particularly poor view of the worth of Mexicans and black people.
Of course they never would so all other statues would be safe.
To which we should add that statue of the sainted nelson in parliament square, you know, the murderous monkey who spent 28 years in jail because he wouldn’t lose the attitude “kill the whites, kill the Boer, kill the farmer”. Oh, sorry, whats that? oh, he’s too brown to be held to account.
Another brown person who suffered through her time at Oxford and now wants to give screechy sermons on social justice.
Question: When the Graun finally folds, what are all these people going to do?
They’ll get jobs at Islington, Haringey and Tower Hamlets councils.
[Smiles to himself]
Fahrenheit 451.
First the statues, then the books, then the history.
Clearly the bloke’s a cunt.
And, to be honest, that’s not a very English name is it? You don’t like our country? Go home. Please.
Just another piece of attention seeking, click-baiting shoite in The Guardian. Worse still C4 News invited Hirsch onto the programme tonight to discuss her sriting, in which she displayed levels of frankly nauseating self superiority and condescension I didn’t think possible.
And when challenged, she denied calling for the removal of Nelson, with weasel words that it was just a figure of speech intended to start a discussion. What a complete c**t.
There’s nothing to discuss. If she is concerned about slavery, she can piss off to the Middle East where it’s going on now – or is it not a problem when Arabs do it?
Edited to add – just watched it. What a sanctimonious cow!
Well there’s a bust of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery. That is worthy of a few dings with a sledgehammer for all the millions his crap theory brought to the slaughterhouse of history. While we’re at it, maybe that abomination to Engels in Manchester should go, too.
If we’re smashing monuments for sins past, those should go long before anyone even considers looking at Nelson or anyone else.
Is Marx’s grave really in Highgate Cemetery? Or is it just a communist plot?
That sentence alone explains the mind set of this cretin. In the shadow of events in Charlottesville and a desperate need to gain attention, Hirsch just decides to dig up Britain’s colonial past and wave it about as if it’s the same thing. It bloody well isn’t.
And as if do demonstrate further that she is an idiot, Britain does not “celebrate the shameful era” at all. But we do commemorate it, and remember it, and that is not remotely the same thing. And we also remember the hundreds of thousands of people like Nelson who sacrificed thier lives in wars to enable and protect the civil rights we all have today, including those of smug, condescending immigrants to write fucking bollocks in The Guardian.