Should History be erased ?

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I seem to think there are more people who want to wipe out history rather than understand what it really was. It does kind of make my blood boil when some people are not prepared to listen about the legacy of a particular historical figure and just want to shout you down saying they were racist, imperialist exploiters of other human beings and to them it is a forgone conclusion and I do agree maybe we shouldn't have statues to people who ran the Slave Trade, I don't even think there should be a statue to Oliver Cromwell because of atrocities committed against the Irish, but I seem to think every statue of a historical figure has a complicated and dark past. For example, Samuel Pepys who was famous for his diary and insight into the Great Fire of London may have invested in slavery but I don't know how much he knew about the suffering that was going on. I mean should then all references to Samuel Pepys be erased as well, I mean where does it end. They have been calls to tear down statues of people who tried to abolish the slave trade because they feel they were still complicit in it.

Chris, good question! I know there are people who would love nothing more than to erase history, it's so much easier to deny the past than to admit the atrocities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_pq579 ... d&index=40

This is kinda long, but excellent!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFBmM1H ... sJNhCxrAAd

Here in the States we have people who worship ideals: the "good old days": they never existed unless you were a white male. It's a big cop-out when people proclaim, "Well that's how they did things back then..." there were still people back then that looked at things like slavery as wrong. We have a propensity to idolize people like George Washington and Winston Churchill without looking at their real motives. Ol' GW was a pretty horrible person if you are will to study history in a critical way...

DIVAIR

We shouldn't erase it. We can't learn from our pasts if we don't know them or deny them.

My fave is when people use the Bible as an excuse "Well they have slaves in the Bible..." Yep, they tell you how to beat you slave: so long as you don't actually kill them, it's alright to almost kill them though Oh, and genocide, rock on dude

DIVAIR

When heroic statues are destroyed/discarded, the blatant proof of how very much those individuals were admired is gone.
When a class, a textbook, a biography details the truth, the WHOLE truth of this person’s life, schoolchildren cannot fathom how they were allowed to lead troops, hold office, rule countries.
When they see Lenin’s, Washington’s, Marcos’ statues and portraits, they can visually see how they were presented, ‘sold’ to the public.
Remember Evita?
Same situation.
Exalted, and sold to the people.
When they could visit her, they could see how she was presented to their parents and grandparents, and why she was revered.

That's exactly why things like slavery are so insidious: it's so much easier to give orders if you don't have to see a persons face who is in the thick of things. Turning a blind eye makes you just as bad as the person holding the whip: worse even, because you're perpetuating the concept of it being good to treat fellow humans that way.

Statues of people who did those atrocities should be recycled into more useful things, they only serve to perpetuate their faulty ideals. But as far as removing them from textbooks, no, but it should be made clear of the bad choices they made too.

It's funny how someone like Adolph Hitler will go down in the annals of history as killing some 6-million people, yet, someone like Winston Churchill who is responsible for the deaths of 20-million + people in India, is glossed over completely Gosh, that's alright, I don't like them, so what we did is acceptable. Or someone like Buffalo Bill Cody and his ilk who killed hundreds of thousands of buffalo just for s*** and grins because the Plains Indians depended on them for their survival. White Americans had a very famous saying, "The only good Indian, is a dead Indian!" Ironic how people are starting to use that phrase again, in all honesty

DIVAIR

I've learned more about some of these people when the statues were taken down than when they were left up.

Heck, I learned some of them even existed.

Museums and books and TV shows are better at educating than statues are.

Statues are just a celebration & we should celebrate people we admire now, not be pressured to celebrate people who were liked in the past.

obviously we shouldnt "erase history".

But demythologizing history?

Its easy to get caught up in the current demythologizing fad. But demythologizing can only go so far.

Society cant really function without putting certain flawed individual humans on pedestals and honoring them because those individuals represent certain ideals.

Where I don't think history should ever be erased, a time must come where the people of the world need to separate themselves from their ancestors choices in life, put history to bed, and move on, so that we can make the best of what time we have now.

Sure, loads of crap things happened in the past. However, if all the people who were responsible are now actually dead.
Then is it intelligent to keep bringing things up.

Well, I can understand with regards to how some may glorify people from history who were actually menaces.
But when it comes to making our world the place that we want it to be, free of prejudice, with love shared among us all.
Then a time comes when the past needs to stay in the past. Not to let guilty people go free, but in order to
not continue to prosecute their relatives who had no part in their crime! as surely, doing so would not change the past and would create further unjust crime!

The world needs to move on. Hate seldom creates peace.

Absolutely not.

We have gone from whitewashing the bad parts about people who did historical things to trying to cancel them.

We have to find some middle ground and this has to be done and case by case basis. I am not optimistic about this.

Agreed. Well said.

I don't think that history should be erased. I think that we should be studying history and learning from it, instead. If we erase or deny history, the same mistakes will keep being made.

No, it shouldn't. I don't support violently breaking statues of historical figures whose actions are questionable at best nowadays, either, but having peaceful negotiations and calm reasoning as to why they should be taken down is something I support. If statues go down, it ought to be done peacefully. Doing it by force will only add fuel to the fire and convince the people who follow the ideologies of those historical figures in one form or the other that they were right. Also, the people portrayed in those statues mustn't be cut from history books, but it shouldn't be written in them that they were evil, either. History should be taught with nothing but facts, including the facts of what was considered right and proper in their time. I mean, was Agatha Christie a horrible racist because one of her books was named "Ten Little Indians?" No, at the time the book was written, it wasn't considered improper. It's not black and white; the title doesn't mean that Christie was a racist, it means that it was considered an okay way to express things back in the day. Personally, I think it's important to teach the future generations about how values and morals change with time.

That's a pretty slippery slope: yes, ideally they should be done peacefully, but in reality, sometimes you need to do things radically in order for people to pay attention.

Should the American colonists have sat complacently by while only a very small portion of the British Empire decided what was best for them? Should Black Americans keep waiting for things to get better one day while many government officials still don't even recognize them as human beings? Should the people who have been molested by church clergy keep waiting patiently to be recognized even though church officials keep covering things up: it's not just happening in the Catholic Church BTW!

That whole thing about, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..." is only given to a very small few. Should George Floyd, and Steven Taylor's families just keep sitting by, while people like Donald Trump are using the U.S. Constitution to wipe their feet?

Not very long ago someone had graffitied Mission San Jose with the words, "Native land". At first I was thinking it was a shame, but the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated what was written. What Spain and the Catholic Church did was horrible but nothing compared to the flat out genocide by the Anglos! Our good American government still refuses to federally recognize many of these peoples as groups, and after how long? Oh, and what the "vandals" did is considered a hate-crime, hmmmm, really? Even after what America and the "nice church" did in the name of god to their ancestors?

DIVAIR

If it hurts peoples’ feelings, it should be erased.