Tuesday, June 16, 2020


Conveniently Re-Assignment History to the Waste Basket

"It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk for attack by violent protesters."
"Yes, he [Sir Winston Churchill] sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial."
"We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history."
"Whatever progress this country has made in fighting racism — and it has been huge — we all recognize that there is much more work to do. But it is clear that the protests have been sadly hijacked by extremists intent on violence."
“Would it not be better and more honest to ask our children to understand the context, to explain the mixture of good and bad in the career of Churchill and everyone else?"
"I will resist with every breath in my body any attempt to remove that statue from Parliament Square.” 
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
Police officers stand in front of the Winston Churchill statue during a rally in Parliament Square in London on Tuesday. Ahead of expected protests on the weekend, the statue has been boarded up. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press)


"It's clear that we're in the middle of a public health crisis. So it's not safe for them [protesters], it's not safe for the people around them [for everyone to be gathering in crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic]."
"Secondly, we do have information that people are intent on coming to cause violence and confrontation."
London Police Chief Cressida Dick


The statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is seen defaced, with the words (Churchill) "was a racist" written on it's base in Parliament Square, central London after a demonstration outside the US Embassy, on June 7, 2020. Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP via Getty Images.
The statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is seen defaced in Parliament Square, central London after a demonstration outside the US Embassy on June 7, 2020. Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP via Getty Images.


In Britain, those styling themselves anti-racism protesters, taking the opportunity of the Black Lives Matter protests set off by the Minneapolis police killing of African-American George Floyd in the United States, have made demands of government and its agencies at every level, universities and other groups who sought to memorialize events and personages in history as part of the nation's heritage, that it is their intention to see that all vestiges of Britain's imperial past reflected in monuments and statuary, the naming of institutions and public thoroughfares be extinguished.

Damage and the assaults of graffiti declaring Sir Winston Churchill -- the WWII saviour of Great Britain, who stood virtually alone with his British Empire support against the axis powers supporting Nazi Germany until the entry of the United States of America following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour -- forced the British government to close off Parliament Square and to board up the parliament-facing statue of Sir Winston Churchill, Britain's war years prime minister whose pledge to the country to 'never give up' in the struggle against the Thousand-year Reich was fulfilled in Germany's defeat.

In the United States, where the protests first emerged in late May, statues erected to memorialize Christopher Columbus were destroyed by ravaging mobs of violent thugs; the statues disfigured in Boston and Richmond, Virginia last week. Black Lives Matter groups protesting the death of George Floyd have outdone themselves in their destructive fury, aiming their vandalism at Confederate memorials n the south of the nation; Richmond and Birmingham, Alabama, Charleston, South Carolina and Raleigh, North Carolina.

In Virginia, a statue of Christopher Columbus erected in Byrd Park, Richmond, was pulled down, and thrown face down into Fountain Lake; a just end, the mob felt, for a man who violently abused the indigenous people he found occupying the New World, when he 'discovered' it in 1492. A bronze statue that was dedicated in 1927 in recognition of a great explorer. Back in London, its mayor, Sadiq Khan, supported the protests' claims that controversial monuments that cause offence be removed.

Churchill statue, Whitehall boarded up  Photograph: Blitz Pictures/REX/Shutterstock

The list drawn up by Black Lives Matter supporters includes statues of leading historical figures included among them, Sir Francis Drake, Nancy Astor, Christopher Columbus and William Gladstone "for celebrating slavery and racism", according to the campaigners. A figure of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was thrown into Bristol harbour before councils and museums were able to tuck it out of view.

Over a thousand demonstrators in Oxford fixed a demand for the removal of colonialist Cecil Rhodes' statue. Mayor Khan remarked that he "hoped" a new commission for diversity in the public realm would recommend removal of memorials that "don't accurately reflect our values", in a mayoral bid to place history in the dungeon of a revisionist garbage heap. If you can't see it, it cannot have occurred. London had "an uncomfortable truth" with historical links to slavery, according to Mayor Khan.

  Baden-Powell statue in Poole. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

"Our nation and city owes a large part of its health to its role in the slave trade and while this is reflected in our public realm, the contribution of many of our communities to life in our capital has been willfully ignored -- this cannot continue."  Not all are in agreement with the mayor's assessment. An assembly member, Susan Hall, stated that "Instead of virtue-signalling and starting a divisive debate, Sadiq Khan should focus on his job"

A list of 60 statues, plaques and monuments was put together identifying which among Britain's rich history of movers and shakers were to be destroyed, according to anti-racism activists who declared the "need to be removed so that Britain can finally face the truth about its past". Charles II, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Nelson, Prime Minister Gladstone, Sir Francis Drake, and Charles Grey, the former prime minister who oversaw the abolition of slavery in 1833, all listed given their "responsibility for colonial violence".

The Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall being boarded up on Friday. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

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posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Monday, March 19, 2018

Remembering the Holocaust

"We need to make our history relevant for everyone: Germans who no longer feel a connection to the past and immigrants who feel excluded from the present."
"It is a powerful way of keeping memory alive and giving meaning to our mantra of 'never again'."
"It's about standing up for human rights and the rights of minorities -- all minorities."
Sawsan Chebli, Palestinian German, Berlin state legislator
All Germans should visit a concentration camp at least once to foster national identity, a Berlin politician said
All Germans should visit a concentration camp at least once to foster national identity, a Berlin politician said   Tom Maelsa/Getty Images

"Does anyone here know who was imprisoned here?"
"It's much easier for me to persuade a young Muslim of the relevance of the Holocaust if I acknowledge their own experience of discrimination and create that link."
Mariana Aegerter, Sachsenhausen tour guide

"It would be naive to expect a two hour tour to turn neo-Nazis into anti-fascists."
"But give us a little time, and we can achieve a lot."
Gunter Morsch, director, Sachsenhausen memorial

 "It's not enough to read books about it [the death camps and the Holocaust]. You need to feel it", by being there, explained Jakob Hetzelein, a history teacher from a working-class Berlin district who made the decision that his students should be taken on a trip of discovery to Sachsenhausen. He had himself grown up in Bavaria, the one state in Germany where it is mandatory for students to visit Nazi memorial sites. He had, as a high school student, gone to Dachau, close to Munich.

In later years he had taken himself to the Nazi death camp in Poland, Auschwitz. He recalls how the cast-iron gates, the barbed wire and the scale of the camp horrified him, and haunts him still, at age 31. He decided he would take the temper of his class by staging a mock election, where a number of students were in support of the Alternative for Germany party, another boy was seen scribbling a swastika and yet another excels at Hitler impressions.
Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen

'Never Again': Memorials of terror   Bergen-Belsen  The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.


There, in his class is also Mahmoud and Ferdous, refugees from Egypt and Afghanistan respectively steeped in the cultural-religious anti-Israel sentiment encapsulating the anti-Semitism that is so pervasive in Muslim culture, along with a penchant for vociferous Holocaust denial. But postwar Germany has devoted itself to memorializing its role in World War II, as a state that engaged in the details of a planned and deliberate atrocity of wholesale genocide.

The irony is that while Germany is struggling to incorporate over a million recent refugees from mostly Muslim countries into its indigenous population of ethnic, cultural Germans infused with a previous absorption of four million Muslims of Turkish and Kosovar and Iraqi extraction among others, the incidence of viral anti-Semitism has sky-rocketed.

A Germany that had vowed, post WWII, to eradicate any remaining vestiges of anti-Semitism in penance for the Nazi eradication of six million European Jewish lives now has six million Muslims to replace them.

The Jewish lives that were forfeit throughout Europe as they were swallowed by the deadly maw of Nazi Germany's dedication to destroying Jewish life, young and old, now replaced by many times greater numbers of Muslims whose heritage, culture, society and religion fail to defer to European law, demanding that Sharia law have equal status, while Turkey and Saudi Arabia have built innumerable mosques whose minarets dominate the European skyline.

As Ms. Aegerter guided Mr. Hetzelein's students around the Sachenhausen camp she pointed out that in one area civil servants determined the type of medical experiments to be conducted on inmates, and how many executions were to take place, requiring how much cyclone B gas to asphyxiate the inmates of Auschwitz, the "desk perpetrators" hard at work to fulfill their war duties administering the two dozen major concentration camps of which Sachsenhausen was the nerve centre of a vast killing machine.

It was a camp that received 40,000 Jews, along with communists, clerics, homosexuals, Roma and the disabled, as well as homeless "antisocials"; the jobless, social welfare recipients and the occasional Muslim, for a total of 200,000 inmates over the years. A number relatively insignificant in comparison to those housed at and murdered in Auschwitz and its sister-death-camps and slave labour camps where Jewish inmates died of starvation, privation, disease, torture and hopelessness, not only by mass chemical gassing.

A Palestinian schoolgirl asked Ms. Aegerter: "Don't you think that what the Jews are doing with the Palestinians today is the same as what the Nazis did with the Jews?" Germany, according to the state parliamentarian Ms. Chebli, has to fight 'Islamophobia', too. The very idea that the Muslims who have migrated to Europe for haven from their own Islamic governments' misrules and depredations upon their populations bring with them virulent hatred of Jews while complaining of 'Islamophobia' entirely trivializes the enormity of the Holocaust.

To remain under the delusion that a trip to a death camp will result in Muslim children in whom hatred for Jews has been inculcated as a cultural-religious-political reality alongside the view that Israel practises Nazi death-camp behaviour with Palestinians will turn these young people toward an understanding and recognition of historical truth is a faint hope. German tolerance for the new anti-Semitism branded by Islam, equating it with 'Islamophobia' simply illustrates the lack of depth of commitment to historical realities.

germany burqa
Women dressed in traditional burqa garments in Berlin. (photo credit: REUTERS)

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posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 19, 2018

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