Group gathers at Sunderland war memorial to ‘protect it from vandalism’
A group has gathered at the Sunderland war memorial on Burdon Road to protect it from vandalism – despite no Black Lives Matter protests planned in the city.
A GROUP of about 30 people have gathered in front of a war memorial to “protect it” during a Black Lives Matter march.
Two soldiers are among those standing in front of the memorial in Old Steine, Brighton, today.
Veterans guarded Kettering’s war memorial this afternoon (Friday) because they feared anti-racism protesters might vandalise it.
About 30 men, many of them veterans, surrounded the cenotaph on the corner of Sheep Street for about two hours and were spoken to by police.
Hundreds of people have gathered in Bristol city centre as part of a ‘All Lives Matter’ protest, saying they are there to ‘defend the cenotaph’.
Protesters are seen holding signs with ‘Not Far Right’ and ”All Lives Matter’ on them.
Rhyl:
Police have taken action over fears that a group is planning to damage the war memorial in Rhyl.
North Wales Police has issued a dispersal order after they were told of plans by a small group of people to cause damage to the memorial off East Parade.
Thus the Sunday Telegraph:
Ten-year jail sentences for desecrating war memorials
Ministers to crack down on those who damage monuments as violence breaks out at protests
The legislation under consideration appears to be the same as the Desecration of War Memorials Bill of 2010; this document’s online presence has led some to suppose the existence of a “Desecration of War Memorials Act 2010”, when in fact the proposal was a Private Member’s Bill that never got through Parliament for the usual procedural reasons. The Bill was inspired by an incident in which a drunken woman had urinated on a memorial in Blackpool and “performed a sexual act” at the location, although Islamist provocations were also a factor.
Desecrating any war memorial provokes anger and causes distress, and even among the secular-minded it also carries a sense of profanation of the sacred, a calculated inversion of decency like a group of delinquents acting out horror-film Satanism by spraying pentagrams over a church. But just as such delinquents may trigger a Satanic Panic, I would be wary as regards proportionality.
The sense that war memorials may be under a threat is derived from last week’s Black Lives Matter protest in London, elements of which descended into hooliganism. The area where the protest occurred includes the famous Ivor Roberts-Jones statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, and the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Someone vandalised the base of the Churchill statue to accuse him of racism, but it is not clear if the Cenotaph was attacked for what it represents or was done out of ignorance – and it should be noted that the assault apparently consisted of just one person, who attempted to burn a ceremonial flag that forms part of the memorial as part of a wider melee occurring at that point.
However, it should be borne in mind that these acts were opportunistic: the two monuments happened to be where the protesters were gathered, rather than having been sought out. Such damage is something that happens from time to time during protests in central London, as is the occasional pre-emptive covering of monuments ahead of protests where disorder is anticipated.
As such, it is disproportionate to extrapolate a general threat to war memorials, either from the Cenotaph attacker or, by a more tenuous association, from disrespect to a statue of Britain’s wartime leader. One gets the impression that the focus here is a diversion from the issue of whether Britain needs to reassess the civic commemoration and popular memory of long-dead individuals whose wealth and status flowed from their involvement in the slave trade.
For the same reason, Boris Johnson currently grandstands by vowing that he will never allow the statue of Churchill to be removed, even though the possibility of such a removal is outlandish in the extreme, while the trickier task of specifically denouncing on law-and-order grounds those who tore down the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol is left to his Home Secretary (and I suspect even Patel if asked would dodge expressing a personal view about direct action against Confederate statues in the USA).
Of course, there is the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy: spray-painting a slogan somewhere provocative takes only seconds, and requires no particular skill, yet can have a huge impact in terms of coverage and reaction. But this is a perennial threat, and more likely to come from someone acting surreptitiously after dark than from a protest event. And given the behaviour of the self-styled “monument protectors” in London on Saturday – bizarrely attacking the police who were already protecting the sites – it is difficult to take their expressed intentions at face value.
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Is it not even more disproportionate to extrapolate a non existent threat from UK statues from either racism or, by a more tenuous association, from centuries old slavery?
Especially as these statues were erected to commemorate not earlier slavery but later good works of the men memorialised?
Good works that the rioters and vandals benefited from themselves all their lives such as skools n ospitals!
One gets the impression that the focus here is a diversion from not just the issue of whether Africa needs to reassess the civic commemoration and popular memory of long-dead black African (note Africans did not recognise races as we do and “Arab” to them was any brown or BLACK person that had adopted the religion, culture and often names of the Middle East) slaver Kings, Chiefs and other individuals whose wealth and status flowed from their involvement in the slave trade.
Not just statues to Black African slavers in those countries where idolatory is permitted, but perhaps even the monumental religious edifices raised by the sweat and blood of millions of slaves their founders owned and whose ownership they promoted in law, religion, cultural practice, and personal example!
For these same reasons anyone virtue signalling support for the rioters and vandals (and in the States looters, arsonists, rapists and even murderers, usually of fellow blacks) currently trying to overthrow modern Western society is worse than grandstanding.
Like all of the media they are throwing fuel on the fire and then fanning the flames!
Oh, and what right have these revolutionary Marxist BLM activists and their Neo-Stasi “AntiFa” accomplices to not just culturally appropriate the word “slave” but to rub the noses of hard working, happily assimilating, culturally respectful Slav immigrants to the UK in the horrific memory of blacks enslaving and castrating or raping MILLIONS of their ancestors?
And not just from the Atlantic slave trade to emancipation, but from centuries before and into the 20th century!
Oh, oh, and one gets the impression that the focus here is a diversion from the issue of whether Britain needs to reassess the Civics education of not just Blacks but Browns and Whites.
How many even White people know that Africa was a slaver continent full of slave societies where up to 90% of the population were slaves.
That more slaves were kept in Africa than sold East.
That more were sold East, as child labour or sex slaves, with 90% fatality from castration and massive fatalities on the forced marches to market, than West.
That the Atlantic Slave Trade actually SAVED most adult male slaves as previously they had little or no market value and were considered too dangerous to leave alive.
That more White crew and White passengers died on the Atlantic Crossing pro rata than Black slaves.
That those Black slaves that did die on the crossings usually died in the first week or two.
Due to their mistreatment in Africa by their Black African enslavers.
That more, over TWENTY TIMES MORE, Africans were sold to the Hispanic and Latino SOUTH AmericaS than to the evil Anglo Whitey North.
But to be fair that was mainly because most were worked to death or killed by Hispanic and Latino slave owners so quickly unlike in the Whitey Pale Face North where slaves lived a life of relative luxury.
Never mind that it was the evil Europeans and (white Northern) Americans, especially the British Gammons, who spent £BILLIONS and lost MILLIONS of lives to free Black African slaves, that ended slavery at home and tried to abroad.
Oh, and let’s not forget that not only did Black Africans enslave and slave trade their own centuries before the evil Whiteman returned to Africa, not only did Black Africans resist the ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and reject ending slavery in Africa, but Increased eg slavery in their brutal slave mines and on THEIR OWN PLANTATIONS to counteract their losses!
Then there’s the teensy-weensy matter of Black Africans slave raiding, enslaving and slave trading Whites, not only in Spain, but as far away as Ireland, and even Iceland.
Not only did Black Africans capture Anglo-Whitey US shipping and enslave and slave trade their evil Anglo-Whitey passengers and crew (the bit about the “Shores of Tripoli” in the Marines’ song isn’t a WW2 allusion but refers back to slave rescue missions to free WHITE slaves!).
Not only did Black Africans ravage, rape, decimate and devastate not just the North Mediterranean coastlines and coastal areas, nor merely the Balkans, but penetated deeply into Eastern Europe for sex slaves and boys to castrate.
In fact the Slavs were such a favourite of Black and Brown slavers, slave traders, and slave owners, and enslaved in so many millions, that we actually appropriate their name for the institution of Slavery (literally – look it up!).
So when “liberals” object to the “commemoration” and popular memory of long-dead individuals whose wealth and status – and SUBSEQUENT GOOD WORKS – flowed from their involvement in the slave trade they forget Blacks did far worse, for far longer, were doing it to WHITES well into the 20th Century, and are STILL doing it to THEIR OWN, even NOW, in the Twenty-FIRST Century!
Any “liberal” who currently grandstands and virtue-signals about White treatment of Blacks is either ignorant and uneducated.
Or knows the truth and is twisting it for their own evil ends!
If you look up the etymology of “slave” you will find a lot about the Romans. Did you forget to include them in this rant?
Well I looked up the etymology of “slave” and couldn’t find anything about Romans.
Perhaps you struggled with the difference between Romans, especially Ancient Romans, and Latin, especially Medieval and Late Latin:
“From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages.”
Even the right-on BBC agrees with the Lefty Wiki entry:
“The term slave has its origins in the word slav. The slavs, who inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe, were taken as slaves by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD.”
While I was looking things up I looked up the Arabic “Saqaliba”:
“The term originates from the Middle Greek slavos/ sklavenos (Slav), which in Hispano-Arabic came to designate first Slavic slaves…”
I also looked up the definition of rant:
“Speak or shout at length in an angry, impassioned way.”
Hardly surprising when you see whole black ghetto neighbourhoods destroyed and even blacks killed because of virtue signalling ignorance like yours!
Anything else you’d like me to look up for you as you’re too ignorant to do it yourself?
PS If you were simply trying to lecture me in your own ignorant way that the Romans had slaves too, guess what:
THE WHOLE WORLD HAD SLAVES!
Including Africa.
By Africans.
Who enslaved their own for the short lived, in historical terms, Atlantic market, as well as their own much, much longer and still continuing domestic, and the Eastern, markets.
But my point, which obviously escaped you, was that you don’t hear the people who were being enslaved by black and brown people for so long before and after the North American blip of the Atlantic Slave Trade (which the Anglo-Americans ended) that we called slaves after them (and whose lands were then handed over to the Soviets by the Anglo-Americans) whinging and whining about it, never mind rioting looting burning and murdering.
Or anyone else that hasn’t been indoctrinated with Liberation Theology.
It’s only the useful idiot white “liberals” of Europe and North America, and the black people they’ve brainwashed and re-educated in Oppression, Grievance and Victimhood Studies!
You mean they should be directing demands for reparations to a few petty chieftains in Africa? Is that the conclusion?
Yup.
Or as they think they would have been so much better off there they could move to a Favella in the South Americas.
Or a shanty in Soweto.
Or Saudi…. oh, wait, no descendants there!
But perhaps they are all thinking if their bros hadn’t sold their enslaved ancestors to North America they would be living in the lap of luxury.
As descendants of slavers, slave traders, African plantation owners….
How does that work then?!