Battling with words, this time 'woke'
Members, ministers and MPs had grown increasingly frustrated with Mr Parker's chairmanship, which critics said he used to take the 126-year-old charity in a 'bourgeois' and 'politically correct' direction.
Tim Parker has resigned from the National Trust partly because he has drawn attention to a truthful piece of history, that many of our wonderful large houses were built on the earnings from slave labour. Well you could go back to Elizabeth 1st for such stories and I would definitely not consider pulling them down as may happen to some statues.
I must admit when first looking at Tim Parker, in my eyes he looked like a weedy modern 'Londonesque' type of chap, not someone who knew his history. The group by the way who challenged him was called 'Restore Trust'. But my sympathies have somewhat fallen on the side of Parker rather than the old-fashioned values of this new group.
History and its truth cannot be denied, it should of course be open and transparent but not used in a modern context to score current political points, in this case the BLM awakening.
Looking through for articles on this subject, and I only pay up to the Guardian, this article came up from last year. I have always thought the best answer for living is to live in the present and welcome the future.
To be honest most of us Englanders live in a fuddy-duddy, cosy contented world of placid ignorance* - sorry ;). In fact the way we ignore our greedy billionaires of today underlines a need not to focus on the nitty-gritty of how money is made. That statement by me would be called 'Marxist' by right wingers, which I am not, but just stating how I feel.
But in all this I would fight to the end to preserve all that beautiful, and sometimes not so beautiful, architecture, craftmanship and most of all gardens, that through time have developed into a distinct facet of our culture. but we should pay lip-service, or indeed written testimony, as to how they came to exist on the backs of hard working cruelly kept slavery.
* Same here
With regard to slavery, it's funny how American activists have failed to target George Washington and all the symbolism that he has left behind - including the name of the nation's capital, the name of the Pacific Northwest state and the names of 31 counties. I know that the past is "another country" but how many of its evil legacies should we happily accommodate? Perhaps we should destroy all Roman remains as the Roman Empire was built on the back of slavery.
ReplyDeleteSo I don't know whether you are arguing for the pulling down of the NT houses, and saying that we should not accommodate any form of 'evil legacy', when an awful lot of history is built on war and conquest. Slavery was an evil happening that is part of most of history, and it is still in our modern society. H.G. Wells divided it along the lines of the Morlocks and the Eloi, one class of people living off another class, they ate them in that case...
ReplyDeleteJust saying that I feel conflicted about this issue.
DeleteOur plantations also have slave quarters nearby so that people do not forget. But I do think they do not really understand how awful it was for some people. I am sure European churches were built with very poorly paid people.
ReplyDeleteIt is a thorny problem but there are so many facetd to it all. Of course we must never forget slavery and the part is has played in our lives over many years. Of course we must ensure that Black Lives Matter. But many things need saying: No way can any of us really understand the concept unless we ave a black skin ourselves. One way we can understand just how much black lives matter is to imagine our hospitals one day without all the black consultants, surgeons, doctors, nurses and other black staff - it just would not funtion. There are still many thousands of slaves in our world and we should do all we can as individuals to at least make people aware, But pulling down buildings which are in many ways a beautiful tribute to suffering does no good at all. I see it as you do Thelma - live in the present, welcome the future but never forget the suffering of the past.
ReplyDeleteGosh that was a long reply Pat. I must admit I was just exploring the idea of the 'politically correct' and how I felt about it. Never go to these NT houses though because of the price.
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