British House of Commons Row over Historic Bust of Oliver Cromwell

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Bizarre Commons row over historic bust of Oliver Cromwell

The historic statue of Oliver Cromwell was relocated for 'health and safety' reasons after the year-long campaign by veteran backbencher Stephen Pound.
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I actually agree with Stephen Pound on this. Cromwell was a butcher who persecuted Catholics in the most brutal fashion, and is not somebody who should be viewed as a hero. He also banned Christmas.
 
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But he was a part of English history. If we remove all statues of every person who someone is offended by, there will soon be no statues of anyone. Wasn’t Cromwell kind of an iconoclast?

It would be a different story if this were the only bust in the buildings of Parliament, or if there were regular services organized by Parliament to adorn it with flowers, public prayers that God, or Cromwell himself, would raise up a new generation of cromwells for our time.

Actually the American cromwells have removed Nativity scenes from thousands of places. They will take a good trend, like removing a Confederate flag from the official flagpole, and extend that to vandalizing monuments to soldiers who died on the Civil War.
 
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Well, it hasn’t been removed, just taken to a different location within Parliament.
 
I’ve been against removing statues of people like Junipero Serra and Johnn A. Macdonald, so I have to be intellectually consistent and say this bust should stay. Wikipedia says this guy was more of a jerk than I thought, but he is very relevant to parliamentary history.
 
Eh, he’s a historic figure, even though he was a nogoodnik. Might as well have a bust of him. I’d just thumb my nose at it or give a raspberry every time I passed it.

I do think turning it to the wall constantly is funny. I’d also be tempted to dress it up in funny wigs, hats, sunglasses, leis etc , maybe Santa hat for Christmas since I understand Cromwell’s religion objected to Christmas celebrations. Ollie baby, get with the program.
 
Where does it end? History is just that. He lived in the 1600s, some time ago. Some want to take down statues of Columbus and Jefferson. I’m sure their perceived wrongs do not compare but still. From what I know, have people even discussed changing the flag of Florida?
 
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One of my favorite quotes from the TV show Firefly was, “My estimation is that…every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a [descriptive] or another.” I think it applies to the entire statue debate/debacle.
 
Not really commenting on the Oliver Cromwell bust, but I will say that I disagree with your argument. I can understand taking down statues of people who are obviously bad and still wanting to preserve some controversial statutes of those such as Junipero Serra. For example, would you be opposed to removing a statue of Joseph Stalin in a former communist country? Imagine that the Chinese communist party fell from power (we can always hope), would it be wrong to remove statutes of Mao?
 
tafan2 said:
Not really commenting on the Oliver Cromwell bust, but I will say that I disagree with your argument. I can understand taking down statues of people who are obviously bad and still wanting to preserve some controversial statutes of those such as Junipero Serra. For example, would you be opposed to removing a statue of Joseph Stalin in a former communist country? Imagine that the Chinese communist party fell from power (we can always hope), would it be wrong to remove statutes of Mao?
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Interesting how perception works. I was starting to say that I would leave them there like southern war memorials and such (in China’s case a hypothetical start of democracy might be a good chance to replace communist pieces if they were the centrepiece of the city, for example). Then I thought: what about a giant Hitler statue? Well obviously not! funny how Hitler elicits that type of reaction yet Stalin doesn’t.
 
Mussolini statues aren’t permitted in Italy, for example.
 
It is interesting, especially since Stalin was arguably just as bad as Hitler, if not worse. I did read a piece earlier today that talked about the “right kind” of silly ideologies people are allowed to indulge in our society. You can find hip neo-communists/socialist students with Stalin stickers on their MacBook or wearing Che or Mao t shirts. All brutal murderers. But they won’t elicit the vicious reaction that, say, a Confederate Railroad t-shirt, or even one of those silly MAGA hats could today.
 
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Most people in the USA wouldn’t know who Stalin, Che or Mao was if you showed them a picture of the person. Even if they recognized the name, they wouldn’t know what the person did/ that they committed murder. People’s knowledge and attention span is generally limited to whatever the media is pushing at them right now.

Even if someone decided to put up a statue of one of these guys in USA, it would be considered “ironic” by the hipsters, just like the Statue of Lenin in Seattle. See for example this article written by someone who actually fled the Soviet Union defending the Lenin statue.

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinio...-ironic-confederate-statues-are-anything-but/
 
Che t-shirts have been in vogue a long time, have always driven me crazy. But these hip neo-communists students really have more excuse than the western intelligentsia of previous generations. At least these students can claim ignorance (most of them). But the communist apologists of the 30s through 80s came to know exactly how brutal and evil these leaders were, and many of them were never deterred.
 
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