Photo: Helen Thomas
Welcome to Worst Hot Take of the Week – a column in which @MULLET_FAN_NEO crowns the wildest hot take of the week.
Reasonable take: Good. Put them in museums with historical context.
Brain rot: "….but what about their philanthropic endeavours?" – the Daily Mail.The statue of slave trader Edward Colston being yeeted into Bristol Harbour by Black Lives Matter protestors seemed to set off a tsunami of fury across Britain this week. Some decided to form small splinter cells of protective gangs to stand guard at war memorials, seemingly having zero comprehension of what was going on. Meanwhile, Conservative MP Henry Smith reacted by calling for the desecration of Jewish philosopher Karl Marx grave in Highgate for “promotion of an ideology leading to mass oppression and the death of over 100 million people last century” and for being an “anti-Semite”.
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The stupendous sight of a racist figurine getting lobbed into the harbour proved too much for the Daily Mail, who took it upon themselves to publish a “balanced” view of slave owners commemorated across Britain by listing their “pros and cons”. Providing the public with some of the worst justifications for evil, they pondered in their headline if these colonial figures were “Racists or Heroes? It’s not black or white”.Before we go any further, I can confirm the answer is, unequivocally, racists, and that slavery is definitively a “black or white” matter.In the article, news reporter Jack Elsom offers up his “good” and “bad” features of each immortalised slaver as if reviewing Sony’s PS5 event. Like an evil service comparison website, Elsom touches upon Britons like Lord Kitchener whose alleged “good” was “securing the Sudan for the British”, while his “bad” was masterminding concentration camps where “thousands of men, women and children died […] many from disease and starvation”.Sir Henry De La Beche was described as owning slaves in Jamaica, but “mapped the Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils of Devon and Cornwall”, so it was hard for Elsom to ratify if De La Beche was irrefutably good or bad.
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