# Why every single statue should come down >[!External Links]- >https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jun/01/gary-younge-why-every-single-statue-should-come-down-rhodes-colston?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other Notes taken from Guardian article: - useful to think about out of the box ideas regarding anything but particularly race. - we should not venerate individuals. All individuals that created change build on the back of something or someone else. A zeitgeist. A movement. Other sacrifice, other hardship for the common good. - when we venerate someone we lie to society and to our future. We lie to ourselves - is veneration an act of vanity? Is it an act of bad pride? A deadly sin? - don't forget our future selves are dicks - statues and art should therefore say something about the nature and character of the individual or individuals that created that change, not simply of the individual themselves. - the 'Saville defence' is amazingly stoopid. There are moral imperatives that transcend generations and should have been immoral back then as well as now. It was never ok for children to be raped in Athens, as it isn't ok now. It was never ok for people to be owned by other people, as it is not OK now. - history is a moving discipline. It cannot be set in stone like a statue. Just like our ideas and thoughts change. - by setting in stone (or concrete etc) a person's legacy we are begging for that legacy to be challenged in future years. Standards and expectations of our leaders will change. And these legacies are codified for all to see, and therefore foisted on others without their consent. Some will find them offensive. - there's got to be a link here to ancient Egypt religion - chancellors have long shadows link too. These people who are venerated have done things that love in today- ie Rhodes > "White America came to embrace King in the same way that white South Africans came to embrace Nelson Mandela: grudgingly and gratefully, retrospectively, selectively, without grace or guile. Because by the time they realised their hatred of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which loving him was in their own self-interest. Because, in short, they had no choice.” - this is fascinating. - I wonder how this applies to what we want to achieve as an SU. I have to make it so that every person in the university has it in their self interest to embrace the SU? - where else might this apply? - I did not know that contemporaries of Leopold and Rhodes etc were critical of how they got their wealth and power. ==That they knew in their own lifetime that what they had done was immoral==. - ==People want to forget facts that make them uncomfortable== -