I read the news today (oh boy) - Current world events | Page 164 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I just wonder where that leads, @Starr Shine?? Penny Lane in Liverpool was named after infamous slave trader James Penny, so if the street gets renamed, do we get Paul to go in and drop in the new street name on every recording he’s ever made of Penny Lane ? It’s not always where names comes from that gives them the meaning they’ve come to have.

History, including our own, is often a short-lived thing, and how it’s viewed – and commemorated – often changes. Sometimes you risk erasing, hiding, a history that isn’t something to be proud about but nor should it be forgotten for the importance of the lessons it teaches about how to and how not to be. People should be aware that some of our history ain’t great, and nor are many of those who were once honoured, but we risk just sweeping them and their mistakes under the carpet – offering the possibility we just remember the best of our kind and hide the worst as it becomes buried deeper in history books.

Only reason I know James Penny was a slaver trader, a despicable thing to be, is because The Beatles wrote a song about somewhere named after him.

Now is too short a span to decide how much of our histories are hidden because they’ve become uncomfortable – we learn from both the good and the bad, and often from unexpected sources, but it becomes harder to learn if we hide so much away at the bottom of a dusty drawer because we disagree with who our ancestors often were, how alike and how unfamiliar.

I worry that once you start looking at the moral attitudes of those from the distant, and not so distant, past, you end up tearing it all down and renaming everything. There’s those who want Churchill removed from Parliament Square, Nelson toppled from atop his column in Trafalgar Square, there’s those suggest Gandhi was racist, Nelson Mandela, Christopher Columbus, Francis Drake.

We stand on the shoulders of flawed giants when it comes to asking if those who came before us lived up to modern moral attitudes and views.

Ron Nasty said
Penny Lane in Liverpool was named after infamous slave trader James Penny, so if the street gets renamed, do we get Paul to go in and drop in the new street name on every recording he’s ever made of Penny Lane ? It’s not always where names comes from that gives them the meaning they’ve come to have.

 

  

The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, said there was no evidence to support it was named after James Penny.

Liverpool is going putting plaques at places named after slave owners explaining Liverpool’s connections with the slave trade.

I agree with both Holey and RN, there is some balance we can achieve. Statues of people like Colston, who while he was a generous man to charities, his money was got through the buying and selling of slaves, should be taken down. I don’t think they should be melted down but should be housed in a museum (if a museum is willing to take it, probably a lot of them have more value in scrap metal to be honest, there are A LOT of statues around).

Gandhi while holding racist opinions on Africans, is known for successfully getting Indian independence from the British through nonviolent resistance.

Should we take down the statues of John Lennon because of his cruel mocking of the disabled? 

What about Queen Victoria, she has statues in practically every major British city (and if she’s not there, a statue of her husband is) yet it’s under her reign that the exploitative British empire grew and achieved its peak?

Oliver Cromwell made Britain one of the strongest countries in the world, took power and control away from the monarchy, established the Royal Navy, made English law fairer and more just, yet he and his troops committed ethnic genocide against the native Catholic Irish in Ireland, which resulted in 41% (618,000) from 1642 to 1651-ish of the population dead through fighting and disease. He has a lovely statue outside Parliament. He did some good things for the island of Britain but decimated a large proportion of a country’s population that was, at the time, under British rule. Should his statue be taken down? I don’t know.