As ISIS move their deathly way across Syria and Iraq, they not only sweep aside all who stand before them, but they also destroy wonderful, irreplaceable historical artefacts and monuments. Like the beautiful temple at Palmyra. Our history. The world’s history. Gone forever. Because it doesn’t align with the perpetrator’s warped and sick view of the world, therefore is unnecessary and evil. A reminder of a horrible past. So its gone.

There’s trouble in Bristol. Colston’s Girls School is under fire. Not literally but almost, as pupils are attacked, verbally if not physically, on the streets. Why? Because Edward Colston, the founder and funder of the school was involved in the slave trade. Among other things. So therefore, 350 years later… what? Burn down the school? Change the name? Destroy all links to that evil industry that died hundreds of years ago?

How is that different from ISIS? Getting rid of our unpalatable past. How does it help?

At Oxford they’re protesting about Cecil Rhodes. I don’t know why. But in his time in Southern Africa he probably did bad things. So some students want his statue removed, his building renamed. It doesn’t say whether they’ll give back their Rhodes Scholarship money and opt for a life of poverty and begging instead.

Again, ISIS would be proud. Destroy the bits of history that we’re not proud of, that were shameful, hurtful, that basically lack moral integrity as judged by today’s standards.

Well it doesn’t work. And it shouldn’t. History is history because that is what happened then. If we don’t like it now, tough shit. Nothing you can do about it.

The Royal family’s antecedents did some pretty horrible things to English peasants, but we don’t demand the Queen be locked up. Maybe we should. Alfred Nobel, he of the Peace Prize and many other wonderful gifts for worthy individuals, made his money out of dynamite. Should he be banned?

The Kennedy family made their immense fortune out of bootlegged liquor during the prohibition. Yet they are revered in America, a nation far less inclined to judge errors of the past. Perhaps because they’ve made so many.

Leave history alone. Good and bad. Its what we learn from. Its where we came from.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx