AlaninWales wrote:mjr wrote:AlaninWales wrote:Wanting to keep statues in prominent places, which were erected specifically to express and increase the subjugation of part of your own nation is a different thing entirely: That demonstrates a desire to maintain the subjugation instead of consigning it to history.
So... those statues of Oliver Cromwell...?
By modern law a war criminal (as many of those he fought would also be). The statue erected in Parliament, to commemorate a leading figure in the foundation of the power of the gathering of representatives and reduction in the influence of the monarchy [...]
So how does one justify the other statues?
I'm not sure that Cromwell was "a leading figure in the foundation of the power of the gathering of representatives" because continuing the Rump Parliament was rather dodgy, then he dissolved that by force when it defied him, replacing it with a parliament of more-or-less appointees rather than representatives and finally accepting appointment as dictator for life. He definitely reduce the influence of monarchy... he reduced the monarch by a head!
The other statues of people around Parliament seem to be Kings Richard I (memento of the Great Exhibition) and George V, prime ministers Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Henry Temple, George Canning and Edward Smith-Stanley, foreign presidents Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Indian independence movement leader Mahatma Gandhi and defeated latterly-anti-apartheid prime minister of South Africa Jan Smuts. It seems easy to make an argument that Oliver Cromwell is very much the odd one out and should be moved to make way for the next statue (Thatcher?
).