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  • Walter's Blog.
  • Home
  • Introduction
  • About Walter
    • 1980 Joining Up - Grafton Street >
      • Arrival and First Impressions
      • First Week
      • Training
      • Passing Out
    • Yaumati Cowboy >
      • Getting on the Streets
      • Jumpers, pill poppers and the indoor BBQ
      • Tempo of the City
      • Into a Minefield.
    • Why Tango in Paris, when you can Foxtrot in Kowloon? >
      • Baptism By Fire
      • Kai Tak with Mrs Thatcher.
      • Home; The Boy Returns
  • 1984 - 1986
    • PTU Instructor & Getting Hitched
    • Having a go: SDU
    • Starting a Chernobyl family
    • EOD - Don't touch anything
    • Semen Stains and the rules
  • 1987 to 1992 - Should I Stay or Go?
    • Blue Lights, Sirens & Grenades
    • Drugs, Broken Kids & A Plane Crash
    • 600 Happy Meals Please!
    • Hong Kong's Best Insurance
    • Riding the Iron Horse
  • Crime in Hong Kong
    • Falling Crime Rates - Why?
    • Triads
    • The Saga That Rocked Hong Kong's Legal Fraternity
  • History of Hong Kong Policing
    • History 1841 to 1941
    • History 1945 to 1967
    • Anatomy of the 50 cent Riot - 1966
    • The Fall of a Commissioner.
    • History 1967 to 1980
    • Three Wise Men from the West
    • The Blue Berets.
    • The African Korps and other tribes.
    • Getting About - Transport.
    • A Pub in every station
    • Bullshit Bingo & Meetings
    • Godber - The one who nearly got away.
    • Uncle Ho
  • Top 20 Films
    • 2001 - A Space Odyssey.
    • The Godfather.
    • Blade Runner
    • Kes
    • Star Wars
    • Aliens
    • Ferris Bueller's Day Off
    • The Life of Brian
    • Dr Strangelove.
    • Infernal Affairs
    • Bridge on the River Kwai.
    • This Is Spinal Tap.
    • Chung King Express
    • An Officer and a Gentleman
    • PTU
    • Contact
    • Saving Private Ryan
    • Family Guy Star Wars
    • Zulu
    • Hard Day's Night
  • The Long Read
    • The Big Game
    • The Hidden Leader
    • How The Walls Come Down
    • War in Ukraine - the narrative and other stuff.
    • New World Order - Something is going on!
    • British Policing - What's to be done?
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Reflections on recent events, plus the occasional fact free rant unfiltered by rational argument. 

"If you want to read a blog to get a sense of what is going on in Hong Kong these days or a blog that would tell you what life was like living in colonial Hong Kong, this blog, WALTER'S BLOG, fits the bill."  Hong Kong Blog Review
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11/6/2020 4 Comments

Good or Evil?

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“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.” - 1984 by George Orwell.
This pulling down statues business intrigues me. Setting aside that judging figures from history by today's woke standards is not a sensible idea, scratch the surface on most so-called heroes, and a complex picture emerges. Let's take a look at a few. Warning — nobody comes out of this with a clean rap sheet.

The bloke who wrote "Give peace a chance" didn't give his spouses much 'peace' with his regular beatings. Both Yoko Ono and Cynthia Lennon suffered at the hand of Lennon's violent abuse. This brutal side of Lennon was on show during his time in Hamburg when he'd attack drunks or others who'd offended him. Lennon would back off when faced with a tough opponent but was happy to kick the shit out of the vulnerable. Later, his treatment of his son Julian Lennon didn't earn John much credit. Lennon was absent, distant and often stoned, leaving his son abandoned. 

How about the Saintly Mother Teresa? Surely beyond rebuke! The popular image is of a poor, cash-strapped nun trawling the streets of Calcutta, rescuing sick, abandoned children to offer them loving care. Yet, along comes Christopher Hitchens with 'The Missionary Position' to expose something much less palatable. 

Mother Teresa is documented as having diverted vast sums donated to her clinics to push missionary work instead of buying medication for her dying patients. In truth, you could argue the sick kids were her bait to generate donations. The medical care she provided was lacking despite the millions of dollars people gave her.

Her patients were sometimes left to die in agony, while she jetted off in first-class to deal with dodgy regimes and take their money stolen from ordinary folk. It turns out her clinics leveraged pain and misery. She then syphoned the cash off. Also, former members of her order describe baptisms of the dying performed without their consent. In short, she ran a death cult.

Gandhi, he must be kosher? You know, the little fellow walking around in a bed-sheet preaching passive resistance. He lamented many things, including that Indians were considered "little better than savages or the Natives of Africa." Thus he sponsored a bill to make Indians superior to blacks under South Africa's apartheid system. A bit racist, you may think. Plus, he appeared to enjoy sleeping naked with underage girls. He claimed this was a 'test' of his will-power. Honest, your Honour. You don't hear that spoken about in polite company. 
​

When Kasturba, Gandhi's wife, came down with pneumonia, he denied her penicillin, even though doctors said it would cure her. He insisted the new medicine was an alien substance her body should not take in. She succumbed to the sickness and died in 1944. Later, when he fell sick, he had no such qualms. Lovely man.

Doctor Martin Luther King - he must be clean; after all, he has a PhD. When people discovered that this politician had a PhD from Boston University, his words carried more weight. Unfortunately in 1991, a Boston University committee found he'd plagiarised much of his dissertation. They advised against revoking the late Dr King's credentials. They did, however, place on record a summary of their findings. Add to that his public affairs with young women in his movement, and a picture emerges of a much more complex man.

Nelson Mandela? Mandela indeed rose to greatness. Freed after 27 years in a South African jail, the anti-apartheid fighter emerged calling for healing. He negotiated a peaceful end to apartheid and practised reconciliation. In this, he was great. A healer. None of that should whitewash from history his use of violence early in his career. Mandela is on record as suggesting cutting off the noses of blacks deemed collaborators with whites. 

Thus the verdict is in. John Lennon was a wife-beater and a crap dad. Mother Teresa, a religious fanatic who ran a death cult, Gandhi was a racist with dodgy sleeping habits, while Dr Martin Luther King cheated on his PhD. Do these folks deserve a statue? Just asking.

And that brings me to my main point. Most of our heroes come with flaws; some have deep flaws. In 20 years will the post-modernists and the social justice warriors be pulling down statues of Gandhi, John Lennon and Mother Teresa? Probably because this is a beast that eats its own tail. Let's face it, nothing is ever straightforward, and no one is 100% clean.

Lastly, if we are to remove statues and whitewash history, why stop with statues, let do the books next. It is a terrible shame we don't have any lessons from history to guide us once this process starts.
4 Comments
Gloria Bing
11/6/2020 12:32:00 pm

Apparently Gladstone must go because his father (not Gladstone himself) transgressed. So it is now indelible sin that the generations cannot wash away. How convenient, this creation of a guilt that can never by exculpated. It is the gift that must go on giving...forever.
Nelson has to go because he wrote, in passing, in one letter, something vaguely supportive of slavery. All other achievements - the freedom of Europe, the love of his nation and his men - must be dismissed because he was apparently a racist in an age when everybody, not just white males, believed race was a set of fixed characteristics ordained by whatever supernatural being they believed decided these things.
"Racism" now weighs so heavily in the balance of character that all the good in a person can now be wiped out. And not just in individuals either, but whole societies. But it does something else too (and I have noticed this very much in connection with Hong Kong recently): if it identifies one race as inherently and permanently guilty, it also completely exonerates others, so that the sins of non-European imperialist and slavers can now be forgotten. If everyone is a victim of the white man then they cannot be perpetrators themselves, and their descendants cannot be held responsible.

Reply
C.Law
14/6/2020 08:51:08 am

Slavery is a topic around which everyone should tread gently. It has been a feature of every society since before recorded history. Tribal societies around the world routinely took slaves from the other tribes they fought and the situation continued though all more advanced(?) societies – Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Inca (etc), Arab, African, Indian, Chinese and all the rest. The big difference with the Colonial Brits and Americans was that they did it on an industrial scale and took the slaves from one general area. However, they didn’t actually go ashore and seize the Africans, they bought them from other Africans who captured them. This is definitely a case of remembering that when you point your finger at someone else your other three fingers are pointing back at you.

In all the current blaming going on it seems generally forgotten that it was the Brits who abolished the African slave trade and, through the Royal Navy, enforced that prohibition on the USA. Though that was perhaps a case of better late than never.

None of this is, of course, a justification for slavery or the celebration of slave traders, far from it, merely a reminder that like most other human behaviours it is a very complicated matter.

Many people have responded to the abhorrent treatment meted out to George Floyd in a knee-jerk fashion. Part of the response has been support not just for the idea that black lives matter (which, indeed they do) but in uncritical, or merely unthinking, support for the organisation Black Lives Matter. Perhaps many of those would be less inclined to do so if they read the statement of the organisation's beliefs on it's official website https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

Reply
Lüko Willms link
17/6/2020 04:39:33 pm

Dear Walter Dehavilland, none of the people whose defaults you list above has been honored because of the shortcomings you mention above (whereby methinks that regarding Nelson Mandela you fell victim of a slander, whereas regarding this Albanian nun known as "Mother Theresa" I am 100% with you).

But it is the opposite in the case of the statues of the Robert E. Lee and other commanders of the slave holder army, which have erected just <i>because</i> of their racist inhumanity and to bolster the bloody counterrevolution begun in the late 1870ies, and which, while not re-establishing the chattel slavery, the private ownership of human beings by other human beings, but took away all other achievements of the 2nd American Revolution know as the Civil War, establishing the institutionalized segregation known as "Jim Crow", which had been copied later by the British in South Africa as "Apartheid". The statutes of Robert E. Lee etc served as humiliation of the Black pupulation, as political signs of White Supremacy, the rule of the Ku-Klux-Klan and the practice of public lynchings of Black people as popular entertainment (eternalized by the great song "Strange Fruit" recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, written by Abel Meeropol and published in 1937).

One has to look up the years when these statues have been erected: from 1880 up to before the 1st World War, again starting in 1948 when then US President Truman ordered to end racial segregation in the US Army, and during the growing “Civil Rights Movement” in the 1950ies.

I don’t know about the statue in Bristol of this English slave trader Colston, whose statue has been torn down and thrown in the river. While this Colston traded slaves in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, this monument had been erected in 1890, which makes it suspicious, if this was not also part of the “White Supremacist” counterrevolution in the USA. For many years, people in Bristol had campaigned to move the statue from a public place to a museum, where it could serve as one of many pieces documenting the slave trade. The powers that be should not resist too long sensible demands.

Because of their political role, the call to remove those monuments from public places is understandable and justified.

BTW, did the British set up similar public signs of humiliation of the Chinese in Hongkong, for example status of the English generals forcing the opium trade on China? If yes, do they still stand?

As a German, I think of <i>Alfred von Waldersee</i>, the German general who was named the leader of the punitive expedition of the 8 colonial nations against the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. I don’t know if ever a monument for this person has been erected in China, but I would think that this would not have survived the victory of Mao’s peasant army, not even the 1911 democratic revolution.

Please excuse me for being so long again, and let me thank for your blog which has offered me essential elements to understand Hongkong, and which I like to read as a sensible counterpart to the hysterical “reporting” in the press of the “Western” powers. How else should I have learned of article 23 of the HK “Basic Law”?

Reply
C.Law
18/6/2020 05:44:45 pm

Hello Walter, you haven't posted my comment, I'm somewhat surprised as it doesn't seem particularly controversial to me. If you really consider it to be unacceptable perhaps you could email me to explain why.

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    Walter De Havilland was one of the last of the colonial coppers. He served 35 years in the Royal Hong Kong Police and Hong Kong Police Force. He's long retired. 

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