Rhodes Must Fall: The Legacy of Cecil Rhodes in the University of Oxford | Hacker News Reader

Rhodes Must Fall: The Legacy of Cecil Rhodes in the University of Oxford

globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk

13 pointsrawgabbit15 comments

They are still doing what Rhodes did today. Its just done differently -

Give a loan to the poor African country in dollars. Expect the loan to be repaid in dollars. Where is the poor African country going to get dollars? Here is the (simplified) road map-

1. "Educate" bright Africans on Wall St.

2. Send them over to tell the "uneducated" how to generate dollars by selling national assets - land, mining rights, oil fields, ports, spectrum, bank savings, pension funds, insurance funds etc etc back to Wall St approved firms in the West.

3. Teach them how to use the loans to buy goods and services from Wall St approved firms in the West, instead of building up local manufacturing or agricultural capacity. Goal being dependency not independence.

4. Provide free "training" for local military/intelligence. Make them dependent on Western MIL complex for everything. When locals start organizing and resisting - use them to topple and protect masters assets.

5. Buy and use media to repaint the whole story

6. Use Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class to trap as many important locals in "golden cage" lifestyles so their brains rot focusing on leisure/endless consumption/luxury/celebs/sports/entertainment.

This cycle is not sustainable naturally. And keeps breaking down in various ways. The hope is with each iteration more people recognize how to break out of it faster and create better alternatives.

There is an interesting argument for tearing down all statues of powerful people. There are precious few examples where someone powerful is worth idolising - titles like "the Great" are often short for "the Great Number of Needless Deaths". Any king stands, necessarily, in opposition to a fully democratic process. And I think it goes well beyond the English speaking nations that most people got their land by their ancestors invading and conquering some other people.

I'd be on board with this if we stick to statues of people who made scientific or philosophical contributions. People who gave their lives to governing or deciding who owns what land should get at most grateful obelisks. Their contributions, good or bad, aren't that worthy in the long run and it is usually ugly work papered over by a veneer of motivated reasoning and nationalism.

Shall we destroy or take down Michelangelo’s David, then? A statue of a king who waged religious wars against the natives of Palestine, conquering Zion to make his capital city. Seems like a cause du jour, right?

The problem with iconoclasm is when to stop. The article deals with this as well — people want the Cecil Rhodes statue gone, but not renaming the building or the scholarship. But the argument for tearing all of something down ends in a bonfire of the vanities, followed by some years of sheepish disavowal of the fire.

Your example distracts from the issue by broadening the topic from Cecil Rhodes, who we know was a real person, with plenty of historical evidence about what he did, to a Biblical figure with precious little other supporting evidence.

Take your assertion that he was "a king". That's certainly the general cultural interpretation. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David#Historicity

> Biblical evidence indicates that David's Judah was something less than a full-fledged monarchy: it often calls him negid, meaning "prince" or "chief", rather than melek, meaning "king"; the biblical David sets up none of the complex bureaucracy that a kingdom needs (even his army is made up of volunteers), and his followers are largely related to him and from his small home-area around Hebron.

It then lists some of "the full range of possible interpretations" for the Biblical account: "a heroic tale similar to King Arthur's legend or Homer's epics", "a political apology—an answer to contemporary charges against him, of his involvement in murders and regicide", "a brutal tyrant, a murderer and a lifelong vassal of Achish", and "the creation of those who lived generations after him".

If the real David didn't do what the Bible says he did, then your question does not need to be answered.

Did Goliath exist, and was he "six cubits and a span" - nearly 3 meters - tall?

I understand your argument and it’s a good one, but I just disagree. A statue is a nothing but a giant symbol, and the symbolic actions matter far more than any real actions of a person in deciding to maintain that symbol. Most objectionable statues are of people that have passed out of living memory, and aren’t about the person per se; the statue symbolizes something, and people object to that something. In this case, colonialism.

What you said about David and how historical he was is interesting and I love secondary analysis. But I’m terms of the argument I was making it’s neither here nor there, because the historical record is only important in how people interpret its meaning in current day. David’s actual role during his life does not change that he’s been a royalist symbol for the past two millennia.

Are you suggesting we take down statues of Darth Vader? It's a giant symbol of someone who ordered the genocide of the population of an entire planet.

That's the sort of question you invite when you broaden the topic. When it's just a distraction from the actual issue, which is about one specific person rather than a general framework of rules which can be applied to a broader range of statues.

> There is an interesting argument for tearing down all statues of powerful people.

This is the argument I was replying to, and I was suggesting that it not be done.

Truly you are correct.

Darth Vader Must Fall.

> Shall we destroy or take down Michelangelo’s David, then? A statue of a king who waged religious wars against the natives of Palestine, conquering Zion to make his capital city. Seems like a cause du jour, right?

Yes. For the reasons you outline.

Most great men were not good men, not even by the standards of their day.

So, what direction does the causation point?

"Those who fall to remember history are doomed to repeate it."

Excising everything ungood from memory doesn't help with this.

I don't think anyone is suggesting excising Rhodes from history. That'd be a completely different matter.

But I don't think we should have statues of people who were, effectively, politicians. There are some politicians who are better than others but as a class they aren't the sort of people who should get special commemoration over the long term. Even above-average politicians tend to be a bit scummy.

A lot of the US East Coast rich and famous have some extremely foul smelling skeletons in their closets: https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31/opium-boston-history Something they don’t teach us in school.

>The gold-rich northern territories of Mashonaland and Matabeleland similarly attracted the interest of European settlers. Sceptical of their intentions, the ruler of Matabele, King Lobengula, regularly turned away those who approached him for mining concessions. While he doubted the intention of the miners, King Lobengula trusted missionaries. In 1888, Rhodes and Rudd exploited this situation, convincing the king to sign a treaty of friendship essentially granting the businessmen exclusive mineral rights through John Moffat, a trusted missionary. The treaty, named the Rudd Concession in recognition of Rudd’s role in the agreement, gave the men carte blanche to pursue the economical exploitation of Matabeleland. With the treaty in hand, Rhodes approached the British government for a charter granting a new company, named the British South African Company, the green light not only to mine but also to occupy Matabele and Mashonaland on behalf of and with the consent of the British crown. The government granted the charter in October 1889. With no northern limit, Rhodes hoped to use the gold fields of Mashonaland to fund the settlement of other areas of central Africa such as Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), and to facilitate his ambition of building a railway linking the colonies from Cape to Cairo. Rhodes was not particularly popular among members of the British establishment; but political figures viewed his extension of empire as too successful to challenge.14 Through the British South African Company, Rhodes intended to use private means to exercise imperial expansion. In June 1890, Rhodes and the British South African Company deployed a group of around five hundred white settlers, known as the Pioneer Column, to seize Matabeleland and Mashonaland. The column marched from the southern region of Bechuanaland north into Matabeleland and then onto Mashonaland, where they established a fort named after the British prime minister, Robert Salisbury. The company increased their efforts to colonise the region one year later, when colonialist Harry Johnson took over the administration of Nyasaland as commissioner of the British government and an employee of the British South African Company. The company named the territory Rhodesia in tribute to Rhodes, and ruled it into the early 1920s, when the imperial British government assumed control, until the area became modern Zimbabwe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com