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Tom Anderson · February 28th 07, 09:48 AM posted to uk.transport.london

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, wrote:

On Feb 26, 7:09ÿÿpm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Arthur Figgis wrote:
John Rowland wrote:
wrote:
(a) the ?new name for the Imperial War Museum

National War Museum...

It's not a problem with Empire, which is purely a bit anachronistic.

Not purely - it's also a painful reminder to some people. It's ever so
slightly like having a theme park in Germany called Himmlerspassland or
something.

Hey, is that Godwin's law i can hear kicking in? Does that mean this
thread's over?

To equate the British Empire in any way with Nazi Germany is an insult
to the millions who served the Empire, in war and peace,

Rubbish. The British Empire was an operation built on the conquest of four
hundred million people who had done nothing to us to deserve it. There
were many positive things that came out of it, but you can't escape that
fact - by modern standards, it was a colossal string of international
crimes. That's simply a fact, and as such, cannot be an insult.

and whose sense of duty ensured that, for example, India was united and
governed with the smallest per capita civil service ever heard of.

A rather impressive way to spin the conquest of an entire subcontinent!
Have you considered a job with the Bush administration?

Why should one man's "painful reminder" outweigh another man's "proud
heritage"? I write as someone who is a descendant of one of the "forced
migrations" which the do-gooders might regard as a "painful reminder"
best avoided of which you write, but I do not see it that way: if that
had not happened, I would not be here today. There was good and bad
about the British Empire (as with all countries' histories) but that is
not a reason to erase its memory, or for those of us who are actually
proud of that history, and feel that we have benefited from it, to feel
ashamed of either fact.

I have at no point advocated renaming anything - i was merely pointing out
that for some people, the Empire was a Very Bad Thing, and thus that
celebrating it is a bit of a slap in the face to them.

So, would you also rename Trafalgar Square, Waterloo, Victoria, King
George and Canary Wharf and Canada Water Stations (and hundreds of other
place names) just because their origins might be questionable "painful
reminders" of our Imperial past?

Well, i wouldn't rename anything (well, i would, but not because of this -
having two stations called Edgware Road is intolerable, for example). But
if we consider it as a thought experiment, i don't see why Trafalgar
Square or Waterloo need renaming, since those are commemorating defeats of
a would-be conqueror, not conquests, nor anything named after monarchs,
since they had lives and reigns distinct from their empires. The names of
docks whose existence was built on the back of empire is an interesting
one, though; if there was a Slave Dock, would we be uncomfortable about
that? What about the slightly less in-your-face Jamaica Dock? New Yorkers
seem to be happy enough to have a station by that name!

tom

--
Not all legislation can be eye-catching, and it is important that the
desire to achieve the headlines does not mean that small but useful
measures are crowded out of the legislative programme. -- Select Committee
on Transport