Statues

[wanderer]

21 hours ago, Hertsscot said:

Another solution? This is from Budapest.  Fairly recently the Hungarian govt put up a memorial to the victims of the Nazi occupation. Jewish groups were unhappy however as it glossed over their suffering and Hungary's complicity in it. As a result there is an unofficial memorial drawing attention to the plight of Hungary's Jews comprising photos, family relics, letters, suitcases etc.  No guards there when we went.

My guide in Budapest last year took me there, first question was "what do you think this is a monument of?".... naturally with all the Star of David symbols, I said about the Holocaust, only to be told that it wasn't and was for all victims of the Nazi occupation in Hungary, but the Jews of the city have kind of made it their own.

Ukraine tore down the last of their Lenin statues last month (bar one's inside Crimea and the Donbass War Zone) with a strict de-Soviet law passed 2 years ago (which has seen Dnipropetrovsk have its name changed to Dnipro due to the city baring the name of Grigory Petrovsky, who was instrumental in the Holodomor famine in Ukraine in the 1930).

Seems to be a mixed bag out there, as a lot of people have wanted them all gone since independence, and now they are, a lot of people feel they should have a park similar to what Lithuania and Hungary have.

While Lithuania as a whole banned Soviet statues in 1991, Vilnius only started tearing them down last year.

[wanderer]

37 minutes ago, PapofGlencoe said:

Leaving things 'upto the states' led to the south carrying on for nearly 100 years with their nonsense.

This idea you need statues to learn history doesn't wash with me.  Not many SS statues i'm aware of.

I suppose people who have lived in a town their whole lives don't want it all changed - I get that.  but surely, you have to see the bigger picture here.

Not a monument as such, but apparently the Stadion Górnika Zabrze in Poland when it was first built was called the "Adolf Hitler Kampfbahn", and though it was changed post war, it was actually discovered in 2014 that the owners of the stadium never actually officially changed the name of the stadium, so while it was formally known as Stadion Górnika Zabrze, in the paper work Hitler was still officially the patron of the stadium.

[kumnio]

The Hungarian approach towards WWII is somewhat farcical, they seem to want to try and paint everyone else as the bad guy and themselves as some innocent little bystander, which is a load of bollicks. 

Edited August 21, 2017 by kumnio

[Larky Masher]

10 minutes ago, kumnio said:

The Hungarian approach towards WWII is somewhat farcical, they seem to want to try and paint everyone else as the bad guy and themselves as some innocent little bystander, which is a load of bollicks. 

There are a few countries like that.

Edited August 21, 2017 by Larky Masher

[wanderer]

5 minutes ago, kumnio said:

The Hungarian approach towards WWII is somewhat farcical, they seem to want to try and paint everyone else as the bad guy and themselves as some innocent little bystander, which is a load of bollicks. 

Every time I have been to Hungary, the locals have something of a chip on their shoulder I found (been told its mainly down to they were once a power-house of Europe, and now nothing).

Currently reading "The Greatest Comeback" about the Hungarian coach Béla Guttmann (born in Budapest to a Jewish family and somehow managed to survive the horrors of WW2) which has been written by David Bolchover, who is using a football story to get a history of Jews in Hungary across in the first half of the book (it does seem to go off in large tangents at points)

[McDange]

What's the update on the Thatcher statue? Has it been blocked indefinitely? Shred the plans just in case.