Yesterday (Sat 22 Aug 2020), David Denny led a protest against Nelson’s statue. I promised that I would join Denny, if anyone could provide any credible evidence supporting the claims made against Nelson. No one did.

I have repeatedly stated that if Nelson is really this evil racist enslaver, and white-supremacist mass-murder of 9,000 Barbadian enslaved, as out historians are claiming, then the statue should be destroyed immediately.

Will the Jews tolerate a statue of Hitler in Israel? Will the residents of New York tolerate a statue of Osama bin Laden? Will the American Indians tolerate a statue of Custer on their reservation? Of course not.

Therefore, Nelson’s statue should not put in any museum to be examined, or thrown into the wharf to be retrieved, or sold to be admired by others, but destroyed – completely.

I will personally rent the jack-hammer, and dare the police to stop me from doing what was good and right and honourable. But before I commit myself to that course of action, I simply requested the evidence. None was provided.

When I went looking for the evidence for myself, it seemed that we were all misled – to support an agenda. I thought that historians were ethically bound to honestly analyse the historical record of evidence. They are not supposed to ignore inconvenient parts, and invent things to fit an activist agenda.

THE EVIDENCE.

The actual evidence is that in an age when everyone, including the most ardent abolitionist, was a racist, Nelson appeared to be the rare non-racist. Further, there is no evidence that he enslaved anyone. Rather, he appeared to have freed more slaved outside of North America, than any other person during that era.

If Barbadian planters and merchants knew of Nelson’s anti-slavery writings, they would probably have opposed erecting the statue. Our historians have easy access to these writings, yet, they still invented a myth of Nelson being a racist enslaver and mass-murder.

The Government has chosen to ignore all the historical evidence, easily available to them, and made policy decisions based on the unsupported agenda-biased fiction of activists. That is bad and wrong – and dishonourable.

• Grenville Phillips II is a Chartered Structural Engineer and President of Solutions Barbados.  He can be reached at NextParty246@gmail.com