A FEW words in response to the letter from P Davidson of Falkirk (June 11), drawing attention to the Nazi evil which was perpetrated at Oradour-sur-Glane in France. I cannot emphasise too much the effect that this place has on you when you see it.
While I have never personally seen any of the well-publicised sites of German extermination camps, I, too, am sure that it is the very existence of the various personal possessions still there in the ruins after all these years, plus the burned out shells of the pre-war cars lying rusting in the street, that more than anything brings home to visitors the absolute horrors of “man’s inhumanity to man”.
READ MORE: Letters, June 11
Walking along that street with one of the houses on the right having that Singer sewing machine still sitting on the shelf made a huge impression on my mind; it stays clearly with me to this day, and I mentioned it to someone in conversation only a few months before lockdown. Perhaps because my mother had one exactly like it all these years ago? There, but for our good fortune, might we have found ourselves and any of our villages.
One other everlasting memory from that day, which in the end, took all day rather than the few hours which we had expected, was the reaction of a member of staff in the visitor centre. When I took several publications up to the till, seeing that they were in French the young lady said: “No, no, you can get English language versions. You don’t need to take these.”
When I explained I really wanted the French language editions so I could use what was left of my schoolboy French to get the real flavour of it all she was hugely delighted. That someone from Scotland would choose these to take home seemed like the best thing that had happened at her till all day.
Her response at that time underlines the whole concept of being part of Europe from which we, as a nation, are being forcibly dragged against our will.
George M Mitchell
Sheriffmuir, Dunblane
I HAVE a great amount of sympathy for the views of your correspondent, Nick Mulgrew (Letters, June 10) as totalitarian regimes throughout history have sought to re-write it by demolishing symbols of past generations, so a more nuanced approach is called for
I also do not think there should be collective shame on the part of the Scottish people per se, as my ancestors certainly did not benefit from the slave trade and neither did the families of most Scots. Indeed, serfdom in Scotland was not abolished until 1799, some 230 years after England. However, we have to recognise that during the 17th and 18th centuries, influential leaders in Scottish society benefited directly from slavery, and that was absolutely wrong.
READ MORE: We cannot change the past, but we can choose who to honour
Like many towns in the west of Scotland there are streets in my ward honouring slave owners and profiteers, such as MacDowell Street in Johnstone, and I am convinced they should be renamed following consultation with local community councils and local businesses. A number of churchmen in Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries were heavily involved in the campaign against slavery and we could find inspiration for replacements from that source, which would also highlight that there were opinion-formers in Scottish society who recognised slavery for the evil that it was.
This perhaps had some bearing on the fact that slavery in Scotland was made effectively illegal in 1788, 20 years before the rest of the British Empire. Mr Mulgrew is right to argue against the eradication of all monuments to slavery as some notable examples should be deliberately kept as warnings from history. For example, Auschwitz and the DDR museum in Berlin are both rightly retained as the physical embodiment of an inhuman totalitarianism which wanted to crush the human spirit.
Liberating the human spirit will inevitably have an impetus to overthrow the suffocating orthodoxies of the past, and I have a bucket list of royal and aristocratic statues in Scotland which should be pulled down, not least the Duke of Sutherland at Golspie.
Cllr Andy Doig (Independent)
Renfrewshire Council
WITH every respect to your chief football writer Matthew Lindsay, Stuart Kennedy suffered his career-ending injury prior to the European Cup-Winners’ Cup semi-final against Waterschei from Belgium, having dispensed with Bayern Munich in the quarter-final. Perhaps if central belt-based sports writers obsessed on the “ugly twins” less they would be better placed to report more accurately on the most consistently dominant football clubs north of Perth.
Charlie Forbes
via email
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