Police were no match for the Black Lives Matter mob that pulled down a statue of Edward Colston last week and threw it in Bristol harbour. But the Scouts are evidently a force to be reckoned with. No sooner had Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council announced that it was planning to take down a statue of Lord Robert Baden-Powell on the harbour front at Poole than the Scouts had mobilised themselves to defend it, setting up camp at its base. The council decided to board it up instead, to protect it from protestors.
The ‘Topple the racists’ website had identified Baden-Powell among its targets, claiming that the creator of the Scout movement had ‘committed atrocities against the Zulus in his military career and was a Nazi sympathiser’. It is true that Baden-Powell wrote in his diary, in 1939, that he had been reading Mein Kampf, describing it as ‘a wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation’ (although the same diary entry also lambasted Adolf Hitler for not following the ideals identified in the book).
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