The Trans Holocaust Is a Dangerous, Murderous Myth: Liberals Must Combat and Refute It

I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.

Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.

And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.

Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.

Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.

But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.

This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.

The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.

And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.

Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.

We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.

Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.

Video on the Holocaust Artist, Felix Nussbaum

Bit of art history. I found this video on Blind Dweller’s channel on YouTube. It’s about Felix Nussbaum, a Jewish artist who fled Nazi Germany only to be caught during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, and deported to a concentration camp in France. It was there that he painted many of the disturbing, surreal paintings of Jewish in incarceration, misery and despair. He managed to escape back to Belgium, where he was sheltered by friends, who provided him with painting materials and a studio. But he knew that it was only a matter of time before the Nazis caught up with him and he was sent to the Death camps. He continued painting, and some of his works have an apocalyptic edge. I am not remotely surprised. I can remember reading a description of the Nazi massacre of eastern European Jews, in which the dead and dying were piled up, and it struck me then that it was like the end of world with the forces of evil spewing violence and death. Eventually the Nazis did catch him, and he was deported to Auschwitz along with other members of his family, including his parents and brother, where they were murdered.

The video gives a full biography of his life, or as full as it can in so many minutes. Nussbaum was born in Osnabruck, and he and his parents at one time travelled to Italy to escape Nazi persecution. While he moved to Belgium, they returned to Germany, where I think they were victims of the Nazi persecution. Since his death, he has become celebrated for his works and there is a dedicated museum to him in his home town. The thumbnail below shows one of his paintings. The subject of the painting, holding up his passport stamped with the French and Flemish word for ‘Jew’, is believed to be a self-portrait. There are other characters in his painting which are also believed to be depictions of Nussbaum himself. In one, painted in the French concentration camp, he is one of a number of Jews, dressed in the prayer shawl, worshipping at a makeshift shrine the inmates had made themselves.

I am absolutely amazed that Nusbaum was able to paint during the horrors as I thought the oppressive conditions would have prevented him. I also admire his Belgian friends for hiding him. I don’t know about Belgium, but Nazi Germany passed laws punishing those sheltering Jews not only with death for those actually hiding them, but also for their entire families. Under these circumstances, it took real courage to do so, and the Jews that were hidden by gentile friends and sympathisers appreciated how much those that did so risked.

Nussbaum is a fascinating artist, whose talent graphically lays bare the reality for Jews of this most horrific period in European history. In my opinion, he deserves to be better known and appreciated.

Mad YouTubers Call Kamala Harris Racist for Talking about Black African Complicity in the Slave Trade in Ghana

Yesterday, the right-wing YouTube channel, Black Conservative Perspective, attacked a ‘woke’ YouTube channel for calling Vice-President Kamala Harris a racist. What had turned the VP into the equivalent of the Grand Dragon of the KKK in their eyes? She had dared to give a speech in which she became visibly choked talking about the enslavement of Black Africans by their fellows in order to sell them to White merchants. How horrendous that the VP should talk about such historical facts! The Black Conservative thought that there was a bit of political tit-for-tat going on here. Ghana is joining Uganda on passing further anti-LGBT legislation, and at least one of the country’s politicos had criticised Harris for trying to promote gay rights. So, in his view, Harris had tried to embarrass them by talking about Black African complicity in the slave trade.

Except that, if you go to Ghana, it’s not much of a secret. One of the former Gold Coast slave forts contains a museum as well as being the site of the local market. There are a number of guilds associated with it, one of whose name translates as ‘White Men’s Children’. Its members are people descended from the White slavers and their Black wives and mistresses. Outside Africa, Black African involvement in the slave trade is discussed and taught in some American universities. One of the books I’ve got on slavery is about African slavery, published by a respectable American academic. About a decade and more ago Channel 4 screened a documentary about Africa’s role in the slave trade, videos of which can be found on YouTube. When Bristol City Museum staged their ‘Respectable Trade’ exhibition on the city’s role in the slave trade, this also mentioned that Africans were partners in the horrendous trade. I also used to work with a West Indian historian, who once told me that his people were told by their ‘mammies’ that they had been sold by the Africans.

The Conservative then continued to say that African participation in slavery should be taught in schools, and attacked the woke people, who tell everyone that America is terrible and Black people are oppressed, but have no intention of moving to somewhere like Ghana. America, he concluded, was the best place in the world to be Black. I’m not sure about that, but it’s certainly true that America has pioneered Black empowerment in the west and its approaches are copied by countries like Britain.

I strongly agree that Black participation in the slave trade should be taught in schools, in contrast to the accepted view which seems to be to place all the blame very securely on Whites. But this would go against one of the reasons behind calls for the teaching of Black history in schools. The idea is to teach Black students about their people’s achievements in order to bolster their self-esteem, and in doing so encourage them to do well at school. There are schools in Bristol that teach Black history, and the subject was covered two years ago on the local BBC news programme, Points West. This claimed that Black history was having the intended results, and proudly stated that the pupils were taught about great Black civilisations before they covered the slave trade. This is all very well, but it also clashes with the idea that history should also be the search for objective truth. This will always be out of reach, because every historian has their own views and biases, just as the sources they use also have their biases. Hence historians develop different views of the same events, which may often strongly conflict with each other. African participation in the slave trade, and the existence of slavery in Africa itself, is something that would probably have a dispiriting effect of Black students, rather than inspiring them with pride and confidence.

Nevertheless, that is no excuse for it not being taught. It’s a fact of history, and so should be included in any teaching about the slave trade. As for America, the Conservative is right when he says that Blacks are better off there than in Africa. I’ve no doubt he’s right. Conditions for many Black Americans are poor, but on the whole they’re more prosperous and have better opportunities than most Africans. A friend of mine once told me that one of the Black Panthers escaped the FBI crackdown and fled to Ethiopia. After a year he returned, walked into an FBI office and handed himself in. The reason was that no matter how much he was oppressed as Black person in America, it wasn’t as bad as Ethiopia. Of course, the enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic could not possibly have foreseen that one day they would be free, and possess equality with Whites, at least in law. But that’s fortunately how it’s turned out, through much struggle by dedicated people willing to risk their lives and liberty.

America isn’t perfect, and there is still much to do to combat Black poverty and marginalisation. But it isn’t the hell some of the woke ideologues claim. And any objective teaching of the slave trade needs to include African as well as European and American participation in it.

JP on How Critical Race Theory Ignores Black Achievement

I posted another piece last night attacking Critical Race Theory and the theory of White privilege as a racist attempt to redefine racism that didn’t fit reality. This used the example of the murder of seven White vagrants in Florida by the Nation of Yahweh, a new Black religious movement that combined religion with a flourishing business empire. Its leader, Yahweh Ben Yahweh, and his commanders bitterly hated Whites, and to get into the upper, governing ranks of the organisation you had to kill a White person. They did so with the murder of seven White tramps. Yahweh Ben Yahweh had been honoured by former president Bill Clinton for his organisation’s regeneration of run-down Black districts in Miami. In this instance, it was the Black religious leader who had the power and privilege, and his White victims absolutely none.

JP, one of the great commenters on this blog, also posted this comment, pointing out that the theory of White privilege also ignores or plays down Black achievement, both in modern America and in the great civilisations that have arisen in Africa throughout history. He writes:

‘>Critical Race Theory and its activists have attempted to redefine racism as prejudice + power. Blacks cannot be racist, because, according to CRT, they are powerless.

That redifinition is insulting. It does 2 things very well:

1. discredits any power that Blacks have ever achieved.

2. deprives the individual Black of self expression

African Americans have achieved power. Justice Thomas has wielded large power over the law in the US since the 1990s, Oprah dominated American society and was the 1st Black billionaire, Obama was elected (and re-elected) President of the US, on and on the list goes. I’ve heard people trying to claim that such powerful, successful people are just “Black face”. What?! That these people are traitors to real African Americans. Wow. That is how far these people will go to nullify Blacks who don’t fit their redefined racism.

Africans have achieved power and greatness. Great African societies and cultures are forgotten or just ignored. The Songhai Empire, Mali Empire, etc. The ancient Egyptian civilization is exempted from being “African” for … well whatever reason besides literally being on the same continent. Even if African achievements are acknowledged, these examples are waft aside as being ancient history; and that European white privledge and racist slavery overpowered them. Not so fast. West African, aka. “Black”, merchants were already enslaving peoples long before Europeans colonized the West Coast in the 18-19th centuries. The timeline of history doesn’t support the narrative that European white privledge caused or started slavery or racism.

This redifinition is revisionist. It’s made by people who don’t like the facts, or are ignorant of history, and who redefine words to fit a narrative of how they want to manipulate the future.’

He has also posted a video of an angry Black mother objecting to CRT being taught in schools. There are many videos like this of Black parents strenuously objecting to their children being taught it in schools. In one of these, a father stated that he had never encountered racism, and that he wanted his son to believe that he could do or be anything he chose. But CRT worked against this by telling Blacks they would always be marginalised, poorer and discriminated against. The father believed in the American Dream. This has taken a bashing through repeated depressions and the Reaganomics that have meant that the middle class – Black, White, Asian, whatever, has become impoverished. Generally speaking, Blacks are less prosperous than Whites, but this is an average. Black conservatives are worth reading in this respect, as they point out paradoxically the immense progress Black America made after the ending of slavery. Despite real oppression in the form of the Jim Crow Laws and segregation, they built up capital, opened businesses and entered the professions. Black districts like Harlem also had their commercial centres, just like their White counterparts. In the 1950s an American advertising magazine hailed Blacks as the new middle class.

Since then, things seem to have gone backward. Authors like Thomas Sowell recall how the streets of areas like Harlem were safe when they were growing up. I think Sowell says that when he lived there, he never heard a gunshot. They were less run-down, and residents had far more self-respect. This isn’t racial – the same conservatives will point to similar conditions and attitudes among the White underclass in Britain. I don’t accept that this relative decline is due to the welfare state incentivising such anti-social attitudes and behaviour. But it’s clear that something has gone seriously wrong, something that the victim narrative of Black America and Britain isn’t addressing and may actually be making worse.

Public Satisfaction with NHS at Lowest Ever

I’m sure you’ve also seen this on the news. According to a new poll, public satisfaction with the NHS is at is lowest since people started being survey about it in the 1980s. The Tories must be delighted, as this is all very much engineered. Despite all the lies that they prize the NHS and that it’s in safe hands, they’ve been aching to privatise it since the Maggie Thatcher. So budgets have been cut, leading to the shortage of beds that proved disastrous during the Covid epidemic. Services have been privatised and outsourced, with the private healthcare companies also imposing cuts in order to keep profits up for their shareholders. Grotty Tory politicos have already started to demand outright privatisation and the levying of charges, despite the fact that the latter violates the fundamental ethos of the NHS that it should be free at the point of use. And I’ve no doubt that their mouthpieces in the media will get more outspoken in their demands for its privatisation. GB News’ Nana Akua has already posted any number of videos on YouTube demanding it, or something very like it.

What the Tories won’t like is that the public still support it. This is a major problem for those demanding it be sold off to private enterprise. You can find them online complaining about the public’s continued support and discussing ways that it should be broken. Labour should be out defending it, and I’m sure some Labour MPs are sincere when they say they will. But not Starmer. He’s a Blairite, and Blair did more to privatise the NHS than the Tories had dared. Moreover, Starmer has surrounded himself with American private healthcare firms as his advisors. When somebody asked him about it, he’s supposed to have snapped that he didn’t answer questions about his advisors. Which is a blatant dodge, if ever there was one.

I hope Labour does get in, because another bout of Tory government will destroy this country. But if they do, I definitely want Starmer held to account and continually pressured to retain and expand the NHS. With no lies or evasions countenanced.

Paul O’Grady Passes

As I’m sure you all have seen, the big news today is that comedian, actor and broadcaster Paul O’Grady has passed on. The obituaries for him have, naturally, talked about his career and its highlights, starting with his most notorious creation, Lily Savage. Savage, complete with her massive bouffant blonde hairdo, long eyelashes, high heels and razor-sharp tongue, hit our screens in the 1990s. She was a character O’Grady had developed in the gay clubs. I also got the impression that she was based on women he’d known in childhood. But O’Grady didn’t stop there. He also hosted chat shows and one series, in which he went through south-east Asia on a quest to find a particularly glamorous Chinese starlet of the 1930s. Among the series more notable incidents was one in which O’Grady appeared in matching black turban and sarong in Thailand or one of the neighbouring countries. But he also visited the cemetery to the British and imperial soldiers worked to death by the Japanese on the Burma railway. O’Grady naturally became upset, looking at the terribly young age of some of these fine men inscribed on their tombstones. He also got annoyed with the official recommendation not to say to much about the Japanese, ‘Why not? They started it!’ Quite. It was a deeply moving piece of television that showed O’Grady at his best. And from there he went on to present a long-running series on ITV about Battersea Dogs’ Home, For the Love of Dogs. O’Grady was a massive dog-lover, and as they’ve been saying on the TV tributes to him, he had a natural rapport with his canine friends, several of whom he took home. During one episode, repeated today, he met the Queen Consort, Camilla. He’d had problems with his heart, and underwent an operation on it some time ago. I think the news has said that he passed away in his sleep, which is a blessing. He was also appearing in a play. The eulogies have also said that he was a staunch supporter of gay rights.

Savage was a little bit racy, but looking back on it, she seems to me to be very much in the traditional spirit of British drag: outrageous, but driven by character and family friendly, and there was real wit involved. The modern drag shows seems to be more in the style of American drag and much more sexualised.

It’s a sad day for British TV entertainment. As well as being a versatile entertainer, O’Grady came across as a genuinely nice bloke. Commiserations to his friends and family. He will be missed on our screens.

Testing Critical Race Theory: The Black Cult Murder of White Vagrants

I posted a piece the other day attacking Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar for comments about racism during an interview with the head honcho of the Reclaim Party, Laurence Fox. In a short video posted by Lozza’s bunch on YouTube, Sarkar denied that Whites could experience racism because they had ‘White privilege’. This means that they are always better treated. Reality says otherwise. I mentioned in my article that part of my schooling took place in a very run-down area of Bristol, frequented by tramps. These vagrants had no privilege whatsoever. But an even stronger refutation of Critical Race Theory’s attempt to redefine racism is the murder in the 1990s of seven White vagrants in Florida by leading members of the Nation of Yahweh.

The Nation of Yahweh was one of the new Black religions that emerged after the racial ferment of the 1960s. Its founder and leader was a colourful individual styling himself Yahweh Ben Yahweh, who I think claimed to be the new Black messiah. The cult combined religion and business in that peculiar mixture that constitutes a certain part of American capitalism. The Nation of Yahweh ran a number of businesses, including general stores and a couple of motels. They were so successful that Y.B. Yahweh received an award from President Bill Clinton for their work in regenerating slum districts.

But the cult also had a murderous hatred of White people. To advance to the highest levels of the organisation, you had to murder a White person. And they did. Yahweh Ben Yahweh and four of his lieutenants were arrested and sent down for the murder of seven White vagrants.

Critical Race Theory and its activists have attempted to redefine racism as prejudice + power. Blacks cannot be racist, because, according to CRT, they are powerless. American and White society generally is intrinsically, systematically racist and oppresses Blacks and other people of colour, no matter what the status of individual Blacks and Whites are. It’s a way of exonerating Blacks of racism. But Yahweh Ben Yahweh’s multiple homicides disproves this trite view. Who has the power between Y./B. Yahweh and his fellow cultists and the White tramps? Most people, whose minds aren’t muddled by CRT, would probably say Ben Yahweh. After all, he was a rich, respected religious leader and businessman. The tramps, on the other hand, obviously had not power, not even to defend themselves from their attackers.

I do wonder what Sarkar and Novara Media would make of this incident if asked about it. I think they would continue denying that the murder was racist and continue supporting the contrived redefinition. I doubt that Sarkar and her fellows have heard of this horrendous incident. It is an obscure event from the weird fringes of American culture, but it shows graphically the failing of CRT to deal with the complexities of real-world racism. And this can victimise Whites as well as Blacks. I am not accusing Sarkar of consciously being an anti-White racist. I don’t think she is. I think she’s just young, naive and too intoxicated with the radical postmodernist revision of Marxism. I hope she grows out of it. But in the meantime it shows that you have to be very careful when it comes to their highly ideological view of racism.

Short Play About Labour’s Silencing of ‘the Wrong Kind of Jews’

I found this very incisive, short piece about the Labour party’s purge of Israel-critical, socialist Jews on the ‘Beating Berlusconi’ channel on YouTube. It’s only 90 seconds long, but is based on real comments by the people themselves. There were live performances of the piece on Wednesday and Thursday last week.

The people in this film state that they have been silenced because they spoke about oppression and apartheid. One woman with a Liverpudlian accent states that she’s sick and tired of non-Jewish, White privileged men telling her about anti-Semitism, as if they knew more about the prejudice she faced. This exactly sums up the attitude of David Evans, and much of the Jewish Labour movement. This latter organisation didn’t require its members to be either Jewish or Labour party members, while claiming to speak for that community. This little playlet shows that the bigotry and intolerance, the refusal to let real Jews speak, is on the other side, the side of Starmer and the Blairites. These men and women should be reinstated and given an apology. But that will never happen while Starmer has his backside in the chair as Labour leader.

Open Britain on Boris Johnson’s Implosion During Questioning and the Unfairness of the Voter ID Laws

‘Hi David

There’ve been many big weeks in UK politics lately, but this one was a belter. The biggest news, obviously, is that Boris Johnson embarrassed himself on live television, dealing a possibly fatal blow to his chances of returning as Tory leader (fingers crossed). But our joint campaign against voter ID also made strides this week, creating national buzz around the misguided policy. 

Boris Johnson’s defence – which we outlined in our last blast – imploded spectacularly for the whole world to see, as the privileges committee picked away at his bluster and obfuscation. Johnson entered the committee room masquerading as a statesman, pretending to be serious and sombre. But that facade quickly crumbled, revealing the arrogant and entitled schoolboy that’s been there all along. 

This was the critical moment when the mask fell off. After an hour of trying to paint the committee as partisan, he lost his cool at Sir Bernard Jenkins’  line of questioning:

Johnson’s case – that he accidentally misled the house in “good faith” – just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. On the basis of what we saw yesterday, it’s entirely possible the privileges committee will find that he intentionally misled Parliament. If they don’t, it’s almost impossible to imagine them not finding him guilty of doing so recklessly. We’ll have to wait for their final report, but it’s not looking good for the disgraced former PM. 

Looking ahead to May elections and the next general election, our joint voter ID campaign also made strides this week. We, alongside other organisations committed to fair elections, displayed a giant map showing how many people across the country could lose their vote as a result of the unjustified and rushed restrictions put in place. 

Twenty Parliamentarians attended, and members of our coalition made our case on Good Morning Britain, local BBC news stations and in nearly 200 local newspapers. That coverage sparked some heated debate on TV and on social media and the government’s voter ID website showed a noticeable spike in applications (the second-highest daily total ever, though still not high enough to ensure everyone has their vote in May).

We’re working hard to dispel the myths about voter ID: people say that it’s not going to reduce participation, that it’s needed to stop voter fraud, and that the free voter ID certificate solves everything. Here’s the truth: We’ve had more PMs in the last five years than cases of voter fraud – and the government’s own data shows that it’s going to cut people out of democracy. 

Even one voter turned away in May is too many. If we want to finally put an end to the era of politicians like Boris Johnson – who lie nonstop to the nation, commit crimes, and dodge accountability at every turn – we can’t start by locking people out. The Elections Act 2022, which mandates voter ID, was just one small part of Boris Johnson’s overarching plan to mould Britain into his own image and take power away from everyday people.  

We’re claiming our victories for this week, but the road ahead is long and hard. There’s much more to be done. Johnson, greased piglet that he is, may yet slip out of this one.

If you want to help us keep the pressure on him, add your name to the 26,000 people who’ve already signed our StopBoris petition, or click the button below to boost the campaign activities we’ll carry out in the event that privileges committee sanctions force Johnson to face a recall process and possible by-election.

Sincere thanks from,

The Open Britain team.

BOOST OUR IMPACT

Open Britain is proud to be funded entirely
through small donations from our many supporters.

Your generosity makes our work possible.
Thank you!‘

Rafe Heydel-Mankoos Arguments Against Slavery Reparations

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo is one of the inmates of the IEA’s New Culture Forum. I heartily despise the IEA, but I do find myself agreeing with some of what the New Culture Forums says. This video is taken from a Cambridge Union debate over whether reparations should be paid for slavery. Heydel-Mankoo was one of the speakers against the motion that it should. He states at the outset that he has a particular interest in this as a child of empire. The Mankoo part of his double-barrelled surname suggests to me that he’s part Indian, as do his features. He also confesses that if this was 1807 or 1834, the dates when first the slave trade and then slavery itself was abolished in the British empire, he may well have crossed the floor and agreed wholeheartedly that damages should be paid for the horrendous suffering enslaved people had endured. But it is not 1807, 1907 or 2007. Six or seven generations have elapsed between the present Black generation and the time their ancestors were enslaved. Reparations are a matter of tort, and while damages should be paid to people who have genuinely suffered, the present generation of Blacks are immeasurably better off than their ancestors in Africa. Ethically, should they profit from the suffering of their ancestors? Is it right that people should be held accountable for the crimes of their ancestors? The advocates of reparations want it to be paid by the British taxpayer. There were also only 3,000 slaveowners in Britain. The major of people lived and worked in grinding poverty in conditions near serfdom. Is it ethically right that they descendants of poor workers should be asked to pay reparations? There are also demands for the payment of reparations from countries like Barbados. Sixteen per cent of this country, however, are foreign born. Is it right that they should be required to pay reparations for something they had nothing to do with? And what about Africa? They supplied the slaves to Europeans, and so shouldn’t the be required also to pay reparations? What about the Arabs and Muslims who enslaved Africans centuries before Europeans and continued to do so before the British and French put a stop to it? And what about slavery in Africa today? The International Labour Organisation estimates that seven out of every thousand Africans is a slave: 10 million people. In 2017 CNN reported hundreds of slaves are sold every week in Libya. He would have far more sympathy for the claim for reparations if the people making it showed equal concern for the plight of today’s slaves. Where are the protests outside the Nigerian high commission, the embassies of Niger, which has a hundred thousand slaves today? What about Mali and Chad and Sudan and Cameroon. It’s almost as though there’s an ulterior motive to ask for reparations exclusively from Britain.

He also asks how far this should be taken. Should Britain demand reparations for the attacks of the Barbary pirates? At the same time as enslaved Africans were crossing the Atlantic, one million Europeans were enslaved by the Ottoman slave states of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And this carried on after the abolition of the slave trade by the British. But Britain should not demand reparations from north Africa. It’s time to move on, and so should we.

He then turns from slavery to colonialism, and asks what damage it has done to those now living in the Caribbean. Most of the countries of the Caribbean are successful middle-income countries. The GDP per head of the Bahamas is higher than Portugal and comparable to Spain or Italy. Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis and other former British slave colonies have higher rankings on the UN development index than many other South American countries such as Brazil and Mexico. It is not clear to him how the British empire has disadvantaged the Caribbean nations. Comparing the modern Caribbean with the West Africa, the homelands of West Indian slaves. The GDP per capita in Benin is $1,430. The GDP per capita in Barbados is $17,000. Life expectancy in Benin is 62. In Barbados it is 79. Rather than write cheques to well-off parts of the world, why not send money to countries that actually require aid? Financial aid, not attempts to cleanse one’s soul. While slavery was abhorrent to those enslaves, had they remained in Africa the lives of their descendants would have been markedly worse..

What is Britain being asked to pay reparations for? Because Britain wasn’t the first empire to practise slavery in Africa, in India, in America. But it was the most benign and the benefits from it far exceed those of Islamic and Indian empire, that carved up India, of the Ashanti empire, of the Dahomey Kingdom, or the hundreds of thousands of slaves that were ritually sacrificed every year in Benin. The Benin Bronzes, that have been mentioned, commemorate those who owned slaves. Why is there a celebration of these?

Why are we apologising for Britain? Are we apologising for introducing new food storage polices, which led to a decline in the subcontinents processes of famine? Every forty years in India there was a famine. The population of India soared from 170 million to 400 million over the course of the Raj.It was because medicine and health and food standards and storage were better than they had been that the population surged.

Let’s not forget what Britain did for women’s rights. It was through the British empire that we have had the progression of women in Africa and India. India’s history is one of female oppression. It was the British who abolished suttee, the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. It was the British who stopped the infanticide of young girls and it was the British who allowed Hindu widows to remarry. Facts are facts. Universities were brought into Africa and India by the British. There would be no system of democratic legislatures in these regions without the empire. He quotes Steven Pinker as saying that before the British empire, these states were more violent than even the most modern states. While many wrongs were committed in the 19th and 20th centuries, the success of Britain’s colonies in the 21st century is due in large part to their colonial inheritance The English language and law enabled them to become global players. Their police, military, the civil service, the judiciary, parliament, the universities in every region of the world you go to, the British colonies are those most likely to be the healthiest and most democratic.

He ends by quoting the great Black civil rights activist and socialist Bayard Rustin, a friend of Martin Luther King, who received King’s posthumous congressional medal of freedom from Barack Obama: ‘If my great-grandfather, who picked cotton for fifty years and who made some money. He’s dead and gone, and nobody owes me anything.’

It’s a powerful speech, and from the way they fidget and pull faces the students behind him simply don’t want to hear what he says. But these are arguments that definitely need to be heard.