Mad Official Demands More Arrests for Blasphemy on Pakistan TV

A few days ago the ex-Muslim atheist YouTuber Harris Sultan put up a link to a piece in one of the English language Pakistani magazines. Harris is an Australian of Pakistani heritage and a very bitter critic of Islam. The magazine had approached him for comment about a programme on Pakistani television in which various members of the clergy and officialdom had demanded more arrests to curb a wave of ‘islamophobia’ and blasphemy that was supposedly threatening the country. The official had stated that 400,000 blasphemous comments had been posted online, and the magazine claimed that Pakistan was the 7th most islamophobic country in the world, despite its draconian laws against blasphemy. Insulting the Prophet Mohammed himself carries the death penalty, and insulting the Prophet’s companions is punishable by 10 years to life in prison. The magazine claimed that this meant that Shia Muslims are particularly vulnerable to this charge, as they reject many of the first caliphs.

A friend of mine with a stronger stomach than me told me once that there’s a piece in William S. Burrough’s The Naked Lunch where the cops get arrestomania and go around arresting anyone they can. It looks like the official demanding more arrests for blasphemy has a bad case of it. The very idea that Pakistan is massively islamophobic seems to me to be entirely false. It was set up by Jinna explicitly as an Islamic state, where Muslims could live in accordance with their faith although it remained relatively secular until the country’s dictator, General Zia in the 1970s formed an alliance with the conservative Muslim clergy. It was then that the blasphemy laws, which had been introduced by the Raj to protect all religions, became solely about Islam and increasingly severe. I also think that the Pakistani upper house is composed of Muslim clergy who check whether the legislation passed is sufficiently Islamic. It’s also one of the nations where there is the strongest support for the return of a Muslim caliphate.

Accusations of blasphemy have led to murder, mob attacks and assassination. The laws are frequently abused by people wanting to get rid of their opponents in disputes that have nothing to do with religion. They’ve also led to attacks on Christians and other religious minorities, as shown in the cases of Asia Bibi, who was accused of desecrating a Quran, and a Christian student who was murdered by his classmates because he took a sip from a glass of water he was bringing to a group of girls. There was also the case of a seven year old boy, who was being charged with blasphemy because he urinated in a madrassa, a Muslim religious school.

Historically, Islam was admired by many intellectuals in the west because it didn’t have the history of mass persecution, such as inquisitions and witch hunts, that has marred Christianity. But this official’s complaints about 400,000 blasphemous posts looks like he wanted all that to change.

Sultan’s comments was that if they wanted to deal with anti-Islamic sentiment, they should stop forcing the religion down their children’s throats and abolish the blasphemy laws. I’m not an atheist, and believe that parents have the right to bring children up in their religion. But in my experience, many atheist activists come from oppressively religious backgrounds that have turned them against religion. And when religion comes into politics, then it does seem to lose popularity through its association with controversial or oppressive legislation. I think Christianity in America has lost some of its ground because of the emergence of the religious right and their influence in the Republican Party. A Pew Poll the other year found that Iran, which the magazine article stated also has harsh laws against blasphemy comparable to Pakistan, was no longer a majority Muslim country. People were either turning to other faiths, or abandoning religion altogether. There have also been other reports about the massive, underground spread of Islam in the Arab countries. I’ve no doubt that this is a reaction to the atrocities and horrors committed by ISIS. I therefore think Sultan is absolutely right about the blasphemy laws.

Religion should be a matter of one’s own private conscience, especially as these laws seem to be used as instruments of religious persecution.

GB News Claims LGBTQ Labour May Withdraw from Pride Marches due to Safety Fears

I don’t know how true this is, as it was reported on GB News by Tom Harwood, former teaboy to far right outfit Guido Fawkes. According to the station that a Labour MP has said has two political biases, right and far right, LGBTQ Labour, the gay rights wing of the party, is considering withdrawing from Pride marches because they are afraid for their safety. It’s because of the anger Keir Starmer has generated within the gay community due to his flip-flopping on the trans issue. First he was solidly behind reforming the gender recognition act, then after seeing it contribute to the fall of Nicola Sturgeon, he wasn’t. The militant gay rights organisation are also angry that he was talking to a ‘homophobic’ pastor about allowing gender critical organisation to attend and speak at conference.

There are several things to unpack here. The first is that, if this is true, then I believe LGBTQ Labour are entirely justified in their fears. There is a culture of violence in militant trans activism. We’ve seen this played out in violent demonstrations against gender critical activists on university campuses and public meetings. The most recent example of this was the mobbing of Kellie-Jay ‘Posie Parker’ Keen in New Zealand. And this is quite apart from Audrey Hale’s shooting of six people, including three children, at an American school. Militant trans rhetoric online is soaked in slogans about killing ‘TERFs’ with some of those posting pictures of themselves with firearms. In fact, LGBTQ Labour are fully behind and pushing for reform of the gender recognition act as well as outlawing anything but the affirmative care model of gender therapy on the grounds that anything else amounts to conversion therapy.

But it absolutely wrong to associate the gender critical movement with homophobia. Many of the women in the gender critical movement are lesbians. There are also gay men, some of whom, like Ted Sargent, are veterans of the original Stonewall riots. Sargent was assaulted and knocked to the ground at an American Pride march recently because he carried a banner stating that trans rights were nothing to do with gay rights.

There is a growing dissatisfaction among gays and lesbians with the mainstream gay rights organisations like Stonewall. They feel that these organisations have kicked gay people to the kerb in order to concentrate almost solely on the trans issue. Again and again they have posted up pieces about various gay rights meetings and events in which nearly all the speakers have been trans, speaking about trans, with only a minority of gay men speaking. And absolutely no lesbians.

There is also growing anger with attempts by the trans lobby to change the definition of homosexual from same-sex attracted to same gender attracted. This means that trans-identified biological men have and are demanding sex from lesbians because, despite their masculine biology, they identify as women. Ditto with gay men being pressured to have sex with trans-identified women, who identify as men and therefore consider themselves gay men. Gender critical gays and lesbians have stated that this is a new form of conversion therapy, similar to the old where gays were pressured to have straight sex in order to cure them.

There are a number of complaints online that where this ideology is being upheld and enforced – in Canada, America and Britain, it has led to the massive closure of traditional gay and lesbian pubs and clubs. The gay scene has, according to them, moved back underground, with gays meeting and socialising in private homes as they used to when homosexuality was illegal.

As for gender critical organisations attending the Labour conference, I think they have every right to. The LGB Association, a gay organisation that solely represents gay men and women, tried to attend the last one but were banned because of the trans activists. They have been accused of being a hate group, but I have seen absolutely no evidence of this except real concerns about how the trans ideology is damaging the mental and biological health of vulnerable people as well as excluding and marginalising gay people within the organisations. They have a right to be heard as well as their opponents.

I don’t know, however, how much this will affect relations between gay Labour members and activists and Pride at a local level. A group from my local Labour party attended the Pride march in Bristol last year, and the year before the Labour administration painted one of the zebra crossings in Bristol’s old city in the trans flag.

Aside from the trans issue, I’ve also read online comments from gay people, who have become generally disenchanted with Pride. In their view it has gone from something that had a real point – fighting real homophobia and anti-gay legislation – to something rather more menacing. Rather than being subversive and liberating, they feel that it has become oppressive and conformist, with corporations and organisations using it as an opportunity to demonstrate how virtuous they are in this regard. I don’t know about over here, but in America there are also growing concerns about the blatant displays of kink in Pride as the marches state they welcome children.

There are some real fractures occurring in the British gay movement. How big the supposed split between LGBTQ Labour and Pride is moot. GB News is a right-leaning broadcaster with an interest in attacking the Labour party so the report may well be exaggerated. But there are cracks appearing as many gays become increasingly disenchanted with their organisations’ focus on trans to what they feel is their exclusion.

1 in 5 American Doctors Planning to Leave US Healthcare

This comes from Amanpour & Co, a US news and comment channel on YouTube. They’ve put up a video discussing the news that supposedly 117,000 American doctors, one in five of them, is planning to leave their healthcare system. If this is true, then it’s very important as it shows America’s private healthcare system is also on the brink of failure. I put up a piece yesterday of a Bristol plastic surgeon, who was concerned about the numbers of British doctors planning to leave the NHS for greener shores downunder with the Ozzies and Kiwis. Those countries are more attractive because they’re offering better wages and conditions. Are the American doctors planning to leave US medicine also considering going there as well? And what does this say about the superiority of private medicine? The Bristol surgeon was suggesting that the NHS should be shrunk to deal with the problem – meaning certain services should be privatised, thus ending the NHS’ commitment to provide uniform healthcare free at the point of delivery. But as America’s healthcare is private, privatisation is obviously no solution. And what about the market forces Thatcher was always bleating about? They should dictate that in order to encourage doctors to stay with the healthcare system, they should have their pay and conditions improved. But obviously something in the American private healthcare system is preventing that from happening. It means that Blair and the Tories are utterly wrong when they try to outsource NHS services and look to American private healthcare as the model for efficiency. In fact the US healthcare system almost broke down a couple of years ago.

The message from this is that a fully private healthcare system is a disaster, as is the privatisation of the NHS. But you won’t find either the Tories or Starmer, let alone the British right-wing press, acknowledging or telling you this.

Bristol Plastic Surgeon Wants to Shrink the NHS

And we all know what that means: more privatisation. This has got me really angry. The BBC local news for the Bristol area, Points West, has added a little local slant on the current NHS crisis. It has covered the views of a plastic surgeon, who was at one point appointed to an NHS committee of some description. Now the surgeon’s calling for a Royal Commission to examine the NHS and what changes should be made to it. The man’s concerned that 40 per cent of doctors graduating are planning to leave the health service, lured by higher salaries and better conditions in Australia and New Zealand. That is a problem that needs solving. However, his solution is to shrink the NHS. He opines that it’s too big, and is actually one of the world’s biggest employers. The NHS is indeed huge. I read somewhere that it employs more people than the Indian railway. But it’s always been big, and historically it always has given value for money. Until David Cameron, Tweezer, Johnson, Liz Truss and Sunak. But way back in 1979 the Royal College considered that improvements to the Health Service would be easily paid for by tax revenue. And to be fair to Tony Blair, it was properly funded during his tenure of 10 Downing Street, even though he really wanted to privatise whatever he could of it.

This is what we’re talking about here: Privatisation. Selling off some of the NHS’ services, so that it no longer provides a service to everyone, free at the point of delivery.

This is what the Tories have been aiming for, and what their media mouthpieces, like GB News’ Nana Akua, are demanding. The present Health Secretary denied that there were any plans for any such thing. Yeah, and Thatcher denied that she wanted to privatise the NHS, but she did. What probably alarmed the Health Secretary was that this surgeon spoke their plans out loud. The Tories are despicable, as is this surgeon’s views. I hope, I really hope, that more medical professions will come forward to challenge the government and their slow privatisation of this precious institution.

And that the government pays our junior doctors what they’re worth.

For Those Who Want A Little Extra Dexterity, A Prosthetic 3rd Thumb

I found this video on the Mashable channel on YouTube. It’s about a mechanical third thumb that’s been designed by New Zealander Dani Clode. Clode was also responsible for designing the Vine artificial limb for the National Museum of Scotland, the video about which I put up yesterday. The new thumb isn’t meant to replace anything, but rather to augment the human hand, turning it into a tool. It’s operated by a pressure sensor underneath the toes. A Bluetooth device then carries the signal to the thumb’s motor. The video shows people performing various actions, such as playing the guitar, holding cards, picking up toy bricks, squeezing lemons and stroking cacti. Or just looking at it in amazement.

There are a number of other videos about it, one of which says that although it’s a small step in itself, it’s a big leap towards human transcendence. We’re talking transhumanism here, people augmenting themselves with prosthetics and other technologies. I also wonder what’s going on down in the antipodes, as this is very much the kind of thing the Australian performance artist Stelarc explores in his performances. Stelarc has said in a number of interviews that the human body is obsolete, and he explores cyborgisation in his performances. In one, he had MIT technicians and engineers build him a third arm, which was worked by signals picked up by his stomach muscles. He was one of the guests, who also included J.G. Ballard, on the Radio Three programme, Grave New Worlds, back in the 1990s. That week-long series set out to explore the transhuman condition. It also grossed out one of the continuity announcers. Towards the end of the interview, Stelarc calmly said that he wanted surgeons to construct an extra ear for him on his arm or somewhere. This would be fitted with a motion sensor and a noise emitter of some kind, so that it acted the opposite of an ear and made a noise when someone got too close. After the programme ended, the poor announcer came on and said something to the effect that if you were still with them and had kept your stomach contents down, you could now enjoy the sublime music of Bach or Beethoven coming up next. This is very much the theme of David Cronenberg’s movies, as he explored the often horrific transformation of the human body into the ‘new flesh’, sometimes through technology. Dr Kit Pedlar, the creator of Dr Who’s cybermen, also believed such augmentation would move away from the conventional human form. In his original idea, the cybermen would have three arms, one set in their chests, but this was obviously impossible for the costume department to realise.

While this is an interesting experiment, it doesn’t seem to be very useful beyond being a gimmick. And I haven’t seen any on sale in your local hardware store and so I don’t see conventional humanity giving way before the massed ranks of the cyborgs just yet.

A Couple of Books on Rock against Racism

Looking for books on Fascism on Amazon the other day, I came across a couple of books on Rock Against Racism, the pop music campaign against the National Front when they became the fourth largest political party for a very brief time in the 1970s. I thought I’d mention them here because some of the commenters have memories about them and the Socialist Workers’ Party, with whom they have been linked and who have been blamed by some historians of British fascism for the movement’s demise.

The books are:

Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982 (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right) Paperback – 10 Dec. 2018

Dave Renton

By 1976, the National Front had become the fourth largest party in Britain. In a context of national decline, racism and fears that the country was collapsing into social unrest, the Front won 19 per cent of the vote in elections in Leicester and 100,000 votes in London.

In response, an anti-fascist campaign was born, which combined mass action to deprive the Front of public platforms with a mass cultural movement. Rock Against Racism brought punk and reggae bands together as a weapon against the right.

At Lewisham in August 1977, fighting between the far right and its opponents saw two hundred people arrested and fifty policemen injured. The press urged the state to ban two rival sets of dangerous extremists. But as the papers took sides, so did many others who determined to oppose the Front.

Through the Anti-Nazi League hundreds of thousands of people painted out racist graffiti, distributed leaflets and persuaded those around them to vote against the right. This combined movement was one of the biggest mass campaigns that Britain has ever seen.

This book tells the story of the National Front and the campaign which stopped it.’

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Again-Anti-Nazi-1976-1982-Routledge/dp/1138502715

Rock Against Racism ―1976–1981 Hardcover – 29 Sept. 2022

by Syd Shelton (Author), Red Saunders (Afterword), Paul Gilroy (Contributor), Adam Phillips (Contributor), & 2 more

An outstanding photography book documenting a movement that rocked the world. 

Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism is a body of photographs that Syd Shelton produced for and about the British Rock Against Racism movement (RAR) of 1976–1981. For Shelton, this work was a socialist act, what he calls a “graphic argument,” on behalf of marginalized lives. His practice of photographic activism began in 1973 when he was driven to document the socio cultural and political dynamics expressed on the streets of Sydney by urban Australian Aboriginal communities, the working class, and the architectural landscapes of these groups. Shelton’s first solo show in 1975, “Working Class Heroes” at the Sydney Film-makers Cooperative, established his distinct activist eye.

Shelton joined RAR in early 1977 on his return to England from Australia. He did so because he found his birthplace a more racist country than it had been when he left. This was marked by the increased political presence of the National Front, notably its gain of some 119,000 votes in the Greater London Council Elections of May 1977. Shelton, like millions of others, feared for the future of multi-cultural Britain. His contribution to RAR was to be on the London committee, to create graphic material with other RAR members such as the RAR publication “Temporary Hoarding,” posters’ badges and his photography—RAR did not have an official photographer. Shelton’s instinctive need to document RAR—its events, contributors, and supporters—has resulted in the largest collection of images on the movement. Alongside his documentation of RAR, Shelton took photographs of what he calls “the contextual images,” the lives and landscapes that were defined by others as “different,” and that often fueled racist acts of violence by simply being.

What is presented here are Shelton’s authoritative visual statements as participant-photographer on the social tempo in Britain at this time and the activist potency of RAR. As collective activism, RAR’s success was dependent on individual contributions to fuel the movement’s activities across the country. This unique national, and eventually international, charge incorporated the visual dynamic of how Black and white RAR contributors and participants styled their bodies as another antagonistic tool against racism. These were acts of style activism—the making of an activist identity through the considered composition of clothes, accessories, hairstyles, makeup, and body language. Shelton’s images prompt us to remember that the individuals at RAR carnivals, gigs, and demonstrations were the event—they were RAR.

There are many versions of what RAR was and its legacy. Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism provides an auto/biographical telling of that historical moment. It reflects on how Shelton’s work as a photographer contributed towards social change at a critical moment of political and racial tension in Britain.’

There are also reviews of the Syd Shelton book online from some of the newspapers and magazines, if you want to look.

Simon Webb Asks What the Scientific Arguments against a Racial Link to IQ Is, and Why Are We Afraid of Discussing It?

Our favourite internet (non)historian this afternoon put up a video asking the above question. Even though it only last just over five minutes, I got just halfway through it before I turned it off and went looking for something less contentious and more edifying. Webb’s argument is that all the opposition to anthropological studies linking race to IQ are ideological rather than scientific. I don’t know enough about scientific, or pseudo-scientific racism to be able to fully refute him there. But I guess a start could be made by reading the late Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, which is about how Darwinian evolution was utilised in the 19th and early 20th centuries to prove the inferiority of non-Whites and women. I can also remember reading an article in a student magazine in the 80s/90s by Marek Cohn that covered this topic. Cohn is, I believe, certainly not a right-winger. He argued, if I recall correctly, that the same data the racial scientists had used to argue that there were real differences between different races in IQ was then re-evaluated after the War and the horror of Nazism to argue the reverse. Which suggests that, whatever its supporters say, the evidence is at least ambiguous.

As for the question why were are reluctant to discuss any link between race and IQ, it’s because it has been used to justify terrible oppression and crimes against humanity. The reluctance isn’t complete. A few years ago Channel 4 screened a series which looked at these differences. In one programme they found that northern Europeans are more resistant to the cold than southern European and Blacks. They also found that east Asians have much less to resistance to alcohol than westerners. This was put down to the orient having tea, rather than alcohol, for generations as their drink of choice. Although I am aware that they also had palm and rice wine, like saki in Japan.

It also covered the extremely delicate subject of cognitive differences between Aboriginal Australians and others. The programme made it clear that this was a sensitive subject because of the way IQ and cognition had been used to oppress and disinherit these incredibly ancient people. However, studies have shown that the visual cortex of indigenous Australians contains 25 per cent more neurons than in people of other races. As a result, they have excellent visual memory. The programme showed Aboriginal people outperforming Whites in memory tests of objects placed before them. It was put forward that the Aboriginal brain had evolved this way to help them find their way in the trackless wastes of the Outback and desert. Landscapes that seem featureless and confusing to westerners are full of landmarks to indigenous Australians. Aboriginal children lag behind other races in education, and it was suggested that their teaching could be improved by taking advantage of this racial skill.

I think the strongest warning against finding some races inferior comes from H.G. Wells. Wells had his fair share of prejudices himself. Biographers have noted that he himself confessed to being a racist and an anti-Semite. But Wells also wrote powerful pieces against racism, extracts from which I have put up here. In one of his SF works, which actually looks forward to a future utopia in which the world has been united into a single state and people of different races mix freely and in equality, he states that if a people were found to be racially inferior, it would be better to exterminate them rather than have them live as slaves. It’s a sentence that chills the blood after the Holocaust.

But the point is clear: decent people don’t want to find a connection between race and IQ, because it has and can lead back to slavery and other horrors.

And that, I believe, answers at least part of Webb’s question. As he himself very likely knows.

Robert Boyle and the Possibility of Spirits on Other Planets and Stars

This might interest any readers of this blog with an interest in mysticism and history. I’ve been reading, off and on, Tony McAleavy’s The Last Witch Craze: John Aubrey, the Royal Society and the Witches (Amberley: 2022). This is about how individual members of the Royal Society, set up to advance science, and the 17th century naturalist and biographer John Aubrey, investigated cases of witchcraft scientifically as part of a project to combat the threat of atheism. They were afraid that the rise of the new mechanical philosophy denied the existence of disembodied spirits and so led to atheism. But this in turn could be challenged by properly investigated cases of witchcraft, hauntings and what would now be considered poltergeists, supported by the testimony of reliable multiple witnesses.

Aubrey himself, the author of Brief Lives, a series of potted biographies of the great men of his time, and books on the natural history and customs of his native Wiltshire and other counties, was a practising ritual magicians, though also friends with Thomas Hobbes, who denied the existence of the supernatural and was suspected of atheism. The Royal Society had no corporate opinion on witchcraft, but individual members were staunch believers, writing and publishing books about it. One of these was Robert Boyle, whose book The Sceptical Chymist, founded the modern science of chemistry. Boyle was deeply Christian, and left a legacy to fund an annual sermon preaching Christianity against atheism. But as a scientist and man of faith, he was also interested in the possibility of the existence of disembodied spirits on other worlds and stars, and the theological implications of their existence.

‘Robert Boyle thought a lot about the supernatural. Not only was he sure about the reality of angels and demons, he also speculated on the possible existence of enormous numbers of spirits of other types, ‘an inestimable multitude of Spiritual Beings , of various kinds.’ Distant planets and stars might contain alien spirits about which we know nothing. There could be spirits inhabiting ‘all the Celestial Globes (very many of which do vastly exceed ours in bulk)’. This raised, for Boyle, interesting theological questions. Angels and demons were known to be saved or damned, respectively, but in other worlds there might be spirits who were still being tested by God, just as Adam and Eve were tested in the Garden of Eden.’ (p. 69).

There’s a link, or a chain of belief here with the Swedenborgians of the 18th century, who believed that the planets were inhabited and that they could travel to them in spirit and communicate with their inhabitants during seances. I think they also believed that people also travelled to these worlds and made their homes on them after death. Some of the Spiritualist mediums believed this. And Evans-Wentz records the view of an elderly Irish mystic in his book, The Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries, that the fairies were an old race come from the stars.

And this also continues into the UFO phenomenon. I am not going to start a debate over whether all alien encounters are mystical in nature rather than encounters with real, nuts and bolts craft, whether alien spaceships or secret terrestrial aircraft. But there have been UFO encounters which do seem to be either hallucinatory or mystical in nature. One Australian woman was abducted and examined in an alien spacecraft on a deserted road one night. When she was taken back there by a member of an Ozzie UFO investigation group, she had another such experience. But she was still physically present with the investigator in his car, and no UFO was visible. Other experiencers have said that there abduction was an astral or out of body experience, rather than physical. Sceptics have suggested that UFO abduction experiences can be explained by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Some no doubt can, but others have occurred to seemingly normal individuals with no history of such a neurological illness.

I therefore wonder if Boyle was right after all, and this type of alien encounters are with disembodied alien spirits, which our brains interpret as physical alien beings in real nuts and bolts craft in order to make it comprehensible.

Wellcome Museum Purges Display on History of Medicine to Include African Shaman – A Piece of Cultural Relativism That Will Also Damage Blacks

This comes from a piece our favourite YouTube historian, Simon Webb, put up on History Debunked a few days ago. He was attacking the new policy towards the museum that has come in with its new director, a woman whose degree is in the arts. Before, according to Webb, the museum was excellent, covering the history of western medicine in rigorous detail and including displays of operating theatres. Much of this, however, has been junked because the new director has deemed it ableist, racist and colonialist. The gallery to its founder, Wellcome himself, has also gone because he did not hold the current, mandatory beliefs. In their stead a gallery has erected containing two photographs showing the horrors of colonial experimentation on Black Africans along with one Mrs Eruditu, a self-professed African shaman, who conducts healing ceremonies and will counsel visitors to the gallery traumatised by the pictures. Webb calls her a witchdoctor, and describes her as completely mad, as she believes inanimate objects also possess consciousness. She doesn’t like the British Museum and the Egyptology displays, because the exhibits there have told her that they want to be underground. Nor does she approve of the display of a Native American totem pole in the Musee Nationale in France, as this has told her psychically that it wants to be out in the open air. Webb states, quite correctly, that western medicine has produced amazing advances in combating disease and extending the human life span. This new policy is a direct attack on that.

I think Webb, if he’s right about the Museum’s new policy, and he seems to be, has an excellent point here. He views it, no doubt, as another attack on western culture in the name of anti-racism, anti-imperialism and post-colonialism. He is, unfortunately, also very likely right about this. There have been pieces on YouTube by other right-wingers attacking the current policies of the Museums Association, which are all about this. I’ve got a feeling that Manchester Museum has also fallen to these new policies, and that they are also reviewing their collections as a result. But this policy is also harming Black and particularly Black African advancement in ways which the founders of the ‘Science Must Fall’ movement, which is ultimately at the heart of this, probably don’t understand.

The ‘Science Must Fall’ movement was a South African campaign to decentre western science because it rejected indigenous knowledges about the world rooted in myth and legend. There was a video on YouTube of a student debate in one of the South African universities, in which a Black female student urged her White comrades to decolonise their minds and accept that tribal rainmakers could indeed make it rain. People are welcome to whatever mystical or religious beliefs they choose, providing these don’t break the law. But they are separate. Back in the 90s, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a biologist and palaeontologist, attempted to end the war between science and religious by stating that there were No Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). Science dealt with fact, and religion with issues of meaning and values. Of course, militant atheists of the Dawkins type disagreed and thought that it was a capitulation to unreason. Gould’s wrong in that religion and science do overlap, but as a general point I think it’s fair. Science and religion, as a general rule, are separate.

I am also sure that the new director is right, and that Blacks were experimented on by surgeons and doctors in the past. It certainly happened in America, where one of the great surgeons of the 19th century experiment on Black women without anaesthetic. I read somewhere that H.G. Wells was partly inspired to write The Island of Dr. Moreau by accounts of a German doctor experimenting on Black Africans. But you have to be very careful in making such judgements. A while ago I provoked an angry reply in a piece I had written for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. I was talking about the history of medicine in the context of space exploration. One of the books I had consulted for the piece described one particular pioneering doctor of tropical medicine as a quack for his theories and treatment of diseases. Unfortunately for me, one of the other senior members of the Society knew him, and wrote to me stating that he was a dedicated, humane man of science. The problem was that he was facing completely new diseases unknown in the west and which nobody knew how to treat. This is a good point, and I wrote to the aggrieved gentleman apologising for the inadvertent smear and issued a correction to the Journal. I wonder if some of the other pioneering doctors and surgeons, whose work has similarly fallen into disfavour, were like the man I mentioned – a sincere medical man, working in the unknown.

Underlying the attempts to decentre western science are two related attitudes. One is the fact that many displaced, colonised peoples have been harmed by the destruction of their own, indigenous world view. This has left them without meaning, resulting in alcoholism and drug addiction in many indigenous communities like the Amerindians in the Americas and Aboriginal Australians. The other is the belief in the Noble Savage, in which indigenous communities like them are somehow better, and more noble than moral than White, western society. The attempts to decentre western science and include indigenous myth and religion are attempts to restore dignity to these colonised peoples.

But African paganism also has its dark side. The priests of one of the cults in Nigeria were actively involved in the slave trade, to the point where the Nigerian equivalent of the saying that someone has been sold down the river literally translates as they ‘have been stolen by the Oracle’. There is also a widespread belief in witches and witch hunting all across the continent. Many of the accused, as in the pre-modern west are women, and some of the trials are just as deadly. In one Nigerian ritual, the accused woman is given the Calabar Bean, a poisonous vegetable. If she doesn’t vomit it out quickly, she’ll die, and so be judged a witch. There have also been professional witch hunters of the same stripe as the infamous Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, of Civil War England. Way back in the 19th century one of the Zulu kings went on a witch-hunting campaign. Witchsmellers, the indigenous Zulu witch hunters, were engaged and duly pointed the finger at a number of suspects, who were duly executed. A European official talked to the king, and said this all looked very dubious, and wondered if the witchsmellers were right in their accusations. The king laughed, said he wondered too, and had all one hundred of them executed as frauds.

And then there’s muti, which is really sinister. This is the sacrifice of humans, often young children, for their body parts, which are sold to the sorcerer’s clients to bring them good luck. I put up a piece I found on one of the YouTube channels about the amazing efforts of a Black British woman against it in Uganda. But it also appeared in Britain back in the early part of this century. The cops dragged the spine of a murdered boy, Adam, wrapped in various pieces of coloured cloth out of the Thames. The cloth’s colours were those of the muti cult, and it looked like child, probably 12 years old, had been sacrificed. And some African anthropologists have defended such murders. A little while ago one of them presented such a paper at an anthropological conference in Manchester. They claimed that these sacrifices were morally acceptable because Africans had a collective morality that saw that the sacrifice of an individual could benefit the community. Bear in mind that we are talking about the murder of children, whose body parts, including their genitals, are considered most effective if they have been hacked off while the victim was still alive. I believe that the anthropologist presenting the paper was asked to leave.

Indigenous African religion has also been the tool of White supremacist governments to keep Black Africans firmly in their very subordinate place. A few decades ago, a Zulu shaman, Credo Mutwa, had a book published in this country, in which he explained his mystical beliefs and practises. From what I’ve read, it was a mixture of native Zulu lore and western occultism, aimed at the New Age crowd. It was reviewed by the sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, who were very scathing. Mutwa, they claimed, had been a stooge of the Apartheid South African government during their retribalisation campaign. This stressed the indigenous, separate identities of the various South African tribes, who by then had become a Black proletariat. The intention was to keep the Black population divided so they were too weak to successfully challenge the Apartheid government.

Magonia have also several times stated that these books extolling the joys of indigenous life without western science and technology are all aimed at westerners, who have no intention of living like their ancestors did. I think it’s a fair point. The satirist Alan Coren expressed similar sentiments, set in a European context, in one of his pieces for Punch back in the 1970s. It’s about a very middle class, academic couple, who take over a French village and undo centuries of civilisation in order to return to them to what they see as the inhabitants’ natural, pre-Christian, pre-scientific state. But they themselves have no intention of rejecting scientific modernity. The piece ends with one of them stating he intends to write a paper on it. I think the same mindset is at work here.

As for Eruditu’s beliefs about the British museum and its exhibits, this is just animism, pure and simple, the belief that every rock and object has a soul. But I’ve heard very different things about the unhappy state of some of the exhibits. I’ve got a strong interest in psychical research, and a few weeks ago went to an online meeting about ghosts and hauntings in the British Museum. The Egyptology section has something of a cult as some of the visitors there are worshippers, who leave offerings. One spiritualist visitor, a medium, is supposed to have said that the mummies like being on display, as they feel they have a role to teach, but are frustrated at not being able to communicate with the living. This, of course, is completely the opposite of what Eruditu has said, and you can take or leave either or both depending on your attitude to mysticism. I many people are unhappy about the dead being excavated and put on display in museums, and don’t need a mystic to tell them this. But Egypt is certainly one of the great, founding civilisations of humanity, and Egyptology has massively extended our knowledge of the human past and this civilisation’s undeniable achievements and contribution.

Back to Africa. Way back in the 1980s I read an article by a Black African historian, a Muslim, who had presented his own series on the continent’s history on the Beeb. He lamented the fact that the west’s scientific and technological knowledge, inherited from ancient Greece and Rome, was not being transmitted to Africa. He’s right. After all, India and China have made massive strides in development this century because they have embraced science and technology. Sun Yat-Sen, the Chinese revolutionary who founded the Kuomintang, said at the beginning of his movement that ‘We say hello to Mr Science and Mr Democracy’. Sadly, democracy in China got left behind, but science has been taken up with a vengeance so that the country is now a centre of serious technological innovation in space and robotics. And it was helped in this by the early translators of western scientific texts, who referred to it not as western science, but as ‘the new science’. Something similar may well be needed in Africa.

This attempt to decentre and stigmatise western science and medicine has the potential to seriously harm Black advancement. I do think that there is a genuine potential for science and technology in Africa that is currently untapped and stifled. And Webb complained a few months or perhaps a year ago about a piece in New Scientist, in which a Black, female scientist called for more Blacks in lab coats. This movement, which sees Blacks and other indigenous peoples as non-scientific, runs counter to that. It reminds me of some of the scathing criticisms of non-western cultures by the early orientalists, who felt that these peoples would not be capable of assimilating western culture.

And I dare say the promoters of this movement would accuse me of racism, but I am afraid that there are real dangers of encouraging the dark side of African religion and spirituality through an uncritical acceptance of such shamanism.

If Webb is right, then the new director has not only ruined a once great museum, but she’s part of a larger movement that poses a threat to the whole tradition of the Enlightenment, a movement that genuinely endangers scientific advancement for some of the world’s peoples, who most need it.

Tony Blair Now Urging the Introduction of Biometric ID Cards

Mark Pattie, one of the many great commenters on this blog, posted this comment on my piece about Open Britain launching a campaign to get people to get photographic ID so they can vote:

‘Apparently Tony Blair has crawled out of whatever stone he’s been hiding these past 15 years to demand “digital ID”! I’m not voting Labour if Starmer goes along with this- haven’t Bunter Johnson et al crushed our civil liberties enough?’

Yes, Blair has, and sent the paranoid conspiracy fringe into a further frenzy of disgust and anxiety. But they’ve got a point. When Blair and New Labour were in government, they were considering the possibility of introducing biometric identity cards, which would hold all your personal details. The new electronic ID cards Blair is now urging to be introduced would also contain all your personal details, including insurance. It looks like the same idea. And before Blair started considering them, I think John Major’s Tory government was also reviewing the same idea.

The conspiracy fringe has condemned it as a totalitarian policy and fear that it could lead to the rise over here as the social credit state surveillance and control programme of communist China. Years ago I read a book about biometric ID cards, the ‘electronic burse’ that was supposed to introduce a wonderful, cashless society and other similar ideas. The book criticised all of them as threats to civil liberties by the state and banks. They’re not for your convenience, but to allow the state to collect every bit of information about you, including your private financial transactions. And they are also horrendously fatally flawed. Similar IDs were introduced, according to the book, in that beacon of personal liberty, Indonesia. The cards were touted as being completely impervious to fraud and being hacked and duplicated by criminals. Famous last words. Within three weeks, Indonesia’s crims had worked out how to hack into them and produce fakes. As for the electronic burse, something similar was trialled in Australia, and abandoned. The reason was that if they were lost or stolen, people were left completely without any money whatsoever.

Not only did this book, whose title I’ve long since unfortunately forgotten, expose these ideas as totalitarian and unworkable, it also announced the existence of a watchdog organisation, Privacy International, that had been set up to guard against them and similar attacks by the state on personal liberty by demanding access to people’s private information. I don’t know if this is still going, but the political class is going to push this idea once more, we really do need it.

I wonder what Stalin Starmer will do it about it. Hopefully he’ll drop the idea, and Blair’s benighted waffling will be ignored. It is indeed true that Cameron and Johnson have both done their best to wreck our liberties through the introduction of secret courts and legislation designed to limit the right to protest, along with Sunak’s proposal to destroy the right to strike. But I’m afraid Starmer is far to enamoured of Blair and his wretched legacy. And I honestly don’t think this policy was Blair’s idea. The fact that Major was also considering it suggests that it was suggested to him, probably by the same people Blair took over along with Tory policies.

The conspiracy fringe are extreme right-wing clowns who believe stupid myths about the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, the Masons, Jewish bankers, the World Economic Forum and the ‘globalists’, if not indeed Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. But this time they’re right.

Personal liberty in the UK is under attack, and must be defended.