Tories Demanding Khan Sack Black Culture Advisor for ‘Hateful’ Tweets – But Everything She Says Is Right!

GB News and the Depress have reported that London mayor Sadiq Khan is facing calls to sack his advisor on Black culture, Kemi Olivia Alemoru. Alemoru’s the former editor of Gal-Dem, and now folded magazine for women and non-binary people of colour. So what were these terribly tweets that she made that have caused such offence? Well, she called Johnson ‘the Grim Reaper’ and wondered why he hadn’t been attacked as others had got a slap for less. She also called the Tory government ‘murderers’ and said “They have stood by idly and let people’s families die taking too much time to make decisions that could save lives, using money to make their friends rich rather than make our pandemic infrastructure robust or useful.” The GB News article about this quotes a Conservative member of the London Assembly, Neil Garratt, as saying “It is quite wrong for Sadiq Khan to appoint someone with extreme and hateful views to a role meant to bring Londoners together”.

Really? ‘Cause I don’t see anything factually incorrect in what she has said. Johnson dithered about imposing the Covid lockdown, listening to stupid eugenicist wibblings about herd immunity instead of what real epidemiologists were telling him. As a result, people caught Covid and died. On other issues, Johnson showed himself far less interested in the actual business of government and more in publicity shots and campaigning. He seemed to be going off to Checkers every weekend during the Covid crisis. And unlike other PMs during national emergencies, he never attended the COBRA meeting about it.

But why stop with Covid? The work capability tests and benefit sanctions have led to untold deaths of the disabled and unemployed, who were thrown off benefits for trivial or utterly fabricated reasons. I remember that c. 2015 people were putting up on their blogs faces of the hundreds who had died, some of them in appalling deprivation and hunger. This included a mentally ill young Black man, who I think had been unable to get himself the insulin he needed for his diabetes. There was also a case of a young woman, who committed suicide with her baby, out of despair after she had her benefit cut off, and an elderly couple who starved to death. As for that vaunted privatisation, that Sunak thinks has done so much for the NHS, a study found that instead it had caused 350+ unnecessary deaths. Quite apart from the chaos caused by massive funding cuts, that left us unable to cope with the pandemic unlike our continental cousins. And Black Brits have been particularly hit by the Tories’ wretched austerity, so Alemoru has undoubtedly seen the greater harm Tories policies have had on the Black community. I despise Critical Race Theory, but Alemoru has a particular right to be angry as a woman of colour.

But could there be anything else that riles the Tories? Well, yes. She’s an admirer of Jeremy Corbyn. She’s supposed to have tweets: A vocal supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, who is rumoured to be pondering throwing his hat in the ring for the London mayor role, Alemoru once tweeted at 1am in November 2019: “I love Corbyn so much”, followed by a post in April 2020 that read: “CORBYN CAN NEVER GO HE LIVES IN MA HEART”. She isn’t alone. Corbyn is an inspiring speaker and people wanted and supported his socialist political agenda. Which is why he was smeared as a Commie, Trotskyite and anti-Semite, and his supporters purged from the Labour party.

And she also committed the heinous sin of dissing Keir Starmer, calling him a scab.

GB News states that she tweeted ‘No one can tell me that @Keir Starmer is not a Tory plant. He’s too s*** to be trying! He’s not trying to be anything to anyone for any reason. I wish he broke the law with that curry.”

She later referred to Starmer as a “SCAB” for sacking Labour MP Sam Tarry from the Shadow Cabinet for joining a strike picket line.’

I’ve thought exactly the same thing about Starmer. He and the Blairites are Thatcherite infiltrators. Various right-wing members of the NEC were on Conservative forums. One of them was even more vitriolic about Corbyn and the left than the Tories. And yes, I do question his support for the strikers. I’ve heard various explanations that, of course the Labour front bench supports the pickets and Sam Tarry shouldn’t have joined the line for various reasons. But Tarry’s sacking still looks like the actions of a Tory scab trying to ingratiate himself with the right.

Back to her comments about killing Johnson, she made it clear that she wasn’t calling for anyone to do it, just wondering why they hadn’t. So she was inciting people to commit a crime, merely expressing an opinion about our massively incompetent, corrupt and egotistical PM.

My verdict on the matter is:

Kemi Olivia Alemoru is right and should stay.

For further information, see:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/sadiq-khan-s-black-culture-advisor-sent-vulgar-tweets-called-tories-murderers-and-starmer-a-scab/ar-AA1aq5fM?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=7c0bf538585d4bac9c7947c23fb3550b&ei=22

When reading, remember that GB News is effectively becoming a mouthpiece of the Tory party. It now employs a number of Tory MPs as presenters, including Jacob Reet Snob, as well as Nigel Farage, former UKIP caudillo. I think I’ve also heard rumours that they want to give a post as presenter to Anne Widdecombe and Liz Truss.

When it comes to GB News, the remarks of a Labour MP while grilling the head of Ofcom is right: they offer a choice of opinions – right or far right.’

Diane Abbott Has Whip Withdrawn for Claiming Jews, Irish and Travellers Not Victims of Racism?

But she does recognise they were victims of prejudice.

I’ve just seen the headline for a video put up by Sky News, stating that Diane Abbott has had the Labour whip withdrawn. This looks like it’s connected to a story that broke this morning, that Grant Shapps was demanding Starmer take action about her because of a letter she wrote to the Independent. She claimed that although Irish, Jews and Travellers suffered prejudice, they didn’t suffer racism. They were no laws in America demanding that they sit in back of buses, like there were Blacks during segregation. This has caused upset, with Lord Wolfson stating that his ancestors weren’t forced to sit at the back of the bus, but in cattle trucks.

The problem here is that Abbott has made the same mistake Whoopi Goldberg did on the American tv programme, The View, which got her suspended for a couple of weeks. Goldberg confused ‘race’ with ‘colour’, and so asserted that the Holocaust wasn’t racist, as both Jews and Germans were White. In fact, the term ‘race’ has a number of meanings regarding ethnicity, of which skin colour is only one. At one time it also meant lineage and biological sex. Thus, 18th and 19th century genealogists talked about the noble race of such and such aristo, meaning his ancestors. It could also mean a specific nation. One of the great 19th century poets – it could have been Tennyson – talked about the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Norman’ race, presumably meaning English-speaking British. When Count Gobineau founded modern scientific racism in the 19th century, he also talked about what he saw as differences between European races, meaning different European nations.

The Nazi persecution of the Jews was based on race, even though its victims were White. Whereas the Medieval persecution of the Jews was largely based on their religion, the Nazis defined Jewishness in terms of race, so that secular Jews and Christians of Jewish heritage were also persecuted. Karaite Jews were spared, not because they rejected the Talmud, Judaism’s second holy book along with the Bible, but because they were viewed as descending from the Khazars and so racially not Jews.

The persecution of the Gypsies by the Nazis was also racist, and a very strong case could be made out that so is the traditional hostility to the Romany. The Romanies entered Britain in the 15th century. According to the stereotype, they had dark complexions. Romany is one of the Indian languages, and the Romanies’ are believed to have their origins in India’s Rajasthan, from where they moved westward over the centuries.

As for the Irish, they were placed well below Germanic northern Europeans in the 19th century racial hierarchies. I think that Gaels like Gaelic-speaking Irish and Scots were viewed as the most primitive of the Celtic peoples. I did hear that one particular 19th century British racial fanatic even claimed that they were lower than negroes. And Irish people could also be subject to the same prejudices and restrictions as Blacks, as shown in the signs ‘No dogs, no Blacks, no Irish’.

Abbott is certainly wrong to claim that the Jews, Travellers and the Irish weren’t victims of racism, simply because they were White. Her statement that they were comes from the attitude, shared with Goldberg, that only Blacks and people of colour can suffer racism. She and Goldberg nevertheless acknowledge that the Jews, Irish and Gypsies were victims of prejudice and whatever else may be said about the two, they definitely have not denied the Holocaust. Part of the problem is that by defining the hostility Jews and the others faced as prejudice, but not racism, she appears to be denying that it could be as severe as that inflicted on Blacks. This is clearly wrong, as shown through the long history of discrimination, pogroms and expulsions against the Jews, culminating in the Shoah.

But I don’t think that’s the real reason the Tories wanted Labour to suspend her, or Starmer’s willingness to do so. Some of it may be because the Tories are still smarting about the sacking of Dominic Raab, and wanted to take a head of their own. There were several videos posted yesterday by butthurt right-wingers moaning that Raab had been brought down by ‘snowflake’ civil servants and the bar for anti-bullying had been set too low and so on. But to me the main reason is that she’s a prominent left-winger and a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn.

This is about purging the Labour left until the Labour party is as right-wing and neoliberal as the Tories themselves. Abbott’s ignorance and tactlessness over the issue of race merely provided an excuse.

Oswald Mosley On Why He Called Himself a Socialist Despite Not Believing in Nationalization

I posted a video by Owen Jones taking apart the accusation that the Nazis were socialist a few days ago. Despite his claims to be one, Hitler stood for privatisation and cuts to the welfare state as well as racism and Social Darwinism, policies that are fundamental opposed to socialism. Oswald Mosley, like Hitler, also called himself a socialist despite not believing in socialist policies. He explains why he called his ideology ‘European Socialism in his answer to ‘Question 276: What is European “Socialism”? ‘in his book, Mosley: Right or Wrong? Mosley states

‘Any man has a right to call himself a socialist if he works for motives of public service rather than far private gain. That is why we used this phrase. Because our people have certainly proved that they work selflessly for the public good, and it is this spirit which is needed for the building of a new European system. But I am not going to use it in future because it has led to misunderstanding. British people in general think that socialism means the nationalization or bureaucratic control of industry, that it means the Labour party policy which was a concept of the last century. But Union Movement has never stood for anything of this kind. In practice, it has proved a mistake to use a phrase that can be misrepresented, and that is why I ceased to use it. I now use instead the term “European Service”.

Hitler took much of his ideology from right-wing authors like Moeller van den Bruck, who considered themselves revolutionary conservatives. One of these wrote a book called ‘The Worker’. They also called for what they considered to be socialism, but they also made it clear that by this they meant an ideology that encouraged individuals to work for the good of society as a whole, but did not mean the nationalisation of industry.

As for the question whether fascism is of the left or right, Mosley answered that in reply to ‘Question 285. Do you consider yourself to be of the Right or Left in politics?’ in his wretched book.

‘Neither. If any such description could be applied to us it would rather be the “hard centre”, the opposite to the present soft core. But I never use these terms in relation to our thinking, because they mean nothing to us. Our policy cuts clean across the “right” and “left” of the old world. These expressions are nonsensical when applied to us. In thought, we are no more Conservative than we are Socialist or Liberal. Our thinking is a creation of the modern age, though it has deeper roots in the European past than that of the old parties. I do not speak of our people as “right” or “left” but given them their true name: the vital forces of Europe.’

Fascism considers itself to be a third political ideology, neither left nor right, because it accepts private industry to subordinates it to state control. Thus, when the German neo-Nazis infiltrated one of the mainstream European parties in the ’80s, it wasn’t the left-wing SDP or the conservative Christian Democrats, but the liberal Freie Demokraten.

So much for Peter Hitchens’ idea that the Nazis were left-wing socialists.

Owen Jones Demolishes the Myth that the Nazis Were Socialists

This is an excellent video in which Guardian columnist Owen Jones attacks and refutes the right-wing myth that the Nazis were socialists, because Hitler said they were. In my experience, this is one the of the favourite accusations of the loony American libertarian right, who see any kind of state intervention in industry as a terrible infringement of sacred property rights and a form of Communism, leading ultimately to death camps and gulags. In fact, as Jones states in this video, there are plenty of examples where a country’s or political party’s name is deceptive. The German Democratic Republic, for example, wasn’t democratic, and the Russian Liberal Democratic Party is far-right. It’s the same with Hitler’s claim to be a socialist. He quotes Adolf Hitler to show that Hitler’s claim to be a socialist is based on his radical redefinition of the word, and his denial that the German Social Democrats, the Communists and Marxism itself are socialist. He goes further, and shows that the Nazis were Social Darwinists, who believed that the fittest would rise to the top while inferiors should stay at the bottom, replaced the socialist emphasis on class with race, and believed in competition as against socialist cooperation. He also makes the point that right-wing, non-fascist parties have also adopted anti-capitalist policies and rhetoric when it suits them. For example, Reform have recently announced they will nationalise the public utilities. As for the red in the Nazi flag, Hitler put it in their to troll the left so they would attend his meetings.

The Nazis’ real political orientation is shown by their cooperation with right-wing parties, like the German National People’s Party, the DNVP, and with German big business. In fact, 29 heads of industry wrote to President Hindenburg calling for him to appoint Hitler as chancellor. In return, Hitler made a speech to various industrialists announcing that private enterprise could not survive democracy and required a dictatorship to protect it. The Nazis received generous funding from firms like Krupps, I.G. Farben and Porsche, who greatly benefited from the Nazi regime and the exploitation of slave labour.

In power the Nazis followed right-wing, pro-capitalist policies such as the privatisation of industry, very much against the trend of the times. They also cut back the welfare provision that had been established by the Weimar Republic, and replaced it with their private charity, the Winterhilfe. All good, Thatcherite policies. Real socialist parties were smashed, as were the trade unions, and their members placed in concentration camps. They also forced women back into their traditional domestic role, again, not a socialist policy. There was a socialist element within the Nazi in the SA, the Nazis paramilitary group, but they were purged and murdered at the request of Hitler’s backers in big business.

The Nazis did establish a rigorous system of state control during the War, but Jones views this as a response to the conditions of wartime. Britain also had a planned economy, but it would be ridiculous to say that the British government was also socialist or communist.

The video is a response to a piece Peter Hitchen’s wrote in one of the middle-market tabloids. If it’s the Heil, they’re probably hoping that people won’t remember how they backed Mosley and his not-at-all socialist BUF. I’ve found other people repeating the same accusation that the Nazis were socialists on the net. However, one of these also claims that the SPD at the time of the German council revolution of 1919 was a Marxist revolutionary party. Well, it was partly based in Marxism, but also contained a revisionist right, led by Edward Bernstein. Bernstein had noticed that capitalism was not collapsing and the working class had become more wealthy during the 19^th century. He therefore recommended a reformist, evolutionary approach to socialism through democracy like the British Labour party and the Fabian Society. The party’s leader, Friedrich Ebert, was a democrat. One of the reasons Germany today is a democratic state rather than a Communist dictatorship was that Ebert got wind that the Communists in Berlin were about to declare a republic and so pre-empted them by declaring it first.

The same YouTuber also claims that the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ council during the revolution were Communist. Some were, some weren’t. A report by German officialdom stated that in many areas the councils were actually very moderate. In several places local authority had collapsed completely, and it was the councils who were keeping things running and the people fed. This particular YouTuber has put up a nearly five hour long refutation of the denials that Hitler was a socialist, but considering his biases and distortions I don’t think it’s worth watching to refute it.

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.

Home Schooling Crackdown: Who Is the Government Really Worried About – Alienated Whites or Muslims?

As some of the great commenters on this blog have pointed out, Simon Webb of History Debunked is a great advocate of home schooling. He makes no secret of this, and talks often about how he home schooled his daughter. He also used to run a blog called ‘Home School Heretic’. A few days ago he posted a piece about how the government was introducing legislation to make home schooling more difficult. He believes, or suggested, that this is a government attempt to enforce ideological conformity on the population by preventing parents from opting out of the official education system. He quoted part of the new legislation, which stated that it was concerned about the home schooling leading to the growth of parallel societies.

Now I do know people, who have home schooled their children because of concerns about the local schools in their area. Their children did really well, got their ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels and went on to university. As far as I can make out, they share the same values as the rest of mainstream British society. Back a decade and a half or so ago, there was a panic over the growth of Creationism and Intelligent Design. Various atheist and sceptics’ groups were panicking about what they saw as ‘science denialism’. A number of fundamentalist Christian groups also pushed home schooling as a way adults could avoid having their children indoctrinated with evolution and so put on the path to state mandated secularism and atheism. That furore eventually blew over. But a friend, who taught religion, told me that most Creationists were Muslims, as were, I think, most home schoolers. But all you ever heard about on the BBC and the mainstream news was about Christian Creationists. The wording of the document Webb was complaining about suggests to me that the government is really concerned about alienated Muslims taking their children out of school to give them a very conservative upbringing, but dare not say it outright. I’ve had the general impression that Christianity, because it has largely been the religion of the White majority of this country, is now a whipping boy for fears about the growth of radical religious movement in ethnic minorities. Christianity can be criticised without accusations of racism or Islamophobia, and Christians won’t, as a rule, start sending death threats.

For example, the right-wing media and vloggers have been discussing this week the criticism directed at somebody Forbes, the woman now tipped to replace Nicola Sturgeon. Forbes is a church-going Presbyterian with very traditional, social conservative views. She doesn’t approve of sex before marriage, gay marriage or the transgender ideology. And so various newspapers, including the Scum, have been denouncing her as unsuitable for the post of Scots First Minister. The same thing happened to the Lib Dems’ Tim Farron. He went to an evangelical church, which also viewed homosexuality as a sin. He was constantly asked, as no-other politico was, whether he shared their views with the implication that if he did, he shouldn’t be in politics. And the attack on religious individuals now includes gay groups, who disagree with them but maintain their right to hold such opinions. The EDIJester posted a piece this morning, which included the story that the LGB Alliance, a gay advocacy group, had been contacted by the Beeb for their comment. Their chief spokeswomen replied that they disagreed with her beliefs, but religion is a protected characteristic and she has a right to hold them. This was not what the Beeb’s producer wanted to hear. The Alliance was contacted again, and told that they would not be using them in the programme. If this is true, then the Beeb wanted to present it as debate in which Forbes would be denounced for her views by all gay groups.

The BBC has also produced very biased programmes misrepresenting religious issues before. A few years ago I picked up a book about political bias at the Beeb written by a Conservative. It was published during Blair’s government, and presented a convincing case. And one of these was a documentary about the Roman Catholic church’s abstinence-only policy towards contraception in Africa. The programme argued that this was causing Black Africans to suffer unwanted pregnancies and catch AIDS purely because of religious dogma. In fact, the abstinence-only policy, surprisingly, has been successful in cutting down on both. There is a very strong cultural hostility in African society to contraception. Nigel Barley, in his book The Innocent Anthropologist, remarks that there’s a joke that the only thing that will go through the Nigerian postal system and not be interfered with is a packed of condoms. In this environment, where contraception will be refused in any case, it makes sense to stress abstinence. But this conflicted with the received opinions of western liberals, who produced a deliberately deceptive programme.

In the case of Forbes and Farron, all that should be needed to be said is that although they personally may disapprove, they will not interfere in previous legislation. I think Forbes may have said that, but it obviously isn’t enough. But I do wonder if the same questions would be asked if she belonged to a non-Christian religion. I suspect she wouldn’t.

In the meantime, I think Webb can stop fretting. I don’t think the government is really worried about ultra-Conservative right-wingers like him. I think the real, unspoken fear is about Islam.

The Wellcome Collection and Its Purge of ‘Racist’, ‘Sexist’ and ‘Ableist’ Artefacts

Some of the great commenters on this blog have criticised an article I put up a few days about a video posted by our favourite YouTube (non)historian, Simon Webb, in which he attacks what he considers to be the ‘woke’ destruction of the Wellcome Collection by its new director, Melanie Keen. Keen has removed from display objects she considered to be ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ and ‘ableist’, and according to Webb, they’ve been replaced with one Eruditu, a female shaman. A number of the commenters have questioned whether Webb was telling the truth, particularly as they were unable to find any reference to Eruditu. However, it is true that Keen has indeed taken down objects and material that is considered problematic from the ‘Medicine Man’ gallery. The Art Newspaper published this piece on it by Tom Seymour on 28th November last year, ‘London’s Wellcome Collection accused of cultural vandalism after closing ‘racist, sexist and ableist’ display of artefacts ‘ The piece is subtitled ‘The institution asks “What’s a museum for?” as it shuts display devoted to objects amassed by its founder’. It begins

‘The Wellcome Collection, the London museum run by the Wellcome Trust, is to permanently close a curated display of medical artefacts amassed by its founder on the basis that it “perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories.”

The announcement, made on 26 November, pertains to a permanent display in the Wellcome Collection, a museum on the Euston Road, London, which opened in 2007. The display had been on show for the last 15 years, and was titled Medicine Man, a reference to its founder, Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936.

The exhibition was closed, permanently, on 27 November. The future usage of the artefacts remains unknown at this stage.

The decision has been met with dismay by some members of the museum community and the wider public who have likened it to cultural vandalism.

Medicine Man showed a selection of curated artefacts from the collection of Henry Wellcome, the founder of the trust and an American pharmaceutical entrepreneur whose company, Burroughs Wellcome & Company, eventually merged with other pharmaceutical organisations to form the modern-day drugs behemoth GlaxoSmithKline.

Wellcome amassed more than one million items relating to the history of medicine throughout the course of his life. The Wellcome Collection was founded as a place to display his collection, which he left to the trust in his will, to a visiting public for free. He also founded the Wellcome Trust, a registered UK charity that focuses on biomedical research. The charity is the largest in the UK, with assets of £36bn. The trust is credited with key findings in the development of drugs that combat the spread of certain cancers, as well as HIV.

Henry Wellcome’s collection was vast and varied. The Medicine Man display included the possessions of famous historical figures: visitors could view a toothbrush used by the French military commander Napoleon Bonaparte, shoes owned by the social reformer Florence Nightingale, the death mask worn by the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and the skull-handled walking stick of the Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin, founder of the theory of evolution, who saw the stick as a ‘memento mori’—a reminder of human mortality.

On show was also ephemera used by less ennobled people, like the good-luck charms and amulets carried by British, Russian and Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. Or an illustration, originally created for British news magazine Sphere, showing British soldiers being treated at a field hospital in Verdun, France, during the First World War.

But some of the artefacts in Henry Wellcome’s collection, as well as the way they were was displayed in the museum was, from the off, “problematic,” museum staff have said.

“The story we told was that of a man with enormous wealth, power and privilege,” the museum said in the course of a Twitter thread published last week. The thread opened with the question: “What’s the point of museums? Truthfully, we’re asking ourselves the same question.”

In a series of tweets and pictures, the museum made direct reference to a series of artefacts that it felt were racist. These includes a 1916 painting by Harold Copping titled A Medical Missionary Attending to a Sick African, which depicts an African person kneeling in front of a white missionary.

“The result was a collection that told a global story of health and medicine in which disabled people, Black people, Indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited—or even missed out altogether,” the thread read.

The closure of the display “marks a significant turning point, as we prepare to transform how our collections are presented,” the Wellcome Collection said in a statement on their website. The collection is now embarking on “a major project that will amplify the voices of those who have been previously erased or marginalised from museums, bringing their stories of health and humanity to the heart of our galleries,” it said.’

See https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/11/28/wellcome-collection-accused-of-cultural-vandalism-after-closing-racist-sexist-and-ableist-display-of-artefacts

There have also been accusations of institutional racism within the museum itself and especially racist behaviour and microaggressions against Black staff.

It therefore seems to me that there has been a purge of material for the ideological reasons stated by Webb. I’ll try and look further into the new display with the modern shaman, Eruditu. If this does exist, it may be that the museum is staging it as a corrective to what it sees as the Eurocentric bias of the previous display.

Candace Owens on the Historic Forcible Sterilisation of Greenland Inuit Women by Danish Government

Yes, I know this is Black American conservative Candace Owens of Republican youth activist group Turning Point USA. Yes, I know she made herself look massively stupid by denying that Adolf Hitler was a nationalist and stating that his policies would have been all right had he stuck to Germany. It’s a ‘no’ to both statements. Hitler was very much a nationalist and wanted to make the Germans the master race, Herrenvolk, of Europe. And the imprisonment of opposition political groups, the smashing of the trade unions, the sterilisation of those judged biologically unfit, the eugenic murder of the disabled, the imprisonment of the long-term unemployed, the mentally unwell and others in concentration camps, and the industrial murder of the Jews and Gypsies would still all have been wicked had they occurred only in Germany. But here she’s saying something genuinely liberal and anti-racist.

She reports that during the 60s and 70s, 4,500 Inuit women, including girls as young as twelve, were forcibly sterilised with the insertion of the IUD – the coil – by the Danish government. This was half the Inuit female population of 9,000 at the time, and was done as part of a programme by the Danish government to control their fertility.

This doesn’t surprise me. The Swedish government was sterilising those it considered biologically unfit until well into the ’90s. There were laws protecting minority ethnic groups, like the Gypsies proper, from sterilisation but they were overlooked when it came to the Tartare, another group of travellers, who were considered ethnically Swedish. This ruling was overturned in the 90s when the programme’s victims came forward. There was also an article a few years ago in the Independent reporting that the Czechoslovakian government had also been sterilising their Gypsy women against their will in order to control their numbers. My guess is that there was similar racist assumption that the Inuit were racially unfit and if their numbers grew too large, they would be a drain on resources. I’ve also heard of Gypsy children in Switzerland being given shock treatment in order to ‘cure’ them of their travelling culture and lifestyle. I don’t know if this will lead to human rights action and the payment of compensation, though it should.

Simon Webb’s Speech to the Traditional Britain Group: A Critique

One of the great commenters on this blog asked me the other day if I’d watched Simon Webb’s speech to the Traditional Britain Group, which has been posted up on YouTube. Webb is the man behind History Debunked, in which he criticises, refutes and comments on various historical myths and distortions. Most of these are against Black history, as well as racial politics. Occasionally he also presents his opinions on gay and gender issues. Like other YouTubers and internet commenters, you need to use your own discretion when watching his material. Sometimes, when he cites his sources, he’s right. At other times he’s more probably wrong. As much of his material is against mass immigration, particularly Black and Asian, and he believes that there is a racial hierarchy when it comes to intelligence, there’s some discussion of the man’s political orientation. He’s definitely right-wing, reading the Torygraph and attacking Labour as ‘high spending’. But it’s a question of how right-wing. Some people have suggested he’s English Democrat or supports a similar extreme right fringe party.

The other day he gave a speech at the Traditional Britain Group, which is a particularly nasty set of rightists within the Conservative party. There was a scandal a few years ago, you’ll recall, when Jacob Rees-Mogg turned up at one of their dinners. Mogg claimed he didn’t know how far right they were, but was shown to be somewhat economical with the actualite when someone showed that he’d actually been warned against associating with them. They are fervently against non-White immigration and some of them have a dubious interest in the Nazis and the Third Reich. I’ve also been told that their members include real Nazis and eugenicists, which is all too credible. They also want to privatise the NHS. I found this out after finding myself looking at their message board a few years ago. They were talking about how they needed to privatise the health service, but it would have to be done gradually and covertly because at the moment the masses were too much in favour of it. Which has been Tory policy for decades.

Webb’s speech is about half and hour long, and takes in slavery, White English identity and how Blacks have taken ownership of the subject so that it’s now part of theirs, White guilt over it and the industrial revolution and how White Brits are being made to feel ashamed of imperialism. He also blamed Tony Blair for mass immigration and claimed that it was due to this that the health service was collapsing.

The British Empire

He started off by saying that when he was young, everyone believed that the British Empire was a good thing and that we had brought civilisation to Africa and other parts of the world. I don’t doubt this. He’s older than me, and so I can believe that the received view of the Empire in his time was largely positive. Even the Labour party broadly supported imperialism. Its official stance was that Britain held these countries in trust until they were mature enough for self-government. This has changed, and there is a general feeling, certainly on the left, that it’s something we should be ashamed of. But this has come from historians and activists discussing and revealing the negative aspects of colonialism, such as the genocide and displacement of indigenous peoples, enslavement, forced labour and massacres. The end of empires tend to be particularly bloody, as shown in the various nationalist wars that ended the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the French possession of Algeria. Britain fought similar bloody wars and committed atrocities to defend its empire, as shown in the massive overreaction in Kenya to the Mao Mao rebellion. Jeremy Black, in his history of the British Empire, also argues that support for the empire fell away from the 1970s onwards as British youth became far more interested in America. I think the automatic condemnation of British imperialism is wrong and one-sided. It’s also somewhat hypocritical, as the same people condemning the British Empire don’t condemn other brutal imperial regimes like the Ottomans. It’s also being used by various post-colonial regimes to shift attention and blame for their own failings. But all this doesn’t change the fact that some horrific things were done during the Empire, which politicians and historians have to deal with. Hence the shame, although in my view there should be a space for a middle position which condemns the atrocities and celebrates the positive.

Britain and Slavery

He then talks about how slavery is now identified solely with Black transatlantic servitude. But he argues that the White English can also claim slavery as part of their identity. He talks of the first mention of the English in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, when pope Gregory the Great saw some English children for sale in the slave market in Rome. Asking who such beautiful children were, he was told they were Angles. At which Gregory punned, ‘Non Anglii, sed angeli’ – ‘Not Angles but angels’. At the time of the Domesday Book 10 per cent of the English population were slaves. And the mob that tore down Colston’s statue in Bristol were unaware that the city had been exported English slaves over a millennium before. These were shipped to the Viking colonies in Ireland – Dublin, Wexford and other towns – from whence they were then trafficked internationally. Slavery existed long before Black transatlantic slavery. The first record we have of it is from 4000 years ago in the form of document from the Middle East recording the sale of slaves and pieces of land. While they weren’t aware of transatlantic slavery at school, they knew slavery existed through studying the Bible. The story of Joseph and his brothers, and the Israelites in Egypt. But slavery has now become identified exclusively with Black slavery and is part of the Black identity. It’s because we’re supposed to feel guilty about slavery and feel sorry for Blacks that Black people over overrepresented in adverts, on television dramas and even historical epics, such as the show about the Tudors where half the actors were Black.

Webb is right about slavery existing from ancient times. There are indeed documents from the ancient near eastern city of Mari in Mesopotamia recording the sale of slaves along with land and other property, as I’ve blogged about here. One of the problems the abolitionists faced was that slavery existed right across the world, and so their opponents argued that it was natural institution. They therefore also claimed that it was consequently unfair and disastrous for the government to abolish it in the British empire. He’s right about Pope Gregory and the English slaves, although the word ‘Angli’ refers to the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that settled and colonised England with the Saxons and Jutes after the fall of the Roman Empire. Angles in Anglo-Saxon were Englas, hence Engla-land – England, land of the Angles, and Englisc, English. Bristol did indeed export English slave to Ireland. Archbishop Wulfstan preached against it in the 11th century. We were still doing so in 1140, when visiting clergy from France were warned against going for dinner aboard the Irish ships in the harbour. These would lure people aboard with such promises, then slip anchor and take them to Ireland. The Irish Vikings also imported Black slaves. One chronicle reports the appearance of a consignment of blamenn, blue or black men in Old Norse, in Dublin. David Olasuga has also claimed that they imported 200 Blacks into Cumbria. Bristol’s export of White English slaves is mentioned in a display about it in the city’s M Shed Museum, which also contains the statue of Edward Colston. I do agree with Webb that there is a problem with popular attitudes towards slavery. Its presentation is one-sided, so that I don’t think many people are aware of it and its horrors outside the British Empire, nor how White Europeans were also enslaved by the Muslim Barbary pirates. I very strongly believe that this needs to be corrected.

Black Overrepresentation on TV

I don’t think it’s guilt over slavery alone that’s responsible for the large number of Black actors being cast on television, particularly the adverts. I think this is probably also due to commercial marketing, the need to appeal to international audiences and attempts to integrate Blacks by providing images of multiracial Britain. Many adverts are made for an international audience, and I think the use of Blacks has become a sort of visual shorthand for showing that the company commissioning the advert is a nice, anti-racist organisation, keen to sell to people of different colours across the world without prejudice. At home, it’s part of the promotion of diversity. Blacks are, or are perceived, as acutely alienated and persecuted, and so in order to combat racism the media has been keen to include them and present positive images of Black life and achievement. There are organisations dedicated to this task, such as the Creative Diversity Network, as well as systems that grade companies according to how they invest in multicultural enterprises, such as television and programmes with suitably racially diverse casts. Webb has himself talked about this. He’s also stated that Blacks are disproportionately represented on television, constituting only 6 per cent of the population but a very large proportion of actors in TV programmes and adverts. This might simply be because other, larger ethnic groups, such as Asians, aren’t so concerned with entering the entertainment industry and so aren’t represent to the same extent. Hence, Blacks sort of stand in for people of colour as a whole. As for adverts, I’ve also wondered if some of this might be purely commercial – a concern to sale to an emergent, affluent, Black market, perhaps. It also struck me that it might also be a make work programme. As I understand it, there are too many drama graduates for too few roles. This is particularly going to hit Blacks and other ethnic minorities because Britain at the moment is still a White majority country. There have consequently been demands for colour blind casting, as in Armando Iannucci’s recent film version of Oliver Twist. A year or so ago one Black actor announced that there should be more roles for Blacks or else they would go to America. As for the casting of a Black woman as Anne Boleyn, this seems to follow the theatre, where colour blind casting has existed for years. I think it also follows the tacit demand to create an image of the British past that conforms to modern multicultural society rather than how it really was. And some of it, I think, just comes from the feeling that as modern Blacks are as British as their White compatriots, so they should not be excluded from appearing as historical characters who were White. I think these considerations are just as likely, or more likely, to be the causes of the disproportionate number of Blacks appearing on camera than simply pity for them as the victims of slavery.

Blair Not Responsible for Mass Immigration

Now we come to his assertion that Blair was responsible for mass immigration. When he made this declaration, there were shouts, including one of ‘traitor’. I don’t believe that Blair was responsible for it, at least, not in the sense he means. The belief that he was, which is now widespread on the anti-immigrant right, comes from a single civil servant. This official claimed that Blair did so in order to change the ethnic composition of Britain and undermine the Tories. But did he really? This comes from a single individual, and without further corroboration, you can’t be sure. In fact Blair seems to have tried to cut down on immigration, particularly that of non-Whites. In order to dissuade people from coming here, he stopped immigrants from being able to apply for welfare benefits. The food banks now catering to native Brits were originally set up to feed those immigrants, who were no longer eligible for state aid. I also recall David Blunkett stating that they were going to cut down on immigration. The Guardian also accused Blair of racism over immigration. He had cut down on non-White immigration from outside Europe, while allowing White immigration from the EU and its new members in eastern Europe. The right had also been concerned about rising Black and Asian immigration for decades, and in the 1980s Tory papers like the Depress were publishing articles about unassimilable ethnic minorities. This started before Blair, and I don’t think he was deliberately responsible for it.

But I believe he was responsible for it in the sense that many of the migrants come from the countries Blair, Bush, Obama and Sarco destroyed or helped to destroy in the Middle East, such as Libya, Iraq and Syria. Blair had made some kind of deal with Colonel Gaddafy to keep migrants from further south in Libya, rather than crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. This was destroyed when Gaddafy’s regime was overthrown by Islamists. The result has been the enslavement of Black African migrants, and renewed waves of refugees from North Africa fleeing the country’s collapse.

He also stated that the industrial revolution, which was something else that was traditionally a source of pride, is now considered a cause for shame instead. Britain had been its birthplace and given its innovations to the rest of the world. However, we are now expected to be ashamed of it through its connection to slavery. The cotton woven in the Lancashire mills came from the American slave south, while sugar came from the slave colonies of the Caribbean. We’re also supposed to be ashamed of it because it’s the cause of climate change, for which we should pay reparations.

The Industrial Revolution and Climate Change

Okay, I’ve come across the claim that the industrial revolution was financed by profits from the slave trade and that it was based on the processing of slave produced goods. However, this is slightly different from condemning the industrial revolution as a whole. You can lament the fact that slavery was a part of this industrialisation, while celebrating the immense social, technological and industrial progress itself. After all, Marx states in the Communist Manifesto that it has rescued western society from rural idiocy. The demand that Britain should feel ashamed about the industrial revolution because of climate change comes from Greta Thunberg. It is, in my view, monumentally stupid and actually shows an ignorance of history. It’s based on an idealisation of pre-technological societies and an idealisation of rural communities. It’s a product of European romanticism, mixed with contemporary fears for the future of the planet. But the agrarian past was no rural idyll. People in the agricultural societies before the urbanisation of the 19th century had very utilitarian attitudes to the environment. It was a source of resources that could be used and exploited. The nostalgia for an idealised rural past came with the new generation of urban dwellers, who missed what they and their parents had enjoyed in the countryside. And rural life could be extremely hard. If you read economic histories of the Middle Ages and early modern period, famine is an ever present threat. It still was in the 19th century. The Irish potato famine is the probably the best known example in Ireland and Britain, but there were other instances of poverty, destitution and starvation across the UK and Europe. Industrialisation has allowed a far greater concentration of people to live than would have been possible under subsistence agriculture. Yes, I’m aware that overpopulation is a problem, that industrial pollution is harming the environment and contributing to the alarming declining in animal and plant species. But technological and science hopefully offer solutions to these problems as well. And I really don’t want to go back to a subsistence economy in which communities can be devastated by crop failure.

The call for climate reparations, I think, comes from Ed Miliband, and in my view it shows how out of touch and naive he is. I have no problem the Developed World giving aid to some of those countries threatened by climate change, such as the Pacific islands which are threatened with flooding due to the rise in sea levels. But some countries, I believe, are perfectly capable of doing so without western help. One of these is China, which also contributes massively to carbon emissions and which I believe has also called for the payment of climate reparations. China is an emerging economic superpower, and I see no reason why the west should pay for something that it’s doing and has the ability to tackle. I am also very sceptical whether such monies would be used for the purposes they’re donated. Corruption is a massive problem in the Developing World, and various nations have run scams to part First World donors and aid agencies from their money. When I was at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum one of these was a scheme for a hydroelectric dam in Pakistan. The Pakistani government was calling for western aid to finance the project. Britain refused, sensing a scam, for which we were criticised. Other countries happily gave millions, but the dam was never built. All a fraud. I suspect if climate reparations were paid, something similar would also happen with the aid money disappearing into kleptocrats’ pockets. There’s also the problem of where the tax burden for the payment of these reparations would fall. It probably wouldn’t be the rich, who have enjoyed generous tax cuts, but the British working class through indirect taxes. In short, it seems to me to be a colossally naive idea.

But these ideas don’t seem to be widespread. When he announced them, there were shouts from the audience to which Webb responded that it was coming, and they should wait a few years. Perhaps it will, but I’ve seen no enthusiasm or even much mention of them so far. They were mentioned during the COP 27 meeting, and that’s it. Thunberg’s still around, but after all these years I think she’s somewhat passe. At the moment I don’t think these ideas are issues.

Mass Immigration Not the Cause of NHS Crisis

Now let’s examine his statement that it’s due to immigration that the NHS is in the state it’s in. This is, quite simply, wrong. He correctly states that while Britain’s population has grown – London’s has nearly doubled and Leicester’s grown by 30 per cent – there has been no similar provision of medical services. No new hospitals have been built. As a result, where once you could simply walk into your doctor’s and expect to be seen, now you have to book an appointment. And when it comes to hospitals, it’s all the fault of immigrants. He talks about a specific hospital in London, and how the last time he was in that area, he was the only White Brit in the queue. This was because immigrants don’t have GPs, and so go to the hospital for every problem. We also have the problem of sick and disabled people from the developing world coming to the country for the better services we offer. A woman from the Sudan with a special needs child will therefore come here so that her child can have the treatment it wouldn’t get in the Sudan.

I dare say some of this analysis is correct. Britain’s population has grown largely due to immigration. One statistic released by a right-wing group said that immigration was responsible for 80 per cent of population growth. It’s probably correct, as Chambers Cyclopedia stated in its 1987 edition that British birthrates were falling and that it was immigration that was behind the rise in the UK population. I don’t know London at all, and I dare say that many of the immigrants there may well not have had doctors. I can also quite believe that some immigrants do come here for our medical care. There was a case a few weeks ago of a Nigerian woman, who got on a flight to London specifically so that she could have her children in a British hospital. I think this was a case of simple health tourism, which has gone on for years, rather than immigration.

But this overlooks the fact that the problems of the NHS has been down to successive Thatcherite regimes cutting state medical care in Britain all under the pretext of making savings and not raising taxes. Thatcher closed hospital wards. So did Tony Blair, when he wasn’t launching his PFI initiative. This was supposed to build more hospitals, but led to older hospitals being closed and any new hospitals built were smaller, fewer and more expensive. Cameron started off campaigning against hospital closures, and then, once he got his backside in No. 10, carried on with exactly the same policy. Boris Johnson claimed that he was going to build forty hospitals, which was, like nearly everything else the obese buffoon uttered, a flat lie. And Tweezer, Truss and Sunak are doing the same. Doctors surgeries have also suffered. Many of them have been sold off to private chains, which have maximised profits by closing down those surgeries that aren’t profitable. The result is that people have been and are being left without doctors. If you want an explanation why the NHS is in the state it is, blame Thatcher and her heirs, not immigrants.

Conclusion

While Webb has a point about the social and political manipulation of historical issues like the slave trade and the British Empire, these aren’t the reasons for the greater appearance of Black actors and presenters on television. Blair wasn’t responsible for mass immigration, and it’s underfunding and privatisation, not immigration, that’s responsible for the deplorable state of the health service. But he’s speaking to the wrong people there anyway, as the TBG would like to privatise it.

I am not saying it is wrong to discuss these issues, but it is wrong to support a bunch of Nazis like the TBG, who will exploit them to recreate all the social inequality, poverty and deprivation of pre-modern Britain.

Did H.G. Wells Predict or Invent the Grays?

I’ve been reading various SF books over the past few days. These have been the collections of classic SF stories edited by the British Library’s Mike Ashley. One of these is a history of British SF in 100 stories. This doesn’t collect the stories themselves, but consists of precis of what he judges to be the 100 best British SF stories. It begins with H.G. Wells, as you’d expect and includes a number of other well-known SF authors from the period, like Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. But there are many others that are now obscure, but seem to be really interesting and sometimes chillingly prescient. For example, the 1918 novel, Journey to Meccania, is a terrible warning of what will happen if Germany wins the War and dominates Europe. It’s the account of visit to Meccania, a Nazi-style totalitarian superstate in 1970 by a Chinese traveller, Mr Ming. Another story, written by Charlotte Haldane, the wife of the scientist J.B.S. Haldane, written in 1932, describes another racist, eugenicist dystopia. This is a state in which the government rigidly controls who may be allowed to marry and breed. The scientist, who has founded this totalitarian society, has also created a poison designed to only kill Blacks. At the moment, this is the only such toxin of its kind, though the story states that there are others working on a similar poison to destroy east Asians. In the ’60s or ’70s the South African secret service, BOSS, was really working on a racist poison like it. The book also uses the term ‘holocaust’, though not in connection with the Jews. Charlotte Haldane was Jewish. Her maiden name was Franken, and so I wonder if she was just looking at the direction the contemporary craze for eugenics and racial ‘science’ was going and showing just how horrific this would be in reality. And it did become horrific reality in Nazi Germany.

Back to H.G. Wells, the book obviously discusses The Time Machine, possibly the first serious book about time travel. Wells based the future races in the book, the Eloi and the Morlocks, on what would happen if present social trend continued. The Eloi are the descendants of the aristocracy and the artists, living above ground but farmed like cattle by the Morlocks, the descendants of the working class, who have been forced underground to tend the machines. Wells set that part of the story 800,000 years in the future because that was when he predicted, using then current theories of speciation, that the two post-human species would have diverged. Apparently the book originally included a section on racial degeneration, which was later cut from the book and published as The Gray Man.

Years ago, Martin Kottmeyer, one of the contributors to the small press, sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, ran a series of articles ‘Varicose Brains’ on how the Grays of UFO lore conform to the aliens in much SF literature. These were based on contemporary theories of evolution, which predicted that as humanity advanced the brain would develop and become larger while the body would consequently become smaller. As humanity became more intelligent and intellectual, so it would become less sensual and food become increasingly simpler. The result would be small people with large heads and atrophied digestive systems. This sounds exactly like the Grays. And some UFO theories state that these are the degenerate remnants of an alien race following mutation and racial decline due to nuclear war. But it’s also the name Wells’ gave his future, racially degenerate humans that also fascinates me: the Gray Man. Did Wells invent the Gray as a cultural motif, which then became incorporate into the UFO experience in the late 1960s and ’70s following the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill? Or did he just predict the figure’s appearance based on nothing more than his literary imagination and scientific insight?

And there are other connections between UFO encounters and early SF. One female SF writer in the ’20s and ’30s wrote a story about Martians coming to Earth to take water back to their own world. UFOs have often been seen over water, including instances like the Joe Simonton encounter, where they appear to be siphoning it into their craft. And then there’s the film The Man Who Fell To Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg and starring David Bowie, in which an alien travels from his desert world to bring back some of Earth’s water. Is it a case of the human imagination taking these images and narratives and turning them into accounts of encounters with aliens during extreme psychological experiences? Or is the phenomenon behind the UFO encounters taking these images and stories and manipulating them? Or is it just coincidence?