One of the books I’ve been particularly enjoying at the moment is Linda Colley’s The Gun, The Ship and the Pen. Subtitled Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World, the book argues that the increased costs of warfare due to the distances involved and that it now involved fighting on both land and sea forced governments around the world to issue constitutions conceding some rights to their citizens in return for their continued support for these military ventures. Some of these constitutions were by people, hailed as heroes of superhuman genius in their time but now forgotten, whose proposed governmental systems were far more radically democratic than those of the American Revolutionaries.
The book begins with the Corsican nationalist, Pasquale Paoli. a junior officer who had served in the armies of various Italian states while at the same time seeking to educate himself at Naples University, in the 1750s Paoli led a revolt against the Genoese, then Corsica’s overlords. His proposed constitution, written on his used letters due to an acute paper shortage on this poor and backward island, set up a tricameral parliament, with one chamber devoted to running the economy. He was made head of state and the country’s armed forces for life. In return for these powers, his constitution granted the vote to every adult male. Sadly, this experiment in democracy did not last. The Genoese, I think, invaded and re-established their rule, followed by a later invasion by the French that annexed the island.
One of the most strikingly progressive of the proposed constitutions was that of the Mexican warlord, Colonel Agustin de Iturbide. Iturbide hoped to established an autonomous, but possibly still royalist, Mexico. In his constitution of February 1821, the 12th clause established that Europeans, Africans and Indians were to have equal political and social rights, regardless of persons. Copies of this constitution were printed and sent all over the world. One reached Ireland, where the liberal Roman Catholic Connaught Journal, drew a parallel between the oppressed conditions of Blacks and Amerindians across the Atlantic, and the disenfranchised and depressed condition of most of the Roman Catholic Irish peasantry. Its editor therefore enthused about it, declaring that a similar clause and constitution was needed for the Emerald Isle.
Also in the early 19th century, the celebrated Indian reformer, Raja Rammohan Roy, who married a Bristol girl and is now buried in a splendid sepulchre in the city’s Arnos Vale Cemetery, believed that the early Indian states also possessed written constitutions granting their peoples civil rights. He was so influential that contemporary editions of Blackstone’s History of the Laws of England state that the Indians had their own counterparts to the Anglo-Saxon witangemot. The witan was the council of nobles and churchmen which advised the king, the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the feudal grand conseil in France. But 19th century liberals saw it as a form of parliament.
This is a fascinating book revealing constitutional experiments across the world. Some of the most interesting are by people most of us have never heard of, and I hope to give it a full review later.
A few days ago, Frank Furedi published a piece about ‘woke’ academic attacks on key figures of the British literary and scientific canon because someone in a series of universities, schools and museums had decided that they were racist and colonialist. This included Chaucer, who was denounced as a rapist, racist and colonialist, Shakespeare, and Milton. Milton was an opponent of slavery, but he didn’t escape censure because he believed Whites were more beautiful than Blacks. Newton came in for it, because despite discovering gravity and revolutionising physics, he ‘may have benefited from colonialism.’ Sydney Opera House apologised for classical music. It was racist, because traditionally White culture views it as the highest musical form. Then there was the case of the Cambridge Archaeological, Museum, which staged a display of Greek statues drawing attention to their ‘whiteness’. The classics department at the same university also the role the classics have played in the development of racism. The article also described how one American high school English teacher boasted online about getting the Odyssey banned from the school library. At the same time, the science departments at British universities are under pressure to decolonise their curricula, because science was a tool the British Empire used to exploit and oppress its subject peoples. This is all being pushed by the Quality Assurance Agency, which also wanted Maths students to be told that some of the statistical techniques had been pioneered by eugenicists. It demanded instead that its teaching should also promote diversity. Furedi rightly considered this an attack on key figures in western culture motivated by the contemporary anti-racism craze.
I’m not a fan of Furedi. I think he started out as one of the Living Marxism crew, before joining the Libertarian hard right with the rest of them after the fall of Communism. But he’s right here. He writes that the ‘decolonisation project of British universities has no interest in academic learning. Its objective is to discredit and take down the leading historical figures in the sciences and humanities. When I say take down, I mean literally take down. In an attempt to emulate the Rhodes Must Fall campaign targeting the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, students at Cape Town University adopted the phrase ‘science must fall’! It appears that discrediting science is a small price to pay for decolonising some of the most precious achievements of humanity.’
And concludes
‘The campaign designed to discredit and de-authorise the humanities should concern us all, for what is at stake is the status of a cultural legacy that has endured for thousands of years and inspired people throughout the ages. If we lose sight of the artistic, literary and intellectual contribution of Ancient Greece and Rome, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we risk falling under the spell of cultural illiteracy. We owe a great debt to the humanities, for they provided the foundation for developing human civilisation’s moral and scientific insights.
The assault on knowledge threatens to corrode and discredit the intellectual foundation of our civilisation. Orwell’s prediction that by 2050 Newspeak will triumph no longer seems farfetched. Every time an academic subject or a field of intellectual or artistic endeavour becomes decolonised, we risk losing sight of what we have lost. As I noted elsewhere, society is coming under the spell of historical amnesia. That is why we must raise the alarm and take action to protect our arts and sciences from the cultural vandals stalking our institutions.’
It’s not hard to find rebuttals against these cancellations. Past people had very different cultural values, and it is wrong to expect them to share those of ‘woke’ 21st century militant anti-racists. But their attitudes towards race and colonialism does not invalidate their work, any more than any other aspect of their personal lives. Isaac Newton is a case in point. He was an extremely difficult, bigoted, quarrelsome individual. He deliberately lectured in Latin so that as few people as possible could understand his theories, and had a venomous hatred of Roman Catholicism. His descriptions of what he hoped would happen to Catholic nuns apparently is very misogynistic. He also had a long-running feud with the German scientist and philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, over who invented calculus first. During the feud, they both reviewed each others’ books under pseudonyms, along with other underhand tactics. But this doesn’t invalidate Newton as one of the key figures in the history of western science.
As for Milton, many peoples across the world believe that their own race is the most beautiful of all. This includes Black peoples, who regarded Whites as ugly, as described by anthropologists. But Milton’s Paradise Lost is a classic of British, and indeed world literature. As is another of his works, the Areopagita, which is one of the first pleas for freedom of speech. I think the various people and institutions intent on censoring and controlling what we say for ideological reasons should be forced to read it, along with Mill’s On Liberty, until they can recite in their sleep.
Moving on to the ‘whiteness’ of Greek statuary, it’s been known for a long time that in their heyday they were painted in bright colours. They only appear white because the paint has worn off over the millennia. And you can find white statues from earlier cultures in the Middle East going back to the Sumerians.
All these attacks ultimately come from the Critical Social Justice conception of ‘Whiteness’. White culture is innately racist and oppresses people of colour. Anti-racists should therefore insist on its decolonisation in order to create a more inclusive and diverse culture.
But in these attacks on key western figures and culture, it has moved beyond simply recognising the value of other peoples and their discoveries into an attack on White culture itself.
I’ve been debating with myself whether to repost anything by Barry Wall, the EDIJester, for a little while now. I really don’t share his political opinions – he’s a Telegraph-reading Tory, who thinks that five years of the Labour party in power will totally wreck this country but will have the benefit of leading to another 25 years of Tory rule, as he says in this video. He also thinks that the NHS needs to be scaled back as it’s a socialist state. Well, it’s not state socialism that’s responsible for the increase in bureaucracy, but privatisation. He is very well-informed on the immense damage Queer Theory and the transgender ideology has done and is doing to gays, lesbians and vulnerable young people, principally autistic and gender nonconforming children. However, he is very forthright and outspoken in the scorn and sheer loathing he has for the ideology and those pushing it. While I share his views there, I’m very much aware that many of the great readers of this blog don’t, and I don’t want to insult them. But this issue’s a bit different. It’s about the Critical Social Justice invasion of STEM and in particular the teaching of evolution and ecology.
In the video, he reads out and adds his own comments to a review from the website ‘Why Evolution Is True’, of a scientific paper demanding that the teaching of evolution and ecology should be revised to include the subject’s racism in order to combat modern racism and ‘White complicity’. He states that it’s the kind of material that comes from Black activists like Ibrahim X. Kehindi. This isn’t anti-racism as you and I would normally understand it, where people look past skin colour and disregard past prejudices in order to appreciate the person within. No. Critical Race Theory states that all Whites occupy a privileged position at the apex of society, while all Blacks are brutalised and discriminated against by the system. This has to be laid bare, and Whites must feel guilty about their past in order to make up for past or present racial inequities. This last word does not mean equality in the sense of equality of opportunity. It means equality of result. Thus, lower performing Blacks must be given preferential treatment over Whites and now Asians through affirmative action schemes.
The Jester’s a meritocrat, who believes that firms should only hire and employ the best people, regardless of race. But this is under attack from the Critical Social Justice adherents, who, following the pedagogical theories of the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freyre, wish to turn teaching into a form of political indoctrination, with the individual subjects merely vehicles for this. The Humanities have been the hardest hit by this attitude, but it’s beginning to infect the science subjects as well. This is particularly pernicious because of the immense power of the STEM subjects to affect the quality of people’s lives. Scientists, engineers and medical professionals need to rely on object fact. But postmodernism, of which Critical Race Theory is a part, rejects objective knowledge as merely a product, or rather a prejudice of western society, and criticises the exclusion of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’. The scientific paper being reviewed does exactly the same.
Now I’d normally avoid sites like ‘Why Evolution Is True’. In my experience, many of them appeared in the first decade of this century as a response to the rise of Creationism and Intelligent Design. They tended to be run by militant atheists, who sneered at people of faith generally when they weren’t attacking them for not believing in evolution. This followed the New Atheists and its leaders, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and so on. Dawkins is known for his particularly bitter hatred of religion, but to be fair he was also very critical of postmodernism. And it’s now postmodernism, in the form of its Critical Social Justice ideologies, that are taken over from religion as the main threat to rationality and objective science.
Evolution is particularly vulnerable to criticisms about its racist past because it was incorporated into the racial anthropology and pseudo-scientific racism that arose in the late 19th century. But Europeans had already developed racial hierarchies with northern Europeans at the top and Aboriginal Australians at the bottom before Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Also, other cultures have also developed their own racial prejudices and hierarchies. Medieval Muslim scholars speculated that White people owed their complexions and temperaments, which were inferior to those of brown Arabs and Asians, because they lived in northern regions and so had not been properly cooked by the sun. Blacks were also inferior, but for the opposite region. They lived in hotter, southern climates and so had been overcooked. And in the First Millennium AD, some Chinese scholars decided that Whites were the product of interbreeding with monkeys. And at one level, I think many students of evolution are already aware of its racist past through works like The Mismeasure of Man by the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
European readers may be surprised at the accusations of racism against ecology, but the American ecological movement is tainted with a racist past. Some of those who established the first national parks in America were fervent racists, who hated Blacks and indigenous Americans. But many of them were also otherwise progressive liberals, who believed in a mixed economy, welfare provision and strong trade unions, as Thomas Sowell points out in his book, Intellectuals and Race. But obviously, racism is only part of this, as I think much of the American ecological movement also sprang from ordinary, working class Americans, who yearned for the beauty of the natural world their parents and grandparents had left when they migrated from the farms to seek work in the cities.
Militant Black activists have also developed their own splenetic racist ideologies, in which Whites are at the bottom. These have been developed by the Afrocentrists and the Black Muslim organisations like the Nation of Islam. The latter teaches that Whites were created thousands of years ago by an evil Mekkan scientist in order to destroy Black racial purity. As time went on, however, they also interbred with lepers and dogs. Now, if the teaching of mainstream subjects like evolution and ecology has to include these subjects’ racist past, the argument could be levelled that no teaching about Afrocentrism and Black Islam should exclude mentioning the racism of these ideologies and religions. But I can see real resistance coming to the mere suggestion of this.
This isn’t about informing students of a particularly evil side of their disciplines, but about using that history as a means of indoctrinating them with an extreme and controversial racial ideology at the expense of the subject itself. CRT should have no place in the curriculum.
‘The prestigious science journal, Nature, reported on 31st May 2023, that the Indian education authority is dropping several key scientific and political subjects from the education curriculum for pupils under 16. the magazine reported:
In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements or sources of energy.
The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.
Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.
Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. “Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it,” says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. “It’s that fundamental to biology.” The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists”.
Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.’
Some material was cut from the curriculum last year in order to lighten it during the Covid pandemic. It was expected that it would be reinstated once the pandemic and the lockdown was over, but this hasn’t happened. Academics and educationalists appear perplexed by the decision, but it looks like it comes from the RSSS, the militant Hindu nationalist organisation linked to Modi’s BJP.
[Amitabh] Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.
Aditya Mukherjee, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, says that changes to the curriculum are being driven by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a mass-membership volunteer organization that has close ties to India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. The RSS feels that Hinduism is under threat from India’s other religions and cultures.
“There is a movement away from rational thinking, against the enlightenment and Western ideas” in India, adds Sucheta Mahajan, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University who collaborates with Mukherjee on studies of RSS influence on school texts. Evolution conflicts with creation stories, adds Mukherjee. History is the main target, but “science is one of the victims”, she adds.’
One of the other subjects cut from science teaching is a section ‘Why We Fall Ill’, which seems to me to be particularly wicked and dangerous. Everyone really needs to know about the causes of disease, regardless of their level of education or the country in which they live. This removal threatens to increase the incidence of disease in a country where many people lack access to medicine.
In an article from the previous day, 30 May, Nature reported the Indian education authority’s, NCERT’s, reasons for the changes
‘NCERT says that ‘rationalization’ is needed when content overlaps with material covered elsewhere in the curriculum, or when it considers content to be irrelevant. Moreover, India’s 2020 National Education Policy says that students need to become problem-solvers and critical thinkers, and it therefore advocates less memorization of content and more active learning.
NCERT also wants “a rootedness and pride in India, and its rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems and traditions”. Some people interpret this as a motivation to remove the likes of Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, and instead use the time to learn more about India’s precolonial history of science.’
But it comments
‘India is not the only postcolonial country grappling with the question of how to honour and recognize older or Indigenous forms of knowledge in its school curricula. New Zealand is trialling the teaching of Māori ‘ways of knowing’ — mātauranga Māori — in a selection of schools across the country. But it is not removing important scientific content to accommodate the new material, and for good reason.’
It all reminds me of the furore back in the 1990s when Christian Creationists in Kansas banned evolution from being taught in their schools. The great comedian, the late Bill Hicks joked about it, saying ‘In many parts of our troubled world, people are crying ‘Revolution! Revolution’. In Kansas they’re shouting ‘Evolution! Evolution! We want our opposable thumbs’. There have been periodic concerns ever since about the teaching of evolution and Creationism in schools. Western scientists have been particularly worried about Creationism, or Creation Science, being taught as scientific fact. There was particularly controversy nearly two decades ago with the emergence of Intelligent Design, and the Discovery Institute. Intelligent Design accepts evolution, but considers that it has carried out by a God or other intelligent force that has actively intervened at specific points. One form of Intelligent Design, proposed by the cosmologist Fred Hoyle in his 1980s book, Evolution from Space, is that the creator may have been an extradimensional computer civilisation. For years discussions of Creationism and its supposed threat to science was chiefly confined to Christianity. There was some discussion of the rise of Islamic Creationism in Turkey, but from what I recall this was mostly confined to the internet. India at that time seemed not to be experiencing any similar concerns about evolution or other doctrines which may have challenged traditional religious teaching.
This looks very much like it’s going to damage India as an emerging global economic and technological force. Yes, the country has a millennia-old tradition of scientific and medical innovation, but the country has become a scientific powerhouse as well through embracing modern, western science, just as its neighbour China has done. I’ve been particularly struck by the country’s ambitious space programme, which has made some remarkable advances and has made India a space power. If these changes to its schools curriculum continue, I can see the tradition of scientific excellence that the country has done so much to build being severely handicapped.
I also note the similarity of its stance on the environment to various right-wing political lobby groups and think tanks to ban the teaching of environmentalism and climate change, and to make us all believe that the massive pollution of the environment by business isn’t happening and won’t cause permanent damage. Trump when he was in the White House passed legislation preventing the American environmental watchdog from publishing anything about climate change of the environment. This partly came from oil industry, whose own, astroturf climate organisations has a policy of buying up independent climate analysis laboratories and using them to turn out its own, anti-climate change propaganda.
Regarding the excision of material on politics, I’ve got the impression that India is trying to establish itself as the true home of democracy, looking back to its traditional village councils or panchayats. But there seems to be a more sinister purpose to the removal of chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy, as well as a chapter on the industrial revolution for older students. It looks here like the BJP and its storm troopers are trying to stop India’s young people from acquiring the historical and political knowledge to understand how their country could be – or actually is – being taken towards authoritarianism and Fascism.
Vicious totalitarian governments of both left and right, from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia, have all attacked and refashioned science, history and education as part of their programmes. Now it seems India, under the BJP, is also going down this path.
I’ve already put up a piece about some of the events at this year’s Arise Festival. Yesterday I had a further email about their programme, which added these events to it.
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4) NHS @ 75 – How can we repair & restore it after 13 years of austerity?
Online. Wed. June 7, 18.30. Register here // Share & Invite here // Get Festival Ticket here // Retweet here
With: Nadia Whittome MP // John Lister (Keep Our NHS Public) // John Puntis (Doctors for the NHS.) // Chloe Brooks (North West. Rep, Labour Students.) July marks 75 years of our NHS. In light of Starmer and Streeting’s recent remarks, join the discussion on how we can end the current crisis, & secure its future as a universal publicly-owned, public service for all.
Hosted by the Labour Assembly Against Austerity at Arise 2023.
5) Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist & Scourge of Empire.
Friday June 9, 1pm, Online. Register here //Share & Invite here // Retweet here // Get festival ticket here
With Katherine Connelly – author of ‘Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire.’ Sylvia Pankhurst dedicated her life to fighting oppression & injustice. This event will look at how this courageous & inspiring campaigner is of huge relevance today.
Register here to get a link to join live or watch back later. Part of the ‘Socialist Ideas’ series.
6) People & Planet on the Brink – Socialist Solutions to Climate Catastrophe
Online, Sunday, June 11, 5.00pm. Register here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
With: Olivia Blake MP // Tess Woolfenden, Debt Justice // Sam Knight, Green New Deal Rising // Sam Mason, Climate Justice Coalition trade union officer // Fraser McGuire, Young Labour. The world is on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, threatening the very future of humanity. Yet our Government – like many others globally – are more interested in protecting the profits of the fossil fuel giants than urgent action to tackle the climate emergency.
A Socialist Sunday session at Arise 2023.
7) Free Palestine – Mustafa Barghouti briefing + Q&A
Monday June 12, Online, 6.30pm. Register here //Share & Invite here // Retweet here // Get festival ticket here.
In-depth briefing + Q&A with Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian National Initiative, on the latest developments in Palestine as Israel’s far-right government steps up its aggression. With supplementary contributions from Young Labour, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign & Labour & Palestine. Chair: Louise Regan, National Education Union & PSC.
Free event but solidarity tickets & donations essential for funding Webinar & streaming. Hosted by Labour & Palestine as part of Arise.
8) The Case for Labour Party Democracy – for Members’ Rights & the Union Link
Online, Wednesday June 14, 6.30pm. Register here // Share & invite here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
With: Jon Trickett MP // Mick Whelan, ASLEF GS//Simon Fletcher // Rachel Garnham, CLPD // Nabeela Mowlana, Young Labour. Join a vital discussion to make the case for a democratic party & movement – & to map out next steps in campaigning for members’ rights & in defence of the union-link.
9) What would Marx & Engels say about today’s global capitalist crisis?
Online, Friday June 16, 1.00pm. Register here // Share & invite here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
With Michael Roberts – economist & author, The Great Recession – a Marxist view.
Register here to get a link to join live or watch back later. Part of the ‘Socialist Ideas’ series.
10) The New Colonialism- resisting racism & exploitation of the global South
Online, Sunday June 18, 5.00pm. Register here // Share & invite here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
With: Asad Rehman, Director, War on Want // Heidi Chow, Director, Debt Justice // Lubaba Khalid, Young Labour BAME Officer // Chair: Denis Fernando, Arise volunteer.
A Socialist Sunday session at Arise 2023.
11) No more Pinochets in Latin America – Stand with social progress, democracy & regional integration
Online, Monday June 19, 6.30pm. Register here // Share & invite here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
With: Guillaume Long, former foreign Minister, Ecuador // Nathalia Urban, Brasil Wire // Claudia-Turbet Delof, Wiphalas Across the World, Bolivia, // Dave McKnight, UNISON NW // Gawain Little, GFTU.
Hosted by Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America at Arise 2023.
12) Socialist economic policies explained: the alternative to never-ending cuts
Online, Wednesday June 21, 6.30pm. Register here // Share & invite here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
Richard Burgon MP // Laura Smith, Labour Councillor & co-author of the No Holding Back report // Professor Özlem Onaran, University of Greenwich // Cat Hobbs, Director of We Own It.
Ask your questions & make your contributions on socialist alternatives to ‘Austerity 2.0.’
13) The Paris Commune – “Glorious harbinger of a new society”
Online, Friday June 23, 1.00pm. Register here // Share & invite here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
With Sandra Bloodworth. Australian labour historian & contributor to The Paris Commune, An Ode To Emancipation. The Paris Commune is still studied throughout the world as one of the first working-class attempts at emancipation, direct democracy & social change – why?
Register here to get a link to join live or watch back later. Part of the ‘Socialist Ideas’ series.
14) Push for peace – No to forever wars
Online, Sunday June 25, 5.00pm. Register here // Share & invite here // Get festival ticket here // Retweet here.
With: Kate Hudson (CND) // Steve Howell (author, ‘Game Changer’ & former advisor to Jeremy Corbyn) // Shadia Edwards-Dashti (Stop the War Coalition) // Chair: Logan Williiams, Arise volunteer.
Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975)
The late 1960s saw a wave of radical ferment and agitation erupt in America and France. In America, the Students for a Democratic Society and other groups campaigned against the Vietnam War and for a radical reform of American society, while Black civil rights activists like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X demanded the end of segregation and improved conditions for Black Americans. This radical agitation was marked by race riots and left-wing terrorism by groups like the Weathermen. I think that most people on this side of the Atlantic are probably more familiar with the American situation than the French through the close ties between Britain and America in the Special Relationship. But France also experienced a wave a radical unrest beginning with the occupation of the Sorbonne by radical students in 1968. These then established contacts with ordinary workers, who struck in sympathy, and there was a wave of wildcat strikes. By the end of the decade and the early 1970s, sections of the radical left were turning to kidnapping and terrorism. Although the French revolutionary activism of these years may be less-well known, it has nevertheless impressed itself on British memory and culture. The left-wing French director, Jean-Paul Godard, produced a film about the agitation and unrest around Jagger and the Stones preparing to record ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. The Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, spuriously claimed to have been a member of the Situationists, one of the radical groups involved in the unrest. And the ideas of ideologues like Guy Debord have found a readership and supporters among the British left. Way back in the 1980s there was a volume of revolutionary texts from 1968 published, I think, by the Socialist Workers Party. And the radical unrest and its turn to terrorism is covered by Guardian columnist Francis Wheen in his book on ‘70s paranoia.
Gombin was an academic attached to the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. His book isn’t a history of the revolutionary movement of the late 60s in France, but an examination of its ideology. He calls this ‘Leftism’ and contrasts it with ‘extremism’, which is how he terms radical Marxism. This is the extreme left-wing Marxism, often Trotskyite, which approaches or has some of the ideas and attitudes of the Leftists, but does not go as far as them by rejecting Marxism. And ‘leftism’ itself could be described instead as post-Marxism. Gombin explains that Marxism came late to France, and as a result the gap of a quarter of century or so until French intellectuals and activists caught up with the radical experiments and revision of Marxism carried out by the German, Hungarian and other eastern European Communists and radical socialists in the council and communist revolutions of 1919 and the early 1920s. The revelations of the horrors of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in the USSR, the gulags and the purges, came as a shock to left-wing intellectuals in France and elsewhere. The Communist party had uncritical accepted the lie that the former Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise. In response to these revelations, some Marxist intellectuals like Sartre condemned the purges and gulags, but otherwise remained faithful to the Communist party. Others went further and joined the Trotskyites. But a few others were moved to use Marx’s critical methods to examine Marxism itself, and rejected many of its central doctrines.
The revolutionary movement was led by a number of different groups, such as Socialism ou Barbarie, Rouge et Noire, the Situationists and radical trade unions like the CFDT, which had originally been set up a social Catholic organisation separate from the socialist trade unions. There seems to have been no overarching ideology, and indeed the radicals explicitly rejected any ideology that sought to dictate the course of the revolution. Nevertheless, there were a set of key ideas and attitudes shared by these groups. This rejected all hierarchies, those of modern, capitalist society, the trade union leadership and the patriarchal family, as well as the education and university system. They adopted wholeheartedly Marx’s slogan that the emancipation of the working class should be done by the working class, while also creating new ideas responding to the new welfare state and affluent society.
The viewed Marxism and trade unionism as a response to the conditions of the 19th century, when the working class had to concentrate on winning concessions from the capitalists and authorities in order to survive. However, the establishment of the welfare state had removed the threat of death and deprivation, and so the workers could now move on to the task of reforming society itself. The expanded Marx’s doctrine of alienation so that it didn’t just cover capitalism’s alienation of the worker from the goods he produced, and the latter’s fetishization, but also the alienation created by the affluent society. People’s real needs and desires were suppressed, and false needs created instead. Work should be playful, but instead the worker suffered boredom.
They also considered that there was a fundamental similarity between the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc, which resulted in them calling the USSR’s brand of state socialism ‘State capitalism’ in contrast to the ideal socialism in which society would be run by the workers. Communist rule in Russia had not liberated the workers, but instead created a new governing class. Unlike western capitalism, the Communist bureaucracy did not own the properties and industries they directed, but otherwise held the same power and privilege that in the west was held by the capitalist elites and industrialists. Changes in capitalism had also resulted in a cleavage between those who owned the companies, and those who directed and managed them. As a result, the struggle in the west was between workers and directors, not workers and owners. Soviet Communism was dubbed state capitalism as it was held the bureaucratic socialism of the USSR resembled that of western capitalism, the difference being that in the Soviet bloc all industries were owned by the state rather than private capitalists. One ideologue, Burnham, considered that Fascism and Communism were both examples of ‘state collectivism’, with the difference between the two being that private industry was retained under Fascism. Burnham was a vicious anti-Semite, and had previously urged the workers to unite with the Fascists against the Jews.
The radicals also rejected critical Marxist doctrines like dialectal materialism and its claim to have produced a science of capitalist development. In his later writings, Marx had believed that he had uncovered the sociological laws that would lead capitalism inevitably to give way to socialism. The Leftists rejected this because it was removed the voluntarist element from revolutionary activity. Instead of revolutionaries deliberately setting out to overturn capitalism and usher in the new socialist society, this attitude instead that all they needed to do was wait for it all to happen on its own. In their view, this attitude was closer to the evolutionary socialism of Bernstein than the Marxism of 1848. They rejected Lenin’s doctrine of a centralised party of active revolutionaries, because the workers on their own could only attain trade union consciousness. This, according to the Leftists, had resulted in a bureaucratic class that ruled over the workers, and was certainly not the vanguard of the working class as it was declared to be by Lenin. They did, however, believe in some kind of central party or organisation, but this would only be to guide and suggest possible ideas and actions, not to dictate a revolutionary programme. And all revolutionary ideas and policies should be subjected to the rigorous test of whether they worked in practice. If they did, they were true. If not, they were ‘ideology’, used in the same sense of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’. The revolutionary could only be carried out by the conscious will of the workers, as they became aware of their mission to reform society, independent of any ideas of social progress or objective historical conditions. There was therefore a radical subjective aspect to their conception of revolutionary activism in opposition to Marx’s ideas of historical progress according to object material conditions. Some of them also challenged Marxism-Leninism’s materialism, in which consciousness arose from matter and was merely matter reflecting itself. This got them attacked as ‘Idealists’ by the Communists.
They rejected the patriarchal family as an institution which brought up and trained the worker to accept hierarchical authority and his position in society as a worker, as well as the sexual repression that resulted from the prohibition of extra- and premarital sex. In fact, the student revolt that sparked the ferment started with a question about this by a student at the Sorbonne to a visiting government minister, who come to open the university’s swimming pool. The student also queried him about the university’s rules against male students entering the women’s halls. Well, as the poet once said, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963.
As for the institutions that should be used by the workers to govern politically and manage industry, there seems to have been a difference of ideas. Some, like the Dutch astronomer and Marxist Pannekoek, argued for worker’s councils like the German Raterevolution of 1919. Others refused to speculate, except to state that they should be created by the workers in response to the conditions of the time and the situations they were faced with. Regarding the conduct of the strikes, these were carried out through workers’ meetings on the shop floor, who would then elect a strike committee that would then take their grievances and demands to management. Some observers felt that this harked back to France’s native socialist and revolutionary traditions that predated Marx. The shop floor meetings were, in their view, related to that of the sections during the French Revolution.
Apart from these political and industrial ideas and aspirations, there were also a set of revolutionary ideas about the proper reform of the arts. These looked back to the attacks on official art by the Dadaists and Surrealists, but felt that they had failed in their mission to create an anti-art. They therefore looked forward to a new, revolutionary society in which everyone would be an artist or a poet.
Well, the revolutionary agitation passed with the sixties and first years of the 1970s. Wheen seems to suggest that it ended when one group was about to bomb a millionaire’s yacht but finally drew back. Nevertheless, the terrorism carried on over this side of La Manche with the IRA in Northern Ireland and in Britain by the Angry Brigade, an anarchist group. In France the anarchists, syndicalists and Anarcho-Syndicalists were largely excluded from the revolutionary movement. Some of this was due to the antagonism between anarchists and Marxists and to the isolation of the anarchist groups themselves. By 1968 these had declined in membership and largely confined themselves to keeping the flame alive and commemorating great anarchist revolutionaries of the past, such as the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno.
The revolutionary movement of 1968 is now over fifty years in the past, overtaken in Britain and America by Reagan and Thatcherism. These two started a political counterrevolution aimed at preventing such a situation ever happening again. The right-wing, if not reactionary philosopher, Roger Scruton, said in an interview in the Spectator that he had been a socialist. But he was in France during the revolutionary movement, and was horrified by their ‘anti-civilizational rage’. The ideologues of the period still have an influence in the radical left. People are still reading and gaining inspiration from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, for example. I think they also exerted an influence on the anti-capitalist movement of the ‘90s and noughties. Their protests had a deliberate carnivalesque aspect, with costumed marches, puppets and so on, which seems to have drawn on the ideas of the Situationists and other revolutionaries.
I strongly believe, however, that the leftist rejection of the family has had a profoundly negative effect on western society. The Tory right loathes Roy Jenkins because of the socially liberal legislation he introduced in the late 60s Labour government. This decriminalised homosexuality and made divorce easier. Jenkins was certainly not as socially radical as the revolutionaries across the channel. In 1982 he, Shirley Williams and David Owen left the Labour party to form the SDP on the grounds that the party under Michael Foot was now too left wing. Still, the Daily Heil once denounced him as the man who had ruined Britain. Jenkins probably had completely different motives for his legislation than the Revolutionaries. In Britain the movement for the legalisation of homosexuality had started, or at least had the support, of Winston Churchill. Churchill had been worried about the danger of gay ministers, civil servants and others establishment figures being blackmailed by the Soviets because of their sexuality. As for divorce, I think this came from the humane desire to stop people being trapped in unhappy, loveless marriages, especially to brutal, violent partners. John Mortimer in his one-man show in the ‘90s recalled that before Jenkins’ reforms, the only cause for divorce was adultery. There was one man, who was so desperate to divorce his wife, that he came home in different hats so that people would think she was being unfaithful.
Unfortunately, there were radical activists, hostile to the institution of marriage and the traditional family. I can remember a pair who turned up on an edition of the lunchtime magazine programme Pebble Mill in the 1970s to present their views, much to the disgust of many of the programmes’ viewers. The result has been a rise in fatherless families. I am very much aware than many unmarried mothers have done an excellent job of raising their children, but the general picture is grim. Children from fatherless homes perform less well at school and get poorer, lower-paid jobs. They are more likely to turn to crime, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Many Black activists are particularly concerned about this and the way these issues are especially acute in their community.
As for workers’ control, I would love a degree of it introduced into industry, but not to the exclusion of parliamentary democracy. And while the radicals have a point in that trade unions hierarchies have frequently acted to stifle revolutionary activism by the workers, trade unionism as a whole was tarnished by the wildcat strikes that broke out against the wishes of the union leadership. It’s resulted in the caricature of union activism presented by the Tories in which Britain was held hostage to the union barons and its economy and industry weakened by their strikes. We desperately need a revival of trade union power to protect workers, especially with Sunak and the rest of them preparing to scrap the EU legislation protecting workers’ rights.
And with an ever-growing number of people in Britain relying on food banks to stave off starvation, because the Tories have wrecked the welfare state, we’ve gone back to the early conditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when trade unionism and other forms of working class activism are very much a matter of survival.
On the plus side, I think the revolutionary movement has left a tradition of radical working class activism, which is no longer confined to either left or right. French working people seem much less willing to put up with government dictates than Brits, as shown in the Yellow Vest protests and the marches and riots against Macron raising the official retirement age. This has been admired by many Brits, including YouTube commenters and people on talk show phone-ins. We really need some of that spirit over this side of the Channel.
There is no doubt, from the position of democratic socialism, that the radicals went too far. Nevertheless, the continue to inspire members of the radical left with rather more moderate aims now protesting against predatory, exploitative capitalism, the exploitation of the environment, and racism, although this is not an issue that the book considers. Nevertheless, it was there, at least in the views and campaigns of post-structuralist Marxist activists.
One of the issues that concerns me about the current debate over historic slavery is that the belief seems to have grown up that only White Europeans and Americans practised it, and only enslaved Blacks and other people of colour. Connected to this is a related belief that only Whites can be racist. There’s an image on the net of young man of colour waving a placard ‘The British invented Racism’. Neither of these ideas is true. Slavery existed in many societies across the world from ancient times. It existed in ancient Egypt, the Middle East, India, China and elsewhere. It was a feature of many Black African societies, dating back to 3000 BC, and the proportion of the enslaved population ranged from 30 to 70 per cent according to the individual peoples. Black Africans were also enslaved by the Muslim Arabs and then by the Ottoman Turks, as were White Europeans, who were also preyed upon by the Barbary pirates of Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. The Islamic world also developed racist views of Black Africans and White Europeans, contrary to the explicit teaching of Islam. The Chinese have also developed their own racial ideologies and hierarchies. However, many people don’t understand this, and this leaves them vulnerable to woke racial ideologies, like Critical Race Theory, which view Whites as innately racist and requiring particular teaching and treatment in order to cure them of their prejudices.
I think part of the problem is that the school curriculum only teaches the transatlantic slave trade. Outside the classroom there is little discussion or mention of slavery elsewhere in the world, except in the case of ancient Egypt. As far as I am aware, there are no TV programmes about global slavery, with the exception of the occasional news item about modern slavery and people trafficking. I am also not aware of any museums which also cover the global history of slavery. This absence, I believe, is leaving people vulnerable to radical ideologies that explicitly demonise Whites and teach Blacks that they have and will always be the victims of White prejudice, maltreatment and discrimination.
Yesterday I emailed messages to Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, Nick Gibb, the minister for schools, and the shadow minister for education, Bridget Phillimon about this issue, recommending that the teaching of slavery in schools and universities should also mention that it was done across the world. As should museum displays about slavery and the slave trade. I doubt that I shall receive a reply from them, as the internet addresses, I used may have been solely for their constituents and MPs are forbidden to reply to anyone except them. I’ve therefore also posted the message to the Department of Education using their contact address. But I doubt I’ll get anything back from them either.
Here’s the message I sent them, which I altered a little according to the minister’s or shadow minister’s sex and official position. Please note: I am not advocating the teaching of slavery and racial prejudice in other societies in order to somehow excuse western slavery and racism. I am merely doing so to counter the very specific issue that some people seem to believe that it is unique to White Europeans.
‘Dear Madam,
I am an historian with a Ph.D. in archaeology. I writing to you to express my deep concerns about the teaching of the subject of slavery in British schools and universities and the historical falsehoods being promoted by radical left-wing ideologies such as Critical Race Theory. I understand that the school curriculum includes transatlantic slavery. This is entirely correct, and that dark page of British imperial history should be taught. However, I am concerned that the exclusive focus on British and White European and American enslavement of Black Africans is leading to the distorted view among many British young people that slavery is somehow unique to White culture and society, and is something that only Whites did to Black Africans and other peoples of colour. This is, I feel, being exploited by the advocates of Critical Race Theory to promote a distorted narrative which demonises Whites as perpetual villains while at the same time teaching Black and Asians that they are victims, who will be perpetually oppressed by White racist society.
The idea that only Whites practiced slavery is far from the truth. Slavery has existed across the world since ancient times, as was recognised by the 19th century Abolitionists and their opponents. White Britons were enslaved by the Barbary pirates of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from the 16th century onwards. This was only ended by the French conquest of Algiers in the 1820s. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans from the 14th century onwards resulted in the White, Christian population being depressed into serfdom as well as slavery itself. Slavery in Africa existed from at least 3000 BC. It was practiced in ancient Egypt and in many Black African societies. In these latter, the proportion of the enslaved population could range from 30%-70%. Black Africans were enslaved by Muslim Arabs and later on by the Ottoman Turks. It also existed in India, where the slave class are recorded in the Vedas as the Dasyas, and in China and elsewhere. There are some excellent books about these subjects, such as Jeremy Black’s Slavery: A New Global History (London: Constable & Robinson 2011), Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2003), and Sean Stilwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014).
At the same time, the West has not been the only civilisation to develop racial prejudice and hierarchies of race. Racial prejudices against Blacks, but also White Europeans also developed in Islam, as discussed in Bernard Lewis’ Slavery and Race in Medieval Islam, and similar racial ideologies have also developed in China. But I very much regret that many young people are unaware that other, non-western cultures have also developed such practices. The result has been that some people seem to believe that racism is, once again, unique to the west. There is an image on the internet of a young man of colour bearing a placard saying, ‘Britain invented Racism’ which illustrates this very well.
I am afraid the lack of knowledge of extra-European racism and slavery is being exploited by Critical Race Theory and its supporters to promote the view that only Whites can be racist, and that racism and historical slavery is something that Whites need to be particularly reminded of and feel guilty about as part of wider radical programme to promote restorative racial justice.
I am very much aware that racism needs to be confronted and erased, but I believe this doctrine to be itself hypocritical and racist. I would therefore like to see the teaching of slavery in schools and universities, and museums exhibits about it also include the existence of slavery throughout the world, including Africa. The intention here is not to demonise other societies and their peoples, but simply to make the point that slavery has never been solely practiced by Whites. At the same time, I would also like to see any teaching in schools about racism also include the fact that this too is not simply something that Whites have done to people of colour. I believe strongly that it is through an awareness of the ubiquity of slavery and racism across the globe that a proper understanding of these issues as both part of British history and a continuing problem can be gained.
I hope you as Secretary of State for Education, will consider this issue worth raising will work to introduce these ideas into the current teaching on slavery, and look forward to hearing from you about this issue.
I gather that she’s been in today’s Guardian, where she’s written a piece about the death of Tina Turner. Turner was one of the greatest soul singers, even appearing as Auntie Entity, the ruler of Bartertown, in the film Mad Max 3, for which she also sang and performed a theme song. Shola’s piece lamented the fact that the singer had died before Blacks had received their proper compensation for their historic enslavement by White Europeans and Americans. She’s an intensely controversial figure. Some people feel that she is anti-British and I believe there was 38 Degrees petition launched by someone to stop the TV companies using her as a guest on their shows when debating racism and related topics. I feel that the issues of Black compensation for slavery raises questions about such compensation that crosses racial and national boundaries and which may affect Shola herself. Slavery was practised for millennia across the globe. Black Africans were enslaved by other African nations, as well as Muslim Arabs and Turks, as well as Indians, Persians and Afghans. Odiously, slavery still persists in Africa and the global south, and has been revived in Islamist-held Libya and Uganda. At the same time, Europeans were held in bondage as serfs until into the 19th century in parts of Europe, and were also enslaved by the invading Turks and pirates from Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. This rises the issue that if compensations is to be paid to enslaved Blacks, then the same principle should mean that the victims of these forms of slavery should also receive compensation from those, who historically enslaved them.
I’ve therefore sent her this message via the message box on her website. I’ll let you know if I get an answer
‘Dear Shola,
I was struck by your article in today’s Guardian about the death of the great soul singer, Tina Turner, and lamenting the fact that she died before Black people had received reparations for slavery. The question of slavery reparations raises issues extending beyond western Blacks, including the complicity of African aristocracies, the enslavement of Blacks by other nations, including Islam and India, as well as indigenous White European forms of bondage and their enslavement by the Barbary pirates and the Turkish empire. As the granddaughter of an African prince, I would be particularly interested in your perspectives on these issues.
Regarding indigenous African complicity in the slave trade, I’ve doubtless no need to tell you about how generally Black Africans were captured and enslaved by other Black African peoples, who then sold them on to White Europeans and Americans. The most notorious slaving states were included Dahomey, Benin and Whydah in west Africa, while on the east coast the slaving peoples included the Yao, Marganja and the Swahili, who enslaved their victims for sale to the Sultan of Muscat to work the clove plantations on Zanzibar. They were also purchased by merchants from India, and then exported to that country, as well as Iran, Afghanistan and further east to countries like Sumatra. It has therefore been said that reparations should consist of Black Africans compensating western Blacks. Additionally, Black Africans were also enslaved by other Muslim Arabs in north Africa and then the Turkish empire. What is now South Sudan was a particular source of Black slaves and one of the causes of the Mahdi’s rebellion was outrage at the banning of slavery by the British. This raises the issue of whether Turkey, Oman, India and other north African and Asian states should also compensate the Black community for their depredations on them.
The complicity of the indigenous African chiefs in the slave trade has become an issue recently in Ghana and Nigeria. I understand that the slavery museum in Liverpool was praised by campaigners and activists from these nations for including this aspect of the slave trade. I would very much like to know your views on this matter. Forgive me if I have got this wrong, but I understand you are of the Igbo people. These also held slaves. I would also like to know if you could tell me a bit more about this, and how this may have affected your family’s history. Your grandfather was, after all, a chief, and this raises the awkward question of whether your family owned slaves. If they did, how were they manumitted and did your family give them reparations for their enslavement?
There is also the question of the enslavement of Whites both under conditions of domestic servitude and by the Muslim powers of the Turkish empire and Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Serfdom in England died out in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it continued in European countries into the 18th and 19th centuries. Prussia only liberated its serfs in 1825 and the Russian serfs were only freed in 1860. Serfdom is considered a form of slavery under international law, as I understand. If Blacks are to be granted compensation for their enslavement, then as a general principle the descendants of White European serfs should also be compensated for their ancestors’ servitude.
In Britain, a from of serfdom continued in the Scottish and Northumbrian mining industries. Miners were bondsmen, whose contracts bound them to the mining companies and who were metal identity collars to prevent them running away exactly like slaves. I would be grateful if you would tell me whether their descendants should also receive compensation for their forefathers’ virtual enslavement.
Over a million White Europeans and Americans, mostly from southern European countries such as France, Spain and Italy, were enslave by the Barbary pirates. This only came to an end with the French conquest and occupation of Alegria. If people are to be compensated for their ancestors’ enslavement, then presumably America and Europe should also receive compensation from these nations for this. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 14th century by Mehmet II resulted in the depression of the indigenous White Christian population into serfdom as well as the imposition of slavery. When Hungary was conquered, the Turks levied a tribute of a tenth of the country’s population as slaves. When one of the Greek islands revolted in the 1820s, it was put down with dreadful cruelty and the enslavement of 20,000 Greeks. Do you feel that the descendants of these enslaved Balkan Whites should also receive compensation from their former Turkish overlords?
There is also the fact that after Britain abolished the slave trade, she paid compensation to the former African slaving nations for their losses as part of a general scheme to persuade them to adopt a trade in ‘legitimate’ products. This was believed to benefit both Britain and the African nations themselves. How do you feel about the payment of such compensation? Do you feel that it is unfair, and that these nations should pay it back to us, or that they should pay it to the descendants of the people they enslaved?
Finally, slavery still persists today in parts of Africa and has even revived. The Islamist terror groups that have seized control of half of the former Libya have opened slave markets dealing in the desperate migrants from further south, who have made their way to the country in the attempt to find sanctuary in Europe. At the same time, slave markets have also opened in Uganda. Slavery is very much alive around the world today. I would be greatly interested in your perspectives on this issue, which is affecting people of colour in the global south. How do you feel it should be tackled? Are you working with anti-slavery organisations, such as Anti-Slavery International and the various organisations by former African slaves to combat this? If not, I would be very grateful if you could tell me why not, when you are obviously motivated by a human outrage at the plight of the historic victims of western slavery.
I hope you will be able to provide me with answers to these questions, and very much look forward to receiving your reply.
This is another video covering flying saucers. It’s a very short piece from a Pathe newsreel showing American police examining the ragged remains of what is described as a ‘flying saucer’ in Maryland. The piece says that it was found while they were looking for a missing Dr Caldwell, and may be a solution to the flying saucer mystery. This was some of other, competing explanations for flying saucers were as popular as the idea that they were alien spacecraft. Many people suspected they were Nazi or Russian secret weapons. The suggestion here is that the saucer, and the rest of those sighted, may have been the creations of the missing scientist. I find this fascinating, as I haven’t heard of this incident before. It raises several questions. One of these is whether the remains found were those of a genuine saucer-shaped aircraft and, obviously, whether there was any connection to the missing scientist. Could it also have been a fake by the authorities, designed to put the public at ease and off the scent? On the other hand, it also has official aircraft markings on its tail and the Americans were experimenting with saucer-shaped aircraft at the time, so it could easily have been one of these. It would be very interesting to find out more.
This is another UFO-related video from the History channel, which has become notorious for having abandoned history in favour of programmes about UFOs. The Vimanas were flying ships recorded in the ancient Hindu scriptures about 1,800 years ago. Some Indian nationalists and that part of the UFO milieu interested in an ancient aliens and lost high technology have suggested that this indicates that Indians knew about aircraft and space travel from far back in their history. The video shows one aircraft engineer building a model of a Vimana as described by the Hindu scriptures and then testing it in a small window tunnel to see whether it would in fact fly. The test shows that it would have generated lift, and that it therefore would have been able to take flight. The engineer very carefully tells the interviewer this, and I noticed that he doesn’t actually say whether this indicated that it existed in reality or not. I’m sceptical of the Vimana, as I think they’re probably mythological. But this test is interesting.
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