Just got this through from the pro-democracy groups about an article in the Heil by someone called Charles Dunst. Dunst says, rightly, that Brits, especially young Brits, are losing faith in democracy. They are, but this isn’t the fault of 13 years of authoritarian Tory rule and legislation setting up secret courts and curbing the right to protest and strikes! No! The real threat to democracy comes from authoritarian leftists like Extinction Rebellion. And Liz Truss, a puppet of the free trade NHS privatisation lobbyists at Tufton Street, is just the woman to defend democracy. This is just completely bonkers. It’s on the same level as telling the British public that Judge Dredd is a staunch believer in civil liberties and prison reform. I don’t have much respect for Extinction Rebellion as their stunts of holding up traffic and so on seem designed particularly to annoy the ordinary public. And they have harmed people, as when they prevented an ambulance from taking a woman having a stroke in hospital in time, so that they woman wouldn’t have suffered paralysis down one side of her body. But Dunst’s crazy article does remind me of the advice Private Eye gave about reading the opinions of Rees-Mogg senior. He must be read carefully. Then you turn his ideas through 180 degrees and, vioila! he’s exactly right. Here’s Open Britain’s comment:
‘Dear David,
In 2023, Britain is inundated with flag-toting, vote-suppressing, reality-denying authoritarianism. In times like these, nations rely on journalists to speak truth to power, to challenge the government line and speak for the people when their voices aren’t being heard. In Britain, our media ecosystem is doing the opposite – its supercharging and amplifying our vocal right-wing minority.
You may have seen this Daily Mail headline circulating on Twitter. Charles Dunst’s unbelievable article claims that young people are losing faith in democracy, that they just don’t feel it’s working for them anymore – and that’s true. Our institutions are not adequately reflecting the will of the people, meaning we need to fix those institutions and restore trust (which is exactly what Open Britain is fighting for).
Dunst has other ideas. Instead, he goes on to commend Liz Truss of all people for standing for “liberal values”, while arguing that the reason democracy isn’t working is actually because of China. He claims that climate protestors are the real authoritarians in the UK, despite their almost complete lack of power and the harsh government crackdowns on their right to protest. It’s an incomprehensible distortion of reality – but it still gets into people’s heads.
The mental gymnastics required to write such an article must have required years of rigorous training. But it’s just one example of how the UK media manufactures consent among the public, deploying specific framings and omitting hard truths that change the tone of the story altogether, functioning as unofficial state propaganda. This article is toeing the line of people like Liz Truss, Rees-Mogg, and Boris Johnson, presenting them as a solution to a problem that they caused.
None of this is terribly new. From backing the actual Nazis back in the 1930s to going on xenophobic, anti-muslim tirades in the 2010s, the Mail and its counterparts have long pushed an unpopular agenda. But now, in the age of tabloid articles, social media, and targeted advertising, it’s posing a real threat to democracy itself. A democratic system is only as good as its information environment – and ours is clouded with propaganda and misinformation.
For one thing, we need to support the independent media in the UK. In recent years, a new breed of media companies like Byline Times, Politics JOE, and openDemocracy have started to set a new standard, covering substantial political stories instead of hacking into Harry and Meghan’s phones.
What we really need, however, is meaningful press regulation. At this critical time, we need to start asking questions like “Why does Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev get to sit in the House of Lords and own the Evening Standard?” or “Why are we allowing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to warp public opinion in his favour?”.
It’s just another reason we need a democratic renewal in this country. As much as a broken press is a threat to democracy, democracy is equally the solution to a broken press. In a survey of 24 countries, the UK had the second lowest level of trust in the press (just 13%) – only beating out Egypt and ranking well below Russia, Indonesia, and Mexico. The people want change, and we need real democracy to reflect that.
As Charles Dunst said, the people are losing faith in democracy. But the solution is not more NatC conventions or bringing back Liz Truss. It’s a wholesale revitalisation of the democratic institutions that deliver the will of the people. That’s what Open Britain is all about.
I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.
Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.
And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.
Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.
Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.
But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.
This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.
The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.
And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.
Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.
We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.
Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.
Rafe Heydel-Mankoo is one of the inmates of the IEA’s New Culture Forum. I heartily despise the IEA, but I do find myself agreeing with some of what the New Culture Forums says. This video is taken from a Cambridge Union debate over whether reparations should be paid for slavery. Heydel-Mankoo was one of the speakers against the motion that it should. He states at the outset that he has a particular interest in this as a child of empire. The Mankoo part of his double-barrelled surname suggests to me that he’s part Indian, as do his features. He also confesses that if this was 1807 or 1834, the dates when first the slave trade and then slavery itself was abolished in the British empire, he may well have crossed the floor and agreed wholeheartedly that damages should be paid for the horrendous suffering enslaved people had endured. But it is not 1807, 1907 or 2007. Six or seven generations have elapsed between the present Black generation and the time their ancestors were enslaved. Reparations are a matter of tort, and while damages should be paid to people who have genuinely suffered, the present generation of Blacks are immeasurably better off than their ancestors in Africa. Ethically, should they profit from the suffering of their ancestors? Is it right that people should be held accountable for the crimes of their ancestors? The advocates of reparations want it to be paid by the British taxpayer. There were also only 3,000 slaveowners in Britain. The major of people lived and worked in grinding poverty in conditions near serfdom. Is it ethically right that they descendants of poor workers should be asked to pay reparations? There are also demands for the payment of reparations from countries like Barbados. Sixteen per cent of this country, however, are foreign born. Is it right that they should be required to pay reparations for something they had nothing to do with? And what about Africa? They supplied the slaves to Europeans, and so shouldn’t the be required also to pay reparations? What about the Arabs and Muslims who enslaved Africans centuries before Europeans and continued to do so before the British and French put a stop to it? And what about slavery in Africa today? The International Labour Organisation estimates that seven out of every thousand Africans is a slave: 10 million people. In 2017 CNN reported hundreds of slaves are sold every week in Libya. He would have far more sympathy for the claim for reparations if the people making it showed equal concern for the plight of today’s slaves. Where are the protests outside the Nigerian high commission, the embassies of Niger, which has a hundred thousand slaves today? What about Mali and Chad and Sudan and Cameroon. It’s almost as though there’s an ulterior motive to ask for reparations exclusively from Britain.
He also asks how far this should be taken. Should Britain demand reparations for the attacks of the Barbary pirates? At the same time as enslaved Africans were crossing the Atlantic, one million Europeans were enslaved by the Ottoman slave states of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And this carried on after the abolition of the slave trade by the British. But Britain should not demand reparations from north Africa. It’s time to move on, and so should we.
He then turns from slavery to colonialism, and asks what damage it has done to those now living in the Caribbean. Most of the countries of the Caribbean are successful middle-income countries. The GDP per head of the Bahamas is higher than Portugal and comparable to Spain or Italy. Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis and other former British slave colonies have higher rankings on the UN development index than many other South American countries such as Brazil and Mexico. It is not clear to him how the British empire has disadvantaged the Caribbean nations. Comparing the modern Caribbean with the West Africa, the homelands of West Indian slaves. The GDP per capita in Benin is $1,430. The GDP per capita in Barbados is $17,000. Life expectancy in Benin is 62. In Barbados it is 79. Rather than write cheques to well-off parts of the world, why not send money to countries that actually require aid? Financial aid, not attempts to cleanse one’s soul. While slavery was abhorrent to those enslaves, had they remained in Africa the lives of their descendants would have been markedly worse..
What is Britain being asked to pay reparations for? Because Britain wasn’t the first empire to practise slavery in Africa, in India, in America. But it was the most benign and the benefits from it far exceed those of Islamic and Indian empire, that carved up India, of the Ashanti empire, of the Dahomey Kingdom, or the hundreds of thousands of slaves that were ritually sacrificed every year in Benin. The Benin Bronzes, that have been mentioned, commemorate those who owned slaves. Why is there a celebration of these?
Why are we apologising for Britain? Are we apologising for introducing new food storage polices, which led to a decline in the subcontinents processes of famine? Every forty years in India there was a famine. The population of India soared from 170 million to 400 million over the course of the Raj.It was because medicine and health and food standards and storage were better than they had been that the population surged.
Let’s not forget what Britain did for women’s rights. It was through the British empire that we have had the progression of women in Africa and India. India’s history is one of female oppression. It was the British who abolished suttee, the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. It was the British who stopped the infanticide of young girls and it was the British who allowed Hindu widows to remarry. Facts are facts. Universities were brought into Africa and India by the British. There would be no system of democratic legislatures in these regions without the empire. He quotes Steven Pinker as saying that before the British empire, these states were more violent than even the most modern states. While many wrongs were committed in the 19th and 20th centuries, the success of Britain’s colonies in the 21st century is due in large part to their colonial inheritance The English language and law enabled them to become global players. Their police, military, the civil service, the judiciary, parliament, the universities in every region of the world you go to, the British colonies are those most likely to be the healthiest and most democratic.
He ends by quoting the great Black civil rights activist and socialist Bayard Rustin, a friend of Martin Luther King, who received King’s posthumous congressional medal of freedom from Barack Obama: ‘If my great-grandfather, who picked cotton for fifty years and who made some money. He’s dead and gone, and nobody owes me anything.’
It’s a powerful speech, and from the way they fidget and pull faces the students behind him simply don’t want to hear what he says. But these are arguments that definitely need to be heard.
A few days ago I watched another video put up by Jim Boobeh, the main man behind the right-wing YouTube channel Correct, Not Political, and a fellow rightists, called O’Looney. Correct, Not Political are the bunch who believe that the World Economic Forum are at the at the heart of a global conspiracy to take over the world and make us all serfs under green communism, owning nothing, confined to 15 minute cities and eating insects for the good of the planet. Many people on the right have similar views, like Carl Benjamin and the Lotus Eaters. But I wasn’t prepared for just how paranoid Correct, Not Political was.
That they’re a bunch of far right conspiracy theorists is obvious, as shown by their videos of them protesting gay rights marches, drag queen story hour, trades union and environmental protests, pro-refugee demonstrations, and events held by socialists and ‘commies’. How right wing they are is also demonstrated by the video they show introducing their live streams, which are old footage of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts marching about. They also don’t like the Freemasons and there’s more than a touch of anti-Semitism there, as I think they’re also into the stupid myths of the Jewish banking conspiracy. But they’re also worried about a military invasion by the Channel migrants. Yup, these are not poor unfortunates fleeing war and persecution in their homelands, but undercover UN soldiers. Now, many members of the anti-immigrant right have said that most of the Channel migrants are military age men, and are suspicious of them because they don’t include similar numbers of women and children. Which is what you would expect to see if people were fleeing war and persecution, or at least what the sceptical peeps of the right would. But there was an interview with one Channel migrant a little while ago who said that he, and many others were running away from conscription, and hoped to bring their women and families over later when they had settled. I also think that many of the military age men are actually young blokes hoping to find work and greater opportunities in the West. The impression I’ve had reading various bit and pieces of information on the current state of the Middle East and talking to more knowledgeable friends is that there’s a real problem with large scale unemployment in many of the Arab countries. A little while ago there was a piece in one of the news blogs that the economic situation in Egypt had deteriorated to the point where many families could no longer afford basic staples. There was a similar situation among Sunni Muslims in Syria, where they were very firmly at the bottom of the social pile and faced with grinding poverty, less educated and with poorer prospects than the Shi’a, Alawi and Christian Syrians. Hence their support for radical Islamist movements and the rebellion against Assad. But Correct, Not Political really do believe that we’re being literally invaded.
Boobeh and O’Looney spoke about how they’d heard from a number of people that the Channel migrants were really undercover UN soldiers. One man had sent a drone off to spy on them, and had seen them being trained by the Black Watch. They were here, ready to take over the country. The two also speculated about the outbreak of a nuclear war, and stated that the elite would be all right as they would be safe in their luxury nuclear bunkers 2- 3 miles underground. That was certainly true of the Soviet elite. After the Fall of Communism it was revealed that a whole city, complete with shops, had been built underground for the Communist rulers in the event of a nuclear war. I dare say that something similar may have been secretly built in the west. One of the TV travel shows, in which a celeb goes round a part of the world talking about the interesting bits, showed the world’s most expensive nuclear bunker. I think it was built by a businessman in Nevada, and was so luxurious it even had a swimming pool. I don’t know if other big businessmen built themselves similar bunkers, but as during the Cold War ordinary Americans were told to build fall-out shelters in their yards it really, really wouldn’t surprise me.
Going back to the weird idea of the migrants as UN troopers, it looks like a mutant British version of some of the rumours that were going around America’s paranoid fringe in the ’90s. This held that the Soviet Union had not in fact collapsed, but had a staged a careful ruse. There were supposed to be secret Soviet military bases on the Canadian and Mexican borders, from which Russian tanks would roll into America once the invasion started. Here the Red Army has been replaced by the Channel migrants and the United Nations, who are the centre of similar fears on the American right. It’s all part of the plan to set up the evil, satanic one-world communist government. The current paranoia about the World Economic Forum is part of that, and indeed Boobeh himself put it into context by mentioning the other groups that have also been seen as part of the global conspiracy, like the Trilateral Commission.
The extent of this section of the far right’s alienation from mainstream society was shown by Boobeh and O’Looney talking about how they’d like to set up parallel societies, complete with a separate healthcare system, independent of the mainstream. Well, the anarchists and other left-wing radicals they despise have also felt the same way, and tried to something like it, but have been unsuccessful. They, or at least Boobeh, also were against voting, because all the parties were compromised, but neither did they want to start a violent revolution. Which was reassuring. Mosley’s their hero, but they don’t want to follow him down the road of trying to attempt a Fascist seizure of power along the lines of Mussolini and Hitler.
I don’t know how many of them there are in Correct, Not Political. Probably not many, as even at their height the extreme right-wing groups in this country were numerically small. The BNP claimed to have 2,000 members, but researchers have suggested that they only had about 200 core members. Most of the others left after about a year, probably because although they were against non-White immigration, they didn’t have any interest in Fascist ideology. But I suspect that there are many other groups and individuals, like Godfrey Bloom, who shared their fears about the WEF and the UN.
As for the notion that the Black Watch were training the migrants, it seems to me that they may have been sent to guard them. Some of them came over with guns, as reported a few months ago. But if any kind of training was going on, I wonder if it could be because these are western-allied soldiers, who were disguised as civilians, perhaps to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban took over. Or perhaps as part of some undercover global security operation which uses the migrant networks. Of course, this is just speculation and it may well be rubbish, and no training of any kind is going on. But I wonder.
There may be a genuine conspiracy here, which has nothing to do with the UN, WEF or Masonic Jewish bankers.
This is a fascinating video I found on Novara Media’s channel the other day. In it, host Aaron Bastani talks to archaeologist David Wengrow about the origins of the state and the development of social inequality. Wengrow argues that the evidence from archaeology challenges assumptions that prehistoric and preliterate peoples were incapable of rationally deciding for themselves what kind of societies they wished to live in. He gives examples from prehistoric Europe and North and South America to show that ancient and indigenous peoples not only did decide on the kind of societies they wanted, but were perfectly capable of reversing trends in their societies towards authoritarianism. One of the examples of this, which I found truly jaw-dropping, was one of the city states the conquistador Hernan Cortes made alliance with against the Aztecs. Unlike the Aztec empire, that state city was a democratic republic. He also talks about the influence on Enlightenment critiques of western society of a Huron Indian chief in Canada, who was an intelligent conversationalist able to hold his own in conversations about the nature of society to such an extent that French, British and Dutch colonial authorities invited him to dinner to talk this matter over.
Wengrow starts off by stating that modern political theory about the origins of society, as taught in politics courses, is completely divorced from archaeological accounts. The theory is based on the speculations of foundational Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau, who admitted that they were speculating. But these accounts are now taught as fact. Archaeological research, however, is overturning previous ideas about the origins of urban society. For example, it was believed that agriculture and urbanisation were linked and appeared together as part of the Neolithic Revolution. But this is not the case. Excavations of the ancient city of Catalhuyuk in Turkey show that while it was an urban centre, although Wengrow hesitates to call it a city, show that its people were still hunter-gatherers, living by foraging rather than agriculture. And the same is true of the settlement at Amesbury at the time Stonehenge was being built. The people then had given up agriculture, although they retained animal husbandry. It appears they had tried growing crops and then rejected it in favour of foraging.
He then goes on to talk about the Huron Amerindian chief. He inspired a colonist from New France, who had been expelled from the colony, to write a book based on the chief and his dinner conversation when the colonist was penniless in Amsterdam. This became a massive Enlightenment bestseller, and inspired other books by Voltaire and others in which Chinese, Tahitians and other outsiders criticise European society. Wengrow states that the Indian societies surprise western Europeans because they were much less hierarchical than they were, and contact with these societies and the indigenous critics of western civilisation did influence European political philosophy. We easily accept that Europe took over many material products from these nations, but are much less ready to accept the idea that they influenced our ideas, even though the Enlightenment philosophers said that they had.
He also talks about Cahokia, a great pyramid and city state in the Mississippi valley in America. This appears to be another example of a society, in which people rebelled or simply walked away from authority and hierarchy. It was also another indigenous monument that was ascribed to everyone else but the native peoples when it was first discovered, and is now disrespected by having a road driven through it. When it was constructed, the local society seems to have been hierarchical. At the top of the mound is a structure from which all of the city could be viewed. But sometime after its heyday it was abandoned. The traditional reasons are that the climate changed, but Wengrow finds that unconvincing. What seems to have happened instead is that people simply got tired of living in such a society and walked away.
Tenochtitlan, one of the great cities in ancient Mexico, is another example of a strongly hierarchical society that underwent profound social change and became more democratic. Wengrow states that it’s a massive state, and they owe a debt to the French scholar who produced detailed maps of it. When it first emerged, it was hierarchical but then the nature of society changed. People started living in high-quality, single-floor homes. These were so good they were originally thought to be palaces, but now it appears they were villas occupied by ordinary citizens. At some point, the people of Tenochtitlan decided that they wanted a more equal society, to the extent that some scholars believe that there was a revolution.
Then there is the case of the democratic city state Cortes encountered. This really was democratic, as there are accounts of the debates in its assembly. This astonished the conquistadors, as there was very little like it in Europe at the time, except some of the Florentine republics. This all challenges the notion that once society develops to a certain extent and becomes complex, inequality also emerges and is very difficult to challenge or remove. These cases show that indigenous peoples could and did. He also argues that the same may have been true of slavery. The only successful slave revolt that we know of is Toussant L’Ouverture in Haiti. But Wengrow suggests there could have been thousands of other successful slave revolts in prehistory of which we are unaware. Slavery came about, he argues, from the expense of laying out offerings for the dead. In order to leave food and drink for the dead, the bereaved had to have access to the foods themselves and so they became indebted and dependent on the people who owned those resources.
He also talks about the problems in describing some of these urban centres as cities. There are huge sites in the Ukraine, but archaeologists are hesitant about calling them cities with some preferring other terms such as ‘mega-sites’ because they aren’t centralised.
Bastani asks him at one point about the problem of pseudo-archaeology. I think this came up because Graham Hancock is currently fronting a series on Netflix claiming that way back in prehistory there was an advanced society, but that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm. Wengrow states that quite often pseudo-archaeology is based on old and discarded idea, such as Atlantis. The people involved tend not to be anyone who’s ever been on an archaeological dig, and view archaeologists as spending their lives trying to hide some momentous secret from everyone. But it can act as an entry for some people to archaeology, and he doesn’t really like the sneering attitude of some archaeologists towards it.
Wengrow himself is an interesting character. He didn’t want to be an archaeologist originally, but came to it from acting. He also worked in the BBC Arabic service. He decided at one point he wanted to get a degree, applied to the best university he could, Oxford, and sent reams of applications to its various colleges. They turned him down. Then he was told that he should apply for a place on a course that was just being set up. One of the colleges was just setting up an archaeology course, so he did. When it came to the interview, he told the interviewer that he had always wanted to be an archaeologist. At which point she held up all the previous letters he’d written. But they admitted him, and he has now had a career teaching and excavating in places like Egypt.
He states that sometimes the pseudoarchaeology about a period or culture misses the point about what’s really interesting about it. He talks about the idea that the Sphinx was constructed before the pyramids, and admits that it’s actually a reasonable question. But if you go back to the predynastic period a thousand years before the pyramids were built, you come to the burial sites of one of Egypt’s first kings. This is fascinating, although you wouldn’t know it from the dry way it has been discussed in conferences and museums like the Petrie Museum. Excellent though these are, they talk about highly specialised subjects like pot typography which is excruciatingly dull if you want to know the wider picture. The early king’s tomb is composed of room after room of the bodies of the people and occasionally the animals that were slaughtered to accompany the king into the afterlife.
The interview is based on a book Wengrow wrote with a colleague, The Dawn of Everything. Sadly, after spending a decade writing it, the co-author died just a few weeks after its completion. The book has been widely praised, and has even inspired artistic pieces. He talks about a French woman, who composed a piece of music based on it. He regrets he was unable to attend its performance thanks to jet lag coming back from somewhere, but later met the lady when she came to Britain.
I know a little about some of what he’s talking about to have no doubt that he’s absolutely right. One of the seminars in the archaeology department at Bristol, which I attended, was about how cities like Catalhuyuk were established before the appearance of agriculture. One of the huge Neolithic sites in the Ukraine is discussed in the La Rousse Encyclopedia of Archaeology. The great mound of Cahokia is also discussed in a book I bought years ago on North American Indian archaeology. I wasn’t aware that the people of Stonehenge had given up growing crops, nor of the democratic city states in South America and Mexico. This is fascinating stuff.
He’s right about archaeology contradicting the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers about the origins of society, though I’m not sure how much of a problem this is. The philosophers he discusses – Hobbes and Rousseau – were Social Contract theorists. Social Contract theory is the idea that the state and society were set up when men came together to select an authority under whom they would live, so that their lives and property would be protected. Thus the first kings. These princes are the representatives of the people, and so from the 17th century onwards the idea developed that sovereignty lay with the people, who could revoke the power they had delegated to the prince. This was the view of John Locke. However, subsequent philosophers showed that this was just conjecture, and that it could have happened like that as the people at the time were using concepts that only subsequently developed after the foundation of states and kingdoms. I thought Social Contract theory was dead, and he closest it had to a modern advocate was John Rawls in his Theory of Justice. Rawls argued that if people were just disembodied entities wishing to chose the kind of society in which they would care to live, they would choose one that had the maximum freedom and justice for everyone, as that would also include them. Away from centrist politics, the anarchists have been keenly interested in anthropology and those indigenous societies where there is no central authority.
I’m not sure how well some of this would go down with Sargon of Akkad and the Lotus Eaters. They’ve developed an interest in archaeology, recently posting a video discussing Homo Erectus, along with the Norman Conquest and ancient Rome. But Sargon is a huge fan of John Locke and describes himself as a classical liberal. I don’t know whether archaeology’s findings about the origin of early states would contradict his ideas or not.
Sorry, folks, but I’m returning here to the something my favourite right-wing YouTube historian posted yesterday. Lenny Henry is the co-editor of a book that’s recently been published on the dire state of Black Britain, Black British Lives Matter, and Simon Webb has been reading it. He posted two videos attacking what he considered to be a couple of its untruths yesterday. One was a demolition of a list in the book of Black people, who have supposedly died in police custody. Except that many of them didn’t. One woman in particular, who the book claims died in 1986, really only died in 2011 or so, according to Wikipedia. The other video concentrated on a chapter about Black British health. Four times as many Black mothers die in childbirth as White mothers. Webb states that one of the causes of this is likely to be obesity. The book notes that a higher number of Black people are obese than Whites, who in turn have a higher level of obesity than east Asians. Webb likes this, as it fits in with the Bell curve and the statistical distribution of intelligence between races. Blacks are thicker than Whites, who are in turn thicker than east Asians. Now according to Webb, the book claims that Blacks have higher levels of obesity because they were fed scraps and other bits of rubbish, like molasses, by the plantation masters when they were slaves. Webb criticises this by saying this makes as much sense as blaming the rise of obesity in working class Whites on the highly calorific food working class people traditionally ate. He argues he could use that to excuse himself getting fat, but it’s still within his power to change his diet.
Now I think here he does have a point. I don’t think you can blame slavery for Black obesity, or not entirely, for the following reasons:
At some point in the 18th century, the plantation masters started giving their slaves plots of land on which they could work on Sundays growing their own food. This was partly a ploy so that they didn’t have to give them so much rations. But it resulted in the development of a market economy in the Caribbean, with the enslaved population producing food which they sold at Sunday markets.
African slaves also took some of their own foodstuffs to the New World. I’ve only read of this in the context of Black American cuisine, but apparently the slaves in the southern US also included food plants from their west African homelands. My guess is that something similar also happened in the Caribbean.
In the 19th century the British deliberately set about improving the slave diet. Yams were introduced from Polynesia and the British government also started laying down regulations on the amount of food the planters had to give their slaves. This consisted of so many plantains, so much fish and ‘farinaceous material’ – presumably wheat and cereals – per week. I’m not a nutritionist, so have no idea whether the prescribed amounts would have been enough. But the legislation is contained in the British parliamentary papers on slavery compiled in the 1820s, and anyone interested could use them very productively as a research tool.
Even if there is a link between slavery and obesity in Blacks, this would only apply to people of West Indian descent. Or rather, it would only have a racist context for those enslaved by the British. It wouldn’t apply to recent African immigrants, unless you wish to argue that they are inclined to obesity because of the diet their enslaved ancestors were fed by their African masters. African societies also owned slaves, the proportions varyiing between 30 to 70 per cent of the population according to culture. And they were fed scraps. In West Africa, people received food in relation to their position in the social hierarchy. The master of the house ate first, and passed his scraps on to his favourites, who in turned passed theirs down to their social inferiors, with the women getting whatever was left. Akapolo slaves in east Africa were also fed poorly, and expected to eat their food off the floor, rather than from pots.
The ideal of beauty in some west African societies is for plump and fat women. In some west African cultures girls are taken to a special hut when they hit puberty where they are fattened up ready for marriage. And if I remember correctly, this has been an issue of feminist concern.
There’s also a class factor at work here, I feel. The British diet traditionally contained a lot of calories and stodge because most people did physical work. Now we live more sedentary lives and so don’t need as much rich, fatty food. This would also apply to people from the West Indies, where much of the work would also have been veery physical, particularly during slavery.
Then there is the question of the amount of healthcare Black women receive compared to those of Whites and other races. Thomas Sowell in one of his books on race debates this issue. He notes that Black mothers have a higher incidence of complications and mortality than Whites, and receive less care than Whites as well. But Mexican mother receive the least healthcare, but have much less infant mortality than Blacks. He therefore argues that the amount of healthcare isn’t the cause of Black infant mortality. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there wasn’t a genetic predisposition towards obesity in Blacks in the same way that there is in people of South Asian origin, who have a higher rate of heart disease than Whites. And if Blacks are genetically more predisposed to complications in pregnancy, in the same way that they suffer higher rates of sickle cell anaemia, then it simply means that Blacks need higher levels of medical care in pregnancy. Or perhaps different kinds of medical care to search for particular kinds of complications than Whites. The fact that Black Americans have higher rates of infant mortality than Mexicans despite receiving more medical care isn’t an argument for complacency and saying that somehow it’s all their fault. Clearly Black women need particular care during pregnancy, and there are initiatives to make sure they get it. There was an article on the local BBC news for Bristol a few months ago stating that a couple of Black nurses had started a scheme to combat the higher rate of deaths of Black mothers. That’s clearly welcome and necessary.
But blaming all of this on slavery is bad history and worse race relations. And it may be doing actual harm by preventing historians and healthcare specialists examining other, possibly equal relevant causes of Black health problems.
The Torygraph has published a piece today revealing that a letter has come to light from the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali from the 1930s, in which he reveals just what an anti-Christian, fascist sympathiser he really was. It dates from 1935. Dali had already been suspended from the Surrealists the year before because of comments praising Hitler, amongst other things. In a nasty bit of social snobbery he said that the train crashes he most enjoyed were those in which only third-class passengers were killed. The Torygraph article also states that in another letter in which he claimed that one of the reasons why he was expelled from the Surrealists 1939 was his positive view of the lynchings in America. He loved Hitler, was fascinated by the Swastika and apparently thought the Nazi party were an example of Surrealism in action.
Uggh. Pass the sick bag!
The Torygraph article begins
‘Salvador Dalí wanted to enslave races he considered inferior and establish a new “sadistic” world religion, a newly-discovered letter has revealed.
In the letter, which was written by Dalí in 1935, the artist proposed the enslavement of “all the coloured races” as part of a new world order that would be “anti-Christian and materialistic, based on the progress of science”.
“The domination or submission to slavery of all the coloured races” could be possible, Dalí wrote, “if all whites united fanatically”. He also insisted on the need for “human sacrifices”.
As Europe was threatened by the fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Dalí’s letter to André Breton, the French writer and co-founder of the surrealist movement, speaks of the need for “new hierarchies, more brutal and strict than ever before” to “annihilate” Christianity.
“I believe that we surrealists are finally turning into priests,” Dalí wrote.
Scornful of Christianity’s “altruism”, he added: “We don’t want happiness for ‘all’ men, rather the happiness of some to the detriment of others”.
The letter was recently discovered in the digitalised personal archive of Sebastià Gasch, an art critic from Barcelona who died in 1982. It was published on Thursday by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.’
Dali scarpered to American during the War, returning afterwards to Spain as a supporter of the Fascist leader, General Franco.
Dali was a great artist but a revolting human being. He was greedy for fame and money, which is why some of the other Spanish Surrealists nicknamed him ‘Avida Dollars’. Malcolm McLaren presented a programme on him on Radio 4 a few years ago, in which he compared the publicity-hungry, media-savvy Dali with contemporary British artists like Damian Hurst and Tracey Emin. Well, Dali did share with Hurst, Emin and the rest of the Young British Artists the urge to shock as well as the pursuit of fame and cash, but YBAs, for all their excesses can never be accused of Nazism. Dali also wasn’t averse to selling his friends out to the authorities. Dali emigrated to America with Luis Bunuel, who also hailed from Catalonia. The two had worked together on the Surrealist films Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, both now regarded as classics of cinema. Surrealism was a mixture of Freudianism and Marxism, and many of the Surrealists were members of the Communist party. Bunuel was one of them. On arrival in the Land of the Free, Dali snitched that Bunuel was a commie to the FBI, and made little effort to excuse himself for doing so when Bunuel confronted him on his betrayal. Bunuel himself emigrated to Mexico where he continued to make Surrealist, anti-Christian films.
I’m fascinated by the Surrealists and love Dali’s art, but the man himself is quite a different matter. I can well believe, despite his later conversion to the Catholicism, that at heart he was an atheist with a hatred of the religion to which he nominally belonged. I didn’t realise he was so racist, however. This was definitely against the Surrealist ethos, which was firmly against imperialism, but patronised the world’s indigenous peoples as seeing their art and culture based as based on the Freudian unconscious. This was the respectable scientific view at the time, but modern anthropologists have rejected it. Instead they see indigenous art and culture as the products of centuries or millennia of conscious intellectual development and no more based on the irrational or Freudian unconscious than our own.
As one of the best known of the Surrealists, Dali is a fascinating figure and he painted some of the greatest works of 20th century art. But as this letter shows, he was in many ways a squalid human being.
This is hilarious, and nothing to do with politics. I gather that Uri Geller has raised his head again, threatening to use his psychic powers against Vladimir Putin. Or at least his spoons. I found this video from 2012 on YouTube in which the great psychic loses his temper during an interview with a man from the Spoon Council. Geller wants to talk about his great achievements, while his interviewer keeps reminding him that he became successful in Britain through appearing on TV and bending people’s spoons. Geller gets very irate at this, and throws him out, threatening to call his lawyer. But there’s a shot of his car outside, decorated with bent spoons.
Geller’s amusing, but I seriously doubt that he has any genuine psychic powers. The spoon bending trick, for example, goes back to the 18th century where it can be found in the book Rational Recreations. Which sounds like the kind of book Mr Spock would read for fun. And back in the ’70s, an Israeli judge found against him in a court case brought by a dissatisfied customer at one of his cabaret performances. Geller was at the time Israel’s foremost nightclub stage magician. He advertised his performances as showing undeniable proof of the existence of psychic powers. But an engineering student who went to one said that all he saw was stage magic, and sued. I think it was under the Israeli version of the trades descriptions act. The beak was not impressed with Geller either, and found in the student’s favour.
At his height in the ’70s Geller was working with scientific psychic researchers like Andrija Puharich. He once claimed to have teleported from Israel to the US, although someone punctured this by producing his airplane ticket. He appeared on one American TV show with one of the American astronauts, who had played golf on the Moon. Geller produced the golf ball he claimed the astronaut had hit and lost up there. And back in the ’90s the Mexican government paid him to use his psychic powers to find lost Aztec gold. He looked for it by flying about over the land of the ancient Mexica in a helicopter waving his hand out the window in the hope of getting the vibrations or whatever. Nice work if you can get it!
Back to the spoons, one of Private Eye’s spoof columns for a long time was ‘Me and My Spoon’, in which the magazine spoofed interviews with celebs and politicians with fictional interviews asking them what their opinions on spoons were. These satirical pieces usually ended with the celeb throwing a strop. Geller’s interview here seems straight out of it.
Thomas Sowell is a Black American conservative. I’ve started reading his Race and Culture, whose title suggests it should be some wretched Nazi screed, but which isn’t. Sowell believes that peoples are shaped by their history and the environments in which they were formed, and thus different people can develop different skills and attitudes to education, commerce and so on. These may be retained by those peoples when they immigrate to a new country. In the chapter on ‘Race and Migration’, he describes how various immigrant groups came to dominate particular areas of the economy in places like Latin America, Africa, and Australia. For example, European immigrants came to dominate trade and industry in many South American countries because the indigenous landowning elites looked down on those sectors. Their preferred occupations were in the profession, such as law or medicine, or in government. He discusses how the Lebanese similarly became important in trade and industry in West Africa, and the Indians, particularly Gujaratis in East Africa. He notes that immigrant success in these areas is often resented, as if the industries the immigrants create somehow happened naturally and the immigrants somehow seized control of them over the indigenous peoples. This was the mentality of the Ugandans when they expelled their Asian population in 1972.
Sowell doesn’t believe in ‘political correctness’ or multiculturalism, and states that often the association between an immigrant group and higher crime rates or poor sanitation really isn’t one of perception and stereotype. He is also critical of multiculturalism as it can seal ethnic minority groups off from the skills, education and values of the mainstream society, skills and attitudes that would allow them to successfully integrate and compete. But he also makes the point that immigration does not necessarily mean that immigrant groups take jobs away from the indigenous or host society. Indeed, the may actually create them. He writes
‘In addition to real costs entailed by immigrants, there are often also false charges that they are a burden to the native-born population, in situations where they are not. However, sometimes there are hidden costs which may be different from what is charged, but significant nonetheless. A common charge against immigrants, for example, is that they take jobs from native-born workers. But there is no fixed number of jobs, from which those going to immigrants can be subtracted. More producers coming into an economy mean more output and more demand, which in turn creates more jobs.
It is an empirical question whether the additional jobs created as a result of the immigrants economic activities equals or exceeds the number of jobs the immigrants themselves take. It is by no means out of the question that native workers may have more jobs available after immigrants arrive. Studies of the large influx of Mexican immigrants into southern California, for example, showed no adverse impact on either the unemployment rate or the labour force participation rate of Blacks in that region, who might be competing for similar jobs. In fact, job trends for Blacks were more favourable in this area heavily impacted by Mexican immigrants than in the nation at large. But while there has apparently been an increase in the total number of jobs, there has been a correspondingly lower pay scale, as the large influx of immigrants has lessened the need for employers to raise wages in order to attract sufficient workers.’ (p,.43).
Which is all very interesting. You often hear the claim that immigrants are taking jobs, and the right are claiming that wages are lower because of foreign immigration. But you don’t hear that immigration can create jobs, and that’s an important omission.
Perhaps it should be made more often in response to the anti-immigration brigade.
Some fascinating and optimistic news for peeps looking for real warp drives a la Star Trek. Trek Culture is a Star Trek fan site, but in this video host Sean Ferrick talks about a possible scientific breakthrough for the development of a real warp drive. Dr. Harold G. ‘Sonny’ White, a scientist at the Limitless Space Institute, observed the formation of a real warp bubble while researching Casimir cavitation. The warp bubble was on the nanoscale, so very, very small indeed. Nevertheless, his paper has been passed by peer review, and Dr. White hopes to follow this up with an experiment with a microscopically small sphere of a few micromillimeters which produce a similarly small cylindrical warp bubble around it.
Real scientific interest in warp drives began with the 1994 paper by the Mexican physicist Dr Marcel Alcubierre, but this was also widely discounted because it would have needed an extreme amount of energy plus a very exotic form of matter. If I remember correctly, the exotic matter involved may be one in which the force of gravity repulses rather than attracts. Since then scientists have been working to refine his theories. One recent physicist has suggested that it may be possible to create a warp field using a mass ten times the size of Jupiter, which is many times smaller than the masses needed to create such a bubble in Alcubierre’s original calculations. It’s still far beyond any practical application or construction, at least with present technology, but there are hopes that further work will cut the masses needed down still further until warp drives hopefully become possible. I think the Casimir force is a force that squeezes the vacuum energy – the virtual particles zipping into and out of existence at the level of the cosmic foam – out of any empty space at the nano level when two plates are set up sufficiently near each other. Years ago in the 1990s one of the British science programmes reported that it would be possible to use the effect to create a metre-sized wormhole. The drawback was that the plates used would have to be the size of Jupiter. It looks like White was researching similar effects when he discovered the formation of a real warp bubble.
While this is very optimistic, Ferrick stresses that it will be a very long time before we see the creation of a real warp drive. This is so far off that it’s Science Fiction. This is correct. There are problems scaling this such effects up from the nano to the macro scale. Wormholes are believe to form and disappear constantly at the level of the cosmic foam at the smallest level of reality. One method of FTL travel that has been proposed is to create such a wormhole and then enlarge it. However, wormholes are unstable, and so its mouth would have to be kept open with the gravity-repulsing exotic matter. I don’t think anyone know how to make it, nor do I think scientists know how you could realistically enlarge such as wormhole so that it becomes a practical method of interstellar travel. Nevertheless, Ferrick states that a line has been crossed, albeit a microscopically small one, towards making warp drives like those in StarTrek a reality.
This is fascinating news, and even if the creation of a real warp drive is decades off, I hope this will lead to their creation. As Captain Picard used to say in Star Trek: The Next Generation, ‘Number One, make it so!’
And just to remind everyone what has helped to inspire many people’s dreams of space exploration, here’s the titles of the original series:
Mind you, I think if they ever create a real warp drive and test it in space, it’ll be hit by a solar flare, opening up a wormhole that will cast the spaceship and its astronaut into a far distant corner of the universe. He’ll be taken on board a living spaceship, full of escaped prisoners, and pursued by an insane military general, while just trying to find a way home.
Sorry. Wrong series – that’s Farscape.
Star Trek has helped to inspire millions not just with its vision of humanity expanding out among the stars to explore strange new worlds, and find new life forms and new civilisations, but also through its idealistic view of future society. It’s a world where racism and sexism have been banished, there is no starvation or want, and people work to better themselves, not because they need to. The late, great comedian Bill Hicks also looked forward to a similar human future. He used to end his gigs with ‘the Vision’, in which he pointed out that the if the world spent what it does on guns and armaments on peaceful activities, we could solve world hunger. Not one person would starve. And we could colonise space, in peace, forever.
Amen to that. RIP Gene Roddenberry and Bill Hicks – great visionaries andentertainers.
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