A Spirited and Informed Defence of European Colonialism

Bruce Gilley, The Case for Colonialism (Nashville, Tennessee and London, New English Review Press 2023)

Introduction

This is a controversial book that arose from an extremely controversial academic article written by the author. It’s particularly timely as yesterday the Guardian reviewed an exhibition on Black slavery with the approving comment that it was a great rebuttal to those who are now arguing that British imperialism was benign and civilising. Gilley is indeed one of the latter. in 2018 he was moved to write an academic article defending European colonialism after researching Sir Alan Burns, the last British governor of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and reading positive comments about British colonialism from the anti-colonialist activist and writer, Chinua Achebe. Achebe is regarded as a staunch enemy of British colonialism, and yet Gilley presents quotation after quotation showing that his attitude was more nuanced. Achebe stated that by and large, Nigeria under the British was well run and that they cared for their colonies. He noted that he owed his education to European missionaries who ran excellent schools, the state schools and finally the university founded by the British. He had no animus against the British themselves, and lived in London. He was also attacked for writing in English rather than his native Igbo, despite the fact that an Igbo language press did not exist.

Benefits of Colonialism

Gilley argues that colonialism benefited its subject peoples by modernising their countries with western technology, medicine and industry, as well as fundamental institutions of political liberty as property rights and democracy. It was not regarded as illegitimate by the colonised peoples themselves. The book begins with a letter from the peoples of the Lakes region of Nigeria, now Lagos, for the British to take over their lands to protect them from their tribal enemies and inviting them to stay as long as they liked. Their willing acceptance of colonial authority was shown in the way they moved closer to the centres of colonialism, not away from them, seeking the greater opportunities to be found there. The colonies’ indigenous peoples formed the majority of civil servants, police and soldiers so that the number of White administrators in some of these nations was minuscule compared to the vast populations over which they ruled. And some of the former colonies are coming to a positive reappraisal of the colonialists as the founders of their nations. This is happening in Nigeria with Lord Lugard and the former Belgian Congo with A Brazza. Moreover, the abysmal misgovernment and corruption in these nations is forcing many of them to look back on their former colonial overlords requesting them to return. After the explosion at the port of Beirut several years ago, a petition in Lebanon went up calling for the French to return and take over the colony. 60,000 people signed in the first hours it was up on the Net. Macron acceded to the request, so that the French state acted as a kind of supervisor in an international arrangement in which a western company took over the running of the port. A Belgian journalist, van Reynbrouck, was surprised when he visited the former Belgian Congo by the numbers of young Congolese who came up to him asking when the Belgians would return. In a similar case to Lebanon, the Indonesian authorities were extremely concerned about corruption among the customs officers in Jakarta. They sacked all 3,000 of them and brought in a Swiss company to rebuild it. But the projects to reintroduce elements of western colonialism to genuinely modernise and restore good government and business practice to these countries goes far beyond that. One economist has recommended setting up ‘charter cities’ in the former colonies, with the authorities’ consent. These would be leased to the former colonial powers under 99 years leases, like Hong Kong, and governed by the former imperial masters. At the same time, leases granting residential status would be given to a limited number of migrants seeking to live and work there. In this way modern, democratic government and business would return to the former colonies.

Resulting Controversy

Gilley submitted his article promoting colonialism to two academic journals. One turned it down because it was too controversial. He then offered it to another, the Third World Quarterly. They published it to a storm of outrage. Over a hundred academics, including those of his own university, demanded that he be sacked or subjected to something like a Maoist ‘struggle session where he would be forced to recant his sin. Eventually the article was withdrawn because of threats to lives of the magazine’s editors and staff from anti-colonial fanatics in India.

The book is partly a response to this controversy. The first few chapters describe the affair and respond to his critics. The next part of the book provide examples of the positive influence of colonialism around the world, including iconoclastic reappraisals of German rule in Africa and China and a complete demolition of the claim that King Leopold’s rule in the Congo was genocide resulting in the deaths of 8 million Black Africans. The chapter on German imperialism shows that, rather than proto-Nazis, the Germans had made explicit provision for the good government of their subject peoples leading to their eventual independence at the Congress of Berlin in 1880. They ruthless punished imperial administrators and troopers who abused and victimised the natives. In Qingdao their chief judge was keen to incorporate local, Chinese law into that of the colony and wrote three books on the subject. The genocide against the Herero in Southwest Africa was not planned and was largely the result of forces beyond the authorities’ control.

Refutation of Holocaust Allegations over King Leopold’s Rule in the Congo

In the Congo the real death toll from the exactions of the Force Publicque was largely confined to one section of this vast, sprawling country and consisted of 18,000 people. This was largely the result of tribal warfare, not deliberate policy by Leopold himself. The severed feet and other bodies shown in photographs of alleged colonial atrocities were the result of the traditional way the tribes in the area showed that they had killed their victims. Leopold had taken over the country with the specific intention of eradicating the slavery and cannibalism which plagued the area. The photographs of people with severed limbs were staged recreations of mutilations resulting from these atrocities, and not of horrific punishments visited by Leopold and his servants on those who failed to meet the rubber quotas. These photographs were then taken over by British missionaries and the anti-colonialist British press to show the supposed horror inflicted by Leopold over the people of his private empire. One notorious photo showed a man looking down forlornly at severed feet and an arm. This has been presented as limbs hacked off by the Force Publique on those rubber workers who had failed to meet their set targets. But the original photograph states that the man was looking down on the remains of his wife and daughter after they had been eaten by cannibals.

Black Anti-Slavery Activists Embrace of American Constitution

Another chapter presents the positive case for enslavement in America. He does not seek to present slavery itself as a positive institution benefiting its victims, although that was one of the arguments of its supporters. Instead he notes that in America slaves could, surprisingly, have the benefit of the law. In 1791 in Newport, Connecticutt, a slaver was tried for murder for throwing an enslaved woman with smallpox overboard as a threat to the health and lives of the rest of the ship. The trial lasted five years before the man was acquitted on the grounds that he had acted to protect the others on board against the contagion. Moreover, Black anti-slavery activists were well aware of the anti-slavery implications of the American constitution and its enshrinement of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. They sought to widen its application beyond White Americans to themselves, in alliance with Whites, writing hymns and other texts supporting this view.

British Attempts to Supply Food to Famine-Struck First Nations in Canada

The book also rehabilitates British rule on the Canadian prairies, stating that they were not indifferent or complicit in a 19th century famine of the indigenous peoples that has now been described as a Holocaust. The British had scant resources in this corner of Canada and did what they could to provide food. They were also seeking to provide the Indians with modern, industrial education in the now notorious residential schools at the Native Canadians own request. They were hampered by distance and the problems of farming in that section of Canada which stumped even season agriculturalists from Ontario and was only solved ten years after the famine. And the same problems afflicted White Canadians. One man, who moved west, suffered from the loss of vital equipment en route. When he arrived, local people, including the Indians, borrowed his equipment but did not return it. The environment itself proved to be too challenging and after sticking it out for three years he finally gave up and returned home.

Erasure of the History of White Farmers in America

White farmers in colonial era America are also being erased from official history through a movement that claims that the piles of stones they left in their fields are really Native American cairns. This started with a group of old, White men. The founders of the movement were interested in pseudo-history, like finding Atlantis. Farmers in 19th century New England, when clearing their fields of stones, used to pile them up in the centre of the field. They were given to children to play with or sold to workers building roads. When such piles have been excavated, they reveal underneath rusted farm equipment and White American domestic refuse. The indigenous peoples then adopted the idea, passionately claiming that the piles were indeed cairns left by their ancestors. They gained this knowledge after visiting the stones and a few minutes of sacred contact with their gods and spirits. From there it moved on to be adopted by state and county authorities, sometimes as a means of preventing building development of these areas. Yet the fake history presented by this movement damages real colonial history. The stones themselves are the physical remains of the agricultural settlement and abandonment of these areas as the farmers moved to fresh lands further west. Another chapter takes apart this misrepresentation of Malayan colonial rule during the Emergency, stating that most Malayans actually supported British rule against that of the Communist guerrillas.

Achebe and Naipaul on the Benefits of Colonialism

There are two chapters given to the positive appreciation of colonialism by Chinua Achebe and the British Asian writer, V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul believed very strongly that British colonialism had benefited its peoples around the world. For him, it was a universal civilisation that promoted benign values applicable to all humanity. He was sharply critical in his novels of the dictators that took over these countries, plunging them into corruption and horrific bloodshed, and their left-wing White European supporters who followed them around, turning a blind eye to the horrors in the belief that something great and genuinely African would arise. He is also scathing of the hypocrisy behind the critics of British colonialism, who all seek its benefits in London or the West. These include Fazlur Rahman, who led the campaign to the Islamise Pakistan in the 1960s. When this provoked opposition, he fled to a nice tenured academic position at an American university. Vijayamprada Gopal, a professor of Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature at Cambridge University and a favourite with Novara Media, also gets it for her snobbery. She stated that she would no longer teach working class students after the university porters called her by the university’s accustomed form of address of ‘madam’ for all women, rather than calling her ‘doctor’ as she wanted. This conforms to Naipaul’s comment that Oxbridge educated Indians were worse petty tyrants than the Indian landlords, who insisted that their tenants bow and touch their feet.

Criticism of Gandhi

Naipaul was also critical of Islam in Among the Believers, and had scant regard for Gandhi. Gandhi had the right idea when he started out, but then transformed himself into a Hindu holy man, after which he had nothing positive to contribute. It’s controversial, but there have been books and articles written arguing that Gandhi was not the benign figure he’s been presented as. Rabindranath Tagore, another great figure in Indian nationalism, dislike Gandhi because of his tactic of whipping up mobs until they were on the edge of rioting and violence and then pulling back. His sudden embrace of the Dalits in the 1920s was provoked, not by genuine concern for them, but because the British were planning to add an extra clause protecting their voting rights. Gandhi feared that this would lead to them supporting British rule, not Indian nationalism. He also knew absolutely nothing about the Second World War and the nature of Nazism. He wrote a letter to Churchill urging him to make peace with Hitler as ‘he is not a bad man’. On the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he recommended that the Czechs and Slovaks should meet the Nazis with passive resistance. When someone pointed out to him that this would simply result in the Nazis exterminating them, he acknowledged that this would happen, but ‘it would have been glorious’. India today is an emerging industrial and technological global superpower, quite contrary to what Gandhi himself would have wanted for his country. Gandhi hated modern technology with its trains and airplanes. He would have liked India to return to its traditional Vedic social and economic structure. And it is precisely by rejecting his vision that India has developed and become the global force it is today.

Gilley’s View of the Handing of Hong Kong to China

The last chapter is Gilley’s own personal observations of Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1991 under its last governor, Chris Patten and an article he wrote for the final edition of a magazine devoted Asian affairs when this magazine finally folded. Patten comes across as trying to do his level best for Hong Kong and its people despite almost insurmountable opposition from the Chinese. Beijing did not respect the original treaty and simply regarded it as an opportune time to take over the colony. They warned Patten not to introduce democracy just before independence, as the British had done elsewhere. Patten defied them and gave it to Hong Kong anyway. He was very keen to soothe local feelings about colonialism, and so appeared in a lounge suit rather than traditional gubernatorial garb. As for the magazine, based in Hong Kong, this was very much a product of the colonial age in taking a broad view of the politics and economic affairs of the region. But it lost readers with the retreat of colonialism. Instead of a broad, regional view, magazines now presented the specific views of the individual nations, such as India or China, and the broader view was now being lost.

Genocide and Butchery by Post-Independence Dictators

The book also describes the horrors and carnage perpetrated by the colonies’ various dictators, who seized power after independence. Guinea-Bissau’s dictator wanted to destroy the legacy and infrastructure left over by the Portuguese, and so tore his country apart, butchering its people in the process. The British in Zanzibar had set up a multi-party system which sought to balance the interests of African and Arab Zanzibaris. A year after Prince Philip had formally handed power to them, however, it was invaded by anti-colonial forces backed by the Soviet Union and East Germany. Only one in ten indigenous Zanzibaris supported the invasion. The invaders set up a regime of massacre and repression, driving out the Sultan and the Arab and South Asian Zanzibaris. In one massacre, they invaded and slaughtered the tribespeople in one of the islands, whose children were then required to sing suitably patriotic songs celebrating their parents’ deaths.

Frantz Fanon’s Glorification of the Shooting and Murder of Whites

He also attacks Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean psychiatrist whose text on Algerian war of independence, The Wretched of the Earth, is now a classic of the decolonisation movement. Rather than being some kind of benign text on the necessity of Black liberation, Fanon’s book is bloodthirsty, revelling in the genocidal massacre of French colonists and White Europeans, and endorsed with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre. Gilley is harshly critical of the western left-wing intellectuals, safely ensconced in their Paris cafes, supporting people who can only be described as monstrous tyrants. No positive view of French rule in Algeria is permitted in the mainstream French press, but there is a large, self-published literature by the Pieds-Noir, the former French colonists, arguing that the mainstream view is incorrect. He also criticised the modern anti-colonial crowd, who angrily denounce America as a colonial power while demanding the right of Africans and Muslims to immigrate there.

Independence Not Expected or Wanted by the Majority of Colonial Peoples

Against this, and attacks on western notions of democracy and human rights, Gilley argues that the independence came unexpectedly and was not wanted by the mass of the colonised. In the Belgian Congo, only 27 per cent of the population supported it, but they were given it anyway, like it or not, by the departing Belgians. The real forces behind decolonisation was European exhaustion following the Second World War. Europe no longer had the ability to afford to run the former colonies and there was pressure from both America and Russia to open them up and decolonise, plus the politics of the Cold War. The countries that did best following independence were those that retained the most of their colonial legacy and infrastructure. This is recognised by many of the former colonies themselves. While colonial rule is hated by the people of most of the former colonies, their rulers are seeking to reintroduce elements of the colonial legacy in order to improve their countries.

Colonialism Preferable to the Alternatives

This all runs counter to what has been taught for decades, at least since the 1970s, about European colonialism, which is still being blamed for the many failures and troubles of the former colonies today. It will certainly not be popular with the Guardian and the other left-wing papers and magazines that hold the view that colonialism was uniformly bad, oppressive and exploitative. But Gilley makes a very strong and clear case. As well as the known facts that contradict the received narrative, it also argues from counterfactuals. What would have happened in the absence of colonialism? There are three possibilities. One is a continuation of tribal warfare and indigenous slavery. The second is the penetration of these colonies by western mercenaries and companies seeking concessions. The third is colonisation by a rival power. None of these would necessarily benefit the indigenous peoples.

As for the brutality of the British and other Europeans, the indigenous rulers and imperial powers were just as ruthless, if not more so. Nader Shah, the Persian emperor, was preparing a common currency for Persia and India, suggesting he planned to invade and annexe the country. During his time in Delhi he massacred 30,000 people. On his return to Persia he gouged his son’s eyes out, castrated one of his generals and had six merchants buried alive for the crime of buying a rug belonging to the imperial court. The British and other colonial powers, on the other hand, erected laws against the exploitation and brutal treatment of natives, sending reports back to the home countries and investigating and prosecuting offenders. This provides the basis for the many works of history denouncing colonialism, which is rather hypocritical in the absence of similar concerns by the indigenous powers presented as being somehow innocent of these crimes.

Arguments for Forced Labour

Gilley also seeks to rehabilitate the system of forced labour the British and other Europeans imposed on their African colonies. Gilley argues that this was indeed to make the colonies pay for themselves in the absence of monetary taxation. He states that the arguments against it are economically illiterate. Perhaps, but in Malawi and no doubt other African countries it was resented as a new form of slavery. He also points out the contradictory arguments against colonialism. For some, it underdeveloped its colonies. For others, it interfered too much. And there is the attitude among many of colonialism’s critics that the British should have provided free education and healthcare to their colonial subjects. In fact, Britons themselves did not have free healthcare until the establishment of the NHS and welfare state by the Labour government in 1948. Education in Britain wasn’t compulsory until the 1870s, and even if it was supposed to be free, the poverty of many working class Brits meant that some were unable to afford items such as school uniforms, pens and pencils and other equipment. It’s a case of presentism, the imposition of modern attitudes on to the past, in this case the expectations of the modern welfare state at a time when it did not exist.

Two Phases of British Colonialism

It is noticeable that Gilley begins his treatment of colonialism when it had entered its paternalistic, liberal phase after 1824. In Britain’s case this followed the abolition of the slave trade in 1809 and the introduction of progressive legislation for the improvement of the slaves’ lives in preparation for their eventual emancipation. The previous phase of British imperialism, such as the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, James VI’s/I’s plantations and the horrors of the Cromwellian campaigns, in my view cannot be justified. Nor can the conquest of the Caribbean and the New World with the extirpation of the original Amerindian populations and the establishment of transatlantic slavery. Which is, no doubt, why he doesn’t and is silent on this phase of western colonialism. Some anti-imperial historians have written about European colonialism as if it was consciously proceeded according to a pre-set plan. But his was not the case. There was no uniform plan and European imperialism was the result of different economic, political, social and religious forces at different times. The lost of the American colonies and their slave holdings made it easier for the British to ban the slave trade and eventually slavery in theirs. Historians have long recognised that there were two phases of British imperialism, the first in America and the Caribbean, the second in the conquest of India, Africa and Asia. It may well be high time that anti-imperial historians and activists took on board the fact that the nature of colonialism itself changed in these two periods.

Imperialists as Colonies’ Real Nationalists

The book is part of a growing mass of literature seeking to present a positive case for colonialism, such as Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Gilley goes further than Biggar, who merely argues that there were certain aspects of British colonialism that were deeply amoral and oppressive, by presenting this phase of imperialism as benign and positive, and takes friendly issue with Biggar on this point. There are even a very few positive facts in favour of Apartheid. One of these is that under it, 100,000 Black Africans a year sought to immigrate to South Africa. But this probably says more about the horrific state of the other African countries than anything really positive about Apartheid. Despite the barrage of abuse and threats Gilley received for his article, the book also reproduces the positive and supportive comments he received from other academics and activists from Africa and Asia, some of whom said that they and their families had greatly benefited from the institutions, especially schools and universities, left by the British. He also claims at one point that the British and other colonialists were these countries’ true nationalists, in that they had a deep interest in the indigenous cultures and their arts and literature that were often being neglected by the indigenous peoples themselves. Naipaul quotes an Indonesian Muslim as saying that his countries’ historic mosques are now preserved by the West, as previously the Indonesians themselves wanted to pull them down.

Necessity of Proper Academic Debate

This is a powerful counterblast to the received narrative about the evils of colonialism. Whatever one feels about it – and looking at the current state of political corruption and creeping authoritarianism in Britain, I am extremely doubtful about the ability of my country to act as a new, benign imperial force – I strongly believe that it and similar books have a place in academic education and discussion. The attempt to silence Gilley, and indeed Biggar on this side of the Pond, with denunciations, personal abuse and death threats is deeply authoritarian and oppressive in its turn. Gilley at one point states that it may take national legislation in America to restore genuine free speech to campuses. And free speech and genuine academic debate are the cornerstones of genuine democracy. Without it, you just have authoritarianism and indoctrination.

A Couple of Videos on the Charango

The charango is an instrument that fascinates me. It’s a type of small guitar from Peru, strung in courses like a lute and its back was traditionally made from the shell of an armadillo. This doesn’t appear to be done any more, probably because the animal is now endangered and so killing it is prohibited. In this video from the Didge Project’s YouTube channel, the speaker gives a brief introduction to the instrument, stating that it was invented some time around 1700 and that it is easy to play. If you can play guitar, like the host, you could pick it up in a couple of hours. He then demonstrates the tinkling sound of the instrument when played before performing a traditional Peruvian song.

And here’s a short video from colomaguitars on YouTube in which the speaker talks briefly about a traditional charango with an armadillo shell back, which has been dropped into her for repair. This time the instrument’s from Bolivia rather than Peru. It’s a family heirloom belonging to her aunt Nina, which she looks forward to giving back to her. That’s if I understand some of the odd Spanish words in the dialogue correctly, and ignore the machine translation that doesn’t seem to me to be quite right.

GB News Outs Muslim Councillor for Correctly Comparing Israel to the Nazis

Oh, how terrible for her to make such a horrendous comparison, even though it’s basically correct. As Tony Greenstein has shown again and again, the policy of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians is like that of Hitler’s infernal bunch towards the Jews before the Final Solution of 1942.

GB News, the broadcaster with only two biases – right and far right, put up a video a couple of days ago in which one of their anchors talked to their ‘investigative journalist’. He had found that a councillor in one of the northern towns, Hadram Bahram, had put up a piece on social media comparing Israel to the Nazis. This included a section where she put Nazi policies parallel to Israeli policies. Thus

Nazis Israel

Founded on Aryan supremacy Founded on Jewish Supremacy

Put racial undesirables in ghettoes Put racial undesirables in ghettoes

and camps and camps.

Employed collective punishments – Employed collective punishments –

Used gas chambers Uses carpet bombing

They then stated that Councillor Bahram’s comparison violated the definition of anti-Semitism the Labour party had signed up to. This is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which states in its examples of anti-Semitism that it may be anti-Semitic to compare Jews with Nazis in certain circumstances. The definition was foisted on the party by a panicked Jewish establishment and the political right, because Jeremy Corbyn was a critic of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The definition has widely been attacked, including by senior British judges and lawyers, who incidentally include Jews, as dangerously threatening free speech. One of those,, who has made this criticism, is the author of the definition, Mr. Stern. The only definition of anti-Semitism which, in my opinion, has any value, is that of the Bund Antisemiten, the 19th century German League of Anti-Semites. They declared it was hatred of Jews as Jews, regardless of religion or biology.

And yes, the Israeli state has acted like the Nazis. It began with the Nakba in which Palestinians in towns and villages across the country were shot and massacred, including women bring gifts of rice and people in mosques. It bulldozes Arab settlements and relocates their people in order for Jewish settlements to be built on their sites. Jewish settlers will raid and physically assault Palestinians. It is an apartheid state where Palestinians must live apart from Jews, take different roads to work in Israel and are paid less. And the White, European Israeli settlers brought with them similar ideas of White racial supremacy. The indigenous Arabic-speaking Jewish peoples of the Middle East, the Mizrahim, were sneered at as ‘human dust’ and given the very worst jobs and educated in separate schools to the dominant Ashkenazy Jews. There is a short video on YouTube by the Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousef, in which he discusses the Israeli state’s sterilisation of Ethiopian women, who had emigrated to Israel. Mass sterilisation of racial undesirables? Now I wonder which regime ruling Germany between 1932 and 1945 did that? Yousef compares this to the extermination of the Amerindians in America and Aboriginal Australians in Oz. He states that the Arabs just want to be treated as human beings.

Quite so. And the Israeli state isn’t.

And let’s not forget, one of Israel’s most senior generals said after one war, ‘Why should it only be Jews who have Holocausts?’

The Israeli state is not forcing Arabs into gas chambers, but in very many respects they are very much like the Nazis, right down to objecting to racial intermarriage. In this case it’s between Jews and Arabs, rather than between Aryans and Jews. Or for that matter, between Blacks and Whites.

This is all part of the ongoing campaign to smear pro-Palestine protesters as Muslim terrorists and anti-Semites. And also present Israel as a humane, western civilisation against Muslim barbarism.

Councillor Bahram is substantially correct, and should not be punished for saying so. But perhaps she’ll be purged by Starmer in order to appease his Likudnik backers and groups within the party like Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour movement.

Providing she has said nothing genuinely anti-Semitic, I stand in solidarity with her and urge her not to be cowed. Jews, Muslims and ordinary Brits are standing together for the Palestinians, and we must not be divided by right-wing imperialist and Likudnik lies.

Black Nationalists Now Claiming that Jerusalem Was Really in Africa

I’ve posted up a number of pieces attacking Afrocentrism and its whacky and ahistorical ideas. Afrocentrism has its roots in 19th century Black American authors, who believed that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation. I don’t think at the time this was an unreasonable claim. Watching some of the videos by Afrocentrists on YouTube, it appears they got some of their ideas from contemporary scholarly writings. One such video began by asserting that Champollion, the French linguist who finally cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, believed they were a Black civilisation. The ancient Egyptians in their art clearly portrayed themselves as darker than Europeans, but not as dark as the Nubians, whom they depicted as really Black. Where it becomes unreasonable is when it asserts that ancient Egypt was the fount and source of Greek, and hence western civilisation, and claims that Black people were the original inhabitants of Britain, America, Vietnam, China, Japan and elsewhere.

There’s also a very strong belief in the Black community that Jesus must have been Black. At one level it’s kind of natural, as White Europeans have seen him in the terms of their own race, and portrayed him as White. He wasn’t either, of course. The Jews were a Semitic people, related to the Arabs and other related peoples in the Middle East, such as the Assyrians and Aramaeans. Hebrew is very closely related to Ugaritic, the ancient language of Byblos now in Syria. Christ would have had an olive complexion like these people, rather than that of a sub-Saharan Black African.

But there are rumours that a Black director is planning a film about Christ, in which not only Our Lord but everyone in Jerusalem will be Black. I don’t know if this will include Pontius Pilate, who was a White Roman. This seems to follow Black racial doctrine rather than historical reality.

But the desire to promote all the Biblical figures as Black Africans seems to have gone a step further. I found a video yesterday of a group of Black people discussing a video they had found claiming that the various locations in the Bible were really in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, the video they were discussing claimed it was on the border with Namibia.

This is bonkers, but no more bonkers than Ahmed Osman, who claimed that the Bible had really been set in Saudi Arabia, or the 19th century British author E. Cummings Beaumont. Beaumont had decided that the various states and civilisations in the Bible couldn’t possibly be those of the modern countries of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. No! Those ancient nations could only have been located in modern Britain. I found a copy of his book once in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and haven’t been able to find it since. It’s a classic of barmy literature.

Behind these claims are ethno-nationalism and the idea that only one’s own people are sufficiently great and noble enough to have been these great nations. In the case of Afrocentrism, it’s partly a backlash against the extremely low view of Black people as a race and their civilisations and cultures up to the middle of the 20th century. The Black American founders of Afrocentrism wrote their books in order to show that Blacks were also capable of creating great civilisations like ancient Egypt, and were therefore the equal of Whites. It’s an entirely noble motive, but has led to the appropriation of the history and achievements of other cultures. Early this week I found a video by Black American conservative Amala Ekponobi in which she put right a video by a smug American Black girls claiming that the Amerindians were wrong and Blacks were the first people in America.

There is a problem in that in America, Afrocentrism has entered the academy with universities teaching courses on it. And it seems to be influencing Black history over here, as when a book on Black British history claimed that Black people had built Stonehenge.

This needs to be stopped, and genuine history taught instead of racial, and racist myths.

Video About the Afro-Centric Pseudo-History Behind the Claim Stonehenge Was Built By Blacks

This is my response to the furore earlier this week about the claim made in the book, Brilliant Black British History, written by a Nigerian author and published by Bloomsbury, that Britain has always been a Black country, the first Brits were Black, and Stonehenge was built by Black people. A few years ago now archaeologists and DNA specialists provided some support for the assertion that the first Brits were Black when they analysed the DNA from Cheddar Man and concluded that he had black or dark coloured skin. However Cheddar Man dates from the Mesolithic, the period between the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. During the Neolithic Europe and Britain were settled by White skinned farmers from Turkey and the Fertile Crescent, who entered the continent via two routes, one which went up through the Balkans and another which went across North Africa then up through Spain to Britain. Stonehenge was built by Bronze Age White farmers. Even the suggestion that Cheddar Man was Black isn’t as secure as it is sometimes claimed to be. One of the team that analysed the DNA later issued a retraction, stating that it was impossible to tell what skin colour he had.

It’s clear why such a pseudo-historical claims should be made by Black authors and appeal to a Black readership. Black Brits identify with Britain and wish to see themselves in its history. But the appropriation of White history like this seems to ignore real Black history and Black achievement. For example, in Africa there were the historic great civilisations of Aksum, Meroe, Nubia and the Swahili, as well as the great Muslim states of the savannah and west Africa. And Black West Indians have also achieved much since the abolition of slavery. In the first generation after abolition there were Black politicians in these countries’ legislatures, elected by Black voters to defend them against the White planters.

Behind the claim that Black people built Stonehenge are various Afrocentric claims that are ultimately based on the theories of two 19th century White Brits, Gerald Massey and David Macritchie. Massey was a campaigner for Spiritualism and Christian Socialism, and was possibly the model for the hero of the novel Felix Holt: The Radical. He believed that Britain had originally been colonised by the Egyptians, who were responsible for the construction of Stonehenge and other monuments.

David Macritchie, on the other hand, believed that the first peoples of the British Isles were what he called ‘melanochroi’, a mixture of White Europeans and a dark-skinned people like Aboriginal Australians. The Black population was reinforced by waves of other dark-skinned invaders, such as Black Huns and Black Danes. It was this Black population that built the dolmens, henges and other Neolithic monuments. Other White writers claimed that the Inuit and the Chinese were originally Black. These theories were further elaborated in 1993 by Ahmed and Ibrahim Ali in their book, The Black Celts. They argued that before the Celts arrived to colonise Britain, the peoples of the British Isles were Blacks descended from the people of Ethiopia, who had moved into Europe via North Africa and Spain. This has been further developed by Indus Khamit Kush, who has claimed that Black Africans were the original Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Vietnamese, Thai, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, British and Americans. This last claim is particular noxious. There was a young Black woman complaining on social media a few months ago that Indigenous Americans were as racist as Whites. She’d been talking to one of them, and was outraged that they didn’t accept that Blacks were the original population of America. I can’t think of anything more likely to cause offence than telling a member of the American First Nations, who have suffered persecution, dispossession and displacement, that they weren’t the first people in America.

Some of the more extreme claims of the Afro-Centrists are extremely similar to those made by White supremacists. Regarding primacy as the first people of a nation or country, there’s more than a little similarity between these claims and a book published in 1978 in Paraguay, then under a quasi-Fascist dictatorship, that the Ache Indian people were descended from the Vikings. In the 19th or early 20th century, a German anthropologist claimed that one of the South African peoples must have been descended from the Vandals, the Germanic people that conquered and colonised part of Roman North Africa. You can go on, and add the way great North American Indian monuments, like the Serpent Mound in Ohio, were attributed to any number of civilisations except the Indians themselves. Or how the fortress at Great Zimbabwe was attributed to the Chinese and Arabs, rather than the local Shona people, who really built it.

And the Afrocentrist claim that Blacks have a unique, spiritual connection with the universe which grants them greater insight and intellectual abilities also seems to me to be very similar to some of the bizarre theories of the Germanic Neo-Pagan cults in late 19th and early 20th century Germany and Austria. One of these claimed that the Aryans had originally possessed ‘radio-telepathic’ organs, but these had been lost through interbreeding with the untermenschen.

Pseudo-historical claims that Blacks really built Stonehenge look harmless and liberal, because they’re advanced in the cause of Black liberation. But behind them there’s a very nasty edifice of racist pseudo-history and scholarship that should not be touched by the mainstream press.

Was UFO Contactee George Adamski Really a Hoaxer?

This might interest some of the peeps here who are into ufology and the question of whether aliens really are visiting the Earth. I’m a member of ASSAP, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomenon. It’s an amateur psychical research group, which was set up in the 1980s to investigate spontaneous cases of ghosts poltergeists, UFOs and so on in the field, as opposed to the laboratory work of the Society for Psychical Research. It differs from other psychical research and ghost hunting groups by using scientific protocols in its investigations as well as mediums. It’s membership comprises wide variety of people, from those with backgrounds in science and medicine, professional investigators like the police, and ordinary people fascinated with and keen to explore these bizarre phenomena for themselves. It has two magazines, Seriously Strange, which is the more popular of the two and similar in tone to the Fortean Times, and Anomaly: the Journal of Research into the Paranormal, which is rather more academic with articles properly referenced. The most recent edition of Anomaly, for May this year, carries an article by Dr John Tate, ‘George Adamski: The Luxury of Disbelief’ (pp. 172-181). And it’s truly perplexing as it questions whether Adamski was the fraud everyone, or nearly everyone, thinks he was.

Adamski was a Polish-America restauranteur, owning a hot-dog establishment on Mount Palomar. He was the first of the UFO contactees, men and women who believed they’d met aliens, who had given them special knowledge and messages for humanity. They emerged in the 1950s, and many of these messages were naturally warnings from the ufonauts about the threat of nuclear weapons. Adamski was deeply interested in eastern mysticism, and claimed to have met a Venusian out in the Californian desert and observed and photographed his spacecraft. The alien, Orthon, also left a footprint from his boots in the sand, of which Adamski and his fellows took a plaster cast. He seems to have been a dubious figure, at least. There’s a suggestion that he made have been bootlegging and smuggling hooch during Prohibition. He’s supposed to have told his cronies one evening that the end of Prohibition had been bad for him, as he had made money selling wine and telling the authorities it was for religious purposes. Presumably this was as part of the sacrament in Christian holy communion. His photographs have been analysed professionally. One of the alien ships was really his chicken hutch, while there have been claims since that the photograph of the classic UFO he made, which appears on the poster in Mulder’s wall in the X-Files with the slogan ‘I want to believe’, was really the top part of a kerosene or similar lantern. It’s so much taken for granted that Adamski hoaxed his encounter that the late British UFO Magazine, which wasn’t particularly sceptical, titled an article about him ‘The Great Pretender’. There was a little spat a few years ago between the Fortean Times and Colin Bennet, who at that time was the webmaster of a site claiming to be the ‘real Fortean Times‘. Bennet was an enthusiast of Postmodernism and had just then published a book about Adamski, Looking for Orthon. Bennet frequently denounced on his website what he called ‘the cult of the real’ and seems to taken the view of the extreme Greek sceptics and contemporary Postmodern philosophers that there was no objective reality. He had appeared on a panel at the Fortean Times Unconvention that year, where he got annoyed with the Fortean Times crew who tried to get him to say if he really thought Adamski was genuine. Hence there was a lot of ranting and personal attacks on his blog against Lance Sieveking and the rest of the Gang of Fort.

I’d always assumed that Adamski was making it all up, though one of the great commenters on this blog has strongly argued that he was instead the victim of a hoax by the US military or intelligence services. I don’t know about that, but Adamski certainly was suspected by them of being a Communist. In the above article, Dr Tate suggests that there are good reasons for thinking Adamski may have been genuine. Firstly, unlike the popular myth, he didn’t own a hamburger stall on Palomar. It was actually quite large, and more like a restaurant. His account of his journey into space aboard the Venusian craft contains details that were only confirmed later during the manned spaceflight missions of later decades. He mentioned ‘fairylights’ surrounding the Venusian UFO, which was unknown at the time but later observed by astronauts. He also said that in space he saw no stars, which again is what the astronauts observed, contrary to expectations. Other experts have analysed his UFO photograph, to reveal details showing it definitely wasn’t part of a lantern and appears to have been a real object.

Furthermore, Adamski wasn’t alone when he met Orthon. He was accompanied by six other people, who also observed the Venusian and his craft. One of these other witnesses was George Hunt Williamson, a professional anthropologist, who carried out pioneering work excavating the remains of the pre-Columbian Amerindian civilisations in South America. Williamson was also into spiritualism and became an advocate of the ancient astronaut theory that claims humanity was visited in the past by aliens. These were responsible for the creation of the world’s ancient monuments like Stonehenge, the pyramids, Easter Island and so on. Later on Williamson changed his name to d’Obrenovic. I think he may also have become involved in far right politics. But at the time of the Adamski sighting he was a respected academic.

Tate says he has no idea what was going on, which I think is a fair description of ufology full stop. Some UFO sightings are hoaxes, misidentifications of ordinary objects seen under extraordinary conditions, hallucinations or confabulations produced by unusual psychological states, sightings of top secret military aircraft. Others, to me, seem genuinely paranormal in the sense they are more like a ghost sighting or similar supernatural event than nuts and bolts alien spacecraft. But who knows? Maybe a few UFOs have been of visiting spacecraft, or beings from the future or parallel worlds. And may be there isn’t a single explanation at all for the UFO phenomenon.

Tate’s article raises some interesting questions about Adamski, and certainly made me wonder if there was a kernel of truth in what he said. If anyone’s interested, I’ll post a longer piece about the article and some of the points it makes.

The Role of Global Warfare in Shaping The World’s Constitutions

Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship & the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (London: Profile Books 2021).

I found this fascinating, thought-provoking book in a recent catalogue from Postscript, a British company specialising in remaindered books. Its theme is that previous accounts of the rise of constitutions limiting monarchs and government have concentrated too much on individual, national explanations for each specific country, viewing the granting of their constitutions as due to the growth of Enlightenment ideas, and the demand for democracy and representative, constitutional government as the result of causes specific to each nation. This has neglected the international dimension and the role of warfare in European and extra-European states in stimulating the emergence. It contends that as the costs of warfare in men and money escalated in the 18th century, as nations increasingly fought over longer distances using both land and naval forces, so rulers and governments were forced to issue constitutions granting their peoples increased rights and limiting their own powers in order to retain their support.

This process affected states as far apart and differing in size, population and power as Corsica, China, Haiti, Revolutionary France, the Russian Empire, Venezuela and South America, Norway and Sweden, Tunisia, the US and finally Japan. There were also brief attempts by the British Empire’s indigenous peoples to produce constitutions for themselves, like the short-lived Fante Confederacy in what is now Ghana and India.

Britain’s Constitution – Unwritten, But Still With Foundational Texts

She also considers why Britain remained unaffected by this process, in which states repeatedly wrote and tore up constitutions as their regimes changed and were overthrown. She maintains that this was because Britain had early undergone a process in which legislation had been passed which acted as the written basis for Britain’s unwritten constitution. This included the Bill of Rights issued during the Glorious Revolution in the 1680s which overthrew the Roman Catholic monarch James II in favour of the Dutch Protestant king, William of Orange, and his queen, Mary, as well as the various political writings issued during the British Civil War. But the chief of these quasi-constitutional texts was, of course, Magna Carta, and its provisions for important constitutional freedoms like Habeas Corpus. It shows how this was promoted in the 19th century to the status of a constitution, with writers and artists celebrating it as the fundamental cornerstone of British liberty. This included patriotic prints of Britannia pointing to copies of it. But if Brits didn’t produce their own constitution, they were intensely interested in those being drawn up elsewhere. This was largely because of British commercial interests across the world, particularly in Latin America. Britain also offered sanctuary to political exiles and dissidents, and so there was a large community of foreign reformers and revolutionaries debating the changes they wished to see in their homelands’ systems of government. And the foreign nations producing these documents were keen to have them read, examined and debated by the British and other nations. The great British philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham, was passionately interested in these new constitutions. He was ardently in favour of democracy, and was quietly in favour of the legalisation of homosexuality. The book describes how the elderly Bentham was visited by activists from Latin America and elsewhere, eager to gain his views and advice on their constitutional ideas.

Some of these constitutions were far more radically democratic than the much more famous and celebrate US constitution. These included the plans for government drawn up by Pasquale Paoli, a Corsican patriot, who wished to see his island nation free of Genoese and French domination. In return for making him head of state and leader of its armed forces for life, his constitution promised a tricameral parliament, with one chamber dedicated to the economy and universal manhood suffrage. Sadly, his regime did not last as a French invasion towards the end of the century resulted in its annexation by France.

Public Enthusiasm for Constitutions

The book also describes the drafting of the American constitution, done very much behind locked doors and a press blackout in the Philadelphia, and the issuing of Madison and Grant’s The Federalist Papers to justify and recommend it to the American public. This was a time of intense stress for the fledgling United States. The Founding Fathers were very much aware that their nascent country was vulnerable to renewed attack by the British and secessionist attempts by rebels. They were also keen to promote the new constitution to supportive states abroad, such as France. However, the Founding Fathers weren’t democrats, and considered the various constitutions emerging during the French Revolution far too radical. The book notes that the concern with forging the new constitution wasn’t just confined to politicians, but was also a passionate interest of the ordinary French reading public. So much so that a Strasbourg newspaper published a template for its readers for a constitution, suggesting possible articles for it.

This intense engagement by the general public in constitutional debate and reform was also seen in Japan during the Meiji Restoration. This overthrew the centuries-old Tokugawa shogunate under the pretence of restoring the Emperor’s power and rights. It came after the country’s isolation had been forcibly broken by a succession of foreign ships, beginning with Commodore Perry from the US, and including the Russians, demanding trade concessions. Guided by a group of counsellors and courtiers, the Meiji emperor issued a vague constitution promising deliberative assemblies and various civil rights in return for the public’s support for the country’s modernisation. One of those impressed with the new direction the country was taking was a man from a minor samurai family, who had joined the opposing forces as a foot soldier during the Boshin civil war that followed the restoration. After the war he got a job as a school teacher in a small provincial town. There he joined a discussion circle debating the country’s situation and what form its new constitution should take. Again, the founders of the new constitution were very careful that it shouldn’t be too radical, and the right to vote was subject to a strict property qualification so that out of the entire Japanese population, perhaps just over half a million held the franchise.

Back in Europe, the king of Sweden found himself in desperate need of his people’s support following expensive and disastrous wars against the Russian Empire. He therefore established a constitution limiting his powers and establishing a governmental chamber divided into the various social estates. These were the aristocracy, the clergy, the bourgeoisie and, uniquely, the peasantry. He did not honour it, however, and was subverting it and claiming more power for himself in preparation for another war with Russia before his assassination by disgruntled nobles.

South America’s Anti-Racist Rebels and Reformers

Over the other side of the Atlantic, South American patriots and freedom fighters were determined to throw off Spanish domination and forge new constitutions for their nations. And these were extremely radical. Agustin de Iglala, a Venezuelan warlord, in his proposed constitution called for Whites, Blacks and indigenous peoples to have the same political and social rights and opportunities centuries before the civil rights struggles in America and Britain. A few years earlier, a French writer had published an early Science Fiction novel. Set in the 25th century, this was about the leader of a Black revolt in Mexico, who eventually lays down his arms and becomes the peaceful ruler of a multicultural state. Reading that, I was reminded of the immense admiration given to today’s Black leaders like Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, who seem to have a similar image and status in their countries’ politics.

Napoleon and European Constitutions

Back in Spain, further constitutions were drawn up by both sides after Napoleon’s invasion. He ousted the lazy and brutal Bourbon king, Ferdinand II, in favour of one of his brothers. The Corsican bandit was partly motivated in this by his desire to get his mitts on the Spanish colonies in South America. After he had gained them, he aimed at annexing the Spanish territories in North America, reconquer the lost French territories like Louisiana and perhaps then go on to conquer the US and Canada. This is megalomania on a global scale which dwarfs even that of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. In order to gain some support for his brother’s regime, he set about drafting a new constitution. So did the British and their Spanish allies. Meeting in Cadiz, they drew up a rival constitution expressing many democratic rights and civil liberties. Many of those involved in its drafting were Roman Catholic clergy, so that the resulting constitution made Roman Catholicism the official, established and sole tolerated religion.

Elsewhere in his empire, Napoleon drafted for the European states annexed and incorporated into his empire. Westphalia in Germany was given a fairly liberal constitution and a degree of political independence as a reward for its loyalty. One of the new states upon which he bestowed a constitution was Helvetia, which included Switzerland as one of its constituent territories. And this links Napoleon and his imperialism with one of the greatest Gothic novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Written in Switzerland, to many contemporary readers, this wasn’t simply a tale of a scientist challenging God by daring to create life. It was also seen as a metaphorical comment on Napoleon, on his constant experimentation, though with constitutions rather than with dead human flesh, and the way these had escaped control so that it was impossible to escape them, even if you fled to the Arctic.

Thomas Paine, Charters and the Image of Ancient India as Constitutional State

One of the major figures defending the American Revolution was Thomas Paine, a British radical. He was the son of a small farmer and part-time stay-maker, producing women’s whalebone corsets. Paine had become convinced that monarchies were inherently warlike, and so promoted revolutionary republican in his books Common Sense and The Rights of Man. But one of his grandfathers had been a local notary, looking through his hometown’s charters for its historic liberties and rights. The book also considers how the American colonies had also been founded through charters and the roles these played when these states forged their own individual constitutions at the Revolution.

The idea of charters as demonstrating a nation’s ancient liberties was taken up by the Indian reformer, Raja Rammohan Roy. A high caste Brahmin, the rules of his religion forced him to eat apart from his British radical friends in Calcutta. He was convinced, however, that ancient India had also been democratic. Settling in Britain, his view was so influential that the contemporary editions of Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England stated that ancient India had been a liberal, parliamentary state, just like Anglo-Saxon England.

Attempts to Establish Constitutional Government by African, Asian and Middle Eastern Nations

This in turn inspired other indigenous peoples under British rule and independent Middle Eastern and Asian states to start writing and demanding their own constitutions. In Tunisia one aspiring Muslim politician and reformer wrote a constitution for his country. Threatened by the French, who had annexed neighbouring Algiers and fearing invasion from other western powers, the Tunisian constitution was intended to show the West as well as his fellow Muslims that modern, constitutional government was entirely compatible with Islam. This experiment did not last long, but it did inspire the growing constitutionalist movement in the Ottoman Empire.

There was also a brief attempt by a Black British naval surgeon to create a constitution for an independent Fante state in what is now Ghana. The British had established a protectorate over the Fante peoples in order to protect them from attack from the Ashanti. However, an ill-fated British expedition failed due to disease and the country’s difficult terrain without seeing their Ashanti enemies. The British then decided to withdraw. In this power vacuum, the surgeon, whose proper rank was major-surgeon, equivalent to Lieutenant-Colonel in the British army, then engaged with the Fante to establish an independent, constitutional state. The man himself was certainly no rebel against Britain. He was an indigenous African, who had been enslaved and sold to western slavers before the slave ship was captured and its human cargo liberated. He always saw Britain as his personal benefactor. But he was concerned to establish an independent state for the Fante peoples, and show that they too were civilised and capable of constitutional government. This did not last, as the British reorganised their forces, returned and conquered the area.

Pitcairn Island, Hawaii and New Zealand

On the other side of the world, the tiny Pitcairn Island, settled by the mutinous White sailors from the Bounty and their Tahitian wives, also benefited from a kind of constitution hurriedly drawn up for it by the captain of a visiting British ship. By this time, the few surviving Whites had died and the island was populated entirely by their Brown descendants. But the Pitcairn people were worried about possible annexation by an expanding, imperial America. Sailors from passing America ships scornfully told them that they felt no need to obey their rules, as, unlike America, they had no constitution. So when a British warship visited them, they appealed to its captain to draw up a legal code. This provided for free, compulsory education and a local assembly. And astonishingly, both adult men and women were given the right to vote.

One of the major chiefs of Hawaii also tried to give his people a constitution and a legislative assembly. This initially consisted of the local chiefs, membership of whom was also granted to women so that about thirty per cent of its members were female. Again, this was partly to fend off the threat of annexation by America by showing that the Hawaiian people were a civilised nation with their own constitution and representative government.

The book also shows how these constitutional experiments also exerted pressures on America to end slavery, pressures which eventually erupted into the Civil War. American politicians felt that the issue hung over them like a black cloud. Other states, such as those in Latin America, had formally abolished slavery decades before. Tunisia had abolished it in 1848. There was a fear amongst abolitionist politicians, therefore, that the persistence of slavery in the US not only discredited it as a nation, but also the constitutional system it was founded on.

But America also exerted a positive influence on British imperial governors. One of those was the governor of New Zealand. Impressed by American democracy and constitutionalism, he established that four seats in the new colony’s legislature should be reserved for Maoris. In fact, this was less than they should have been given by the size of their population. It should really have been 15. Nevertheless, it was a ground breaking move. Also ground breaking was the fact that, while only men possessing a certain amount of property had the vote in the White population, no such property qualifications existed for Maori men, who also possessed the vote under these reforms.

Aristocratic Constitutions in Haiti and South America

Not all countries experimenting with constitutions were radically democratic. In Haiti, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successor as the head of the new, Black nation, Henry Christophe, proclaimed himself king. He then set about establishing orders of nobility like those of Europe until he was overthrown in a coup that killed him and his son. The intention seems to have been to try to impress the European countries by showing that Black Haiti had a society and aristocracy like those ruling them.

Less extreme was the plan by the great South American patriot and liberator, Simon Bolivar. Bolivar was concerned by the way the new constitutions in the emerging South American nations were being repeatedly torn up and redrafted, before being torn up again. He wanted them to enjoy constitutional stability, and looked to the British constitution to provide it. Britain had not suffered the same shocks of foreign invasion as the other nations and it had been able to afford the expense of the new, transcontinental warfare. Thus Britain had not suffered serious political disturbances at the same level as many other nations, giving the impression that the British constitution provided Britain with stability as well as representative government and civil liberty. Bolivar therefore wished to establish in his nation a House of Lords and other institutions similar to Britain.

Law Codes and Autocracy in Russia and China

And then there were the autocratic countries, which nevertheless promulgated legal literature that was intended to have the same reverence as that accorded to constitutions. In Russia, Catherine the Great issued her Nakaz, or instruction, a compendium of the laws of her vast empire. She herself personally worked on it for months, and a copy of it was to be placed in every school in Russia. While certainly not a constitution, the compilation of the Nakaz was surprisingly democratic. A committee was gathered to collect and draft its provisions. These were elected. Bourgeois members of the assembly merely had to have a house or their own trade to qualify for inclusion. Also, membership was not limited to Whites or members of the Orthodox church. It included Christians from the other churches, as well as central Asian Muslims, a fact of which Catherine was extremely proud.

The Chinese also produced their own text intended to help the Qin emperor, Qinlung, rule the new territories he had conquered in the 17th century. This was an encyclopaedic study of these territories geography, climate, vegetation and animal life, and their peoples, their history and customs. This followed a genocidal war against a Mongolian empire, which resulted the massacre of its men and boys while its women and girls were carried off into slavery.

The Exclusion of Women from the Franchise

The book also examines the question why many constitutions granted the franchise only to men. Those that did grant women the vote gradually restricted this at the 19^th century wore on, so that the franchise became even more narrowly male. This was, it argues, because constitutions were largely granted by monarchs in order to gain public support for their wars. Warfare is a masculine occupation, although throughout history individual women have fought for their countries. One of these was a Spanish woman, depicted by Goya firing a cannon in his Horrors of War series. These constitutions rewarded men with the franchise in return for their willingness to fight and provide funding.

Constitutions and Public Support

The last chapter considers the question whether the enthusiasm for writing constitutions has passed, after so many constitutions have been drawn up and then scrapped. America is an exception. Its constitution has persisted, despite numerous amendments. The reverence accorded this foundational document and its provisions is the reason, the book argues, modern American politics is so dysfunctional.

Another problem is how the new, modern, constitutional Japan could then become imperialist power in its turn, claiming and invading Korea and Taiwan in its turn. There was little opposition or condemnation of these invasions. The book argues that this was because many Asian countries had their own empires before the invasions and conquests of the west. This new Japanese imperialism was seen simply as the old order reasserting itself.

Conclusion

This is fascinating and truly eye-opening book, not least for its description of forgotten politicians and activists across the world, who were far in advance of their time. Men like Pasquale Paoli, the British naval surgeon and the Tunisian and Muslim constitutionalists. It makes a strong case for the role of warfare in the forging of modern, constitutional states but also demonstrates how interconnected these efforts were. Politicians, rebels, intellectuals and activists across the world corresponded with each other, newspapers in places like London printed extracts of these constitutions, and British printers published entire documents. Statesmen and diplomats also gave them to sympathetic foreign regimes. And people are still concerned to publish constitutions today, even though experience has shown these tend to be short-lived. And many of the people covered in the book are still inspiring figures, whose efforts to create constitutional government for their peoples deserved to be better known.

Mexico’s 19th Century Anti-Racist Constitution

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.

EDIJester on Critical Race Theorist Demands to Influence Teaching of Evolution and Ecology

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.

Call From An Indigenous Brazilian To Help Save the Amazon

I got this message from the internet petitioning group, Avaaz. It’s from Sonia Guajajara, an Amazonian warrior and the first ever Minister of Indigenous People in Brazil.

‘Dear friends from Avaaz,

I am Sonia Guajajara, a warrior of the Guajajara people of the Brazilian Amazon, and the first-ever Minister of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.

Today Indigenous leaders from around the world are at the United Nations to deliver an urgent call to save the Amazon and commit to zero deforestation. We need your help to make this louder!!

Here is part of what I said

“Human greed is pushing the Amazon towards a dangerous point of no return. We live in an economic system where everything that is in nature can be privatized or purchased. This unrestrained exploitation of the common goods of nature does not generate wealth, but wears down and impoverishes the planet. It is time to fight for the good of humanity and for a new story. A story where indigenous peoples lead… because we know the way.”

I invite you to watch my full speech below. Hear my words as a call to action — don’t just support us, fight with us. If you resonate with this message, please urgently share my call with everyone you know and be part of the movement to save the Amazon. 

SHARE ON TWITTER

SHARE ON WHATSAPP

SHARE ON FACEBOOK

 SHARE ON INSTAGRAM

For the past few years, you and the rest of the Avaaz community have been key allies of Indigenous peoples, from the Amazon to the Congo basin, and around the world. And together, I have every hope that we will achieve a future where our rights will be respected, and our planet will be safe.

With hope and determination, and love for the planet,

Sonia Guajajara, Minister of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, together with the Avaaz team’

I’m more than happy to pass this message on, as the Amazon is under threat from loggers and ranchers, and its people are in danger of being dispossessed. This was graphically shown in one of the Beeb’s travel documentaries a few years ago, where the presenter went to live with one of the Amerindian peoples. They were very suspicious and it was quite a tense atmosphere because of the threat to indigenous land. There were public meetings being staged and the mood was very angry. I am not remotely surprised, as these peoples have been terribly harmed by colonial encroachment. I read somewhere that at one point the Brazilian farmers were shooting them for sport. The current demands for decolonisation going through western society and academia is disastrously flawed, but it is based on a memory of real injustices, even if these get mixed up with myths and false history.