Another video criticising Netflix for casting a Black woman as Cleopatra. I’m post this up, not just because of its content, but also because the author of the post is of Asian heritage. They have their own history of colonisation and discrimination, and so it’s not just case of White supremacists or generally offended Whites criticising the casting. . As I hope is also clear by the fact that it’s the Egyptians themselves who are objecting to what they see as the appropriation of their history by Black Americans. I noticed he’s also dyed his hair blue, which also probably would raise alarm bells amongst the militant right and mark him down as a ‘woke’ leftie weirdo
Fang makes many of the same points as the Fun Slaying King about the historical evidence for Cleopatra’s racial identity. But he also adds that under the Roman Empire, the Egyptians were subject to an apartheid system which heavily discriminated against them in favour of the Greek and Roman colonists. At one point he says that showing Cleopatra as Black is like portraying King Leopold, the butcher of the Congo, as Black. He swiftly changes his mind, and says it’s more ridiculous than this, it would be like portraying him as an indigenous American.
He also makes the same point that the concentration on Cleopatra ignores some really stirring events in genuine Black African history. He talks about the last stand of the Songhai empire, when they drove cattle against the muskets of the invading Moroccans. Or when the Cushites fought off a Roman invasion and even decapitated the head of a statue of the Roman emperor. I think this is a real problem. There’s some fascinating discoveries being made about the rise of urbanism in Black Africa. A few years ago a White archaeologist teaching in Nigeria discovered the remains of an urban complex covering an area the size of Salisbury plain. But he’s the only one exploring it, as his Nigerian students are all keen to go to Egypt.
Having looked at the Art Newspaper’s report on the withdrawal of the ‘Medicine Man’ gallery at the Wellcome Museum and its replacement with shamanistic performances by Grace Ndiritu, along with her biography on Wikipedia, I think I now understand what’s happened there. One of the names that leapt out at me reading the Art Newspaper article was Dan Hicks. He was one of the lecturers in the Archaeology and Anthropology Department at Bristol University when I was there. This is going back over a decade, and when I saw him, he was young and hip. I think his speciality is Historical Archaeology, and from what I remember he has co-edited a series of papers about it. Over here, Historical Archaeology is merely that branch of archaeology concerned with monuments and artefacts from historical times, rather than prehistory. Over the Pond, however, it is very definitely ideologically loaded, and concerns itself with colonialism, the oppression of the indigenous peoples, slavery and the emergence of capitalism. And this focus can be very clear in the work of some lecturers and academics. It’s not all like this – some of the historical archaeological research is less left-wing. While doing my Ph.D., one of the papers I consulted was about the building of 18th century Annapolis and how it conformed to 18th century ideas about architecture and society. For example, the buildings were deliberately constructed with large windows so that outsiders could look in. This came from the view that business should be conducted as far as possible in public view, so that public scrutiny would make sure that everything was correct, orderly and legal. Hicks’ doctoral student studied the archaeology of Long Kesh, the Maze Prison, in Ulster. She gave a seminar one lunchtime about her research, and she was very, very good. She presented an excellent case for its preservation and exhibition from a non-sectarian perspective as somewhere that was vital to the heritage of the people of Northern Ireland.
Archaeology has also expanded its scope in recent decades. When most of us think of archaeology, I’m pretty sure it’s of prehistory and ancient civilisations like Egypt, Greece and Rome. But it can also be much more recent, taking in not just the Middle Ages but also recent history up to the Second World War and beyond. One of the lads I knew was studying World War II tank defences around Bristol and Somerset. There was even a pillbox study group, which catalogued and documented the various WWII pillboxes left along the country’s coasts and beaches to protect us from invasion. There has, like Ndiritu at the Wellcome Museum, also been artistic events performed or staged around pieces of archaeology. In one of these in America an historic barn or house was allowed to decay, with photographs taken and finally displayed showing its gradual destruction. When I was there, the archaeology department had been part of a similar project concerning the various objects at Severn Beach, a holiday resort near Bristol. From what I dimly recall, this photographed and decorated such historic monuments as the public benches and decaying boats. This was too ‘arty’ in the pejorative sense for some of the people at the seminar on it I attended. They saw themselves very definitely as scientists. It was too arty for me, and I see myself much more as coming from the arts rather than the sciences.
There was, at the time, a general movement towards drawing different disciplines together, and especially the arts and sciences. Interdisciplinary subjects were in vogue, and there was much talk about overcoming C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ arts and science, in which people from one side of the cultural divide had no knowledge or interest in the other. One such artistic project based in science I read about in New Scientist featured genetically modified organisms. One of these was a cactus, whose DNA had been tinkered with so that instead of prickles, it grew hair. Ndiritu’s performances at the Wellcome Collection come from archaeology and anthropology, rather than genetic engineering, but they are part of the same project of mixing science and art.
Her Wikipedia entries also mentions work at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium. Way back when I was at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum I got material from Belgium about some of their museums looking at their countries imperial history. One of these was a series of artistic projects and performances in the country’s museum about the Belgian Congo. As I’m sure readers are well aware, King Leopold’s personal rule in the Congo is one of the bloodiest holocausts in African history. About 8 million people are supposed to have been murdered by his Force Publique in order to produce rubber for export. I’ve been told that the country tried to forget about it all, until the first years of the 21st century when these events were staged at the museum as part of the confrontation with this infamous period in Belgian history.
There have also been other archaeological and anthropological events and displays in which indigenous peoples have performed their religious rituals. A few years ago, if I recall correctly, there was one where Amerindian shamans performed their people’s rites. When the exhibit is of those peoples, then it is only fair to include the people themselves. I think this is what was going on in the Wellcome Museum with Ndiritu and her shamanism. It looks like it’s an attempt by indigenous African culture to claim a proper place in the exhibit as a counterpoint to western rationalism.
This does not mean, however, that it should be free from criticism or that such criticism is right-wing. The decolonisation movement does indeed have as its goal the decentring of western science and historiography. It goes far beyond the usual explanation about including overlooked non-western and indigenous perspectives. The ‘Science Must Fall’ movement really existed. And some of the critical of modern postcolonial theory are left-wing feminists. Asian feminists, for example, have complained that they are given no support by western postmodern feminists in their struggle against their cultures’ own restrictions on women, because postcolonialism is only interested in such problems if they are caused by the West. This is described by Bricmont and Sokal in their 90’s attack on Postmodernism, Intellectual Impostures. And Sokal is, or was, very much a man of the left. He was a physicist who gave up his career to teach maths in Nicaragua under the left-wing Sandinista regime.
I also wonder how this all fits with Edward Said’s critique of western views of the east, Orientalism. His book was a polemic arguing that the west since ancient Greece had regarded the east as the Other, and produced images to justify its conquest and domination. Western travellers and explorers had therefore presented it as backward, irrational and feminine and somehow unchanging. But Nditiru’s performances are based on the non-scientific irrational and traditional, which are now presented as positive. This is indeed a challenge to the view of magic in indigenous cultures that I remember from my childhood. I can remember watching a BBC documentary about African shamanism when I was in my early teens, in which the voiceover concluded that while western science had succeeded in discovering so much about the world and made so many advances, while magic had reached an end and could produce no such advances. The great British scientist and broadcaster, Jacob Bronowski, said something similar in his TV series and book, The Ascent of Man. He looked at the traditional culture of one of Iran’s nomadic people, and considered that it similarly locked them in a stifling, unchanging world. Bronowski was no man of the right. He was a member of the Fabian Society at a time when that actually meant something, before it was taken over by the Blairites.
I am also very much aware of the crisis that has affected many indigenous society with the collapse of their world of meaning through contact with western modernity and the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. But there are also dangers in idealising indigenous societies. I mentioned in my previous article that in Nigeria, priests from one of the country’s pagan religions had been involved in the acquisition of slaves, and that a South African anthropologist had attempted to defend muti human sacrifice at a convention in this country, as well as witchcraft and witch hunting in Africa. Those aspects of indigenous religion and spirituality shouldn’t be ignored. I am not saying they should be stressed to restore the old image of Africa as a backward continent needing western civilisation, but not all the continent’s ills should be ascribed to western rationalism either. Hence it should be perfectly legitimate to question this latest policy by the Wellcome Museum, regardless of whether one is politically right or left.
This is a bit abstract, but as it involves issues about the objective reality of moral values and justice against moral relativism, it needs to be tackled. A few days ago the Lotus Eaters published an essay on their website by Helen Dale, which denied that there were such things as objective moral values. This followed an conversation on YouTube between Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Gasbag, and the philosopher Peter Boghossian, in which Sargon was also arguing that objective moral values don’t exist. People, including myself, have taken the mick out of Sargon, pointing out that he’s not university educated and that at one point his standard response to his opponents seemed to be to ask if they hadn’t read John Locke. But Sargon’s bright and is well-read in political philosophy, albeit from the Conservative, Libertarian perspective.
Which seems to be where his denial of objective morality comes. Conservatives since Edmund Burke have stressed the importance of tradition, and from what I remember of Sargon’s debate with Boghossian, he was arguing that concepts like human rights and democracy are the unique products of western culture. These notions are alien and incomprehensible to other culture, such as Islam, which have their own value systems, notions of justice and ideas about their ultimate grounding. Now Sargon does have a point. Human rights seem obvious to us, because we have grown up in a society in which such notions have developed over centuries, dating back to the 18th century and beyond, going back to the Roman idea of the Lex Gentiles, the Law of Nations. This was the idea that there were fundamental assumptions about justice that was common to all nations and which could be used as the basis for international law. And the Enlightenment philosophers were confident that they could also discover an objective basis for morality. This has not happened. One of the problems is the values which are to be regarded as fundamental also need supporting arguments, and morality has changed over time. This can be seen in the west in the changing attitudes to sex outside marriage and homosexuality. Back in the early 20th century both were regarded as immoral, but are now accepted. In the case of homosexuality, moral condemnation has been reversed so that it is the persecution of gays that it rightly regarded as immoral. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin was aware of the changes in morality over time, and deeply influenced by the 17th century Italian philosopher Vico. His solution, as someone who bitterly hated Stalin’s USSR and its tyranny, was to argue that although objective moral values didn’t exist, there were nevertheless moral values that acted as such.
I can see some positive aspects to Sargon’s position. If it is accepted that western ideas of truth and justice are just that, localised western notions, that it prevents them from being used as pretexts for foreign imperialist ventures like the Neo-Con invasions of the Middle East. It brings us back to the old, pre-War American conservative values that held that America had no business interfering in the political institutions and concerns of other peoples. But it also leaves the way open for cultural relativism and the justification of despotic regimes. If there are no objective moral values, then there can be no firm moral objections to obvious injustices, such as the genocide of the Uighurs in China or the Taliban’s recent decision to deprive women of university education. From what I’ve been reading, Chinese nationalist communists dismiss such ideas of democracy and human rights as baizuo, which translates as White liberal nonsense. And the Fascists and Communists Sargon despises were also moral relativists. Both Mussolini and Hitler also declared that each nation had their own set of unique moral values and that liberal notions of justice and humanity did not apply to their regimes. In a number of his speeches Lenin denied that there were any eternal moral values, but that these changed instead with each historical epoch, as determined by the economic structure of society at the time. This opened the way to the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
The Lotus Eaters are also staunch enemies of wokeness, but Critical Theory in its various forms also relativizes traditional morality and attitudes arguing that these too are merely the local intellectual products of the west, and specifically White heterosexual elite men. This has led to Postcolonial Theorists betraying feminists and human rights activists in nations like India, by refusing to criticise these cultures repressive traditions, or instead blaming them on western imperialism.
My own belief is that there are indeed objective moral values although human moral intuitions have changed over time. Notions of democracy and human rights may have their origin in the west, but they are nevertheless universal and universally applicable. This does not mean that other cultures may not adopt and adapt them according to their own cultural traditions. In the case of Islam, there are any number of books by the Islamic modernists arguing that modern notions of human rights are perfectly in accordance with Muslim values.
For the sake of genuine humanity and international justice and the eradication of tyranny, we have to believe that there are objective moral values protecting human life and freedom.
Simon Webb’s turn towards outright Fascism has puzzled me a little. Agreed, almost all the material on Video Debunked is deeply critical of Black and Asian immigration and the problems that have come with multiculturalism. So much so that his readers and commenters have implored him to join Patriotic Alternative. To his credit, he refused, and is deeply critical of its leader, His commenters contain people, who can only be described as real Nazis and anti-Semites. There are any number of them pushing the Great Replacement theory, which hold that the Jews are responsible for mass non-White immigration to the West. This is supposedly being done to destroy the White race. It’s American in origin but made its way into British Fascism where it mixed with certain native British strains of anti-Semitism from The Britons and Arnold Leese. Some of his commenters boast names like ‘Talmud ZOGberg’, after the Talmud, the second Jewish holy book, and ZOG, the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ of Nazis like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber. Webb isn’t an anti-Semite and is a staunch defender of Israel, which frustrates the Nazis on his channel no end, especially when he puts up videos debunking the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the arguments marshalled by the Holocaust deniers.
But these past few days he seems to have become overtly far right. Or at least, nostalgic for it. Yesterday he put up a video asking what was wrong with Fascism, citing Portugal’s former dictator Salazar as a benign Fascist regime in all but name. Salazar, he states, gave his country prosperity and didn’t bring it into the Second World War. In another video, celebrating the victory of Sweden Democrats as part of a right-wing coalition in Sweden and the increasingly right-ward turn of Italian politics, he looked back to the 1975 or so when the NF won 5 per cent in the British elections. He could have cited UKIP’s victory in the elections a few years ago, such as it was. That provoked various pundits in the media to speculate about Farage’s party becoming a major force in British politics. Channel 4 even made a mockumentary about what it would be like if the Drunken Financier took power, with immigrants confined in cages in the street. But Webb ignored the Kippers, and looked back to the boot-boys and hooligans of the NF instead. Why so?
I think the answer is that Webb is an authoritarian, who wants a specific political party for Whites. He’s a racial nationalist. He made a video a week or so ago discussing the rioting that has been going on in Leicester between Pakistani and Indian youths. This started after Pakistan won a cricket match against India. The rioting, which then had been going on for ten days, was obviously covered in the local papers but has received no national coverage. It has been covered in the Indian papers, as Harris Sultan and Nuriyah Khan have discussed on one of their videos. Webb suggested in his video that it wasn’t being covered nationally in Britain because it contradicted the narrative that people of Pakistani and Indian descent were as British as White, indigenous Brits. He also claimed that the cops trying to quell the violence weren’t British, citing one officer, who had an Asian surname. Actually, it seems to me to be eminently sensible to have Asian police officers trying to stop the unrest, if only to avoid the accusations of racism that would be directed at the White officers. From Webb’s description, you’d think that these Asian officers were men and women on loan from the Pakistani or Indian forces. But they’re not. They’re just British Asians. The fact that he calls them foreign, despite the fact that in many cases they may well have been here for generations shows his view of Britishness is based firmly on race, like the BNP. But unlike UKIP, who were national populist rather than racial nationalist. They were against immigration, but claimed they weren’t racist and had it written into their constitution that former members of Fascist parties were ineligible to join them. Of course, it turned out there were any number of former extreme rightists in it, but the image they wanted to project was of non-racism. Webb has also called for extremely authoritarian methods to be used against the Channel migrants. He’s pointed to the legislation defining entering the country illegally as an act of war, and asked why we couldn’t be like Poland and have armed soldiers guarding the frontier to makes sure no-one gets in illegally.
I believe that ethnically based parties are extremely dangerous. If nothing else, they fragment countries into competing ethnic groups, resulting in ethnic conflict and violence. This has been the case in many African countries. Robert Mugabe started his wretched reign of terror in Zimbabwe by terrorising and massacring the Ndebele, the traditional enemies of his tribe, the Shona, before moving on to other tribes and finally the White farmers. In Nigeria there was the Biafran War, when the Hausa and other Muslim tribes turned on the Igbo. In Uganda in the 1980s the dictator started massacring the largest tribe, the Buganda. And I’m afraid there’s a danger of ethnic specific parties arising in Britain. There’s the Aspire party in London, which resulted from a split in the Labour party after they deselected Lutfur Rahman. This party’s membership seems to be exclusively Bengladeshi Muslims, who were strongly favoured by Rahman in his administrations on the council. Sasha Johnson was setting up an ethnically specific party for Blacks, Taking the Initiative. This was supposedly because the major parties had done nothing about continuing Black poverty, and she denounced mainstream Black politicians like David Lammy in very strong terms. Whites could support Taking the Initiative, but its leadership could only be Black. From what I’ve heard, it had 40,000 members before Johnson met with a bullet in her back garden.
This is dangerous, because the BNP did well in the parts of London like Tower Hamlets where a section of the working-class White population felt marginalised and ignored by the major parties in favour of ethnic minorities. If Taking the Initiative had got off the ground and started winning elections, then there would have been a real danger of a backlash from some Whites seeking a party to represent them racially. And almost certainly if Johnson had had her way and founded a paramilitary Black militia.
As regards Salazar, he strikes me as having been a reactionary Roman Catholic, the Portuguese equivalent of a Spanish caudillo, or military dictator, rather than an outright fascist. There’s a chapter on his works in a book on dictator literature, and from this it seems that most of the books he wrote were Roman Catholic social doctrines, rather than the secular ideology of Italian Fascism. Webb has struck me as a right-wing Conservative, in favour of small government and private enterprise. I very much doubt he and his supporters would like Mussolini’s brand of fascism, which included state direction with private enterprise, and in which the trade unions were expected to sit in parliament with management to direct the economy. And this is quite apart from the overt militarism and warmongering of Italian Fascism.
What he seems to want, therefore, is a form of authoritarian, racial nationalist Conservatism, centred around the White British, rather than the overt, aggressive Fascism of Mussolini. This has to be opposed, along with other, ethnic parties that threaten to divide ordinary Brits and create more ethnic conflict while promising their people uplift and respect.
Well, it looks like Simon Webb of History Debunked has finally gone full Mosley. And you never go full Mosley. He’s put up a piece today asking, ‘what’s wrong with fascism?’ He argues that fascism is viewed negatively because it’s confusion with Nazism. But socialism has also committed horrible atrocities and run death camps. In contrast to this, he points to the Portugal of the dictator Salazar in the 1960s, which was prosperous and had kept out of the Second World War. And fascism, he explains, is neither communist nor capitalist.
No, I’m not going to put the video up here. Because he’s arguing for fascism after all. Now he’s got a point in that some political scientists and historians do make a distinction between Nazism and Fascism. Nazism is at its heart a form of biological racism and has its own origins unique to Germany, while Italian Fascism was a form of militaristic nationalism which included elements of both socialism and capitalism. However, Italian Fascism was also imperialistic, calling Italy a ‘proletarian nation’ that had been unjustly deprived of colonies by the great powers of Britain and France. It invaded Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia, as well as Tripolitania in north Africa and Ethiopia. In nearly all these countries the Fascists committed horrendous atrocities. They also developed racial policies similar, but not as harsh as the Nazis, defining Italians as Aryans as contrasted with the Jews, who were expelled from various professions. Both Nazism and Fascism supported and protected private industry, but the economy was centrally planned by the state. Germany was a complete dictatorship under Hitler, in which the Reichstag was only called once a year to sign the act stating that Germany was still in a state of emergency and so Hitler’s dictatorship could legally continue, In Italy Mussolini let the Italian parliament continue for a few years until he replaced it with a chamber of Fasces and corporations. A corporation in this case was an industrial organisation, one for each industry, that contained both management and the unions. By the 1930s there were 27 of these. They were supposed to run the various industries, but in practice they served just to rubber stamp the decisions Mussolini had already taken.
I’ve read some of the comments that have been left on the video. Some of them are rants against Tony Blair’s period in office and complaints that it was supported by a biased media. Well, one paper stood against him – the Daily Heil. And you can wonder who had the real power in Blair’s relationship with the media, as he was always worrying whether his policies would meet the approval of one Rupert Murdoch. And Blair was a Tory in all but name. Thatcher, remember, regarded him as her greatest achievement. I’ve also notice that several of the commenters can’t spell Nazism. They’ve spelled it ‘Natzim’.
Of course, it hasn’t just been the association with the Nazis that has tarnished Italian Fascism. It’s also the various brutal dictatorships that have appeared across the world that committed horrendous atrocities, like the various military dictatorships in Latin America, the most famous of which is General Pinochet’s in Chile, as well as Greece under the Colonels. You can also attack his argument by pointing out he deliberately confuses socialism with communism. Communism is a form of socialism, but it is not the definitive form. For most British Labour supporters and politicians before Blair and his stupid, Thatcherite ‘Third Way’, socialism meant democratic socialism, which supported and included parliamentary democracy, and a mixed economy. This was the type of socialism practised by the reformist socialist parties of western Europe, like the German Social Democrats. And this form of socialism was keen to support human rights and democracy to a greater or lesser extent, as shown in the various people who joined anti-apartheid and anti-racism movement and gave Khrushchev a hard time when he visited the country about the imprisonment of socialist dissidents in the USSR.
I’ve left this comment on Webb’s video. I wonder if anyone will reply.
‘Salazar is probably best viewed as a reactionary Catholic like General Franco, rather than a pure Fascist. His books apparently are pretty much about Roman Catholic dogma, rather the secular ideas which informed Italian Fascism. And Fascism wasn’t just nationalism or dictatorship. Would your readers want definitive features of fascism like a state-directed economy, even if it is done through private industry and the corporate state, in which parliament is replaced by a chamber representing industries, each corporation including management and unions, which is charged with running the economy?’
Readers of this blog will be well aware that I have extremely mixed views about Simon Webb and History Debunked. I don’t share his High Toryism, heading into the ideological territory of parties like Reform, Reclaim or Patriotic Alternative, for example. I particularly reject his views that the IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is biologically determined, and that there is a further biological difference in IQ between Whites and Asians. Some of what he’s written about African history is just plain wrong, such as the statement that before the White man arrived, Black Africa was stuck in the Bronze Age. Not true – the Bantu cultures spread throughout Africa were very firmly Iron Age, as were the Kordofanian and Nilotic peoples and those of Ethiopia. His videos about the decline of South Africa after the end of apartheid and Zimbabwe after it passed to Black majority rule and the horrific dictatorship of Mugabe seem to be based on a nostalgia for White colonial rule.
But sometimes he also says something interesting and important. Looking through his website, there’s a piece on the non-fiction books he has written. Three are mentioned – one on the Suffragette Bombers, subtitled ‘Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists’, another on 1919; Britain’s Year of Revolution, which probably explains why he disputes the memorialization of Philip Wootton in Liverpool as an innocent victim of lynching, rather than a violent thug. But it’s the third that interests me here. This is British Concentration Camps: A Brief History from 1900-1975, published by Pen & Sword like his other books. He describes this book thus:
‘For many of us, the very expression ‘Concentration Camp’ is inextricably linked to Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. The idea of British concentration camps is a strange and unsettling one. It was however the British, rather than the Germans, who were the chief driving force behind the development and use of concentration camps in the Twentieth Century. The operation by the British army of concentration camps during the Boer War led to the deaths of tens of thousands of children from starvation and disease. More recently, slave-labourers confined in a nationwide network of camps played an integral role in Britain’s post-war prosperity. In 1947, a quarter of the country’s agricultural workforce were prisoners in labour camps. Not only did the British government run their own concentration camps, they willingly acquiesced in the setting up of such establishments in the United Kingdom by other countries. During and after the Second World War, the Polish government-in-exile maintained a number of camps in Scotland where Jews, communists and homosexuals were imprisoned and sometimes killed. This book tells the terrible story of Britain’s involvement in the use of concentration camps, which did not finally end until the last political prisoners being held behind barbed wire in the United Kingdom were released in 1975. From England to Cyprus, Scotland to Malaya, Kenya to Northern Ireland; British Concentration Camps; A Brief History from 1900 to 1975 details some of the most shocking and least known events in British history.’
This looks like solid scholarship, and one those of us on the left can get behind. One of the female commenters on this blog years ago, a very staunch socialist, sent me information about the forced labour camps set up by the Labour party in the 1930s supposedly to train unemployed workers into the habit of working again. This was relevant because it was based on the same squalid attitude as Blair’s ‘welfare to work’ policy, in which the unemployed were only to be given their dole if they did unpaid work for various companies, including charities like Tomorrow’s People, and the big supermarkets. The declassification of government documents a few years ago following a court case brought by the victims of the brutal methods Britain used to suppress the Mao Mao in Kenya has resulted in another book about the concentration camps set up by Britain there, Africa’s Secret Gulags. Some of this book sounds very similar to John Newsinger’s book about the horrors committed under British imperialism, The Blood Never Dried. Newsinger is very much a man of the left, but his book also describes the atrocities committed by Britain when attempting to quell the independence forces of Britain’s former colonies. I did not know, however, about the concentration camps set up north of the border by the Polish government in exile to persecute its political enemies, including the same people targeted by the Nazis, Jews and gays.
The book and his research on this shocking topic clearly impressed others on the left. In the journalism section on his website there’s an article he wrote about it for Jacobin, a left-wing journal. He’s also written a fourth book, on the Barbary pirates, but this isn’t mentioned on his website.
In writing the book on British concentration camps, Webb’s clearly done something that can be supported by the left in bringing to light the way the British state and its allies have used forced labour and similar camps to exert its control in the home country and across its colonies. Brutal methods that should concern anyone who believes in democracy, human rights and humane government.
Thomas Sowell is a Black American conservative intellectual, and fierce critic of affirmative action, which he argues is actively harmful to Black improvement and uplift. I’ve been reading his Conquests and Cultures: An International History (New York: Basic Books), his examination of the effects of imperialism on both the conquerors and conquered peoples, concentrating on four groups of peoples: the British, Black Africans, the Slavs and western hemisphere Indians. In his chapter on Africans, he states very clearly that the western imperial powers committed atrocities, including the imposition of forced labour. This was widely resented and also caused innumerable deaths. The mortality for rate for porters on one route in colonial Tanzania, for example, was 20-25 per cent. However, he also describes the political, social and economic chaos that swept many African nations after they gained independence with coups, ethnic violence and economic collapse. Africans compensated for the disappointment of their political hopes by blaming the former imperial masters and the US. He writes
‘African governments by the dozens were toppled by military coups in the post-independence era. The swift disappearance of newly attained democracy, as brutal dictatorships took over, led to the cynical phrase: “one man, one vote – one time.” The elaborately fragmented peoples of Africa turned upon one another, sometimes with massive bloodbaths. Approximately 30,000 Ibos were slaughtered by Moslem mobs in Nigeria, 200,000 Hutus were slaughtered by the Tutsis in Burundi, and Idi Amin’s regime slaughtered 300,000 people in Uganda. A continent once virtually self-sufficient in food, Africa became a massive importer of food as its own production faltered and in some places declined absolutely, in the face of rising population. It was not uncommon for national output as a whole to decline absolutely for years in various African nations. In Equatorial Guinea, for example, the growth rate was negative for the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, averaging nearly minus 4 per cent per annum for the 1980s and minus 9 per cent for the 1970s. In Burundi the annual “growth” rate of national output was minus 6 per cent in 1994 and minus 18 per cent in 1995, while in Rwanda it ranged from minus 3.2. per cent in 1992 to minus 50 per cent in 1994.
After the soaring rhetoric and optimistic expectations at the beginning of independence were followed by bitter disappointment and painful retrogressions that reached into virtually every aspect of African life, the immediate political response was not so much a re-evaluation of the assumptions and policies which had led to such disastrous results, but instead a widespread blaming of the departed imperialism, or racial minorities such as the Indians, or even the United States, which has had relatively little role in African history, for good or ill.’ (p. 120).
The British Conservative historian Jeremy Black says much the same in his The British Empire: A History and a Debate (Farnham: Ashgate 2015), where he discusses the way contemporary commonwealth politicians have used the history of British colonialism to divert domestic attention away from the failures of their own regimes.
The same attitude is held by some elements of the recent anti-racist movements. Post-Colonial Theorists, for example, will not criticise indigenous colonised societies, but will only attack western nations for the horrors of imperialism. At a Zoom event a few years ago held as part of the Arise festival of left-wing ideas, ‘Why Socialists Should Oppose Imperialism’, Barbara Barnaby, the head of Black Lives Matter UK, demanded that Britain allow in immigrants from the former colonies ‘because you oppressed us under colonialism’. But colonialism was at least fifty years ago in the cases of many of these countries. Western meddling and international capitalism has contributed greatly to many of these nations’ misery, but it cannot be considered the sole cause. These countries had the opportunity of creating better societies and economies for themselves during independence. By and large, they didn’t, at least, not in the immediate post-independence period. Since then it has been African oppressing and exploiting other Africans. The argument that Britain should take in more African immigrants because of imperial oppression is invalid, and is a piece of deliberate anti-White racism by Barnaby and those like her.
There are other, better arguments for allowing entry to Black asylum seekers – common humanity, the moral imperative of giving sanctuary to those genuinely persecuted or oppressed, and common historical ties through the empire and commonwealth.
But not a vengeful attitude of entitlement by Black militants unable to come to terms with the oppression of Blacks by their fellow Blacks.
We are pleased to be inviting members in the South West to attend anti-semitism awareness training from the Jewish Labour Movement. It will take place over Zoom on Wednesday 6th July at 7pm.
Please email’ ————–‘to register and the meeting link will be sent closer to the date.
Best wishes,
Labour South West’
I should cocoa! The very cheek! Just in case you need reminding, the Jewish Labour Movement was one of the Jewish organisations deeply involved in the witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. I put ‘anti-Semitism’ inverted commas because these organisations, including those outside the party like the Chief Rabbinate and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were not, in my opinion, genuinely concerned with anti-Semitism in its true and original sense. This is a hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, regardless of political or religious opinions on their part. I have made this point again and again on this blog, citing some of the 19th century founders and leaders of modern organised anti-Semitism in Wilhelm Marr’s Bund Antisemiten or League of Anti-Semites. The Jewish Labour Movement used to be Paole Zion, Workers of Zion, and was virtually moribund until a decade or so ago when in received an injection of cash from person or persons unknown. The Labour Party has always had Jewish members and the parliamentary party has, or used to have, slightly more than the Tories. There are a number of other Jewish organisations in the Labour party and on the left, such as Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group, not to mention Jewdas, with whom Jeremy Corbyn spent a Passover Seder. Corbyn also received strong backing from the Haredi Jews, who believe it is their duty to stay in galut, exile, until they are called back to Israel by the Messiah. In the meantime, they are to cooperate with the peoples in whose lands they reside to build better societies and to ‘pray for the health of the city’ as commanded by the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. And I’ve no doubt there are many other Jews in the Labour party, who are not party of any Jewish organisation, because, like Dr. Jonathan Miller, they consider themselves Brits, who happen to be Jewish, and don’t want to be part of a minority.
But these Jews and their organisations are not recognised as properly Jewish and are actively opposed and maligned by the Jewish Labour Movement. The JLM’s focus, like the other organisations behind the witch-hunt, is to combat anti-Zionism and silence any criticism of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. And they do this by smearing their enemies as anti-Semites. And very many of their victims are Jews, which make their claims to be tackling anti-Semitism risible.
Mike was told by the Labour party that he would be allowed to remain in it after he was smeared as an anti-Semite if he attended anti-Semitism training by the JLM. Mike’s only crime was to point out that Ken Livingstone was entirely correct when he said that Adolf Hitler initially supported Zionism. He did. It was the Ha’avara Agreement, a shameful pact with the German Zionists to smuggle German Jews into British mandate Palestine. It was done as a way to cleanse Germany of Jews. The pact was short-lived, but it happened. Mike refused, as he is not and has never been and never will be an anti-Semite and attendance would have been taken as a tacit admission of guilt.
Jackie Walker is another of their victims. They secretly recorded her at workshop to discuss the best ways to commemorate the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Day not only commemorates the Jewish Holocaust, but also the many other genocides that have disfigured human history. Walker is a Jew by faith and blood. Her father was a Russian Jews, and so she knows from family experience more than most about real anti-Semitic persecution. Her mother was a Black American civil rights activist, and so was deeply concerned about another form of racial persecution against her people. Walker’s crime was to ask what the event would do about commemorating other holocausts, such as those against Black people. Since the great Black activist and scholar W.E.B. DuBois, many Blacks and White sympathisers have regarded the slave trade and slavery as a Black holocaust. Walker asked a decent question. But for some reason this was regarded as ‘anti-Semitic’ and she was smeared and purged.
I think most severely normal Brits are aware of the dangers of anti-Semitism. The documentaries about the Second World War and the Nazis shown on television necessarily include the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Shoah. There have been a number of award-winning Hollywood films about the Holocaust and the heroes who rescued Jews, like Schindler’s List, which came out in the ’90s. I also remember the outrage and campaigning on the left in the 70s and 80s against the NF and BNP when they were marching about trying to get votes, and similar fears and disgust when the BNP briefly revived and its noxious leader, Nick Griffin, was invited onto Question Time. There are very many excellent books about the Holocaust, and some of the late Clive James’ best TV criticism is from the 70s when Fascist and Nazi scumbags like Oswald Mosley, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were interviewed on British TV. James expertly took apart their lies and false protestations of innocence to reveal the real malignity underneath.
Part of my undergraduate course in history was on the rise of Fascist and Communist regimes in Europe, and I still have the books I bought during then. I’ve also done some reading on Fascism since then, including on its post-War varieties. I’m also interested in conspiracy theories, the most infamous of which are those about some secret Jewish conspiracy which controls both capitalism, socialism and communism to enslave the White race. These theories became prominent again in the ’90s when they were incorporated into the UFO mythology and the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, another group who are supposed to be controlling world events, the economy and politics from behind the scenes. David Icke believed that the world is secretly run by Reptoid aliens. He caused alarm and outrage because he used quotations from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery, to support his crank ideas. Icke isn’t an anti-Semite, and genuinely seemed to believe that the world was run by extraterrestrials rather than Jews. Other UFO researchers, like the late Bill English, did the same, though when they cited the Protocols they claimed they should be read as talking about the Illuminati, rather than the Jews. Nevertheless these quotations were in danger of making the Protocols seem respectable to the point where a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern towns stocked them.
I totally accept that respectable scholars and lay people have to be very careful when it comes to some of the material on topics like the Nazis and Holocaust. Real anti-Semites and Nazis try to disguise their awful views and attempts to deny or minimise the Holocaust by setting up respectable-sounding magazines. Often they use coded language. For example, a very respectable folklorist wrote a piece in one of the urban folklore magazines back in the ’90s to tell how he’d been taken in by such tactics and to warn other to be on the guard. He had been researching tales of atrocities committed by the Germans during the First World War. He came to the conclusion that one of these, the story that the Kaiser’s troops had crucified a Canadian soldier, was bogus and may have been just allied propaganda. He was then approached by a history magazine with a respectable-sounding title, who asked him if they could reprint his article. He innocently agreed, only to find out later it was a Nazi rag. Its editors were using stories of allied propaganda to suggest that the Holocaust was also nothing but fiction. But as an American judge has ruled, the Holocaust is so well documented that its existence cannot be sanely denied. The scholar was shocked and disgusted, and so wrote the article to let others know about the deception and to be on their guard about similar tactics and approaches.
As for coded language, the believers in a world-wide conspiracy to enslave humanity talk about the globalists, the Illuminati, or the global elite. Sometimes this is innocent of anti-Semitism, and they really are talking about a secretive group of leading politicos, capitalists and so on, which isn’t some Jewish conspiracy. But sometimes it isn’t, and is code for ‘Jews’. I’ve also noticed that while Simon Webb of History Debunked isn’t an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist by any stretch of the imagination, some of his commenters do seem to be. There’s a lot of talk by them about the Great Replacement, the idea that the Jews are trying to destroy the White race with non-White immigrate. There’s also comments about ‘small hatted people’, or ‘people with small hats’, which sounds very much like its about the Jews, referring to the kippa skullcaps many observant Jews wear.
Sometimes you really do need to be careful and be informed so you’re not taken in by such language and deceit. But the Jewish Labour Movement won’t help you.
They’re concerned to discredit criticism of Israel using literary criticism and citing entirely bogus conspiracy theories about the Jews from the past. Remember when Shai Masot was caught plotting with a senior British civil servant to decide who should or shouldn’t be in the cabinet? This could rightly be called a conspiracy. But if you called it that, or described the two as plotting, you were the using an anti-Semitic trope because of all the genuinely stupid, poisonous and entirely mythical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the past. The same if you report the atrocities committed by the Israeli state and IDF against Palestinians, especially if they can get in a reference to the Blood Libel, that Jews sacrificed Christian children to use their blood in the matzoh bread at Passover. This vile medieval smear has been responsible for numerous anti-Semitic pogroms. However, the Israeli state now is manipulating its memory to close down reasonable criticism. When the IDF shot a Palestinian woman a few years ago, one of the respectable newspaper cartoonists produced picture of her burning in the fireplace while Netanyahu, the-then president of Israel, hobnobbed with the US president. This was promptly denounced by the Israelis as anti-Semitic, because the fire recalled the gas ovens of the Holocaust. Similarly, when Gerald Scarfe drew a cartoon of the Israelis building their wretched wall to keep the Palestinians out using Arab blood, the Israelis again demanded a retraction and an apology because the blood supposedly referred to the infamous Blood Libel. And so another piece of entirely reasoned, reasonable and absolutely not anti-Semitic criticism and comment was again silenced. And this is what the Jewish Labour Movement also does in its events about anti-Semitism. They have nothing to do with making people genuinely aware of the threat of anti-Semitism and the way it is coded. They are all about discrediting justifiable criticism of Israel through using literary devices to make them apparently connected to past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and innuendo.
I have absolutely no intention of going to this monstrous charade. If I want information and guidance on genuine anti-Semitism, I’d try to consult the JLM’s Jewish victims – Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Martin Odoni and others, self-respecting decent people, who have been smeared by the anti-Semitism witch-hunters as self-hating. Even though these people are Jewish and have fought against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. Or I would contact Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racism activist. He was smeared as an anti-Semite, again using literary tropes, because he caught a Jewish Labour MP passing on a party brochure to a Torygraph hack. Oh, it was the trope of the disloyal Jew, they claimed. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth didn’t know the politico was Jewish, and had in the 1980s worked with the Board of Deputies about passing legislation to protect Jews against genuine anti-Semitic violence by the NF or BNP. Or I’d go to someone like Mike, who can tell fact from fiction, well-researches his stories and who was asked by a Jewish friend at College to be one of the readers in her performance commemorating the Holocaust’s victims.
All of the above have a far better understanding of anti-Semitism, or a more honest one than the Jewish Labour Movement and its highly ideological, distorted view of what counts as Jew hatred.
I’ve said it before: Judaism is a religion. The Jews are a people. Zionism is an ideology. Israel is a state. Judaism and its people are not synonymous with the modern state of Israel. Under a free society, all ideologies should be able to be examined and criticised, including Zionism. States can and do commit horrible atrocities, for which they should criticised. Israel should not be an exception merely because its people are Jews. Only hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, should count as anti-Semitism.
Fight racism! Fight anti-Semitism! And don’t be taken in by bogus propaganda like that of the Jewish Labour Movement.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, parts of the right have sympathised with Russia and argued against supporting Ukraine. I think Sargon of Gasbag and the Lotus Eaters have put up a post raising issues about Ukraine and I believe that Peter Hitchens may have done so as well. This afternoon I found a short video on YouTube from American Republican politician Tulsi Gabbard, which, if true, raises significant questions why we should be supporting Zelensky’s regime. She claimed that Zelensky closed down three Ukrainian TV stations because they were criticising him, and that he banned the party that came second in the Ukrainian elections and imprisoned its leaders, all actions which Putin has been accused of doing. In the case of Putin, there’s little doubt: this is exactly what he has done. But there have been no reports over here of Zelensky doing the same, though this is not to say he hasn’t done them. One of Hitchen’s videos on the war is about what the media isn’t telling you. Gabbard in her video calls the people demanding support for Ukraine ‘warmongers’, which is surprising language coming from a Republican. But it’s no more surprising than the Tories opposing Blair’s invasion of Iraq. Some of them were no doubt opportunists, opposing the invasion simply because it was done by Labour, not themselves. But some of the Tories did oppose it from moral conviction, the best example being Hitchens, who has continued to denounce it and Blair. It’s possible that Gabbard is the same.
There’s a fair amount of self-interest in the Tory defence of Russia. Russian oligarchs have contributed handsomely to Tory coffers. In America Trump’s government also gave contracts and concessions to Russian firms, quite apart from the rumours that Putin had some kind of incriminating footage involving Trump from the Orange Man’s visit to Russia. And even if these accusations of dictatorial behaviour by Zelensky were true, they would not justify the Russian invasion and the atrocities Putin’s forces have committed. But they do raise questions about why we are providing military aid. Are we doing so simply because Ukraine is a sovereign nation, which is threatened with annihilation and dismemberment by a larger, more powerful former colonial master – Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and before then the Russian empire? Or are we backing it for the same reason the American state department and the National Endowment for Democracy under Barack Obama, Hillary ‘Queen of Chaos’ Clinton and Victoria Nuland helped to orchestrate the the Orange Revolution of 2012? That had nothing to do with overthrowing an unpopular president, and everything to do with installing one who favoured the west rather than Putin’s Russia. These are serious questions that need to be answered. But I doubt we’ll get them through the mainstream news.
One of the books I’ve been reading recently was Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Slavery and Islam. I did so partly to see whether there was any truth in the accusation by the islamophobic right that the Muslim grooming gangs were rooted in Muslim sex slavery. They aren’t. They’re just evil men with a racist attitude to Whites, who wanted to rape and degrade young girls. Brown states in his introduction that his book was a response to the shock he and the overwhelming majority of Muslims the world over felt when ISIS revived sex slavery. His book is also partly an attempt to answer the question why, if slavery is such a monstrous crime, did it take so long for Christians, Muslims and other religions and philosophies to ban it. His conclusion is that slavery wasn’t condemned but regulated by religions like Christianity and Islam because it was too much a part of everyday life for previous civilisations to consider outlawing it. Not even rationalist philosophers like Aristotle argued against it, because they felt it was too indispensable. Aristotle apparently said that it could only be banned ‘when looms drive themselves’. Brown therefore concludes that abolitionism arose in the west when a series of social and technological changes showed that society could still survive and prosper economically without slavery. Part of his argument is that it survived so long in Islam because Muslim slavery was more benign than western chattel slavery and even the western treatment of free workers. It was heavily regulated, slaves had rights, most could expect to be manumitted in 8-10 years and female slave concubines could rise to become powerful women, the mothers of Ottoman emperors and caliphs.
Brown’s a White American convert to Islam and a professor of the religion at one of the American universities. He amasses a wealth of information and sources to prove his point. At the same time, it strikes me that he’s producing a biased account of Islamic slavery intended to impress the reader with its comparative mildness. Others have produce much more critical studies to Islamic slavery. The White European and American victims of the Barbary pirates complained of constant beating by their masters. They were given meagre rations and expected to make money for their masters. They lived in particular fear of being pressed into the pirates’ galleys. As oarsmen they were kept chained to their benched night and day, fed little and deprived of sleep. Many were driven to ‘strange ecstasies’ – madness. Another fear was that, if their relatives and friends back home could not raise the money to ransom them, their masters would sell them on to the big Ottoman slave market at Constantinople, and they would be lost among the enslaved masses of the Ottoman empire for ever.
Nevertheless, despite the book’s bias, Brown chronicles the process of abolition in the Islamic world and the attempts by Muslims themselves to abolish slavery. Sometimes this was by sincere reformers, who felt that Muhammed had intended slavery to be banned eventually, but circumstances prevented him from doing so in his own time. Sometimes the bans were simply for reasons of diplomatic expediency. Islamic states and rulers wanted to make treaties with western nations. These wanted to ban slavery around the globe, and so their Islamic partners did so. Brown notes the existence of radical Muslim groups we haven’t heard about in the West, because their radicalism is that of left-wing opponents of racism, sexism and homophobia in the West. These include movements like the Progressive Muslims.
But unfortunately, despite the hard work put in by Islamic abolitionists, the fanatics are coming back to preach aggressive jihad and the enslavement of the kufar.
Harris Sultan and Nuriyeh Khan are two ex-Muslim atheists with their own channel on YouTube, which attacks religion in general and Islam in particular. They are very concerned about the rising intolerance in the Islamic world, like Pakistan where people have been murdered on the mere accusation that they have committed blasphemy. A few days ago they discussed a recent case in which a schoolteacher was murdered by three of her pupils, because one of them apparently had a dream in which the teacher blasphemed against Islam. It’s sheer, mindless fanaticism, though there’s also the suspicion that there may have been more mundane motives for the killing. They’ve also attacked similar trends among extreme right-wing Hindus in India and also among the Sikhs. and recently they’ve put up a couple of videos showing Muslim preachers calling for or defending aggressive jihad and the enslavement of non-Muslims.
One was an Indonesian preacher on Zakir Naik’s PeaceTV. Naik’s a Muslim anti-Christian polemicist. This delightful preacher told his congregation that in 50-60 years, Muslims would be strong enough to make war and invade the non-Muslim world. If non-Muslims allowed them to take over their countries without struggle, they would be allowed to keep their homes and property. If, however, they fought back, or continued with un-Islamic practices like nightclubs after they allowed Islam to take over their countries, they would be conquered by military force and enslaved.
The other day they put up another video of a female professor of Islam at one of Islam’s most prestigious universities, al-Uzzah, as recorded and translated by Memri TV. This woman attacked the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis. But she was in favour of Muslims enslaving non-Muslim women as sex slaves, because this would humiliate them. This particularly shocked Nuriyeh Khan. As a modern, liberated woman she found it deeply distressing and incomprehensible to hear another woman advocating such vile treatment of the members of her own sex. Sultan also made the point that the Israelis weren’t enslaving Palestinian women for sex. If they did, this would be a crime against humanity and would be condemned by the international community. This is probably true, but condemnations by the UN haven’t stopped the decades long process of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israeli state, the erection of a system of apartheid or the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children.
To show what these policies meant in practice during Ottoman history, they show clips from a Hungarian TV series about Magyar, Serb and Croat girls, who are carried off into slavery by Ottoman raiders. These kill the girls’ fiances and husbands. At the slave market they are stripped and humiliated with their breasts and buttocks prodded by prospect male buyers. This is historically accurate. Under the sharia the only legitimate source of slaves was prisoners of war, and so Muslim states were engaged in warfare and raiding for slaves to supply the slave markets. And Brown states in his book that female slaves were treated like this.
Now this TV series raises a number of issues. There’s a bitter hatred of Muslims in Hungary and the Balkans. These countries were invaded and conquered by the Ottomans. The Turks only succeeded in conquering two-thirds of Hungary, and it was later reconquered by the Austrians, hence the Austro-Hungarian empire. But Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Greece, for example, spent five hundred years as provinces of the Ottomans. Most of the hatred, though, dates from atrocities committed by the Muslim forces during these nations’ wars of independence. A revolt on one of the Greek islands was put down with terrible massacres in the 1820s, after which 17,000 + Christian Greeks were enslaved. It should be noted too that the Christians were also capable of committing atrocities of their own against Muslims, but this received much less publicity in the west. During the Second World Bosnian Muslims united with the forces of Croatian Fascist leader Ante Pavelic to perpetrate appalling massacres on the Serbs. The Fascists wanted to have 1/3 of the Serbs converted to Roman Catholicism, a third forced in slavery and another third simply wiped out. Concentration camps like those for Jews in Nazi Germany were set up. Captured Serb women and children were thrown off mountains to kill them.
It was memory of these horrors that spurred the Serbs in their turn to commit horrific atrocities against Bosnian Muslims during the War in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. One of the paramilitary groups responsible, under a particular vicious brute called Arkan, had taken part a few years earlier in a re-enactment of the Battle of Kosovo Polje at the end of the fourteenth century in which the Ottoman forces defeated the Christian armies and conquered Serbia. However much based in fact the Hungarian TV series is, it worries me that it has the potential to inspire a similar genocidal hatred of Muslims. Hungary has attracted international criticism from the EU amongst other for refusing to admit Muslim asylum seekers. I also seem to recall that Serbia also refused to let the mass caravan of migrants from Syria and the Middle East pass through their country on the way to western Europe in 2012. But I might be wrong. At the moment Britain is going through a period of post-imperial guilt because of the enslavement of indigenous peoples during the empire. But I wonder how tolerant we would be, if we had not been the conquerors but the conquered.
But the Hungarian TV series also raises questions about TV series about the enslavement of Blacks in America and Europe, such as Alex Haley’s landmark book, Roots in the 1970s. Since then there have been a number of films, TV shows and documentaries about the enslavement of Blacks by westerners, such as Amistad and 12 Years A Slave. These are partly a response to the poverty, racism and marginalisation experienced by many western Black communities which it is argued have their basis in their enslavement. But if it is not only permissible but laudable to produce such historical dramas about transatlantic Black slavery, why shouldn’t series about the enslavement of Whites by Muslims also be shown? I doubt that any mainstream western European or American TV station would want to show such a series like the Hungarians because of the fear that it would promote islamophobia. But nevertheless, this occurred, and its legacy is felt in Orban’s Hungary and other parts of the Balkans.
But it’s also frightening to see that, after ISIS shocked decent people across the world, the preachers of hate in the Dar al-Islam by picking up their ideas and calling for jihad and sex slavery.
I wish the heirs of the great Islamic abolitionists every success in combating these intolerant fanatics, and the continuation of an international order marked by peace, respect and dignity for everyone, regardless of their colour or religion.
I haven’t posted the videos by Harris and Sultan here, because they make harsh comments about Islam as a whole. I’m not an atheist and genuinely don’t wish to upset Muslim readers of this blog. This is a time when the Conservatives are forcing working people of all religions into ever greater poverty. European Muslims are, in general, the most impoverished group after Blacks. See the book The Crisis in Islamic Civilisation. It shouldn’t matter what our individual religious faiths are or their absence thereof. We all need to stand together against genuine intolerance wherever it is found, and the Tories’ and neo-liberals to drive us further into poverty and despair.
If you want to see their videos, please look for them on YouTube. Their titles are
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