Away from politics, I’ve been reading a couple of books on failed predictions of the future, and the technological innovations of tomorrow that never appeared. And some of them are very strange indeed. In the 1970s there were a number of predictions that as the world’s resources ran out and farming became increasingly difficult, we’d all be turning to eating algae instead. As a prediction, it reminds me of the way certain parts of the environmental milieu are telling people to cut down on meat and eat insects instead. But a Canadian architect also though of another use for algae: turning in the Moon into a living, habitable world like Earth.
I’ve come across a number of schemes for terraforming the planets over the years. One of the most famous is Carl Sagan’s plan for changing the environment of Venus. At the moment it’s a hell planet with an atmosphere pressure 40 times that of Earth, temperature over 400 degrees, a suffocating Carbon Dioxide atmosphere and sulphuric acid rain. Sagan’s plan for terraforming this was to release bacteria that would consume the carbon dioxide releasing oxygen instead. This would also create water, leading to rain and surface water developing.
There’s also been much discussion of terraforming Mars, which again revolves around releasing water and oxygen trapped in the rocks to create a thick, breathable atmosphere. One of these, alarmingly, involved bombarding it with nuclear missiles in order to release more gas into the atmosphere and let global warming take hold to produce an oxygen-rich, thick atmosphere which could support life.
The Moon is rather more difficult. The plans I’ve read about for colonising the Moon have centred around building atmospheric domes over enclosed cities or burying habitats underground to protect the Moon’s citizens from the dangerous radiation on the surface. There has also been a suggestion of enclosing the entire Moon in a protective canopy, similar to the transparent domes over the cities.
The Canadian architect, however, worked with the natural products in her architectural designs. She therefore suggested using algae. Presumably this would be the anaerobic type that would feed on the nutrients in the soil to release the gases trapped in the regolith to form an atmosphere. Like all of these schemes, it seems very ambitious. I think to be able to create a breathable atmosphere oceans of the stuff would be needed. It’s clearly impossible with the current technology and the inability of any government or group of governments to afford.
But perhaps it may become a viable possibility in time, and the Moon, or at least part of it, could become and living, inhabitable world.
It was St George’s Day yesterday, the day dedicated to England’s patron saint. There were parades in various parts of the country. I think most of the time these went very well, except in London where the right-wing demonstrators were involved in clashes with the police. They’ve been claiming on the net that, contrary to what the Met police have been tweeting, ’twas the cops that started it. Given that the Met police also have form starting fights with some left-wing protesters, such as during the Poll Tax riots back in the ’90s and against the miners during the miners’ strike, I can also believe that they may have started by attacking the rightists, even if I don’t agree with the protesters’ views.
The day was also accompanied by various bods arguing whether or not it should be celebrated on GB News and elsewhere. Femi Oluwalde popped up on GB News a day or so ago to argue against displaying the flag of St George because of England’s history in the slave trade and colonisation, while ignoring the fact that other countries also were involved in this long before England. But it also reminded me how the Tories under Maggie Thatcher draped themselves in the mantle of British patriotism. The 1987 general election featured Battle of Britain Spitfires zooming around the sky while an excited voice declared ‘It’s great to be great again!’ And there was a headline in the Torygraph quoting Maggie as saying, ‘Don’t call them boojwah, call them British!’ Well, it’s nearly forty years later, and there’s precious little great about Britain. Oh yes, I’ve seen the headlines announcing that Britain is the second most powerful country, but
1. Our public utilities are owned by foreigners,
2. An ever increasing number of working people are suffering real poverty, resorting to food banks because their not getting the welfare benefits they need, or their wages are too low to cover the costs of food and/or heating.
3. The NHS and dental services are being decimated due to Tory underfunding and privatisation. As a result, many people are pulling out their own teeth because of shortages of NHS dentists.
4. Rishi Sunak and the rest of his party of knaves and brigands has announced they’re going to stop GPs giving people sicknotes and cut Personal Independence Payments, because Tory ideology and the Heil say that everyone on benefits is a scrounger and malingerer.
5. Meanwhile, the Tory party is more than happy to received dodgy donations from the mega rich while doing their level best to reduce genuine democratic accountability by placing restrictions on the Electoral Commission.
6. And then there’s the issue of the Tories’ own personal corruption. Rishi Sunak has given public monies to his wife’s companies, the party also gave PPE contracts, for equipment that didn’t work, to companies with which they were personally linked, and BoJob handing out a computer contract to the woman with whom he was having an affair.
I also wonder about their personal commitment to this country and its people. Sunak, before he got the go-ahead for his political ambitions, was all set to get his green card and emigrate to America. Boris Johnson was born in America, and although he also became Prime Minister, showed precious little interest in actually doing the job of governing. He didn’t turn up to the COBRA meetings about Covid, and seemed to spend every available moment either off home for the weekend or having a holiday. He fancies himself as a statesman in the mould of Churchill, but his aptitude and abilities are, whatever we make of Winnie, in no way comparable.
I see precious little genuine patriotism amongst the Tories.
They have consistently betrayed the interests of this country and its great working people, of all ethnicities, while declaring the opposite.
They represent solely the interests of the global rich, and are impoverishing ordinary Brits in order to give vast tax cuts to their corporate paymasters.
Whatever party you decide to vote for, get them out at the next election!
I’m afraid I haven’t posted much over the past few days as most of its been about conflict in Gaza, and there’s just so much coming out about it that I really can’t keep up. I have, however, noticed the anti-left, anti-Palestinian bias of certain news outlets and organisations, such as the New Culture Forum and the Lotus Eaters and the appearance of the current head of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simon, to tell everyone that the protests against Israel and its barbarity towards the Palestinians is just ‘Israelophobia’. I think he’s written a book of that title, telling everyone that hostility to Israel is simply a matter of anti-Semitic prejudice.
Er, no. No, it isn’t. Israel’s critics, like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker et al, as Jews are naturally extremely well-informed about Jewish history and the history and vile politics of the Israeli state. Greenstein and Walker both took the side of the Palestinians through their own research, not out of some pre-existing self-hatred or hostility towards the Jewish people. In the case of Tony, I think it started when, as a schoolboy, he took the side of the Palestinians in a school debate about Israel and the Palestinians. And what he found and read convinced him that the Palestinians were right, and had been unjustly persecuted. Jackie came to supporting the Palestinians through protesting against apartheid in South Africa. She was asked by a friend why she protested against it in South Africa, but not in Israel. Like Tony, Jackie’s very definitely Jewish, the daughter of a Russian Jewish father and a Black America Civil Rights worker mother. Her partner’s Jewish, and her daughter goes to a Jewish school. Many of the books against the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians are written by Jews or by gentiles, who support them. One of the books I’ve got on it has the title Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. This discusses not only the brutality of Israeli colonisation, but also the contempt the founders of Israel had for diasphora Jewry, which Tony also discusses in several of his articles. There are also Israeli human rights organisation campaigning against the oppression of the Israeli state. These include B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence. The latter is an organisation of ex-Israeli soldiers, which exists to talk about the atrocities they have seen and committed. As for Muslims, the impression I had is that they are very well informed about the Israeli state’s persecution of their coreligionists. The closure of mosques, for example, by the authorities is covered in their equivalent of parish magazines in a way that isn’t done elsewhere.
Hamas are a bunch of terrorist murderers, but the Israeli response has been massively disproportionate and constitutes war crimes in its turn. Also, support for the Palestinians does not equal support for Hamas and support for terrorism, despite the impression given by some of the marchers on the pro-Palestinian protests. There is a question of bias and spin in all this. The Muslim marchers on one protest were supposed to have carried Hamas flags and the black flag of jihad. But Mike didn’t see any evidence of this in the pictures the right produced of this march, and I can’t say I’ve seen any either. Some prats do seem to have been waving the jihad flag around, and there are accusations that some of the participants in another protest were chanting ‘jihad’. It’s certainly possible, but doesn’t mean that everyone there marching wants another genocidal war in the Middle East.
But the right is definitely spinning this as the evil anti-Semitic socialist left allying with the anti-Semitic Palestinians and Muslims to attack the completely innocent and virtuous state of Israel. Muslims and anti-racist activists have already commented on how British Muslims are seen as ‘the enemy within’, and it’s being spread to include the socialist left. One of the right-wing news channels – I’ve forgotten which one – had some pundit on who claimed that if Israel went, the West would be next. And a few days ago GB News had on an academic from a Jewish university in Vienna, who lived in the last Jewish area in the Austrian capital. This gentleman declared the present wave of Muslim unrest over Israel to be ‘the end of Jewish life in the West’.
He gave as his reasons the security threats to European Jewish institutions, such as synagogues and schools, incidents of anti-Semitic abuse and violence and the statistic that 70 per cent of French Jews would like to leave France. I find that hard to believe. No details were given of who carried out the poll, how reliable it was and the bias or otherwise in the questions asked. Back in the 90s and Noughties there were concerns about the way the French state seemed keener to clamp down on cases of Islamophobia than against anti-Semitism. The Financial Times explained it was because there was far more prejudice against Muslims then against Jews. Far more French people considered Jews fellow countrymen than Muslims. The lack of action didn’t come from indifference or hostility to Jews, but from the opposite: the French people, as a whole, were not anti-Semitic and regarded the Jews as part of themselves. Muslims, on the other hand, were far more vulnerable.
The academic was also worried about the loss of Jewish influence. There were only 400,000 Jews in Britain compared to 4 million Muslims. As the Muslim population increased, so would their influence amongst politicos. This is a fair point, but the size of the Islamic population didn’t stop the right-wing British establishment and that part of the Jewish community that considers itself the official leaders and spokespeople for British Jews, the Chief Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Chronicle and associated grotty journalists running a very successful smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. And whatever some fanatics scream, the severely normal British public aren’t anti-Semitic. Tony demolished this claim with some stats a few years ago showing that the overwhelming majority of Brits either had a positive view of their Jewish comrades, or didn’t think they were either particularly good or evil. The real anti-Semites were very much in a minority at 7 per cent. I dare say it’s gone up since, but almost certainly not as much as the right would like us all to believe.
And it looks very, very much like shabby fearmongering. Round about the time of the invasion of Iraq, the Spectator published a glowing review of a nasty little novel set later this century. In fact, I think it may have been set about now, in the ’20s. This imagined a future France, where the remains of the socialist left had united with militant Islam to seize power. France was now a Muslim state, and there was a new Jewish Holocaust underway.
And then when Corbyn was leader of the Labour party we had rather excitable individuals making the same exaggerated claims. Various celebs on the internet were tweeting to each other that it was like 1930s Germany all over again. Which it definitely wasn’t. If it had been, they’d have been in absolutely no position to complain about it on the net, nor would they be free to pursue careers or run businesses. And the only public performances they’d be allowed to do would be those designed to humiliate them. There were also various TV executives declaring that British Jews weren’t safe before departing for Israel. I have a feeling that one those saying that actually returned to Britain a few years ago, but I might be wrong.
I don’t see any of that. We had a protest in Bristol against the situation in Gaza. This was just for peace, with no racial denunciations. I haven’t come across any reports of Jewish Bristolians being abused or molested. There was Palestinian embassy in Bristol’s Old City, but I haven’t heard anything about that for years and there hasn’t, as far as I know, been any Muslim demonstrations here calling for the Jewish community’s death. What I do see is a temporary crisis, which certainly has the possibility to get much worse, the racial aspects of which are being grossly exaggerated in order to scare Jews and ordinary Brits into supporting Israel and against the socialist left.
The spectre of Cheddar’s oldest known inhabitant rose again last week in piece of controversy over the Beeb’s Horrible Histories children’s programme. This had included him as part of a segment claiming that Black people had always been part of British history. This has been widely attacked, particularly by one YouTuber who put up an entire video rebutting the programme on his ‘Survive the Jive’ channel. He then appeared with another historian on the New Culture Forum’s ‘Deprogrammed’ series on their channel.
Cheddar man was a late Palaeolithic skeleton found in the Somerset village of that name in 1903. The Concise Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, edited by Leonard Cottrell, and published in 1960, says this in its entry about him:
‘The complete skeleton of Cheddar Man is to be seen in the Cheddar Gorge in England. It is mounted to stand upright in a small museum at the entrance to Gough’s Cave.
The cave has been known since 1877. In 1903 the skeleton was found, together with flint implements and an antler baton-de-commandement, a tool now thought to be a shaft-straightener. Further excavations in 1927 produced some hundreds more flint tools, another shaft-straightener, bone awls, part of an ivory rod, and perforated shells and teeth that could have been threaded as necklaces. Some other human remains also came to light.
The caves in the sides of the Cheddar Gorge were hollowed out in the soft limestone by water. Several of them were inhabited by bands of humans towards the end of the Palaeolithic period. The population of Britain at the time was Homo Sapiens, and tools found with skeletons show that there was close cultural contact with France. The English Channel was not then formed, and once the British ice that corresponded to the Wurm glaciataion had retreated, it was possible for Upper Palaeolithic cultures to develop in Britain.
In Gough’s Cave, the flint tools were of the types associated with the Creswellian culture, as is shown by the small battered-back blades used as knives. This is a pale reflection of the splendid French Aurignacian of the Upper Palaeolithic.
Magdalenian influence is shown by the presence of the shaft-straighteners.
The bones of Cheddar Man were found near the entrance of the cave, for, with little means of artificial light at his disposal, Palaeolithic man was forced to live within the range of daylight. The spot where they were dug up is to be seen on the left-hand side in a grotto below the present ground level.’ (p. 130).
A few years ago a group of three scientists used DNA sequencing and forensic anthropology to reconstruct Cheddar Man’s face and complexion. This was a major advance at the time showing that surviving DNA from such ancient remains could be used to reconstruct the person’s original appearance. This caused astonishment, as from this it appeared that Cheddar Man was dark skinned, albeit with blue eyes. Scientists were amazed that Britons had retained a dark complexion at this late stage of human prehistory. Various anti-racist commenters stated that it gave a space for a Black presence in Britishness. And this is where it becomes controversial.
Firstly, one of the scientists involved retracted the reconstruction and claimed it was impossible to know from the DNA what the skeleton’s original complexion was. This was printed in New Scientist. The panel on ‘Deprogrammed’ did not mention this, but stated that the reconstruction was also matched and influenced by similar reconstructions from the Netherlands and elsewhere. also pointed out that the absence of White DNA does not automatically mean that Cheddar Man had dark skin. East Asians don’t have the same genes for pale skin as Europeans, but nevertheless the peoples of many of these countries have them because they have a different set of genes that do this. And the depth of Cheddar Man’s dark colouring seems to have been influenced by one of the scientists’ own pro-EU and anti-racist beliefs. It seems that there was a range of possibilities how dark this individual was. But this scientist, according to the Forum and its guests, deliberately made him as dark as possible, saying something about attacking Brexit and ‘white supremacy’. And when the reconstruction was photographed, it was deliberately made even darker.
Horrible Histories conflated a dark complexion with explicitly African ancestry. They stated that he was Black, which has a very specific definition in British law. It refers to people of specifically African ancestry, and excludes others, who may be similarly dark-skinned, such as the Tamils from southern India. And all the modern Blacks whose images appeared at the end of the Horrible Histories segment were all of West Indian and Black African ancestry. This, the Deprogrammed panel considered, was deliberately misleading, as it gave the impression that people of specifically African ancestry were present that far back in the Stone Age. They also considered it problematic because in trying to show that the peoples of the British Isles were or included Black people originally, it conceded ground to their opponents in viewing historical priority as a crucial, defining factor in Britishness. In fact, they said, there was nothing wrong in later, recent immigrants being regarded as British without projecting that presence far back into history.
There was much more in the discussion, which stated that the dark-skinned Palaeolithic peoples then gave way themselves to an influx of further, light-skinned people from the Ukraine, and 90 per cent of the Palaeolithic population was replaced within a space of two centuries. They found this difficult to imagine without ‘something terrible’ happening. By which they mean some kind of genocide or war of extermination. They commented on the irony that the new, 21st century scientific techniques were bringing back 19th century models. Which meant the Diffusionist ideas of 19th century archaeologists and anthropologists. These considered that human prehistory had seen a series of invasions and colonisations as one group of early settlers came and conquered its predecessors before being supplanted by later arrivals in its turn. This idea was later rejected in the 20th century by the idea that the underlying populations did not change over time, but simply adopted new cultural trends. The ancient Brits who became the Beaker people were still genetically the people they had always been. It’s just that they accepted the package of Beaker culture that had reached Britain from Spain and north Africa. Now it seems this view is being challenged by DNA information showing that mass invasions and population replacement really had taken place.
I realise this came from the right-wing New Culture Forum, but it seems solid science to me. I don’t think there’s much controversy over the assertion that the very first Homo Sapiens colonists of Europe were dark-skinned. This occurred around 50,000 or so years ago, and I can remember reading decades ago that skeletons from this remote epoch were like those of Aboriginal Australians. At this period, European humans were more archaic and robust in their appearance, with pronounced brow ridges, than their fellows in Africa, who were much more gracile. But it does seem, if the NCF and its guests are to be believed, that liberal, anti-racist ideology had played a part in creating a possibly misleading reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s appearance and the Beeb had also been misleading in claiming that Cheddar Man had been Black.
Since the Second World War western archaeologists have been very keen to avoid nationalist ideologies influencing the reconstruction of the past, including the reconstruction of ancient humans from elsewhere in the world with European features. Early reconstructions of the Scythian skeletons from the Pazryk region of Siberia were originally given Caucasian features by the Russian forensic anthropologists who originally reconstructed them. But later examination and reconstruction has shown that they had, as might be expected, east Asian features.
Now it seems that the racial bias has swung the other way so that scientists feel constrained to reconstruct ancient Europeans as dark as possible without considering this ideologically driven or racially biased.
Regardless of the racial issues involved, Cheddar Man is fascinating. Some of the other human remains that were found show signs of cannibalism. And the scientists who reconstructed his DNA also compared it with people in the village to see if he had any modern descendants. It turned out he did: the headmaster of the local school. His mother, however, strongly objected, wondering what people would think. And the people of the Palaeolithic have contributed to the appearance of modern Brits. Supposedly the genes for blue eyes come from them.
This story from the Torygraph came up on my YouTube feed earlier this evening. According to the article ‘Israel’s actions in West Bank like Nazi Germany, says retired general’ by James Rothwell in today’s edition of the wretched rag, Amiram Levin, the commander of the Israeli army’s northern forces and former Mossad spy – I think he may have been the agency’s deputy director – has called Israel an apartheid state.
The description of Israel as an apartheid state and its comparison to Nazi Germany will come as no surprise to pro-Palestinian campaigners. People like Jeremy Corbyn, Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein have been demonstrating the truth of this description very clearly for decades. Walker became a critic of Israeli apartheid in the 1970s after she was asked why she campaigned against apartheid South Africa but not Israel. Comparing the state of Israel and the parties and officials that have created the country’s system of segregation and oppression, and who have presided over the decades’ long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their own homeland to Nazis has been angrily denounced as anti-Semitic by the country’s most zealous defenders. But dissident Israeli intellectuals have themselves made the comparison. One highly respected Israeli chemist and philosopher, whose name at the moment escapes me, called the racist ideology of the Israeli state ‘Judaeonazism’. Tony Greenstein, himself one of the many Jews purged from Labour for criticising the Israeli state’s racism, has made the point that Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians resembles the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis before the launch of the obscenity of the Holocaust in 1942. It also resembles the Nazi colonisation of eastern Europe, in which a tract of land stretching from Poland through Ukraine and into Russia was to be cleansed of it indigenous population, their towns and villages erased, ready for German colonisation.
But despite the accuracy of the comparison and the sheer brute fact that Israel is an apartheid state, anyone making these criticisms will be immediately denounced as anti-Semitic. This is despite the fact that Israel’s critics include many self-respecting Jews, like the actor Miriam Margolies. She appeared in a book of papers criticising the bombardment of Gaza nearly a decade ago, describing herself as a ‘proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’. Ashamed, no doubt, by the brutality Israeli showed towards the country’s indigenous Arabs. There have been a number of Israeli activists and organisations who’ve attacked the state’s brutality. These include Breaking the Silence, an organisation of ex-service personnel, who bear vocal witness to the atrocities by the Israeli military they have seen and participated in. There is also the human rights organisation B’Tselem, which attacks the official myths of the country’s foundation and shows how the Palestinian territories have been steadily encroached upon and annexed over the decades.
Levin is clearly a soldier and a patriot, and so I wonder how the Likudniks and bug-eyed ultra-nationalists are going to handle his criticism. I don’t doubt he’s going to be attacked and denounced, if he hasn’t been already, but they can hardly call him self-hating and anti-Semitic as they have done to too many others.
This is going to be another controversial video because of where it comes from: Paul Joseph Watson. Yeah, I know, he’s another far right mouthpiece. He was Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars, which pushed just about every bizarre conspiracy known to humanity. He was one of the celebrity rightists who broke UKIP, along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meacham and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin. When those three joined the party, all the genuine anti-racists left. Party collapse followed, as well as refounding as the Brexit party, now Reform or whatever.
But here Watson makes a perfectly valid point. It’s in response to Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip, torpedoing his career by telling Whites to stay away from Blacks. He said this in response to a poll which found that just under 50 per cent of Blacks thought it wasn’t okay to be right, or didn’t know if it was or wasn’t. He took this as showing that this proportion of the Black American population hated Whites. He therefore told Whites to stay away from Blacks, even though just over 50 per cent of Blacks had no problems with Whites and ‘don’t know’ doesn’t necessarily translate to ‘hate Whites’.
What Watson objects to in this video is that Critical Race Theorist and anti-racist activist, Robin DiAngelo, says much the same thing from the Black perspective but doesn’t suffer the same consequences as Adams. He presents a clip of her saying that Blacks need their own separate spaces away from Whites. Now this attitude ain’t new. I encountered it years ago in the editorial/ ‘things you should know about’ column in the newsletter of the Black and Asian Studies Association newsletter, no. 31 or perhaps 32, c. 2002, when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. I wasn’t impressed. One of the columnists for the Financial Times had reviewed a book on the Empire and post-war immigration, and, if I recall correctly, had criticised it for saying nothing about what it called ‘reverse colonisation’ and ‘liberal apartheid’. Liberal apartheid is the system of goods and services set up exclusively to benefit Blacks and ethnic minorities. The call for separate Black spaces, however well meant, is effectively a call for a return to segregation. When coupled with an opposition to restrictions on non-White immigration, as was also expressed in the same column, it becomes effectively a form of colonialism in which Whites are to be excluded from certain spaces for the benefit of non-White immigrants. I don’t doubt, though, that those making these demands wouldn’t see it like that and would be terribly offended by the very idea. Nevertheless, it’s there, and it’s causing further racial division and conflict. But it’s seen as acceptable because the people advocating it come from the left and do so on the part of an underprivileged ethnic minority.
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.
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.
This might interest some of the readers of this blog, who are interested in the rich history of Africa. The Conversation has posted an article by Nancy Bird, a postdoc research assistant at UCL, ‘DNA study opens a window into African civilisation that left a lasting legacy’ about how she and her fellow researchers analysed DNA samples from Africa to reconstruct the movement and expansions of different ethnic groups in the continent before European colonisation. The article describes their methodology and talks about how the samples were collected and analysed, and that there had been little genetic sampling and research of this type previously in Africa. The article then goes on to discuss some of their findings.
These begin with the probability that two ethnic groups in what is now Cameroon, the Kanuri and Kotoko, are descended from three ancestral peoples in the Kanem-Bornu empire, which flourished for 1000 years after its foundation c. 700 AD and covered northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and southern Libya. The study also revealed how African genetic heritage had been affected by the Arab expansion into Africa. This included Arab contact with the kingdom of Makuria in the Sudan. The signed a peace treaty with the Arabs in 700 AD, which allowed the kingdom to survive for 700 years. The genetic evidence revealed that the racial mixing occurred after the treaty was beginning to breakdown and the Arabs were expanding into the area. The study also examined the genetic legacy left by the southern Arab migration into Africa that resulted in the empire of Akxum, which covered what is now Ethiopia, Djibouti and part of Yemen and was considered one of the world’s four great powers alongside Persia, China and Rome. It also suggested that the expansion of the Bantu languages was the result of migrations from a part of Cameroon which began in 2,000 BC and had spread south and east over the next 2000 years. But the study also revealed that they had spread west as well. During their expansion, the Bantu met and mixed with other ethnic groups. No-one knows what caused this expansion, but it may have been climate change.
The article concludes
‘It’s vital that scientists analyse more DNA from genomes of African people. As we do so, it will undoubtedly reveal an intricate picture of the continent’s rich past.’
Last week my local Labour party held its monthly meeting, online because of the continuing Covid lockdown. There was a monthly report from our local MP, Karin Smyth,along with reports from the two conference delegates. This was followed by a speech from the Unison liaison – I’m afraid I’ve mistakenly said that she’s Unite in the letter, for which I apologise to Unite – and that’s when I got sick and tired of it all and quietly left.
Smyth’s talk was highly informative and chilling in her description of the government’s continuing campaign to privatise the NHS and replace it with a system financed by private health insurance as in America. She supports Starmer, but is very committed to protecting the NHS for which I respect her.
I was less impressed with the two delegates, who supported Starmer and David Evans’ measures destroying party democracy and purging the left. It’s blatant factionalism and the reasons they gave were spurious. They claimed that as Starmer only had 200 MPs, he needed to shore up his support so that he has 40 to form a cabinet. But he has no shortage of supporters in the parliamentary party, and so the rationale makes no sense. They did, however, vote for the Green New Deal, but didn’t vote for the measure supporting the Palestinians. They claimed they didn’t understand it. I think it’s far more likely they shared Starmer’s aggressive Zionism and support for the current far-right Israeli government’s colonisation of Palestine through the construction of illegal settlements and the consequent suffocating restrictions on those of the indigenous Palestinians.
But I was most annoyed by the Unison liaison’s speech talking about how she’d been indifferent to the problem of Labour anti-Semitism, but had just attended a ‘powerful’ presentation about the terrible abuse our Jewish brothers and sisters in the Labour party were suffering from the Left. What was this abuse? Why, it was all tropes, as you’d expect. This is just Zionist propaganda. Tropes are invoked to smear reasonable criticisms of Israel by decent people through contrived parallels to real anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and myths. As I have said ad nauseam, the people targeted for these smears are mostly genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism, many of whom – indeed the majority – are self-respecting Jews. These are people, who frequently lost relatives in the Holocaust and have suffered genuine abuse and violence from real anti-Semites and Nazis.
I have therefore sent off this email of complaint. It criticises the delegates’ Starmerite factionalism, and the leadership itself for calling for a return to Blairism. I attack Blair’s further privatisation of the Health Service, the introduction of the Work Capability Tests and the bullying tactics used by the DWP on claimants. I also attack Blair for his illegal invasion of Iraq and Libya, and the consequent destabilisation of the Middle East. A destabilisation that prepared the way for the rise of ISIS. I also make it plain that I oppose Blair’s corporatism and his grant of government positions to the captains of industry and his support for big business over the wishes of communities and their small businessmen and women. I make it very clear that I feel Blair and his policies are not to be supported or revived, and that Starmer has shown that he is completely treacherous and untrustworthy. He will, I feel, turn on his own supporters the moment it suits him, and his support for the NHS at this moment is merely tactical.
I also attack the Unison lady’s talk, pointing out that this has probably been given by JLM, a Zionist organisation, who aren’t interested in Jews but protecting Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. I denounce the mass purges from the party of Starmer’s critics and critics of Israel, and briefly describe my own experience of being so accused. I end by asking to present my case at a future meeting of the party.
I may well have set myself up for expulsion as another evil lefty troublemaker, but I can’t let these evil policies and falsehoods go unchallenged. Here is my email below:
“Dear Sir/ Madam,
Thank you for sending me this month’s reports. However, I must express here my very strong disapproval and dismay of some of the views expressed by the speakers at this month’s meeting and particularly the actions of the conference delegates. This does not extend to the great work of our local MP, Karin Smyth. I very much appreciate all the very hard work she does for her constituents and defending the NHS against Tory privatisation.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same of the Labour leadership. Keir Starmer’s return to Blairism is a source of severe concern. Tony Blair in office continued and extended further the Thatcherite policies of the previous Tory governments. Indeed, they have complained that he went further in his privatisation of the NHS than they would have dared if Labour had stuck to its traditional defence of the Health Service. For example, when the Community Care Groups were set up they were given powers not only to purchase services from private medical companies, but also to raise funds privately. The polyclinics were supposed to be privately run, and he continued handing over doctor’s surgeries to private health companies as well as the management of hospitals to private healthcare chains.. Please see books like Raymond Tallis’ and Jacky Davis’ NHS – SOS for further details.
I am also disgusted by the bullying attitude towards welfare claimants and the Work Capability Tests that Blair also introduced. This has seen genuinely poor and disabled people thrown off benefits for the most trivial reasons, leading to great hardship, deprivation and death. This should be ended now. The unemployed and disabled should not be supported by food banks but by a properly funded and functioning welfare state, and damn whatever Rupert Murdoch and Geordie Greig say in their wretched propaganda sheets. But I see precious little evidence of this from Starmer. Indeed, he seems to favour extreme right-wing members, who believe that conditions should be made even harsher for the unemployed!
We also suffered from massive corporate corruption by Blair giving places in government to the private companies that the same departments were supposed to be regulating. The result was a colossal increase in the expense of public works and the favouring of these companies over the wishes of local communities and their businesses. See Bremner, Bird and Fortunes’ You Are Here and George Monbiot’s Captive State, for example. Blair also showed his absolute contempt for international law and the British people with his illegal invasion of Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a monster, but the invasion of Iraq left the country in chaos and destroyed what had been one of the most secular societies in the middle east with something like a welfare state where women could pursue careers outside the home. This is all gone. 200,000 people have been killed and millions more displaced, contributing to the refugee crisis we see now. Moreover it gave a space for the emergence of the monstrous ISIS. It has also, in my opinion, further contributed to the alienation of Muslims in Britain and abroad, as has Blair’s similar participation in the overthrow of another tyrant, Colonel Gadaffy.
I am utterly disgusted that Kier Starmer should believe Tony Blair is a leader worth emulating and to whom the Labour party should return and refer for its policies. I do not trust him to continue defending the NHS once is power, and I am afraid MPs like Karin will be faced with the difficult choice of supporting the leader or supporting the NHS. The purges and long list of broken promises to members show that Starmer is, in my opinion, utterly without principle and treacherous and I am afraid that valued MPs like Karin will also be purged if they dare to show any independence against him.
I am deeply disgusted by the conference delegates’ support for the leadership’s motions affecting party democracy. These are entirely partisan, and go against both the democratic traditions of the party and the views of many of the ordinary members. Starmer seems determined to purge the party of the left and make Labour into another, perhaps not even paler, version of the Conservatives. At the same time, he seems to have done precious little to oppose them in parliament, to the point that he has been easily ridiculed and mocked by Johnson, to the applause of the media.
I was also disappointed by the delegates’ refusal to support the motion in favour of the Palestinians. The motion is not difficult to understand. The Israeli state is colonising Palestinian territory with the construction of illegal settlements in defiance of international law. At the same time there is a system of apartheid in Israel that persecutes Palestinians as second class systems. This has to stop if Labour really believes in peace and equality in the Middle East. I fear the delegates’ refusal to support the motion has less to do with a failure to understand the situation than Keir Starmer’s support for the hard-right government in Israel.
This brings me on to the comments by the Unite liaison officer and her praise for the ‘powerful’ training she had received showing the ‘terrible abuse’ Jewish members of the party had received from the left through tropes. She comes across as a thoroughly decent woman, though naive and uninformed, and I fear that she has been terribly mislead by people I can only describe as liars, propagandists and smear merchants. People who, in my certain experience, have smeared thoroughly decent, genuinely anti-racist people, including staunch opponents of anti-Semitism, as Jew-haters. Starmer handed over anti-Semitic training to the Jewish Labour Movement, an extremely partisan and biased organisation. According to the organisation’s Jewish critics, they used to be Paole Zion, ‘Workers of Zion’, a Zionist organisation which describes itself as the sister party to the Israeli Labor Party. This organisation was moribund until it suddenly received an injection of funds from persons or persons unknown a few years ago.Its Jewish critics have pointed out that its members do not have to be either Jewish or members of the Labour party, as is the case with their ideological opponents in Labour, Jewish Voice for Labour. Yet the Jewish Labour Movement is somehow privileged as speaking for Labour’s Jewish members and Jewish Voice for Labour demonised as anti-Semitic ‘commies’ by right-wing Labour MPs like Neil Coyle.
In my experience organisations like the JLM are not interested in tackling anti-Semitism. They are there to counter criticism of Israel and Zionism, and the use of literary tropes is the only method they can use to do so. And their targets have been overwhelmingly Jews. Jewish Voice for Labour have complained that Jews are 300 times more likely to be accused of anti-Semitism than non-Jews. Those accused have included self-respecting men and women, who frequently lost relatives and friends in the Shoah, and who, along with their gentile friends and supporters, have suffered real anti-Semitic abuse, harassment and assault from genuine Nazis and anti-Semites. I cannot express sufficiently my absolute disgust at this deplorable persecution. Miri Hillel, a Jewish journalist, has said that many Jews are afraid of speaking out against this campaign of official harassment because of the effect it has on their families. Those accused of anti-Semitism are subjected to horrendous, foul abuse because of these lies and smears. .
As for terrible anti-Semitic tropes, this is being done to silence criticism of Israel by finding spurious literary and historical parallels with real anti-Semitism. Thus, any mention of Israeli embassy official Shai Masot’s covert negotiations with British civil servants to exclude Alan Duncan, a critic of Israel, from the cabinet, as a plot or conspiracy is loudly denounced as an example of the old myth of Jewish conspiracies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But Masot was plotting and engaged in a conspiracy in the true sense of the word. Describing it as such does not connect it to real, poisonous anti-Semitic myths like the infamous Protocols or the more recent myth of the Great Replacement. Such literary criticism, and that’s all it is, is done not to protect Jews, but as a cynical campaign to deflect criticism from Israel by misrepresenting its critics as anti-Semites.
I myself haver personal experience of the witch hunt against critics of Israel. A few weeks ago I was told I was under investigation following complaints of anti-Semitism about an article on my blog. What the complainants objected to was almost wholly statements I had made criticising Zionism. They objected to my statement that all states and ideologies, including Zionism and Israel, should be open to examination and criticism, even though the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism says that criticism of Israel is perfectly acceptable provided the country is not held to a higher standard than others. They also didn’t like my statement that many gentiles initially did not support Zionism because it was too closely linked to real anti-Semitism, even though this is historically documented fact. They also considered that I was being anti-Semitic simply for stating another historical fact, which is that Zionism was, up to the Second World War, a minority position among European Jews. Most of them wished to remain in their homes, fighting for equality and to be accepted as fellow Brits, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles and so on rather than move to a country to which they felt no connection. Again, documented historical fact. I am further disgusted by the deplorable way Starmer is trying to silence reasonable opposition to Israeli’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians through mass expulsions and the proscription of organisations defending those unfairly purged, such as Labour Against the Witch Hunt and the Labour In Exile Network.
I was so outraged at the Unite lady’s speech defending the JLM training that I left the meeting. I feel that the meeting has been very one-sided in the views presented. I would therefore very much like to talk about my experiences of what I can only describe as a factionalist with hunt the demonises and expels decent people and exposing them to real anti-Semitic abuse and violence at a forthcoming meeting.
First off, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for a few days. I’ve been busy with other things down here, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Yesterday, our Tory government announced that they were going to put a new memorial up commemorating the Holocaust. And Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, and his mate Callum over at the Lotuseaters Youtube channel have asked the obvious question: why? The proposed memorial has received widespread approval, especially from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who were highly delighted. They claimed it was needed because Holocaust denial was growing in the UK and we needed to be reminded of our part in the Shoah, the great crime against the Jews, and also against the disabled, gays and the Roma. But as the commenters on the Lotuseaters video have pointed out, they said nothing about the Slav peoples of eastern Europe, who were also massacred. This is true. Hitler hated the Slavs, and in his Tabletalk he makes it clear he was looking forward to the extermination of the Czech. After the Jews, the Poles formed the largest number of the victims of Nazi massacre and extermination, particular Polish Roman Catholic clergy. Slavs were considered subhuman under the Nuremberg race laws. Their lands were targeted for German colonisation, and those Poles, Russians and Ukrainians lucky enough to survive were to serve as an uneducated peasant class producing agricultural goods for their German masters.
The Lotuseaters are men of the right, and the extreme right at that. I find their videos difficult to watch because of the idiot sneering at the Labour party, idiot ‘woke’ lefties and similar comments that also come out of the mouth of the mad right-winger, Alex Belfield. Particularly annoying in this video was all their jokes about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism, and how he especially wouldn’t like the memorial and agrees with Holocaust denial. It’s just right-wing libel. Corbyn, like George Galloway, has never denied the Holocaust and has a proud record of standing up for the Jews in this country, as he has done for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. His crime wasn’t anti-Semitism, but standing up for the Palestinians. The Israeli state and the ultra-Zionists, like the Board of Deputies, can’t justify it, so they smear those criticising their ethnic cleansing of Israel’s indigenous population as anti-Semites. This include proud, self-respecting Jews, who are tarnished and demonised as ‘self-hating’.
But the Lotuseaters are right to ask why we need such a memorial. They say we entered the War to stop the persecution of the Jews, when the Nazis and USSR had signed a non-aggression pact to divide Poland between. Callum even claimed that when the Soviets took over their part of Poland, they handed over its Jewish inhabitants to the Nazis to massacre. Well, I haven’t heard that before and neither did Sargon, but it doesn’t surprise me. Stalin was a vicious anti-Semite, and during the Weimar period western Communists were ordered to collaborate with Nazis despite the Nazis hatred of Marxist socialism and their persecution of the KPD under the Third Reich. It’s wrong to say we entered the War to save the Jews. We didn’t. We declared war on Nazi Germany because of our defensive alliance with France and Poland. Although there was little outright anti-Semitic persecution in Britain, low-level anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread and acceptable. There was considerable sympathy for Nazism amongst the British aristocracy, with various high-ranking individuals joining pro-Nazi organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. The father of Geordie Grieg, editor of the Heil, was a member of one such group. On the other hand, the Fascist parties and groups remained generally small. Britain passed laws banning the stirring up of racial hatred, and once war was declared Oswald Mosley, the head of the BUF, was sent to the Tower of London and his stormtroopers interned on the Isle of Man along with other enemy aliens. And our troops did liberate some of the concentration and death camps, along with the Russians and our other allies, and we did save the survivors from starvation, or as many as we could. There were Nazi sympathisers who served as auxiliaries in the Waffen SS, the British division of which served as the basis for neo-Nazi organisation the League of St. George. But as far as I know, there was absolutely no British state involvement with the Holocaust and I haven’t heard of any British commercial involvement with it, either. I’m therefore puzzled when the Board says it was needed to remind us of our role in it.
As for anti-Semitism in Britain, only 7 per cent of Brits have negative view about Jews. The majority have positive views of them, and a smaller number consider them no better or worse than anyone else. The Lotuseaters state that the Holocaust is taught as part of the British history curriculum. There are Holocaust deniers knocking around, but there are very few of them, at least among the vast majority of severely normal Brits, who despise them. I wondered if behind the cloaked language which didn’t name anybody in particular, the real fear was about the possible growth in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial amongst Muslims. It’s rife in the Middle East because of the Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the humiliation inflicted on the Arab nations during the Six Day War. I have the impression that the majority of British Muslims despise Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians. However, Tony Greenstein has pointed out that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism offer no supporting statistics or information on their website for their statement that the majority of anti-Semites are Muslim.
David Cameron apparently approved the monument five years ago in 2016, but Boris has only just given it the go-ahead. My impression is that this has precious little about commemorating the Holocaust for itself, and everything to do with generating support for Israel. Peter Oborne in his documentary for Channel 4’s dispatches 11 years ago described how the Israel lobby had effectively captured Britain’s political parties, and especially the Tories, through parliamentary friendship groups, sponsored trips to Israel and donations from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen. Any British paper or broadcaster, including the Beeb, that dared to cover atrocities by the Israelis and their allies, like the Lebanese Christian Phalange, were attacked and smeared by the Board as anti-Semites. Hence the attacks on the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, and the capture of the party of Keir Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’. Hence also the foundation of front organisations claiming to represent Jews and combat anti-Semitism, but which are really concerned with persecuting and smearing critics of Israel, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, Workers of Zion. These two organisations were founded to combat the rise in anti-Israel sentiment following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. My guess is that Israel and it’s satellite organisations and mouthpieces in the UK have been rattled by British support for the Palestinians following the riots around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian districts in east Jerusalem ready for Israeli settlement. This all looks to me very much like the Israel state exploiting the Holocaust to garner support on the one hand, and the Tories using it to signal their compliance with Israel and its genocidal attitude to the Arabs on the other.
The Holocaust was a monstrous crime against humanity and it is entirely right that British schoolchildren are taught about it. But this new memorial looks like it has nothing to do with remembering the victims of the Shoah, but is simply a PR exercise to shame Brits into supporting Israel and its ethnic cleansingof the Palestinians.
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