This little curiosity also appeared on YouTube for me yesterday. It’s an interview from the BBC Archives channel with George King, the founder of the Aetherius UFO space religion, broadcast from 1959. The Aetherius Society are the people who believe that their leader, George King, channelled messages from Aetherius, an entity on Venus. They used to hold rituals after a disaster somewhere in the world in which they’d queue up to charge up their prayer meters. These were devices that supposedly acted as reservoirs of benevolent psychic energy, which would then be released to help solve or ameliorate the problem.
I’ve something of a soft spot for them, as although I don’t believe one word of it, there have never been any accusations of brainwashing, exploitation or abuse and brutality made against King and his followers, as there have against so many other leaders of New Religious Movements. Whenever one of their representatives has appeared on TV in the past decade or so, they’ve been keen to stress their absolute personal normality. Perhaps that’s been something of their undoing. John Spencer in one of his books describes being lined up to appear on a popular TV programme with someone from the Aetherius Society, only for both of them to be dropped. Spencer says that the programme’s producers were clearly looking for Ufologists who would say something daft or outrageous they could take the mick out of. Neither he nor the Aetherian played ball, and were far too sensible, so they were dropped.
In this clip King describes how he was doing the washing up in his kitchen one Saturday morning when he heard a voice say ‘Prepare to become the voice of interplanetary parliament.’ He stepped outside, and met Aetherius, an Indian-looking gentleman who lives in the Himalayas when he is on Earth, and who had come to inform King of his mission. King explains that Aetherius also lives on Venus, and when he goes there he alters his molecular structure to suit the environment on that planet. Aetherius and his fellow Venusians, as well as people from other planets, such as Saturn and Mars, fly across space in UFOs. These are completely real and material, and if you fired a 16mm shell at them it would not hurt them because of their defensive shields. Saturnians are like us, but have no pupils to their eyes.
The interviewer politely asks if he could talk to Aetherius. George King agrees, but says he will have to get into a trance. He duly puts a pair of blindfold goggles over his eyes. These look somewhat like the shades worn by Agent Smith in the Matrix films, so I was half expecting King to saying something sneering and condescending about ‘Mr Anderson’ before launching into Kung Fu moves as robots attack. Fortunately, he doesn’t. After a few moments snorting, Aetherius’ voice emerges. In answer to the interviewer’s question, he confirms he is Aetherius. The interviewer then asks if he can tell them where he is, if it’s a UFO or Venus. Sadly, he can’t, to the interviewer’s obvious disappointment.
The interviewer then states bluntly that there are many people, who would say that King is sincere, but deluded. What could he say to convince them otherwise? King replies that the UFOs are solid and real, and that not only he but his mother has flown on them. She had to walk through a field to get to the saucer, which had made her shoes very muddy.
When the interviewer asked King why Aetherius and his fellow space brothers wanted to make contact with us, King replied that they were worried about our situation. Not just the political situation, but our moral development. If we were Christians, we should diligently follow Christ’s teachings. If we were Buddhists, we should properly follow those of the Buddha. If we were Hindus, we should be the best Hindus.
Throughout the clip, there are shots of others in the studio carefully listening to what was being said. At the end of the interview, the questioner states that although many will consider Mr King sincere but deluded, nevertheless his cry of concern for our age is genuine and relevant.
The clip’s interesting as an example of old school broadcasting, where forthright comments could be made about the person being interviewed and their message or pretensions, while not holding them up to ridicule and stressing that they were quite right in their concern for the current moral and scientific situation of humanity.
The description of Aetherius as an Indian fellow is significant. Before he received his telepathic message, King had been interested in eastern mysticism. Aetherius clearly follows in the mode of the Theosophical Society’s Ascended Masters and Koothoomi, who were also supposed to come from India. In their case, they resided somewhere in the Himalayas. This was also a time when the Lux Orientis movement was influential, and many westerners believed that western spirituality had been discredited and people should seek enlightenment in eastern traditions.
King died a few years ago, and I think in his later years subjects of his revelations changed so that they were more about the ecological crisis and planetary consciousness centred around the Earth. Or at least, that was the impression I had.
I know that many of the readers of this blog have very different attitudes towards the trans issue and so may find the following essay offensive. It is certainly not my intention to insult or offend anyone, but merely to examine a distinct sociological aspect of the mass trans movement as it has emerged over the last decade or so. This has taken it far beyond the issue of the appropriate treatment of adults and children suffering distress or confusion about their biological sex. If this was simply the case now, I believe that it would have been quietly and amicably resolved a few years ago, and would be of no more interest than the question of suitable treatment for other people suffering distressing psychological and mental health conditions.
But the medical question has been co-opted by radical postmodern political activists and has been transformed and broadened as part of today’s identity politics. The ideologues behind this movement see it as part of a broader agenda to radically transform western society, and the mass movement that has emerged from this is bitterly intolerant of its critics and detractors. It has thus taken on the sociological character of a religion, and in some aspects particularly resembles historic heretical sects and cults as explained below.
Mutilating the Flesh for the Spirit: Trans Ideology as Quasi-Religion
According to the ideologues, adherents and activists of trans ideology and practice, trans identity, and the social and medical transitioning of troubled and psychologically confused individuals from their birth to the opposite sex is entirely rational and scientific, based on a scientifically recognised and confirmed medical condition. Its gender critical detractors, however, such as Barry Wall of the EDI Jester channel on YouTube and his many followers, are harshly sceptical of this ideology. For them, stripped of its scientific trappings, the trans movement is ‘a flesh-sacrificing cult’ with its basis in the Cartesian dualist separation of mind and body. A recent commenter, furiousfemale996 on one of the Jester’s posts, ‘Queering Classrooms – LGB Alliance Responds’ recommended that if the trans ideology is taught in schools, it should not be taught as a sexual identity like homosexuality in PSHE, but instead taught in RE as a religious cult: ‘They need to teach all kids how to recognise the signs of a cult.’
In fact, sociologists of religion such as Clifford Geertz have formulated the concept of quasi-religions to describe secular ideologies and movements that perform some of the sociological functions of religion, and the trans ideology certainly conforms in many respects to such a classification. Indeed, the concept of religion itself is notoriously difficult to define. While most people would automatically regard religion as the worship of supernatural beings, these are absent in some religions. The Latin term ‘religio’, from which the modern English ‘religion’ is derived, means literally ‘to tie together’ and may originally have meant something like filial piety to the Romans. Many cultures do not recognise a religious sphere as distinct from the secular as the two are so bound up together in their way of life. Snorri Sturluson, the 13th century writer of the collection of Viking myths, the Edda, described Viking paganism as ‘an old law’. Some sociologists of religion eschew discussions of the supernatural and define it as about ‘matters of ultimate concern’. Another academic definition simply states that it divides the world into the important and valuable and less important and valuable. There are also secular religions, such as Humanism and its predecessor, the Ethical Church Movement of the 19th century, that developed as rationalist, scientific alternatives to supernatural religion. The sociological description of these as quasi-religions, rather than simply religions, is important as many atheists take considerable offence to their movements being described as a religion. The ‘quasi’ element in the term serves to differentiate these movements from supernatural religion proper, while emphasising that they still perform some of the socialogical functions of religious belief and worship.
The secular movements identified as quasi-religious include nationalism, Humanism and the totalitarian political ideologies of Nazism and Communism, the latter because their doctrines of the Thousand Year Reich or the age of true communism have strong similarities to millennial, apocalyptic Christianity. Religions commonly have a set of core doctrines, rituals and ethics so that their adherents form a distinct ideological and moral community.
The core beliefs of the trans ideology may be simply described thus:
Everyone has a unique gender identity distinct from their biological sex. For trans people, this gender identity is opposite to that of the sex they were born as. This gender identity represents their authentic sex, and must be recognised and protected through progressive legislation. As members of the opposite sex trapped in the wrong bodies, they also require medical and surgical intervention to transform their bodies into those of the identified sex. At the same time, following the ideas of postmodern feminist Judith Butler and her text, Gender Trouble and the doctrines of Queer Theory, sex itself is a matter of social performance following socially constructed ideas of masculinity and femininity. Thus, sex is reduced to a matter of fashion and stereotypical gender roles and activities, distinct from the biological, embodied reality. This has led to nonsensical statements from politicians like Keir Starmer that only one per cent of women have penises, or circular definitions of womanhood such as ‘a woman is anyone who identifies as one.’ At the same time, the trans community and its supporters draw a clear moral distinction between themselves and their critics. The trans community has appropriated the general gay rights movement, presenting itself as an integral part of the general gay and bisexual community, which is conceived as uniquely loving. An LGBTQ+ cartoon to promote gay and trans acceptance among children reviewed and critiqued by the ‘femalist’ pro-woman activist, Kelly Jay Kean-Minshull, presents this community as animals in a parade. One of them has the mastectomy scars from ‘top surgery’, the polite euphemism for double mastectomies performed on trans identifying girls and women. The voiceover, singing a version of ‘The animals went in two by two, hurrah’, declares that they love each other so proudly.
Trans people are also presented as uniquely virtuous and persecuted. Outside the realm of the blessed elect are the gender critical fallen, creatures of absolute hate, prejudice, and malignity. As Maria MacLachlan of the Peak Trans vlog on YouTube and other gender critical feminists have discussed and demonstrated, these activists accuse feminists like MacLachlan of being Nazis, planning a ‘trans holocaust’, who must be physically fought, beaten and killed. See her video ‘Awful Argument 8: Terfs Are Rightwing’. MacLachlan has herself been physically assaulted by a trans activist, and has documented similar attacks on gender critical feminists in videos such as ‘Another day, another trans activist bully, another feminist assaulted’. In America, gun-toting goons in black bloc have appeared as stewards for trans rallies. This may be considered as a political paramilitary uniform, which would be banned over on this side of the Atlantic under legislation designed to suppress genuine Fascists like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. As I write this, the government is deeply concerned with the issues of political and religious extremism and is busy formulating a definition of such that would allow the proscription of dangerous anti-democratic groups. A definition of extremism and terrorism could fairly include the violent, paramilitary wing of trans activism but due to the identification of trans with pro-gay liberalism and its advocacy from the left, is unlikely to do so.
Rather than being rational and scientific, the core doctrines of the trans movement resemble supernatural religion, and particularly Platonic Gnosticism. The distinction between a gendered mind separate from the body does indeed bear a marked kinship to Cartesian mind-body dualism, with the twist that the ghost in the body’s machine has its own gender. It also resembles Gnosticism in that primacy is given to the disembodied gendered mind with the body given much less regard. In Platonism, the ancient Greek philosophy derived from the great philosopher, the human soul comes from the realm of the spirit among the stars. In Gnosticism this realm is the creation of a good god, as opposed to that of matter, in which these spirits are entrapped. Matter is the creation of the evil god, and the flesh body a prison from which the Gnostic believer hoped he would be freed on death to ascend to the higher realms through belief in the Gnostic cult’s salvific message.
The trans cult eschews this supernatural, post-mortem doctrine in favour of a this-world practice in which the trans person has their flesh altered and mutilated so that they may ‘live their authentic lives’. At the same time, ideas of femininity and masculinity divorced from their biological reality, also resemble Plato’s transcendent forms. These are the patterns for the material world and its objects, which are their expressions. Thus, for example, there is the transcendent idea of a dog, or a man or woman, beyond the individual dogs, men, and women of material reality. In Queer Theory, this transcendent idea of gender is superior to biological reality. The idea of that sex alone, divorced from the reality of the physical body, is considered authentic. The biological sex is considered false, almost a product of mara, the realm of illusion in Hinduism, when it contradicts the inner conception of the sex of the trans person. The rhetoric that trans people must be accepted as their preferred sex or altered to conform to it to live their authentic lives comes partly from the contemporary emphasis for authenticity in popular culture. Rap musicians, for example, frequently talk about ‘keepin’ it real’. But it also seems to derive from Kierkegaardian existentialism and its stress on an authentic faith and life.
Gender mutilation is also a part of many cultures and religions, ranging from FGM, male circumcision to castration. Male circumcision is an important rite of passage among the Dowayo people, studied by the anthropologist, writer and broadcaster Dr Nigel Barley. In his book The Innocent Anthropologist Barley states that the Dowayos regarded circumcision as removing the biological elements that prevent boys from being real men. In a passage discussing how widespread the practice is amongst cultures throughout the globe, he states that in some societies the testicles may be hacked off. As the Jester has stated, there have been religions that practised castration, such as the Christian Skoptzi, as well as the Galli, the priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. They castrated themselves and dressed as women. Some shamans were also transvestites. The trans ideology resembles these castration cults, especially with WPATH’s embrace of the Eunuch Archives and eunuch as a gender identity.
But Queer Theory goes beyond individual transformation to call for radical social change. Some members of the movement have called for the destruction of the bourgeois heterosexual family, such as a recent trans person, Samantha Hudson, promoting Doritos in their Spanish advertising campaign. Internet trans activist Jeffrey Marsh has also suggested to the confused and distressed young people watching his YouTube channel that they should break with their biological parents if they refuse to accept their imaginary gender identity. This is particularly pernicious, as Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh, the hosts of the gender critical Queens’ Speech podcast, have made clear. Many young gay people have suffered from being disowned and rejected by their families unable to accept their sexuality. This has caused them no little upset and distress, and is clearly not something to be blithely recommended to naïve children. But radical trans activism goes much further. The mathematician and fierce critic of postmodern woke nonsense, James Lindsay, in one of his anti-woke New Discourses podcasts has critically analysed a piece published in an American educational journal by two LGBTQ+ activists, one of whom is a drag queen. For them, drag queen story hour is not just about promoting literacy and toleration towards gay and trans people amongst young children. It is about creating an alternative, queer identity among children and youngsters in order to turn them into radical social activists. This queer identity is deliberately made unstable in order to alienate them from bourgeois society. Instead of their biological family, the children are to be turned instead to the trans and queer community as their real family. This again resembles the radical cults and ideologies that seek a radical transformation of society, including Nazism and Marxism, which attacks the family in The Communist Manifesto.
The trans movement also resembles radical cults in its separation of the trans individual from the outside world. The trans community is presented as uniquely loving and accepting, in contrast to the normal world outside the movement. Members of the trans community may encourage youngsters undergoing a crisis of gender identity to flee their homes to live and reside with them. It is exactly the same as the way religious cults have sought to separate their believers from their friends, family and community outside them. It also resembles ‘lovebombing’, a strategy also used by cults to capture new converts. In the initial phase of proselytization these cults impress upon their new members how the cult loves and values them. As the person is drawn into the cult, the attitude hardens until they may be subjected to harsh punishment inflicted for breaches of the cult’s discipline or morality. Questioning the cult’s doctrines and seeking to leave are particularly harshly dealt with. Detransitioners, former trans people who have regretted their decision and sought to revert to their previous birth sex, are shunned and excluded from their former trans colleagues, and may even be abused and vilified like heretics and apostates.
Whatever its scientific trappings, it is clear from this analysis that the trans movement counts in many respects as a secular quasi-religion. Even the claims of a scientific basis do not disqualify this identification. Since the rise of science, many new religious movements have claimed a scientific basis for their doctrines. One of the small press Spiritualist magazines published in Bristol in the 1990s proudly declared that it was ‘in support of psychic science’.
The designation of a movement as a religion or quasi-religion is not a comment on its moral content or nature, even though many people in today’s sceptical, secular society consider religion as intrinsically irrational and malign. Much bloodshed and oppression has been inspired by religion, but at their best religions have also inspired tremendous altruism and social advance. The French historian of science, Jean Gimpel, in his The Medieval Machine, described how Christian religious belief resulted in scientific breakthroughs and advances in the 14th century. Several of the mathematical treatises from India and the Islamic world collected by Henrietta Midonick in her Treasury of Ancient Mathematics: 1 begin with a dedication to Brahma, in the case of Hindu India, and Allah for Islam. And while Humanism is a quasi-religion, it is very far from violent and oppressive movements such as Fascism and Communism.
What the designation of quasi-religion for the trans movement does mean is that its claims to scientific objectivity needs to be scrupulously and critically examined and rejected. At the same time, as Mr Wall’s commenters have suggested, it should be taught in RE rather than PSHE. Britain is now a multicultural, multifaith society. Regardless of what one feels about their truth content, most of the traditional religions since the Enlightenment are benign, offering their believers hope and comfort in a transcendent realm away from the trials and sufferings of the flesh as well as stressing the importance of altruism and moral conduct. Others, particularly some of the most notorious New Religious Movements that emerged in the ‘69s and ‘70s, are much more malign. School students should be taught that intolerance, repression, and cult-like behaviour are not confined to supernatural religions. They are also to be found in the secular realm amongst ideologies and movements that would angrily reject any claims of a religious or quasi-religious basis. Yet they are there, and children should be given the skills and reasonable scepticism to identify them as such and so avoid them. And this needs to include the trans movement as a grave threat to young minds and bodies.
Further Reading
Jonas, Hans, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge 1963).
Smith, John E., Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke: MacMillan 1994).
Thurlow Richard, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918 -1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987)
Wilson, Bryan, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982)
Bruce Gilley, The Case for Colonialism (Nashville, Tennessee and London, New English Review Press 2023)
Introduction
This is a controversial book that arose from an extremely controversial academic article written by the author. It’s particularly timely as yesterday the Guardian reviewed an exhibition on Black slavery with the approving comment that it was a great rebuttal to those who are now arguing that British imperialism was benign and civilising. Gilley is indeed one of the latter. in 2018 he was moved to write an academic article defending European colonialism after researching Sir Alan Burns, the last British governor of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and reading positive comments about British colonialism from the anti-colonialist activist and writer, Chinua Achebe. Achebe is regarded as a staunch enemy of British colonialism, and yet Gilley presents quotation after quotation showing that his attitude was more nuanced. Achebe stated that by and large, Nigeria under the British was well run and that they cared for their colonies. He noted that he owed his education to European missionaries who ran excellent schools, the state schools and finally the university founded by the British. He had no animus against the British themselves, and lived in London. He was also attacked for writing in English rather than his native Igbo, despite the fact that an Igbo language press did not exist.
Benefits of Colonialism
Gilley argues that colonialism benefited its subject peoples by modernising their countries with western technology, medicine and industry, as well as fundamental institutions of political liberty as property rights and democracy. It was not regarded as illegitimate by the colonised peoples themselves. The book begins with a letter from the peoples of the Lakes region of Nigeria, now Lagos, for the British to take over their lands to protect them from their tribal enemies and inviting them to stay as long as they liked. Their willing acceptance of colonial authority was shown in the way they moved closer to the centres of colonialism, not away from them, seeking the greater opportunities to be found there. The colonies’ indigenous peoples formed the majority of civil servants, police and soldiers so that the number of White administrators in some of these nations was minuscule compared to the vast populations over which they ruled. And some of the former colonies are coming to a positive reappraisal of the colonialists as the founders of their nations. This is happening in Nigeria with Lord Lugard and the former Belgian Congo with A Brazza. Moreover, the abysmal misgovernment and corruption in these nations is forcing many of them to look back on their former colonial overlords requesting them to return. After the explosion at the port of Beirut several years ago, a petition in Lebanon went up calling for the French to return and take over the colony. 60,000 people signed in the first hours it was up on the Net. Macron acceded to the request, so that the French state acted as a kind of supervisor in an international arrangement in which a western company took over the running of the port. A Belgian journalist, van Reynbrouck, was surprised when he visited the former Belgian Congo by the numbers of young Congolese who came up to him asking when the Belgians would return. In a similar case to Lebanon, the Indonesian authorities were extremely concerned about corruption among the customs officers in Jakarta. They sacked all 3,000 of them and brought in a Swiss company to rebuild it. But the projects to reintroduce elements of western colonialism to genuinely modernise and restore good government and business practice to these countries goes far beyond that. One economist has recommended setting up ‘charter cities’ in the former colonies, with the authorities’ consent. These would be leased to the former colonial powers under 99 years leases, like Hong Kong, and governed by the former imperial masters. At the same time, leases granting residential status would be given to a limited number of migrants seeking to live and work there. In this way modern, democratic government and business would return to the former colonies.
Resulting Controversy
Gilley submitted his article promoting colonialism to two academic journals. One turned it down because it was too controversial. He then offered it to another, the Third World Quarterly. They published it to a storm of outrage. Over a hundred academics, including those of his own university, demanded that he be sacked or subjected to something like a Maoist ‘struggle session where he would be forced to recant his sin. Eventually the article was withdrawn because of threats to lives of the magazine’s editors and staff from anti-colonial fanatics in India.
The book is partly a response to this controversy. The first few chapters describe the affair and respond to his critics. The next part of the book provide examples of the positive influence of colonialism around the world, including iconoclastic reappraisals of German rule in Africa and China and a complete demolition of the claim that King Leopold’s rule in the Congo was genocide resulting in the deaths of 8 million Black Africans. The chapter on German imperialism shows that, rather than proto-Nazis, the Germans had made explicit provision for the good government of their subject peoples leading to their eventual independence at the Congress of Berlin in 1880. They ruthless punished imperial administrators and troopers who abused and victimised the natives. In Qingdao their chief judge was keen to incorporate local, Chinese law into that of the colony and wrote three books on the subject. The genocide against the Herero in Southwest Africa was not planned and was largely the result of forces beyond the authorities’ control.
Refutation of Holocaust Allegations over King Leopold’s Rule in the Congo
In the Congo the real death toll from the exactions of the Force Publicque was largely confined to one section of this vast, sprawling country and consisted of 18,000 people. This was largely the result of tribal warfare, not deliberate policy by Leopold himself. The severed feet and other bodies shown in photographs of alleged colonial atrocities were the result of the traditional way the tribes in the area showed that they had killed their victims. Leopold had taken over the country with the specific intention of eradicating the slavery and cannibalism which plagued the area. The photographs of people with severed limbs were staged recreations of mutilations resulting from these atrocities, and not of horrific punishments visited by Leopold and his servants on those who failed to meet the rubber quotas. These photographs were then taken over by British missionaries and the anti-colonialist British press to show the supposed horror inflicted by Leopold over the people of his private empire. One notorious photo showed a man looking down forlornly at severed feet and an arm. This has been presented as limbs hacked off by the Force Publique on those rubber workers who had failed to meet their set targets. But the original photograph states that the man was looking down on the remains of his wife and daughter after they had been eaten by cannibals.
Black Anti-Slavery Activists Embrace of American Constitution
Another chapter presents the positive case for enslavement in America. He does not seek to present slavery itself as a positive institution benefiting its victims, although that was one of the arguments of its supporters. Instead he notes that in America slaves could, surprisingly, have the benefit of the law. In 1791 in Newport, Connecticutt, a slaver was tried for murder for throwing an enslaved woman with smallpox overboard as a threat to the health and lives of the rest of the ship. The trial lasted five years before the man was acquitted on the grounds that he had acted to protect the others on board against the contagion. Moreover, Black anti-slavery activists were well aware of the anti-slavery implications of the American constitution and its enshrinement of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. They sought to widen its application beyond White Americans to themselves, in alliance with Whites, writing hymns and other texts supporting this view.
British Attempts to Supply Food to Famine-Struck First Nations in Canada
The book also rehabilitates British rule on the Canadian prairies, stating that they were not indifferent or complicit in a 19th century famine of the indigenous peoples that has now been described as a Holocaust. The British had scant resources in this corner of Canada and did what they could to provide food. They were also seeking to provide the Indians with modern, industrial education in the now notorious residential schools at the Native Canadians own request. They were hampered by distance and the problems of farming in that section of Canada which stumped even season agriculturalists from Ontario and was only solved ten years after the famine. And the same problems afflicted White Canadians. One man, who moved west, suffered from the loss of vital equipment en route. When he arrived, local people, including the Indians, borrowed his equipment but did not return it. The environment itself proved to be too challenging and after sticking it out for three years he finally gave up and returned home.
Erasure of the History of White Farmers in America
White farmers in colonial era America are also being erased from official history through a movement that claims that the piles of stones they left in their fields are really Native American cairns. This started with a group of old, White men. The founders of the movement were interested in pseudo-history, like finding Atlantis. Farmers in 19th century New England, when clearing their fields of stones, used to pile them up in the centre of the field. They were given to children to play with or sold to workers building roads. When such piles have been excavated, they reveal underneath rusted farm equipment and White American domestic refuse. The indigenous peoples then adopted the idea, passionately claiming that the piles were indeed cairns left by their ancestors. They gained this knowledge after visiting the stones and a few minutes of sacred contact with their gods and spirits. From there it moved on to be adopted by state and county authorities, sometimes as a means of preventing building development of these areas. Yet the fake history presented by this movement damages real colonial history. The stones themselves are the physical remains of the agricultural settlement and abandonment of these areas as the farmers moved to fresh lands further west. Another chapter takes apart this misrepresentation of Malayan colonial rule during the Emergency, stating that most Malayans actually supported British rule against that of the Communist guerrillas.
Achebe and Naipaul on the Benefits of Colonialism
There are two chapters given to the positive appreciation of colonialism by Chinua Achebe and the British Asian writer, V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul believed very strongly that British colonialism had benefited its peoples around the world. For him, it was a universal civilisation that promoted benign values applicable to all humanity. He was sharply critical in his novels of the dictators that took over these countries, plunging them into corruption and horrific bloodshed, and their left-wing White European supporters who followed them around, turning a blind eye to the horrors in the belief that something great and genuinely African would arise. He is also scathing of the hypocrisy behind the critics of British colonialism, who all seek its benefits in London or the West. These include Fazlur Rahman, who led the campaign to the Islamise Pakistan in the 1960s. When this provoked opposition, he fled to a nice tenured academic position at an American university. Vijayamprada Gopal, a professor of Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature at Cambridge University and a favourite with Novara Media, also gets it for her snobbery. She stated that she would no longer teach working class students after the university porters called her by the university’s accustomed form of address of ‘madam’ for all women, rather than calling her ‘doctor’ as she wanted. This conforms to Naipaul’s comment that Oxbridge educated Indians were worse petty tyrants than the Indian landlords, who insisted that their tenants bow and touch their feet.
Criticism of Gandhi
Naipaul was also critical of Islam in Among the Believers, and had scant regard for Gandhi. Gandhi had the right idea when he started out, but then transformed himself into a Hindu holy man, after which he had nothing positive to contribute. It’s controversial, but there have been books and articles written arguing that Gandhi was not the benign figure he’s been presented as. Rabindranath Tagore, another great figure in Indian nationalism, dislike Gandhi because of his tactic of whipping up mobs until they were on the edge of rioting and violence and then pulling back. His sudden embrace of the Dalits in the 1920s was provoked, not by genuine concern for them, but because the British were planning to add an extra clause protecting their voting rights. Gandhi feared that this would lead to them supporting British rule, not Indian nationalism. He also knew absolutely nothing about the Second World War and the nature of Nazism. He wrote a letter to Churchill urging him to make peace with Hitler as ‘he is not a bad man’. On the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he recommended that the Czechs and Slovaks should meet the Nazis with passive resistance. When someone pointed out to him that this would simply result in the Nazis exterminating them, he acknowledged that this would happen, but ‘it would have been glorious’. India today is an emerging industrial and technological global superpower, quite contrary to what Gandhi himself would have wanted for his country. Gandhi hated modern technology with its trains and airplanes. He would have liked India to return to its traditional Vedic social and economic structure. And it is precisely by rejecting his vision that India has developed and become the global force it is today.
Gilley’s View of the Handing of Hong Kong to China
The last chapter is Gilley’s own personal observations of Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1991 under its last governor, Chris Patten and an article he wrote for the final edition of a magazine devoted Asian affairs when this magazine finally folded. Patten comes across as trying to do his level best for Hong Kong and its people despite almost insurmountable opposition from the Chinese. Beijing did not respect the original treaty and simply regarded it as an opportune time to take over the colony. They warned Patten not to introduce democracy just before independence, as the British had done elsewhere. Patten defied them and gave it to Hong Kong anyway. He was very keen to soothe local feelings about colonialism, and so appeared in a lounge suit rather than traditional gubernatorial garb. As for the magazine, based in Hong Kong, this was very much a product of the colonial age in taking a broad view of the politics and economic affairs of the region. But it lost readers with the retreat of colonialism. Instead of a broad, regional view, magazines now presented the specific views of the individual nations, such as India or China, and the broader view was now being lost.
Genocide and Butchery by Post-Independence Dictators
The book also describes the horrors and carnage perpetrated by the colonies’ various dictators, who seized power after independence. Guinea-Bissau’s dictator wanted to destroy the legacy and infrastructure left over by the Portuguese, and so tore his country apart, butchering its people in the process. The British in Zanzibar had set up a multi-party system which sought to balance the interests of African and Arab Zanzibaris. A year after Prince Philip had formally handed power to them, however, it was invaded by anti-colonial forces backed by the Soviet Union and East Germany. Only one in ten indigenous Zanzibaris supported the invasion. The invaders set up a regime of massacre and repression, driving out the Sultan and the Arab and South Asian Zanzibaris. In one massacre, they invaded and slaughtered the tribespeople in one of the islands, whose children were then required to sing suitably patriotic songs celebrating their parents’ deaths.
Frantz Fanon’s Glorification of the Shooting and Murder of Whites
He also attacks Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean psychiatrist whose text on Algerian war of independence, The Wretched of the Earth, is now a classic of the decolonisation movement. Rather than being some kind of benign text on the necessity of Black liberation, Fanon’s book is bloodthirsty, revelling in the genocidal massacre of French colonists and White Europeans, and endorsed with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre. Gilley is harshly critical of the western left-wing intellectuals, safely ensconced in their Paris cafes, supporting people who can only be described as monstrous tyrants. No positive view of French rule in Algeria is permitted in the mainstream French press, but there is a large, self-published literature by the Pieds-Noir, the former French colonists, arguing that the mainstream view is incorrect. He also criticised the modern anti-colonial crowd, who angrily denounce America as a colonial power while demanding the right of Africans and Muslims to immigrate there.
Independence Not Expected or Wanted by the Majority of Colonial Peoples
Against this, and attacks on western notions of democracy and human rights, Gilley argues that the independence came unexpectedly and was not wanted by the mass of the colonised. In the Belgian Congo, only 27 per cent of the population supported it, but they were given it anyway, like it or not, by the departing Belgians. The real forces behind decolonisation was European exhaustion following the Second World War. Europe no longer had the ability to afford to run the former colonies and there was pressure from both America and Russia to open them up and decolonise, plus the politics of the Cold War. The countries that did best following independence were those that retained the most of their colonial legacy and infrastructure. This is recognised by many of the former colonies themselves. While colonial rule is hated by the people of most of the former colonies, their rulers are seeking to reintroduce elements of the colonial legacy in order to improve their countries.
Colonialism Preferable to the Alternatives
This all runs counter to what has been taught for decades, at least since the 1970s, about European colonialism, which is still being blamed for the many failures and troubles of the former colonies today. It will certainly not be popular with the Guardian and the other left-wing papers and magazines that hold the view that colonialism was uniformly bad, oppressive and exploitative. But Gilley makes a very strong and clear case. As well as the known facts that contradict the received narrative, it also argues from counterfactuals. What would have happened in the absence of colonialism? There are three possibilities. One is a continuation of tribal warfare and indigenous slavery. The second is the penetration of these colonies by western mercenaries and companies seeking concessions. The third is colonisation by a rival power. None of these would necessarily benefit the indigenous peoples.
As for the brutality of the British and other Europeans, the indigenous rulers and imperial powers were just as ruthless, if not more so. Nader Shah, the Persian emperor, was preparing a common currency for Persia and India, suggesting he planned to invade and annexe the country. During his time in Delhi he massacred 30,000 people. On his return to Persia he gouged his son’s eyes out, castrated one of his generals and had six merchants buried alive for the crime of buying a rug belonging to the imperial court. The British and other colonial powers, on the other hand, erected laws against the exploitation and brutal treatment of natives, sending reports back to the home countries and investigating and prosecuting offenders. This provides the basis for the many works of history denouncing colonialism, which is rather hypocritical in the absence of similar concerns by the indigenous powers presented as being somehow innocent of these crimes.
Arguments for Forced Labour
Gilley also seeks to rehabilitate the system of forced labour the British and other Europeans imposed on their African colonies. Gilley argues that this was indeed to make the colonies pay for themselves in the absence of monetary taxation. He states that the arguments against it are economically illiterate. Perhaps, but in Malawi and no doubt other African countries it was resented as a new form of slavery. He also points out the contradictory arguments against colonialism. For some, it underdeveloped its colonies. For others, it interfered too much. And there is the attitude among many of colonialism’s critics that the British should have provided free education and healthcare to their colonial subjects. In fact, Britons themselves did not have free healthcare until the establishment of the NHS and welfare state by the Labour government in 1948. Education in Britain wasn’t compulsory until the 1870s, and even if it was supposed to be free, the poverty of many working class Brits meant that some were unable to afford items such as school uniforms, pens and pencils and other equipment. It’s a case of presentism, the imposition of modern attitudes on to the past, in this case the expectations of the modern welfare state at a time when it did not exist.
Two Phases of British Colonialism
It is noticeable that Gilley begins his treatment of colonialism when it had entered its paternalistic, liberal phase after 1824. In Britain’s case this followed the abolition of the slave trade in 1809 and the introduction of progressive legislation for the improvement of the slaves’ lives in preparation for their eventual emancipation. The previous phase of British imperialism, such as the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, James VI’s/I’s plantations and the horrors of the Cromwellian campaigns, in my view cannot be justified. Nor can the conquest of the Caribbean and the New World with the extirpation of the original Amerindian populations and the establishment of transatlantic slavery. Which is, no doubt, why he doesn’t and is silent on this phase of western colonialism. Some anti-imperial historians have written about European colonialism as if it was consciously proceeded according to a pre-set plan. But his was not the case. There was no uniform plan and European imperialism was the result of different economic, political, social and religious forces at different times. The lost of the American colonies and their slave holdings made it easier for the British to ban the slave trade and eventually slavery in theirs. Historians have long recognised that there were two phases of British imperialism, the first in America and the Caribbean, the second in the conquest of India, Africa and Asia. It may well be high time that anti-imperial historians and activists took on board the fact that the nature of colonialism itself changed in these two periods.
Imperialists as Colonies’ Real Nationalists
The book is part of a growing mass of literature seeking to present a positive case for colonialism, such as Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Gilley goes further than Biggar, who merely argues that there were certain aspects of British colonialism that were deeply amoral and oppressive, by presenting this phase of imperialism as benign and positive, and takes friendly issue with Biggar on this point. There are even a very few positive facts in favour of Apartheid. One of these is that under it, 100,000 Black Africans a year sought to immigrate to South Africa. But this probably says more about the horrific state of the other African countries than anything really positive about Apartheid. Despite the barrage of abuse and threats Gilley received for his article, the book also reproduces the positive and supportive comments he received from other academics and activists from Africa and Asia, some of whom said that they and their families had greatly benefited from the institutions, especially schools and universities, left by the British. He also claims at one point that the British and other colonialists were these countries’ true nationalists, in that they had a deep interest in the indigenous cultures and their arts and literature that were often being neglected by the indigenous peoples themselves. Naipaul quotes an Indonesian Muslim as saying that his countries’ historic mosques are now preserved by the West, as previously the Indonesians themselves wanted to pull them down.
Necessity of Proper Academic Debate
This is a powerful counterblast to the received narrative about the evils of colonialism. Whatever one feels about it – and looking at the current state of political corruption and creeping authoritarianism in Britain, I am extremely doubtful about the ability of my country to act as a new, benign imperial force – I strongly believe that it and similar books have a place in academic education and discussion. The attempt to silence Gilley, and indeed Biggar on this side of the Pond, with denunciations, personal abuse and death threats is deeply authoritarian and oppressive in its turn. Gilley at one point states that it may take national legislation in America to restore genuine free speech to campuses. And free speech and genuine academic debate are the cornerstones of genuine democracy. Without it, you just have authoritarianism and indoctrination.
A few days ago Richard Tice, the head honcho of Reform, appeared on the New Culture Forum’s YouTube channel to give the benefit of his wisdom – or what he thinks is his wisdom – to host Peter Whittle and the viewing public. Tice has been running around telling everyone that Reform is a growing force in British politics that’s threatening the status quo and particularly the Conservatives, who have betrayed the country. Especially over immigration. Whittle agreed with him about Reform’s growing popularity. According to him, Reform is now the third largest party, though Whittle allowed that under the British electoral system, this didn’t necessarily mean they’d actually see any MPs in parliament. This is doubtless one reason why Tice would like to see First Past The Post ditched in favour of Proportional Representation, like many other, smaller parties and organisations from the opposite end of the political spectrum, such as Open Britain. Tice was scathing towards both parties. The Tories had broken Britain, but a Labour victory would finish it off in a ‘Starmergeddon’. I don’t see a Labour victory at the next election doing much for the country either, but that’s because Starmer’s just another Thatcherite. Thatcher’s free enterprise zombie economics have severely harmed this great nation and its great people, not socialism, and more Thatcherism will create even more chaos, poverty and starvation. I think a Labour government will probably be better than the Tories, however. But you can’t tell Tice that. He’s one of the far right nutters who believes that both the Tories and Labour are ‘socialist’.
The interview began with the two discussing the changes and threats to British culture from mass immigration and the need to end the leftist indoctrination of British schoolchildren to rescue British culture. He has a point here, in that teaching Critical Race Theory would be a form of indoctrination if it was taught as unchallengeable fact without balancing it with other views. But Tice wants British schoolchildren taught to take pride in their country. This is also a form of indoctrination, like some of the woke education going on in some places that Britain has been a terrible force for evil for which we should all be ashamed. Neither is true. Britain has done some great things and also committed some horrors. What we should have with history teaching is balance, with children being told the facts and given the intellectual skills and freedom to make their own minds up on certain issues.
He then moved on to tackle immigration. itself Now he also has a point here. There are problems with mass immigration and the challenges of integrating peoples from very different cultures. Tice mentioned the riots the year before last between Hindus and Muslims in Leeds, and that he had been heckled and made to feel very uncomfortable when he went down to take a look at a pro-Palestinian march in London. He also talked about how there were Muslim communities that wanted to be ruled by sharia law. This is another valid point. In the ’90s I was vainly trying to study Islam in Britain. I found passages in some of the books published by the British Islamic press Taha calling for the establishment of autonomous Muslim communities in Britain governed by sharia law. Only about five per cent of British Muslims want Britain to be governed by Islamic law, but the demands from this section of the Muslim community haven’t stopped. About ten years ago I found the demand repeated in another Islamic book in one of Bristol’s bookshops. This argued for the acceptability based on Britain’s colonisation of North America. The first British colonies allowed foreign colonists to settle and populate their territories, keeping their own language and culture. The only requirement was loyalty to the crown. Thus Britain should allow Muslims to establish similar enclaves in Britain. This is sheer colonialism, but I’ve never seen it discussed by the British press or media. I think it’s because it’s far too close to what the real Nazis were saying about mass non-White immigration as an invasion.
As regards the current Tory scheme to tackle immigration, In addition to the left’s objections to putting asylum seekers on a plane to a country with vicious human rights abuses, the right have also been attacking the Rwanda plan on the grounds that it isn’t actually going to work. But Tice has a solution. He plans to cut immigration down to net zero. The numbers allowed into the country would be the same as those emigrating every year. But where would industry find the labour it needs? Easy. There are too many people on sickness benefit. There are more people off sick than ever before. We have to cut benefits to force them back into work and do the jobs currently done by migrants.
This seems to be the view of the Tory right, and particularly its broadcasting mouthpiece, GB News. I note they were off today ranting that there were too many people on sickness benefit, who should be made to work. We’ve heard this nonsense for nearly a year now. There’s no thought that the people off sick are genuinely ill, or any consideration why they should be so, like poor working conditions, the mental stress of having to feed themselves and their families and heating their homes on low wages, or forced into insecure work through zero hours contracts and the like. No, they’re all malingerers and scroungers, who need to have their benefits cut even further to make them do an honest day’s work. Britain’s welfare state is already so broken that needy claimants are left waiting weeks for the benefits they need and people are being thrown off them under the sanctions system for the most trivial of reasons. And if people are on sickness benefit, it’s because that right at this moment they’re so sick even the wretched DWP can’t find a reason to deny giving it to them. Besides which, if Tice, Reform and the Tories really wanted to make work pay as they’ve been loudly claiming for the past decade and a half, they should actually do something to ensure that their filthy rich corporate donors use the money they’ve given them in tax cuts to pay better wages. But this would contradict one of the other tenets of Thatcherism, that we need wage restraint to stop inflation.
Tice made it clear that he wants a multi-ethnic Britain, united by a common culture. This is fair enough, as without a unifying culture there is a danger that the different ethnic and religious communities will move further apart. He quotes Tony Blair as well as a number of others as saying that multiculturalism has failed.
But his vision of Britain is one of oppressive Thatcherism, with its exaggerated patriotism and contempt for the poor, the sick and the unemployed.
Rakib Ehsan, Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities (London: Forum 2023).
I first came across this in an interview Ehsan himself gave about it on YouTube. I can’t remember now what channel it was on, but I think it may have been the SDP’s as Ehsan’s politics seem similar to theirs – left-wing economically but conservative socially. He also says at the outset that he tries to bridge the gap between Blue Labour and Red Tories. I have very strong issues with both of those groups, as they cloak their Thatcherite economics that disenfranchise and exploit working people in the language of the left. See Philip Blonde’s Red Tory. The book is directed very firmly at the Labour party. Ehsan sees the party as having abandoned class based activism in the wake of the BLM movement for divisive identity politics imported from America. This is a country that has a very different history and political culture from the UK, and this is going to cost them the votes of the very ethnic minorities they seek to court.
Contrary to identitarian propaganda, Britain and its people aren’t racist, although racism still exists and needs tackling where it does. The supposed privilege Whites enjoy over people of colour disappear when examined in detail. Some ethnic minorities are surpassing Whites in school grades, pay and employment. There are also differences in achievement between White demographic groups. Working class White English males are nearly at the bottom, with only Irish Travellers below them. Chinese and Indians outperform Whites. Black Africans are also outperforming Whites academically. There is no overarching ‘BAME’ community, as these are very different peoples who have different levels of achievement. Black Africans, for example, are much more successful than Afro-Caribbean peoples. The success and growing achievements of people of colour is being obscured by the grievance narrative that they are all being held back by systemic racism. As a man of mixed Bangladeshi-Uttar Pradeshi heritage, he felt particularly insulted when Jeremy Corbyn declared that only Labour could unlock the potential of Britain’s Black and Asian communities. This attitude, he warns, is going to cost the Labour party the votes of Britain’s non-White communities. Rather than being obsessed with racial grievances, these communities value the two parent family, religious faith and are patriotically British. It is these values, that are despised by the woke left, that produces their increasing academic, economic and social successes. This success should be celebrated, and the White population, which is trailing behind in many instances, could, he dares to suggest, take a leaf out of their book. At the last election, one million people of colour abandoned Labour for the Tories.
Brexit Not Fascist Project of Nostalgic White Supremacists
He is also a Brexiteer and is at pains to argue that Brexit wasn’t the project of Fascist, backward-looking Whites. Many of the Whites who voted for it did so because they came from communities who believed the country had been harmed by the EU, not because of immigration. And a large proportion of the non-White population also voted Leave. One in three Asians did so. They feared the immigration to this country of large numbers of people from parts of Europe which were much less tolerant of non-Whites. They also wanted Britain to establish greater contact with the Commonwealth.
Ethnic Disparities Based on Other Factors Apart from Racism
As for the disparities between ethnic groups in sport, jobs and education, some of this is down to class, and differences in culture and job expectations. For example, Bangladeshis largely do better than Whites at school, but come from a very traditional culture that sees women’s place as being in the home. There is thus a relative lack of Bangladeshi women in the workplace. He also discusses the question of the absence of British Asians in cricket played at the county and national level. This comes from the allegations of racism at Yorkshire CC. He states that this was clearly a case of racism, and that the club was racist hellhole. But he quotes several British Asian cricketers that there are particular attitudes in British Asian culture against playing cricket professionally. Asian parents want good, secure jobs for their children – jobs like doctor or dentist. Professional cricket is very insecure, and so their parents will try and steer their kids away from it. As for the police, in many instances it’s a matter of family tradition, with children following parents and relatives in the force. Thus, White people tend to predominate simply because of family tradition. And on the subject of the cops, he cites evidence that shows that most people of colour are satisfied with their local police forces. Indeed, more non-Whites trust the cops more than White British. This does not include the Metropolitan Police, who are distrusted because of their proven racism, misogyny and other forms of bigotry. He believes that this could be tackled by breaking it up into smaller, local forces, and letting local forces also run the parts of the Met that extend into surrounding counties like Kent.
Regarding Islam, he cites the statistic that three-quarters of Muslims believe that Britain is a good place to be one. This is much more than the general British population. More Muslims are also concerned about the threat of Islamism than Whites. He also criticises the Labour MP Naz Shah for claiming that the Prevent programme was resented by Muslims for demonising them when the stats showed that 53 per cent of Muslims weren’t aware of it.
Black and Asians Patriotic Brits
The Black and Asian communities were also generally more patriotic and had a greater trust in British democracy, although this was much less so in the younger generation. 78 per cent of older Asians had faith in British democracy, but only 58 per cent of the younger generation, just a bit lower than Whites at 62 per cent. He put this down to the older generation coming from countries which were unstable with very repressive regimes, tracing the history in particular of the British South Asian community. This began after the War with Sikhs from the Punjab, who had been displaced from Pakistan and given poor quality land in India. They were then followed by Gujuratis seeking employment in the NHS. And then came the ethnic cleansing of the Ugandan Asian community by Idi Amin and his policy of Africanisation. The South Asians in Africa were employed as middle ranking officials and businessmen between the White colonial officials at the top and indigenous Africans at the bottom. There were already immigration restrictions in place, but they were admitted by Ted Heath. I’ve heard again and again, including from Asian speakers at our local church, that the Ugandan Asian community is still grateful to Britain because of this.
He also has immense respect for the Queen and King Charles. The Queen had a strong sense of duty to the Commonwealth, while our current liege lord is strongly multicultural. He said in his coronation speech that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ and that he wanted to be known as ‘Defender of Faith’, meaning all Britain’s religious communities, not just the Anglican church. On the subject of which, he notes the strong contribution made by Black Africans to keeping it alive in the face of the massive secularisation of the White population. He states that you are far more likely to get a sense of the deep antiquity of Christianity in Britain in an African cafe eating Jellof rice in London than in many White communities. It is ridiculous to blame the Queen for the evils committed under imperialism and colonialism, and Britain’s non-Christian religions are certainly not resentful of Christianity. He takes issue with the secularists in the Labour party, who feel that religion is outmoded and dangerous. They are actively putting non-Whites off, because these cultures have a very strong religious identity. More Muslims see their religion as important to their identity than Whites. The Labour party has a strong tradition of Christian Socialism, and these non-Christian religious communities would like to see it revived.
Importance of Education to Indians and Chinese
He also puts the growing success of the Indian and Chinese communities in education and professionally to strong families and religion. He cites statistics showing that children from stable, two parent homes are less likely to join criminal gangs, are more emotionally stable, and do better at school and in the world of work. Far fewer Asian children live in single parent families than Whites. They, and the Chinese, are also very aspirational. They want their children to do well, make sure they work hard at school and in the case of the Chinese make sure they keep away from bad influences. They also have the support of the wider community, with elders actively taking an interest in the welfare and progress of the young. He does not decry single mothers, recognising the immense hard work so many do to raise their children, and that the relaxation of the divorce laws were brought in for the very good reason of allowing women in particular to escape abusive marriages. But it has had a devastating effect on marriage and the family in Britain. 63 per cent of Afro-Caribbean children live in one parent families, and 43 per cent of Black African. 25 per cent of Whites also are being raised in families largely without a father. This is holding these groups back, and he dares to suggest that Whites could take a leaf out of the Asian communities in starting to value marriage and the family more. I am in complete agreement, and don’t think this is at all controversial.
On the subject of religion, he states that he has mixed views on the subject, wondering if it really is outmoded and dangerous, especially after the terrorist attacks of 7/7 and the massacre of schoolgirls by a suicide bomber at the Ariana Grande concert. But the stats also show that people, who have a strong religious faith are generally more mentally stable, more optimistic and with a higher degree of life satisfaction than atheists. He also believes that respect for the cultures of ethnic minorities should not be used as a pretext for avoiding tackling crime and extremist attitudes in those communities, which could be excused by their perpetrators as part of their culture.
Britain Not Racist Country
He also cites the statistics showing that Britain is not a racist country. A large majority of Whites -well above 70 per cent – believe that Englishness is a matter of values rather than colour. The number of people linking Englishness to White ethnicity is low, and fell markedly in the last decade. Britain has robust laws against racism and discrimination, and the level of real racism, including abuse and violence, is lower in Britain than in many continental countries like France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. This, he claims, shows the falsity of the Remain argument that views the continent as a paradigm of anti-racism in contrast with evil Britain. Anti-Black racism also isn’t confined to Whites. Eight per cent of Blacks in Britain have experienced discrimination at the hands of other Blacks. 84 per cent of Brits have no problem with a person of colour heading the government. Rishi Sunak, regardless of his wretched political policies, is an example of Asian success, who should be celebrated. His parents both worked in the medical sector – I think his father was a pharmacist. Sunak was privately educated, rising professionally and politically.
This is where the book is really controversial. He takes these stats showing that Britain isn’t a racist country from a variety of reports, including those of CRED and Sewell. The last was commissioned under the Tories, and came under widespread attack for supposedly erasing the reality of racism in Britain. This was despite it being written by mostly Black and Asian academics. Various Labour MPs accused it of being Fascist, with one even Tweeting an image of a Klan meeting underneath. The Black and Asian politicians, who do not accept that Britain is racist, like Kemi Badenoch, are subjected to horrendous racist abuse as Uncle Toms and worse language. He himself has been attacked in these terms. His favourite has been that he is a ‘Muslim Mosley’. Well, I’d say that the Muslim Mosleys were the Islamists convincing lost and alienated Muslims to join Daesh, or march around our cities demanding sharia law while waving the black flag of jihad. The British left, and primarily the Labour party, has taken over dangerous and divisive identity politics imported from America. What many of the people of colour demanding these policies want is not equality, but preferential treatment. He is also suspicious of many of those attacking Islamophobia, as he suspects that many of those are Islamists using it as a strategy to introduce aspects of sharia law. I think he’s right here, as the mass protests against the autistic schoolboy for Islamophobia when he scuffed a Qur’an, a horrendous blasphemy under Islam, certainly shows. He is against the European Court of Human Rights ruling that businesses are allowed to discriminate against women wearing the hijab if this threatens to be disruptive. He points out that the hijab simply covers the face. It is not like the niqub, which covers the whole body, including the face. The ruling threatens to prevent devout Muslim women from finding work outside the home and bring them into contact with mainstream society.
Attacks on Corbyn
Naturally for a man of the right he gives Jeremy Corbyn a good kicking. He claims that Labour lost the 2019 election due to his inability to tackle the anti-Semitism crisis and the promotion of identitarian politics. But this wasn’t the case. Corbyn had very wide support and paradoxically a greater share of the vote than Blair and New Labour, regardless of the fact that it was the poorest electoral performance for the party since the 1930s. What brought him down was a very manufactured campaign by the British right and the official Jews of the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and various pro-Israel groups. They were alarmed by his championing of the Palestinians against the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Israeli state, and so did everything they could to smear him as an anti-Semite. Corbyn has a long career of standing up for Jewish Brits, but this counted for nothing to people who regard any opposition or criticism of Israel as an anti-Semitic. As for the real anti-Semites in the Labour party, the true nature of the crisis was kept hidden from him by right-wing intriguers and traitors within the party. People like Margaret Hodge, who admitted she did everything she could to stop Labour being elected.
Rejection of Labour’s Proposed New Equality Act
He respects the Labour party for the anti-racist legislation it passed in the 70s as well as the Equality Act passed by Blair, but is firmly against Labour’s promised new Equality Act demanding affirmative action. The majority of Black and Asian people do not want or need it. Indeed, he claims that there is a suspicion that Labour will hold people of colour back in order to stop their success invalidating the claim that their lagging behind Whites is all due to racism. He is also critical of organisations like the Runnymede Commission pushing this narrative. Twenty years ago the Commission praised Britain for its multicultural tolerance. Now it claims that Britain is marred by deep structural racism. But British society isn’t racist and hasn’t become worse. It is just that the Runnymede Commission, in order to keep itself relevant, has joined BLM and the other grievance mongers. Labour’s embrace of these groups and individuals, such Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, is putting voters, including those of colour, off. And they may well abandon the party because of it.
The Trans Issue
He also has controversial views on the trans issue. He states that trans people should enjoy the same protection from abuse, discrimination and violence as other protected groups. However, transwomen should not be allowed to enter women’s private spaces such as prisons, toilets and changing rooms. In many ways, this is common sense as trans identified biological male rapists have been put in women’s prisons in California and Scotland, and there has been an outcry against it. The SNP lost much of their support when they also placed these dangerous men in women’s prisons. It does conflict, however, with the view that ‘trans women are women’, even if they are not biologically, and so trans activists and supporters will naturally find it very offensive. And he is also not afraid to call divorce parties degenerate as part of the collapse of marriage and the nuclear family in the west.
Radical Attacks on Marriage and the Family
This is a controversial but necessary book. Controversial because it overturns the received wisdom about British ethnic minorities as the victims of systemic racism needing aid and allyship from mainstream White British society. The statistics about the beneficial effects of growing up in two-parent family are almost certainly correct. They’ve been reproduced several times before. This will jar with some on the radical left. There has been an attack on traditional European marriage since the time of the 18th century French philosophes. Free love instead of marriage was embraced by 19th century Romantics like Shelley and Byron. It has also been part of the Anarchist critique of capitalism as well as Marxism. Marx states in The Communist Manifesto that it degrades women and believed it was dying out among the working class in his own time. This was further expanded by Engels in his The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, which also drew on the Das Mutterrecht of the German antiquarian, Backhausen. Backhausen had believed that society had passed through several phases of development – a communal society without institutional marriage, followed by matriarchy and then finally patriarchy. Archaeologists and historians have since rejected this. Historical research has also shown that marriage very definitely wasn’t dying out among the 19th century working class. Nevertheless, marriage has been attacked by radical activists. I can remember the controversy about Pebble Mill, a BBC lunchtime magazine programme in the 70s, when they invited on a couple who very definitely believed that marriage was dying out, and that this was a very good thing indeed. Over the other side of the Channel, the Postmodernist Marxist Althusser attacked marriage and the family as part of the sociological infrastructure of capitalism and feudalism.
Benefits of Religious Faith
Similarly there is abundant evidence supporting the view that religion is beneficial to one’s wellbeing. A few years ago medical researchers claimed that having a faith in general added six months to one’s life. And back when the New Atheists were beginning their assault on religion neurologists found that people who had mystical experiences were generally in no worse mental health than the rest of the population. This obviously isn’t something secular and atheist activists want to hear. Nor do I think they really want to hear that in general, non-Christian minorities don’t have an issue with institutional, public Christianity. The claim that they do tends to come from secularist and atheist organisations like the Humanist Society as part of their project of removing Christianity and other forms of religion from the public sphere. The philosopher Bruce Trigger tackled this subject in his Religion in Public over decade. He claimed that many Jews did not want the bishops removed from the House of Lords because, so long as they were, it created a public space for religion in politics.
Ethnic Success Also Due to Differences in Culture and History
I also think that the stats showing that Britain is not an intrinsically racist country is likely to be true, even if the report that argued this was commissioned by the Tories. If it is untrue, then it has to be shown to be untrue through further sociological research and polling. The argument that it must be the case from ethnic disparities is false, because as Thomas Sowell has shown, different ethnic groups have different attitudes and economic and professional specialities due to their history and quite often geographical location. The Chinese and Gujuratis are, like the Jews, ‘middleman cultures’ strongly based on trade. They therefore tend to surpass other groups in business, as do the Lebanese in South America. Ehsan himself argues that the success of various ethnic groups depends on the cultural resources and the attitudes and material advantages they may have enjoyed when they left their country of origin. Ugandan Asians have prospered, despite having been robbed of nearly everything they owned by Amin and his thugs, because they were business and professional people. Afro-Caribbeans, however, generally speaking lack this entrepreneurial and professional background and so lag behind. And the idea that all White people are privileged is going to ring particularly hollow for White working class boys and the hollowed out coastal towns and post-industrial communities. The instant dismissal of the claim that Britain isn’t racist is based on prejudice rather than genuine scepticism.
Changes in Patterns of Racism Since the Experience of the First Afro-Caribbean Migrants
The attitude of the identitarian left that Britain must be intrinsically racist seems to come mostly from the experience of Afro-Caribbeans, who are generally more distrustful of the police and democracy than other groups. They have indeed, along with the first generation Asian immigrants, suffered real racism in the form of institutional discrimination – no dog, no blacks, no Irish – racist bullying and violence, particularly from real Fascists in the shape of the BNP, National Front and other lowlifes. It is Afro-Caribbeans in particular who lag behind Whites. This history has bred an attitude among many that Britain is racist and hostile, backed up with convoluted and contrived arguments from the Postcolonial set. This has become part of the general culture of the left, because of the long tradition of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. It looks plausible, because for over four decades now the received view has been that Britain is racist to a greater or lesser extent, even though the situation has changed and is now becoming much more complex. Diane Abbott didn’t want to discuss inter-ethnic minority conflict and racism, but this attitude is contradicted by rioting last year between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester. Ehsan points out that this shows that ethnic conflict isn’t just something confined to Whites. And there is now and industry of grievance mongers in academia and woke capitalism, whose careers are centred around portraying White Britain as innately oppressive, that Blacks and other people of colour are always victims and that Whites should feel guilty as racial oppressors tainted with the blood of the indigenous peoples they exterminated and enslaved.
Multiculturalism Pulling Ethnic Groups Apart, Not Together
Ehsan notes that while Britain may be more tolerant than other countries, there is still a problem in pulling the different ethnic groups together. He cites further statistics shown that a majority of Brits feels more needs to be done on this count, and argues that was is needed is a common set of shared values. But this is one of the problems of multiculturalism. Blair recruited as his community representatives people who very definitely not representative of their communities and determined to push their own sectarian or ethnic politics. And the attack on the welfare state has meant that different communities are competing against each other for government funding and aid. For all his faults, Corbyn did represent a return to class politics, which is another reason why there was such a concerted attempt to remove him. If the working class in general receives proper welfare support, there is less jealousy and resentment between ethnic groups, and so Whites in particular are less inclined to heed racists like the BNP.
Blue Labour and Attacks on the Welfare State
As for the position that government action is needed to strengthen the family, I agree. But this goes further than simply making it a matter of tax. And I am very suspicious of the right when they claim to strengthen the family. All too often it is based around the view that it’s declined due to the welfare state, and so the first thing they do is cut welfare support even further while loudly crying, like Thatcher, that it’s more self-help and will make people more self-reliant.
He is critical of the Tories as a corrupt group wrecking the economy for their own benefit and hope that Labour will put forward pro-working class policies. But this won’t come from Blue Labour any more than it will supposedly come from Red Tories. What comes from the Blairites and the other Thatcherite infiltrators is more privatisation, including that of the NHS, more cuts to the welfare state and more attempts to strangle the unions, all of which you can see in Stalin’s leadership of the Labour party.
This book is necessary as it argues against the current racial narrative from a man of colour, who clearly believes that such narratives are damaging the Labour party. Certainly racial attitudes have changed radically in my lifetime and it is time that the debate recognised this. But at the same time, as Ehsan is careful to state, racism still exists and needs tackling where it does.
This is yet another video on a strange and unusual musical instrument, taken from Brett’s own channel on YouTube. Lyre guitars were a hybrid version of the guitar popular in Europe in the 19th century. They were based on ancient Greek lyres, and so combined that instrument with the guitar. They had the shape of a lyre but with the addition of a guitar neck, fingerboard and pegbox. They were made in France, Britain and Spain. The instrument played was made in either Spain or Italy in the late 19th century. The instruments also commonly had flat bases, so they could be stood up as musical ornaments. The decoration varied from country to country. Those in France had designs taken from Celtic Gaul. Several had their sound holes in the shape of swastikas. This was when that symbol had yet to be adopted by the Nazis. At the time it was a perfectly respectable symbol found across Europe and Hindu India, where it represented good luck. The instrument was clearly a product of the immense fascination with Classical and ancient Greek culture in Europe and America. I think they’re fascinating instruments, and this one sounds and looks beautiful. I don’t know if it’s been revived, but I certainly would like to see people once again making them.
I’ve put a few videos in the past about the infamous Asian grooming gangs, who terrorised and raped White girls in places like Rotherham and Telford. The abuse wasn’t confined just to Whites, however. They also used to prey on Asian Women and girls, and so I feel that I absolutely have to put this video up as well. It was put up nine days ago by Black British YouTuber Shady Shae, who seems to have put up a number of videos about the grooming gangs and other racial issues. Some people may understandably find this difficult to watch, and I don’t blame them if they do.
The video simply consists of Shae watching a report from WION, which I believe is an Indian news agency, reporting on the grooming gangs preying on British Asian girls. The report says that they’re mainly Pakistani Muslims, and interviews one of their victims. She was in what first appeared to be a loving relationship with the man who became her abuser after accidentally literally bumping into him in the street. Then he started to abuse her, pimping her out as a prostitute to others like himself. The report states that the victims are mostly Sikhs, and because virginity is highly valued in Asian culture there is immense pressure on these women not to come forward with their accounts of their rape and exploitation. The anonymous lady was able to come forward with hers after hearing Mohan Singh of the Sikh Awareness Society speak at her local gurdwara (temple). Singh is an activist campaigning against the gangs and their exploitation of the women of his faith. The victim was thus able to come forward, to to the police and have the men arrested and jailed. However, they received lenient sentences and have since been released. She states that they still torment her by ringing her up to abuse and laugh at her. Her only solution to this has been to change her phone number. Like many victims of trauma, particularly women, she has self-harmed and talks about the scars left on her stomach and arms, though she hasn’t done this for quite some months now.
The video also talks to a man, who is described as a defender of Islam. He states that the abuse does not come from the religion of Islam, because Islam is against rape and child abuse. This is true. Iran certainly has a legal age of consent for marriage and so on. As far as I know, this is 16, but they were considering lowering it to 14 because of the problem of randy teenagers. Rape is punishable by death. A few years ago they executed a monster, a taxi driver dubbed ‘the vampire’ for his crimes against women and girls. He had raped and murder seven women. The man was flogged by the fathers of the murdered girls. The number of lashes were limited, but one dad had to be held back from giving this creature a few more stripes. The rapist was then publicly hanged with a crane. British rapists and child abusers should be glad they’re in Britain, where they only get sent to Britain, rather than an Islamic country. However, back to the Muslim talking about what he believes is behind the gangs. He states that there are issues present in the other south Asian religions, like Hinduism and Sikhism, and not just Islam. These include forced marriages and honour killings. In the case of the Pakistani grooming gangs, it was the culture. There was an attitude in Pakistani Islam that the women of other religions were worthless, and so could be abused and exploited.
I’ve come across allegations that Sikhs were also being abused by the grooming gangs before, and the report, and Shae’s video, make it clear that there is a problem here. A problem that doesn’t seem to be reported in the mainstream media. Mind you, there was particular reluctance by the media to report the abuse of White girls, and the police and local authorities really didn’t want to act against them, fearing riots and allegations of racism. But these Asian girls are British, and as we are a multicultural society, their suffering and abuse needs to be told and combated as well. It occurs to me that some of this reluctance to cover the story in the lamestream British media may come from Diane Abbott’s demand that inter-ethnic racism and abuse should not be made an issue otherwise ‘they will use it to divide and rule’. Well, we’ve got Rishi Sunak, an Asian, as our Prime Minister here, Hamza Yousaf as First Minister in Scotland, and other people of colour like Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman in government, not to mention Sajid Javid and David Cleverly still popping up from time to time, so that argument won’t wash.
As for the composition of the grooming gangs themselves, they were mainly Pakistani Muslim men, but they also included people of other religions and ethnicities, like Whites and Sikhs. The Muslim spokesman strikes me as correct. These men weren’t Muslims, as they drank and did drugs, which is definitely haram. I doubt that they had ever put their face inside a mosque for years. But yes, it does seem that there is this attitude in parts of Pakistani Muslim culture. One of the Labour councillors, who helped expose the gangs and have them prosecuted, was a Muslim woman and she stated very clearly, against the denials of the police, that racism was involved.
One of the allegations from the Islamophobes is that the Pakistani grooming gangs were simply following the medieval Muslim laws that allowed sex slavery. There’s a very good book on slavery in Islam by a White American Muslim academic, that makes it very clear they aren’t doing it because of Islam. These are just like rapists and child abusers everywhere. They’re simply evil men preying on vulnerable women and girls.
It’s an interesting and chilling video, and one which shows very clearly that these gangs aren’t just racist against Whites. I do have a problem with it in that Shae seems to be impressed with Tommy Robinson for his long pursuit and campaigning on this issue. I’m not. The grooming gangs were exposed by a number of people, many of them Labour MPs and councillors. Robinson has come late to the party. He’s struck me and some of the commentators on this blog as exploiting the issue as part of his hatred of Islam. He has lied and smeared his opponents, and has had no qualms about appealing to his fans for donations. There are plenty of better people talking about this issue.
Rape and sexual abuse is repugnant and needs to be exposed and fought no matter who the abuser and the victims are. Every women needs to protected from exploitation regardless of whether they’re White, Black, Asian or whatever. And everyone fighting against it needs the fullest support from all Brits, regardless of creed and colour.
Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism (London: Atlantic Books 2004).
Orientalism is the name historians and anti-racist scholars and activists have given to the complex of prejudicial attitudes and images towards the Arabs and Middle East underpinning western imperialism and colonialism. Its best known treatment is the book of the same name by the American-Palestinian historian Edward Said. In contrast to this is a similar system of prejudicial attitudes, occidentalism, by Muslims and Middle Easterners against the West. I first came across the term back in the 1980s when I was studying Islam, and understood it then to mean the complex of everyday prejudices against the West, Such as the belief among some Muslims, at least back then, that in the West women walk round naked. Well, not in my experience, and definitely not about this time of year when people of both sexes are better off wrapping up against the winter cold. This book isn’t about those prejudices, but against the larger, viciously anti-western ideologies held by the imperial Japanese, the founders of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Islamist terrorists responsible for 9/11 and 7/7.
Occidentalism views western society as corrupt and godless, an urban civilisation dominated by the City, rejecting warm, human, organic values for that of cold rationalism and the egotistical pursuit of private profit against the higher ideals of the community. And quite often the forces behind this Babylon and its selfish pursuit of money are the Jews. This ideology has emerged not just in the Middle East, but in imperial Japan just before the Second World War, where it motivated a group of academics, scholars and thinkers meeting in Kyoto to debate how they could fight the western values and way of life they felt were threatening 1920s Japan. Occidentalism also views western art and mass culture as trivial and shallow. Western society, it is held, prefers bourgeois comfort to danger and struggle. It is cowardly and unheroic. Against this, occidentalism promotes the death cult of suicidal warriors, such as the Japanese kamikaze. After the bombing of the American army base in Beirut in the 1980s, Osama Bin Laden declared that the forces of militant Islam would win, because they loved death while the Americans and the west loved Coca-Cola.
The European Origins of Occidentalist Ideology
These attitudes, according to Buruma and Margolit, against the city, the selfish pursuit of trade, rationalism, godlessness and sexual immorality go back millennia, right back to Genesis in the Bible and the stories about the Tower of Babel and later Babylon and the King of Tyre. But they were also further developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries by European writers and social campaigners such as Karl Marx against the new, urban, mercantile, industrial culture that emerged during the industrial revolution. And while the early commenters on the stock exchange in London were delighted to find Christians, Jews and Turks all working peacefully together in the common pursuit of profit, others were horrified by the spectacle. This anti-rationalist, anti-modern attitude was developed in 19th century Germany as a reaction to the Napoleonic occupation. Acutely aware of the superior intellectual sophistication of the French, German writers and thinkers such as the philosopher Schelling argued instead that French – and British – rationalism was shallow. It ignored the greater depths and truths of the human soul, depths that particularly existed among the Germans. Schelling became extremely popular amongst 19th century Russians, and his views on the profundities of the soul, instinct and the organic community as against the atomised society of the West was taken up by the Slavophiles, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. In his heart, even the most boorish, uneducated peasant knew greater profundities than the most educated western scholar. These ideas were taken further by proto-Nazi ideologues like Moeller van de Bruck, who coined the term ‘Third Reich’ and Carl Schmitt. They added the death cult, the celebration of a higher, noble death for a cause against bourgeois ‘komfortismus’. This complex of ideas was then taken over by Middle Eastern and Asian nations struggling against western imperialism and the encroachment into their societies of the western way of life.
Japanese Imperialism and the Kamikaze Death Cult
The Japanese response to the western threat had been to copy it. Western ideas, science, technology, art and culture had been imported so that by the time of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, Japan had become a modern industrial power. Its defeat of Russia to Tolstoy represented the victory of western industrial civilisation over that of Asia. Japanese imperial militarism, intended to combat the west and establish the Japanese as an imperial power – another form of western imitation, in the eyes of some Japanese – was based on garbled ideas of western, pre-Reformation society. Its architects believed that western society had originally been an organic unity in which society, culture, science and religion had formed a harmonious whole. This had been shattered, first by the Reformation and then by the Enlightenment. In order to strengthen Japanese society, they attempted to copy this by establishing an official Japanese religion, state Shinto. The emperor, hitherto a remote figure in his palace, became the country’s war leader, a living god and the centre of adulation and worship by the masses. And death for him became a sacred duty, as promoted through a poem dating from the 8th century. But this noble death originally was only for the emperor’s bodyguards.
The adherents of this death cult, who piloted the kamikaze aircraft and sailed as human torpedoes launched from subs, were highly educated young men. They were the brightest students from Japan’s universities, well-read in three languages, including philosophers such as Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche. Some were Christians, others Marxists but most looked forward to a new, more egalitarian Japan arises after the War. Their official correspondence was about their enthusiasm for destroying Japan’s enemies with their deaths, but private letters to their families reveal much more anguish.
The Rage of the Country Against the City
Most of the anti-urban, anti-modern, anti-western movement came from the urbanites, but this changed with the peasant armies of Mao and Pol Pot. These troops from the countryside – many of Pot’s troopers were stunted from starvation and malnutrition and illiterate – represented the revenge of the countryside on the city. In China, Mao unleashed ‘tiger-hunting’ squads to round up the capitalist bourgeoisie. The small fry received prison sentences. For the big industrialists there was no mercy. Shanghai, one of the most westernised, modern cities in China, was an especial target of the Communists’ hatred. In Cambodia, having glasses, being able to read or simply having soft hands marked you out as a member of the hated middle class and therefore deserving execution.
Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Islamism
These attitudes were then incorporated into Islamic radicalism with a further twist: that the Islamist ideologues regarded western materialism as shirk, idolatry. For Sayyid Qutb one of the founders of modern Islamism, the West was the source of a modern jahiliyya – the name Moslems gave to the age of ignorance that prevailed before the coming of Mohammed. Western scholars have also translated jahil as ‘barbarism’. The West are barbarians, corrupting the pure religion and civilisation of Islam. Although they hate the West, the prime focus of their rage is the Muslim leaders who have adopted and introduced western ways into their countries. Some of this is understandable, given the brutal way this was done by Kemal Attaturk in Turkey and the father of the last Shah of Iran. In Iran, for example, women were forbidden from wearing the veil and men the turban. Squads of soldiers were despatched to roam the streets forcing people to remove these items of clothing at gun point.
Qutb, an Egyptian, had been an English student, and had received a scholarship to study in America, and it was his experience of the American way of life in the 50s that turned him against America and the West. The carefully manicured lawns were to him symbols of American individualism. He hated the way American preachers attempted to inspire their congregations by introducing Jazz into the hymns and was horrified by the lust at a church dance in Greeley, Colorado – hardly a modern Babylon. In New York, he was struck by a painting of a fox in one of the city’s art galleries. This was, however, given hardly a glance by the other visitors hurrying past it, which seemed to him to indicate the superficial attitude to art in the West.
Alia Shariati and Iran
Ali Shariati, one of the ideologues behind the Iranian Islamic Revolution, was a bitter opponent of imperialism, Zionism, colonialism and multinational corporations. He also included in his anti-western critique Marxist elements, such as the fetishisation of the market and commodities, as well as the gharbzadegi – the mindless pursuit of western culture. He believed that the only way the Third World could combat the west would be through developing a religious identity, which meant, in the case of Iran, Islam. He was particularly concerned with social justice and protecting the poor against the rich. In the 1950s when he was a school teacher in the province of Khurassan he translated Abu Dharr: The God-Worshipping Socialist by the Egyptian writer Abul Hamid Jowdat al-Sahar. Abu Dharr was a follower of Mohammed, who championed the poor and attacked the rich for deserting God for money. Shariati saw him as the model for the new, revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-Western Iran he wanted to see created. Mohammed Taleqani was another major influence of the Iranian revolutionary movement. He was a member of the militant Fadai’ane-e Islam, and set out to establish revolutionary Islam as an alternative to the secular, Communist Tudeh party. It was Taleqani who, in his revolutionary reading of the Qur’an, identified western materialism with the pre-Islamic jahiliyya.
Maududi and the Caliphate
Another major intellectual force behind Muslim occidentalism was the Pakistani journalist and ideologue Abu-l-Ala Maududi, the founder of the Islamist party Jamaat-I Islam. It was Maududi who devised the idea of the modern jahiliyya. He was opposed to democracy, as it substituted man-made law for that of God, and saw it in India as a way of forcing Gandhian Hinduism on Muslims. He also rejected nationalism, and regarded Islamic nationalism as a contradiction in terms, like a ‘chaste prostitute’. His idea was a new caliphate governed by shariah law.
Puritans Vs Fundamentalists
The book draws a distinction between Muslim puritans and fundamentalists. The puritans want to purify Islam, but not to overturn society as a whole, unlike the fundamentalists. In contrast to the occidentalists is the more benign theology of Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal was educated at Government College in Lahore, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Munich. Iqbal was particularly concerned with khudi, the self, and its relationship to the Almighty. Iqbal believed that the self could only be properly cultivated through a proper understanding of the tawhid, the unity of God. He also believed in an Islamic state under shariah law, but unlike the fundamentalists, who insisted that only the Islamic community, the umma, merited salvation, he believed that other groups also were destined for heaven. And he argued also that Islam had to be liberated ‘from the medieval fancies of theologians and legists’.
Herzl, Zionism and the Palestinians
The book also discusses the politics of the veil and the seclusion of women and the incorporation of occidentalism, as well as socialism and fascism, in the Arab nationalism of the Ba’ath party in Iraq and Syria. This party also attempted to unify the Arab peoples through the doctrine of asabiyya, (Arab) blood solidarity. It also discusses Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and his 1904 novel Altneuland (Old-New Land). Zionism and the establishment of Israel with the consequent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has caused immense suffering to the indigenous Arab population. The two authors, one of whom is an Israeli philosopher, recognise Israel’s bullying of them as the cause of Palestinian resentment and the conflict between Jew and Arab. Tony Greenstein has devoted a series of posts about the racism, including the internalised anti-Semitism in Herzl’s ideas. Herzl believed that Jews would never be accepted by gentile westerners, and declared that he had learned to forgive this attitude. Instead of a malign villain, here he appears as colossally naive and arrogant with all the faults of other western colonialists. Herzl believed that Jewish colonisation would spur development through the introduction of superior western technology. Massive engineering projects would be initiated, including huge dams and hydroelectric projects. By 1920 the new Israel would be an advanced, technological nation, with Jews and Arabs working together in vast, cooperative enterprises. The colonisation would also benefit the Arabs, whose landowners would become rich selling their properties to the Jews. This optimistic vision hasn’t materialised. Israel is an advanced, westernised nation, but this has been at the expense of the Arabs.
The book’s conclusion discusses how this occidentalism may be combated, and urges that despite the challenge of occidentalism, the West should preserve and defend the institution of free speech. Because without it, we become occidentalists ourselves.
Occidentalism and Islamist Terror
The book appears to me to be an attempt to explain to the western public the bitter hatred of parts of the Islamic world and the reasons behind the terrorist outrages of 9/11, 7/7 and the oppressive, persecutory regimes of revolutionary Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It differs from some, right-wing treatments of Islamist and radical Muslim ideology, which located these in Islam itself. Instead, these ideas came from the West itself, and these hatreds and ideas were not confined to Islam, but also shared by other nations and cultures such as the Japanese. These ideas arose in the west as a reaction to secular, capitalist modernity and then were adopted by the extra-European nations as part of their own critique and defence against western imperialism and global dominance.
Fighting Occidentalism by Upholding Free Speech
As for the supposed hatred of democracy and western personal freedom and civil liberties, while they are loathed by ideologues like Qutb, a vicious anti-Semite who published an Arab version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for most Muslims the reason for hating the America and the West is much more straightforward. Polls of the Muslim world cited by the late critic of American imperialism, William Blum, show instead that they distrust us for the simple reason that we invade their countries. Occidentalist ideology and hate needs to be dissected and fought, but the book is exactly right by stating that we cannot do so by shutting down free speech. This is particularly timely given the victory of the anti-Islam politician, Geert Wilders in the Dutch elections. Over a decade ago Wilders announced that he would like to ban the Qur’an, which undermines the Dutch and western tradition of religious tolerance and dangerously brings the state into the private realm of religious belief and conscience.
‘The prestigious science journal, Nature, reported on 31st May 2023, that the Indian education authority is dropping several key scientific and political subjects from the education curriculum for pupils under 16. the magazine reported:
In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements or sources of energy.
The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.
Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.
Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. “Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it,” says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. “It’s that fundamental to biology.” The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists”.
Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.’
Some material was cut from the curriculum last year in order to lighten it during the Covid pandemic. It was expected that it would be reinstated once the pandemic and the lockdown was over, but this hasn’t happened. Academics and educationalists appear perplexed by the decision, but it looks like it comes from the RSSS, the militant Hindu nationalist organisation linked to Modi’s BJP.
[Amitabh] Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.
Aditya Mukherjee, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, says that changes to the curriculum are being driven by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a mass-membership volunteer organization that has close ties to India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. The RSS feels that Hinduism is under threat from India’s other religions and cultures.
“There is a movement away from rational thinking, against the enlightenment and Western ideas” in India, adds Sucheta Mahajan, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University who collaborates with Mukherjee on studies of RSS influence on school texts. Evolution conflicts with creation stories, adds Mukherjee. History is the main target, but “science is one of the victims”, she adds.’
One of the other subjects cut from science teaching is a section ‘Why We Fall Ill’, which seems to me to be particularly wicked and dangerous. Everyone really needs to know about the causes of disease, regardless of their level of education or the country in which they live. This removal threatens to increase the incidence of disease in a country where many people lack access to medicine.
In an article from the previous day, 30 May, Nature reported the Indian education authority’s, NCERT’s, reasons for the changes
‘NCERT says that ‘rationalization’ is needed when content overlaps with material covered elsewhere in the curriculum, or when it considers content to be irrelevant. Moreover, India’s 2020 National Education Policy says that students need to become problem-solvers and critical thinkers, and it therefore advocates less memorization of content and more active learning.
NCERT also wants “a rootedness and pride in India, and its rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems and traditions”. Some people interpret this as a motivation to remove the likes of Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, and instead use the time to learn more about India’s precolonial history of science.’
But it comments
‘India is not the only postcolonial country grappling with the question of how to honour and recognize older or Indigenous forms of knowledge in its school curricula. New Zealand is trialling the teaching of Māori ‘ways of knowing’ — mātauranga Māori — in a selection of schools across the country. But it is not removing important scientific content to accommodate the new material, and for good reason.’
It all reminds me of the furore back in the 1990s when Christian Creationists in Kansas banned evolution from being taught in their schools. The great comedian, the late Bill Hicks joked about it, saying ‘In many parts of our troubled world, people are crying ‘Revolution! Revolution’. In Kansas they’re shouting ‘Evolution! Evolution! We want our opposable thumbs’. There have been periodic concerns ever since about the teaching of evolution and Creationism in schools. Western scientists have been particularly worried about Creationism, or Creation Science, being taught as scientific fact. There was particularly controversy nearly two decades ago with the emergence of Intelligent Design, and the Discovery Institute. Intelligent Design accepts evolution, but considers that it has carried out by a God or other intelligent force that has actively intervened at specific points. One form of Intelligent Design, proposed by the cosmologist Fred Hoyle in his 1980s book, Evolution from Space, is that the creator may have been an extradimensional computer civilisation. For years discussions of Creationism and its supposed threat to science was chiefly confined to Christianity. There was some discussion of the rise of Islamic Creationism in Turkey, but from what I recall this was mostly confined to the internet. India at that time seemed not to be experiencing any similar concerns about evolution or other doctrines which may have challenged traditional religious teaching.
This looks very much like it’s going to damage India as an emerging global economic and technological force. Yes, the country has a millennia-old tradition of scientific and medical innovation, but the country has become a scientific powerhouse as well through embracing modern, western science, just as its neighbour China has done. I’ve been particularly struck by the country’s ambitious space programme, which has made some remarkable advances and has made India a space power. If these changes to its schools curriculum continue, I can see the tradition of scientific excellence that the country has done so much to build being severely handicapped.
I also note the similarity of its stance on the environment to various right-wing political lobby groups and think tanks to ban the teaching of environmentalism and climate change, and to make us all believe that the massive pollution of the environment by business isn’t happening and won’t cause permanent damage. Trump when he was in the White House passed legislation preventing the American environmental watchdog from publishing anything about climate change of the environment. This partly came from oil industry, whose own, astroturf climate organisations has a policy of buying up independent climate analysis laboratories and using them to turn out its own, anti-climate change propaganda.
Regarding the excision of material on politics, I’ve got the impression that India is trying to establish itself as the true home of democracy, looking back to its traditional village councils or panchayats. But there seems to be a more sinister purpose to the removal of chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy, as well as a chapter on the industrial revolution for older students. It looks here like the BJP and its storm troopers are trying to stop India’s young people from acquiring the historical and political knowledge to understand how their country could be – or actually is – being taken towards authoritarianism and Fascism.
Vicious totalitarian governments of both left and right, from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia, have all attacked and refashioned science, history and education as part of their programmes. Now it seems India, under the BJP, is also going down this path.
One of the issues that concerns me about the current debate over historic slavery is that the belief seems to have grown up that only White Europeans and Americans practised it, and only enslaved Blacks and other people of colour. Connected to this is a related belief that only Whites can be racist. There’s an image on the net of young man of colour waving a placard ‘The British invented Racism’. Neither of these ideas is true. Slavery existed in many societies across the world from ancient times. It existed in ancient Egypt, the Middle East, India, China and elsewhere. It was a feature of many Black African societies, dating back to 3000 BC, and the proportion of the enslaved population ranged from 30 to 70 per cent according to the individual peoples. Black Africans were also enslaved by the Muslim Arabs and then by the Ottoman Turks, as were White Europeans, who were also preyed upon by the Barbary pirates of Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. The Islamic world also developed racist views of Black Africans and White Europeans, contrary to the explicit teaching of Islam. The Chinese have also developed their own racial ideologies and hierarchies. However, many people don’t understand this, and this leaves them vulnerable to woke racial ideologies, like Critical Race Theory, which view Whites as innately racist and requiring particular teaching and treatment in order to cure them of their prejudices.
I think part of the problem is that the school curriculum only teaches the transatlantic slave trade. Outside the classroom there is little discussion or mention of slavery elsewhere in the world, except in the case of ancient Egypt. As far as I am aware, there are no TV programmes about global slavery, with the exception of the occasional news item about modern slavery and people trafficking. I am also not aware of any museums which also cover the global history of slavery. This absence, I believe, is leaving people vulnerable to radical ideologies that explicitly demonise Whites and teach Blacks that they have and will always be the victims of White prejudice, maltreatment and discrimination.
Yesterday I emailed messages to Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, Nick Gibb, the minister for schools, and the shadow minister for education, Bridget Phillimon about this issue, recommending that the teaching of slavery in schools and universities should also mention that it was done across the world. As should museum displays about slavery and the slave trade. I doubt that I shall receive a reply from them, as the internet addresses, I used may have been solely for their constituents and MPs are forbidden to reply to anyone except them. I’ve therefore also posted the message to the Department of Education using their contact address. But I doubt I’ll get anything back from them either.
Here’s the message I sent them, which I altered a little according to the minister’s or shadow minister’s sex and official position. Please note: I am not advocating the teaching of slavery and racial prejudice in other societies in order to somehow excuse western slavery and racism. I am merely doing so to counter the very specific issue that some people seem to believe that it is unique to White Europeans.
‘Dear Madam,
I am an historian with a Ph.D. in archaeology. I writing to you to express my deep concerns about the teaching of the subject of slavery in British schools and universities and the historical falsehoods being promoted by radical left-wing ideologies such as Critical Race Theory. I understand that the school curriculum includes transatlantic slavery. This is entirely correct, and that dark page of British imperial history should be taught. However, I am concerned that the exclusive focus on British and White European and American enslavement of Black Africans is leading to the distorted view among many British young people that slavery is somehow unique to White culture and society, and is something that only Whites did to Black Africans and other peoples of colour. This is, I feel, being exploited by the advocates of Critical Race Theory to promote a distorted narrative which demonises Whites as perpetual villains while at the same time teaching Black and Asians that they are victims, who will be perpetually oppressed by White racist society.
The idea that only Whites practiced slavery is far from the truth. Slavery has existed across the world since ancient times, as was recognised by the 19th century Abolitionists and their opponents. White Britons were enslaved by the Barbary pirates of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from the 16th century onwards. This was only ended by the French conquest of Algiers in the 1820s. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans from the 14th century onwards resulted in the White, Christian population being depressed into serfdom as well as slavery itself. Slavery in Africa existed from at least 3000 BC. It was practiced in ancient Egypt and in many Black African societies. In these latter, the proportion of the enslaved population could range from 30%-70%. Black Africans were enslaved by Muslim Arabs and later on by the Ottoman Turks. It also existed in India, where the slave class are recorded in the Vedas as the Dasyas, and in China and elsewhere. There are some excellent books about these subjects, such as Jeremy Black’s Slavery: A New Global History (London: Constable & Robinson 2011), Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2003), and Sean Stilwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014).
At the same time, the West has not been the only civilisation to develop racial prejudice and hierarchies of race. Racial prejudices against Blacks, but also White Europeans also developed in Islam, as discussed in Bernard Lewis’ Slavery and Race in Medieval Islam, and similar racial ideologies have also developed in China. But I very much regret that many young people are unaware that other, non-western cultures have also developed such practices. The result has been that some people seem to believe that racism is, once again, unique to the west. There is an image on the internet of a young man of colour bearing a placard saying, ‘Britain invented Racism’ which illustrates this very well.
I am afraid the lack of knowledge of extra-European racism and slavery is being exploited by Critical Race Theory and its supporters to promote the view that only Whites can be racist, and that racism and historical slavery is something that Whites need to be particularly reminded of and feel guilty about as part of wider radical programme to promote restorative racial justice.
I am very much aware that racism needs to be confronted and erased, but I believe this doctrine to be itself hypocritical and racist. I would therefore like to see the teaching of slavery in schools and universities, and museums exhibits about it also include the existence of slavery throughout the world, including Africa. The intention here is not to demonise other societies and their peoples, but simply to make the point that slavery has never been solely practiced by Whites. At the same time, I would also like to see any teaching in schools about racism also include the fact that this too is not simply something that Whites have done to people of colour. I believe strongly that it is through an awareness of the ubiquity of slavery and racism across the globe that a proper understanding of these issues as both part of British history and a continuing problem can be gained.
I hope you as Secretary of State for Education, will consider this issue worth raising will work to introduce these ideas into the current teaching on slavery, and look forward to hearing from you about this issue.
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