Some of the great commenters on this blog have criticised an article I put up a few days about a video posted by our favourite YouTube (non)historian, Simon Webb, in which he attacks what he considers to be the ‘woke’ destruction of the Wellcome Collection by its new director, Melanie Keen. Keen has removed from display objects she considered to be ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ and ‘ableist’, and according to Webb, they’ve been replaced with one Eruditu, a female shaman. A number of the commenters have questioned whether Webb was telling the truth, particularly as they were unable to find any reference to Eruditu. However, it is true that Keen has indeed taken down objects and material that is considered problematic from the ‘Medicine Man’ gallery. The Art Newspaper published this piece on it by Tom Seymour on 28th November last year, ‘London’s Wellcome Collection accused of cultural vandalism after closing ‘racist, sexist and ableist’ display of artefacts ‘ The piece is subtitled ‘The institution asks “What’s a museum for?” as it shuts display devoted to objects amassed by its founder’. It begins
‘The Wellcome Collection, the London museum run by the Wellcome Trust, is to permanently close a curated display of medical artefacts amassed by its founder on the basis that it “perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories.”
The announcement, made on 26 November, pertains to a permanent display in the Wellcome Collection, a museum on the Euston Road, London, which opened in 2007. The display had been on show for the last 15 years, and was titled Medicine Man, a reference to its founder, Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936.
The exhibition was closed, permanently, on 27 November. The future usage of the artefacts remains unknown at this stage.
The decision has been met with dismay by some members of the museum community and the wider public who have likened it to cultural vandalism.
Medicine Man showed a selection of curated artefacts from the collection of Henry Wellcome, the founder of the trust and an American pharmaceutical entrepreneur whose company, Burroughs Wellcome & Company, eventually merged with other pharmaceutical organisations to form the modern-day drugs behemoth GlaxoSmithKline.
Wellcome amassed more than one million items relating to the history of medicine throughout the course of his life. The Wellcome Collection was founded as a place to display his collection, which he left to the trust in his will, to a visiting public for free. He also founded the Wellcome Trust, a registered UK charity that focuses on biomedical research. The charity is the largest in the UK, with assets of £36bn. The trust is credited with key findings in the development of drugs that combat the spread of certain cancers, as well as HIV.
Henry Wellcome’s collection was vast and varied. The Medicine Man display included the possessions of famous historical figures: visitors could view a toothbrush used by the French military commander Napoleon Bonaparte, shoes owned by the social reformer Florence Nightingale, the death mask worn by the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and the skull-handled walking stick of the Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin, founder of the theory of evolution, who saw the stick as a ‘memento mori’—a reminder of human mortality.
On show was also ephemera used by less ennobled people, like the good-luck charms and amulets carried by British, Russian and Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. Or an illustration, originally created for British news magazine Sphere, showing British soldiers being treated at a field hospital in Verdun, France, during the First World War.
But some of the artefacts in Henry Wellcome’s collection, as well as the way they were was displayed in the museum was, from the off, “problematic,” museum staff have said.
“The story we told was that of a man with enormous wealth, power and privilege,” the museum said in the course of a Twitter thread published last week. The thread opened with the question: “What’s the point of museums? Truthfully, we’re asking ourselves the same question.”
In a series of tweets and pictures, the museum made direct reference to a series of artefacts that it felt were racist. These includes a 1916 painting by Harold Copping titled A Medical Missionary Attending to a Sick African, which depicts an African person kneeling in front of a white missionary.
“The result was a collection that told a global story of health and medicine in which disabled people, Black people, Indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited—or even missed out altogether,” the thread read.
The closure of the display “marks a significant turning point, as we prepare to transform how our collections are presented,” the Wellcome Collection said in a statement on their website. The collection is now embarking on “a major project that will amplify the voices of those who have been previously erased or marginalised from museums, bringing their stories of health and humanity to the heart of our galleries,” it said.’
There have also been accusations of institutional racism within the museum itself and especially racist behaviour and microaggressions against Black staff.
It therefore seems to me that there has been a purge of material for the ideological reasons stated by Webb. I’ll try and look further into the new display with the modern shaman, Eruditu. If this does exist, it may be that the museum is staging it as a corrective to what it sees as the Eurocentric bias of the previous display.
Simon Webb put up a piece yesterday about how one of the London bookshops had a whole bookcase devoted to the transatlantic slave trade. I’m not surprised at this development. Bookshops are businesses, after all, and exist to sell books. And transatlantic slavery is very much a subject of contemporary controversy and debate, and so you can expect that there’s a demand for books on it. Especially in London, with its large Black population. Nor am I worried by some of the books that branch of Waterstone’s or whoever are stocking. One of the books on the shelf shown in the thumbnail to the video is Slavery and Slaving in African History This is a very respectable academic discussion of the subject. It traces the history of slavery in the continent right back into prehistory and describes historic and contemporary indigenous slavery in Africa, as well as obviously the transatlantic slave trade. Webb is concerned, rightly in my opinion, that many discussions of Black slavery omit the involvement of Black Africans themselves. This book certain doesn’t play that aspect down, and I can imagine that any militant anti-racists seeking to put the blame solely on the west would be very disappointed with it. But it also contains information on contemporary African organisations, set up by former slaves, to campaign against the continued existence of human bondage on the continent.
The history section in Bristol’s branch of Waterstone’s also contained a sizable number of books on slavery. Madge Dresser, one of the lecturers of the University of the West of England, former Bristol Polytechnic, ran a course on the transatlantic slave trade. She also published a book, Slavery Obscured, on Bristol’s continued participation in the slave trade after it had been banned. I made a note of the books on the shelves, as well as a few others I found interesting at the time.
One of these was Saul Friedman’s Jews and the American Slave Trade, which is an academic rebuttal of the lies of the Nation of Islam that the Jews were responsible for the American slave trade. The description of it on Amazon runs
‘The Nation of Islam’s Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan’s charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.’
Friedman is the sort of scholar the mighty Jacky Walker was talking about in her discussion of Jewish involvement in the slave trade on the interwebs, which was picked out and used by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to smear her as a terrible Jew-hater – despite the fact she’s Jewish and her family are Jewish! At nearly £37 for the paperback edition, and £127 for the hardback, it’s certainly not cheap. Nevertheless, it’s necessary. I haven’t read it, but looking at the blurb it looks like a very good book to recommend to anybody with an interest in this area. And especially those who might be taken in by the lies of Farrakhan and his cronies.
A few weeks ago I found a notebook I had when I was working at the former Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, now sadly defunct. I’d made notes in it of anything relevant to what I was doing at the time, cataloguing the Museum’s documents relating to slavery or otherwise seemed relevant.
At the time Jamaica was promoting the Maroons, the free Black communities who had fought and won their freedom from British slavery, as a tourist attraction. There were five Maroon towns, one of which was Accompong. According to a travel book on the Caribbean nation I read at the time, there was a Maroon tour to Accompong which ended up in another towns founded by the free slaves, Maroon Town. On the 6th of January each year, the Accompong Maroon Festival celebrated the victory of the Maroon leader Cudjoe over the British. This took place at the Kindah area and the Peace Cave. There was also a Maroon Tourist Attraction Company, whose headquarters are, or were located 32 Church Street, Montego Bay. This is the company that organised the tours to Accompong.
The museum displaying the history and culture of the Arawak, who with the Caribs were Jamaica’s two indigenous peoples, and who also inhabited many of the other islands of the Caribbean before the European invasion and genocide, is the White Marl Arawak Museum in White Marl, St. Catherine, Spanish Town. This is run by Institute of Jamaica and includes a reconstructed Arawak village behind the museum proper.
Not all of the unfree population of the Caribbean were Black slaves. The Caribbean was also settled using indentured servants, who could be and often were as badly treated as the slaves and often joined them in revolt. There is a Historical Mini-Museum to Jamaica’s indentured German labourers in Seaford Town, also in Montego Bay, as well as a Jamaican German Society. I also believe one of the Caribbean islands also has a gallery or little museum devoted to the Polish settlers. They were freedom fighters, who joined Napoleon’s troops in his invasion Russia in order to liberate their country from Russian rule. Following the Corsican general’s defeat, they fled to the Caribbean. Because of their role in fighting against slavery in the French Revolutionary armies, I recall that they were the only Whites legally permitted to settle in the independent, Black republic of Haiti.
I don’t know if this information will help anybody, but these are important and fascinating parts of Jamaican and Caribbean history.
There were also a couple of books specifically about the Maroons. These were
Angorsah, E. Kofi (ed), Maroon Heritage: Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives (Kingston: Canoe Press/ University of the West Indies: 1994).
The anthropologist Katherine Duchamps also wrote an account of her Journey to Accompong in 1946.
There was also a History of the Maroons published by R.C. Dallas in London as far back as 1863. I don’t know if it’s been republished, but it might be that somebody at university with an interest in the subject could get a copy on academic loan.
This comes from Tom Scott’s channel on YouTube and it’s brilliant! as the lad character always used to shout on the Fast Show. In this video, Scott goes flying with Aeroplume, a French company provides flights from human-powered blimps. These were designed twenty or so years ago by a French artist, inventor and engineer, Jean-Pierre David. The blimps are filled with helium and the human pilot is suspended underneath in a kind of horizontal harness. There are two paddles either side of them, which allow them to propel themselves around and steer the aircraft. It apparently takes a litre of helium to lift a gram of weight, so a blimp must carry 70,000 litres or so to lift a human. Antoine Sibue, Scott’s host from the company, explains that the hangar in which the flights are performed was originally built in 1919 for the military. It passed out of military service in 1999, and a think it was acquired by Aeroplume in 2009. It’s one of two locations. The other is in a cave 50 metres underground. Flight cost 60 Euros for half an hour. The company has three such blimps, lifting 90, 70 and 45 kilos respectively. They’re also open over school holiday, which is tempting fate, one feels. Still, they have had tens of thousands of flights and zero casualties. Sibue teaches Scott how to fly the blimp, how temperature affects buoyancy and how helium leaks from the blimp so that they have to replenish it occasionally, as well as problems when the surrounding air seeps in. But it all seems safe, sedate and rather cool.
The balloon was invented in France in the late 18th century and was enthusiastically taken up by scientists and the public. It represented the victory of human scientific ingenuity over nature. And when Napoleon was invading everyone in Europe, one of his schemes was to create a military airship. However, there was no form of artificial propulsion available at the time, so the idea was to have its crew pulling on paddles rather like those on Aeroplume’s blimps.
The blimps strongly remind me of the 19th century airships depicted by some of the early pioneers of Science Fiction, such as Jacques Robida. I think the French novelist and artist would be highly amused by the way his vision has now been realised.
This is another piece from the anti-Islamic YouTuber, the Apostate Prophet. I said yesterday when I posted another piece up by his that I don’t share his atheism nor his wholesale dismissal of all of Islam, although it very definitely isn’t my religion. Not all Muslims are the same, and I got the impression that there is a wide variety of belief and practice within global Islam. It’s therefore wrong and dangerous to give the impression that all Muslims are somehow militant hardliners wishing to impose the sharia and subjugate the unbelievers.
But there certainly are some very unpleasant individuals in the western Islamic community, who would like to impose an extremely strict, repressive version of Islam and who have a bitter hatred of gays, non-Muslims and apostates from Islam. These people, like White Fascists, deserve to be exposed and condemned for their vile views. One of these is Daniel Haqiqatjou. Haqiqatjou is an American Muslim apologist of Iranian extraction. In this post from June last year, 2020, the Apostate Prophet discusses Haqiqatjou’s squalid views and his connections to the Yaqeen Institute, a hard-line Islamic organisation whose leader, Omar Suleiman, attended some kind of public gathering with Joe Biden.
Haqiqatjou would like the death penalty for homosexuality. On LGBTQ Remembrance Day last year, he joked about remembering them through Muslim base jumping. It’s a tasteless joke about the method used by some Muslim countries of executing gays by throwing them off tall buildings. When AP called him a vile piece of sh*t, Haqiqatjou made it clear that people like him wouldn’t be forgotten either. Which is a reference to the traditional Muslim penalty for apostasy, death. The video contains a clip of Haqiqatjou explaining this to one of his callers. He also wrote a piece for the website of Muslim Jurists of America hailing the Sultan of Brunei’s introduction of Islamic law against homosexuals and fornicators, and urged western Muslims to come to Brunei to watch a public caning to see Islamic law in action. Thanks, but I’d rather stay in Britain and watch Gardener’s World. He also whined about how the West looks down on child marriage, but western children are sexually active at 13, 14, 15. The Apostate Prophet points out that this is 14 year old kids having sex with other 14 year olds. It is not a case of thirty year old men marrying 13 year old girls.
Haqiqatjou did, however, have some criticism for his posts from the American Muslim community. This was from an American convert, Justin Parrott, who objected to them, not because he found them to be wrong or offensive, but because he and other Muslim authorities didn’t want him to make Islam look bad. Haqiqatjou dismissed this by saying it is exactly what Jews and Christians have done to their religion, and they won’t look well on Islam unless Muslims convert to their religions. And so he blithely carries on spreading his backward views.
The Apostate Prophet also makes point in this video that there is something wrong in western society. If a westerner expresses hatred of homosexuality, like the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple, or if they express concerns about Islamic grooming gangs and immigration, then they are met with immediate howls of disapproval and cancellation. But the worst thing that happened to Haqiqatjou when he posted his obnoxious views online was that the post was taken down, something he found to be terribly tyrannical. Which is especially rich coming from him, as if left to him he’d end freedom of speech. All in the name of Islam, of course.
And in July last year, Apostate Prophet put up this video in which he questions Haqiqatjou on his attitude to slavery. Guess what! Haqiqatjou doesn’t condemn it. Indeed, he tries to defend it by saying that where it exists, the slaves may be better treated than free workers. He accuses AP of comparing slavery to an idealised form of freedom that has never existed, and may not make people happy. It seems to me to be very clear from this that Haqiqatjou would like to bring back slavery.
Now Haqiqatjou is correct when he says that in countries where slavery still persists, the slaves may be well treated. I can remember one book on modern slavery stating that the lot of slaves in those cultures that still practise traditional slavery is much better than modern from of enslavement, disguised as long-term work contracts, for example. I also suspect that Haqiqatjou has a very romanticised view of Islamic slavery. It could be different from western chattel slavery, in that slaves could serve as soldiers, scribes and arrange their masters’ business affairs. The Mamlukes, the Muslim warriors who ruled Egypt prior to Napoleon’s invasion, were originally such a corps of slave soldiers. Their name actually means ‘White slaves’. And ostensibly free labour, as we’ve seen, can be highly exploitative. The abolitionists’ opponents in the 19th century argued that it was hypocritical of William Wilberforce and the others to demand freedom for enslaved Blacks, when their White ‘factory slaves’ endured such grinding poverty and poor conditions. I suspect Haqiqatjou looks back on Islamic slavery as a time, that actually didn’t exist, when loyal slaves worked for caring, paternalistic masters. One of the British ambassadors to Zanzibar and Pemba in the later 19th century argued that the British government should not bother about demanding the abolition of slavery there because it was so benign and gradually dying out. But it didn’t, and the resentments of the enslaved Africans grew until there was a rebellion in the 1920s in which the ruling Arab class was massacred.
As for Haqiqatjou’s bizarre statement that ‘owning a person is better than renting a person’, this shows his ignorance about the issue. In free labour, the employer rents the worker’s labour. He does not rent the worker. It’s a fine, but important point.
Now I believe that genuine freedom comes with true democratic rights – the right to elect one’s rulers, serve on juries and negotiate with employers over wages and conditions. Which means the right to form trade unions and other professional associations, which Conservatives and Libertarians hate, because their interpretation of freedom is just freedom for the bosses, not the workers. But freedom begins with personal freedom – the freedom to do exactly as one wishes away from work, regardless of the views of one’s master, and not to be tied to one employer. Haqiqatjou, it seems, would like to end that, just as he would like to end secular law and government.
Now I think Haqiqatjou is almost certainly an extreme case. I doubt many western Muslims would want to see the return of slavery. Even the Saudis officially ended it in 1964 or so, although it still goes on in private and foreign workers are treated as slaves under the sponsorship system. I read somewhere that the Mullahs in Iran briefly considered bringing it back after the Islamic Revolution, but they decided against it. And there are certainly Muslims in the West who very strongly oppose views like his.
Unfortunately, liberal, modern Muslims are given no support in their struggles against the hardliners, and there certainly does seem to be a double standard amongst western liberals towards intolerant, repressive Islam. At the moment the west is going through paroxysms of guilt about its historic involvement in the slave trade. I realise that there are a few extremists out there, who would like to have it brought back. They are tiny minority who are rightly marginalised and attacked for their views. But it seems that their Muslim counterparts with deeply unpleasant views, like Haqiqatjou, are free to express similar views and no-one says anything against them.
This has to change.Fighting Islamic intolerance does not equal Islamophobia or fighting Islam. It is defending democracy and freedom, not all of whose enemies are White or somehow virtuous because they’re people of colour.
For a brief period about 1991 I tried pursuing a research degree in British Islam. I ended up giving it up because it would have been mostly sociology and I was having difficulty getting informants, and because I found it difficult to cope with some of the anti-Christian polemic. I’ve Muslim friends, and didn’t want my experience of this material poisoning my relationship with them or my overall view of British Islam. I’ve blogged before about the passages I found in books published by British Islamic publishers like TaHa calling for autonomous Muslim colonies in the UK. But one of the very worst books I found was one of the college bookshelves literally demonising Whites. This was published in Pakistan, but in English and so clearly aimed at the global Muslim community. It was written by someone who had clearly spent time in Britain before moving back to Pakistan. And a fair section of it was loud denunciations of White Brits and British society for being mean and racist.
In the years since, I forgot its title, but the book’s sheer vitriol has stayed with me, and I do think that it and books like it are fuelling the rise of militant Islam around the world and the alienation of many western Muslims. Among the book’s claims was that the White peoples of Europe, particularly those who speak languages related to German, Dutch, English and the Scandinavian languages, are the descendants of the tribes of Gog and Magog, known in Islam as Juj and Majuj. These are anti-Muslim peoples, the servants of al-Dajjal, the Muslim equivalent of the anti-Christ in Christianity, who were walled up behind a mountain chain by the Islamic hero Dhu’l-Carneyn. I went Googling for it yesterday to see if I could find it on the internet. I think I have, or something very like it. It’s Cain’s Creed, The Cult(s) of Rome, by Dr. Omar Zaid. The book seems to be largely a rant directed against the Roman Catholic church and particularly the Jesuits, as well as, inevitably, the Jews. It draws heavily on the bonkers 19th century anti-Catholic Protestant diatribe, the Two Babylons. If it isn’t that book, then Zaid’s is very like it and certainly following it ideological line in the demonisation of White Europeans. Zaid put up a blog post about his wretched tome, which contains this dainty little passage.
This region (Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Khazaria etc.) is a major focus of Monotheism’s eschatology and deviancy as it holds ancient houses of satanic cults that are directly related to the present globalist menace. It appears that Gog & Magog refer to the peoples descended from Tubal-Cain and Noah’s errant stock that became Slavonic and Teutonic Caucasian Races respectively and then trod in all directions during the course of two dispersions, reaching Egypt, Persia, Pakistan and beyond.
See ‘GOG & MAGOG BY DR. OMAR’ at Gog & Magog by Dr. Omar – zaidpub, which is an extract from Omar Zaid’s book, Cain’s Creed, The Cult(s) of Rome, published by Dar al-Wahi.
If it is the same book, then it also contains long passages ranting about how Whites Brits are all racist and callous. He states that we don’t care if an elderly woman dies in the street, but shamefully get upset about the maltreatment of dogs, which are an unclean animal in Islam. But he’s also massively impressed with how wealthy the country is, which betrays something of the mentality of the hostile invader. It very reminiscent of Napoleon’s description of Britain – ‘a good land with a bad people’.
Now I’m very much aware that this is only one book, but I can remember that as an undergraduate studying Islam for my Religious Studies minor that one of the lecturers told us that some of the material being published in Pakistan was vitriolically anti-Christian. This was nearly forty years ago, and I think the situation must have become much worse since as the country has become intolerantly religious. Christians and other religious minorities, like the Shi’a and Ahmadis are increasingly persecuted, accused and imprisoned under spurious blasphemy charges or murdered in mob violence.
Now I am very definitely not trying to demonise Muslims here by posting about it. I’m very aware of the rise of Islamophobia, especially as stoked by Boris Johnson and the Tory party, despite their denials. I can quite believe that the author was the victim of terrible racism in Britain, having heard of some of the ‘pranks’ and maltreatment meted out to Asian workers at the time and more recently.
But I wanted to discuss this to make the point that other nations and cultures too have their own prejudices and racial hatreds. The BLM protests have renewed discussions and attacks on White western racism, but there is little or no discussion or examination of Black and Asian prejudice. This exists, but is denied and any mention of it suppressed or silence by accusations of racism in turn. You’re a racist bigot if you dare talk about anti-White racism in Britain or elsewhere. And so we have a very unbalanced view where all Whites are increasingly seen through the lens of Critical Race Theory as embodying White privilege and embedded in a racist system, while any attempt to discuss Black and Asian anti-White racism is furiously denied.
This has to change. All forms of prejudice and racial hatred have to be fought and attacked, even if this is uncomfortable for parts of the Left.
Because if it isn’t, the Tories will exploit it to divide the working class and inflict more misery, poverty and death on working people of all colours and religions.
The Telegraph ran a story yesterday claiming that they’d received documents showing that Oxford University was considering changing their classical music course. This was because, following Black Lives Matter protests, students of colour at the university had complained that they were left very distressed by the course on European music from Machaut to Beethoven, because this was the period when the transatlantic slave trade was developing. They also made the same complaint about western music notation.
Now this comes from the Torygraph, part of Britain’s exemplary right-wing press, who are known for their rigorous commitment to journalistic truth and integrity, ho, ho. So you wonder if it true, or is the product of some Tory hack’s fevered imagination, like many of the stories about the Labour party produced by Guido Fawkes. Is this all made up to discredit Black Lives Matter?
Thinking about the issue, it seems very much to me that the problem isn’t the curriculum’s links to colonialism, but an attitude of entitlement and the cultural prejudices of the rich and monumentally uninformed.
Let’s deal with their objection that western musical notation developed during the time of the Black slave trade. As the Torygraph pointed out, it didn’t. It developed before the transatlantic slave trade from the church’s Gregorian Chant. This is absolutely true. The origin of the western musical tradition is in the music written for church services. This soon expanded to take in secular subjects, such as the courtly lyrics of the troubadours, the celebration of kings and princes, drinking, war, and just about every aspect of life. As a genre, the emergence of western classical music has nothing to do with the slave trade. Machaut, the French composer mentioned as the beginning of that part of the Oxford music course, lived in the 12th century, three centuries or so before the development of the transatlantic slave trade in the 15th. The modern system of musical notation was also developed in that century by Guido d’Arezzo. The scale, Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Te Do, comes from the initial syllables of a line in the Latin Mass. And whoever thinks that Beethoven is connected to the slave trade is clean out of their tiny mind. Beethoven, I think, was a German liberal with a profound sympathy for the ideals of the French Revolution. His Eroica was originally dedicated to Napoleon, until the Corsican bandit invaded Austria. His Ode to Joy looks forward to a world where nations live together in peace and fraternity. Furthermore, it’s also been suggested that he may have had Black ancestry. Either way, I doubt very much that he had any sympathy for slavery or any other form of human servitude whatsoever.
The complaint about that part of the music course is just so wrong, that I do wonder about the motives of the people making these complaints. Assuming they exist, and that the complaints are genuine. Because the complaints are so wrong, and so ignorant, that either the complaint is some kind of mickey-take, or else the people making them are simply monumentally stupid and lazy. For example, what kind of individual, who seriously wants to learn music, objects to learning the notation? Yes, people can and do play by ear, and many non-western musical traditions don’t have a system of notation. But if you seriously want to play music, and certainly if you’re studying it an advanced level, then understanding its notation is very much a basic requirement. This includes not only classical music, but also Jazz, rock and pop. Much of this is composed through improvisation and jam sessions by the musicians themselves, and its form of reproduction is primarily through records rather than print. But nevertheless, they’re also published as sheet music. I’ve got several books of pop, rock and Jazz music on my shelves. They’re published as sheet music as people not only want to listen to some of these great pieces, but also play them for themselves.
So basic is an understanding of written music as well as the development of western music from the Middle Ages onwards, that I really do wonder if the people behind these complaints actually want to study music, or do so to the extent that they have to do some serious work that might stretch them. It doesn’t look like they do to me. I also wonder why, if they consider western music so intimately linked to colonialism and slavery that it causes them distress, that, if they’re foreign, they wanted to come to Europe to study it.
It’s therefore occurred to me that, if the complaints are real, the people doing the complaining may not actually want to study the subject. They just want the cachet of studying at Oxford. Years ago I read a history of Japan, which warned about giving in to the insularism and xenophobia of many Japanese. The Japanese highly value an education at Oxbridge and/ or the British public schools (God help them!) but they don’t like mixing with non-Japanese. Thus one or the other of Oxford or Cambridge was building a separate college to accommodate Japanese students so they wouldn’t have the inconvenience of mixing with people of other nationalities. Perhaps something similar is the case here? Do they want the prestige that goes with an Oxford education, but have their own racist prejudices about European culture and music?
If this is the case, then it’s a scandal. It’s a scandal because education at one of Britain’s leading universities is being dumbed down for these morons. It’s a scandal because it cheapens the real problems of Britain’s Black community, which were behind many of the Black Lives Matter protests. For example, there’s a programme on the Beeb this evening investigating the reasons Black British mothers are four times more likely to die in childbirth than Whites. It’s a scandal because there are doubtless plenty of kids of all colours in the UK, who would just love to study music at Oxford and have a genuine love of classic music. There’s a campaign at the moment to get more Black and Asians into orchestras. It’s been found that people from these ethnicities are seriously underrepresented. Hence there’s an orchestra, Chinikwe!, purely for non-Whites, in order to produce more Black and Asian orchestral musicians. This has also followed attempts to recover the works of Black classical composers. Back in the 1990s one of the French labels issued a CD of harpsichord pieces written by Black composers. Earlier this year, Radio 3 also played the music of Black classical composers. The best known Black British classical composer, I’m sure, is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who lived from 1875 to 1912. His father came from Sierra Leone while his mother was British. He was the composer of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on Longfellow’s poem, which is still performed by choral societies up and down the country. And yes, it’s written in western musical notation. But these attempts to encourage the performance of classical, orchestral music by Black and Asian performers, and to restore and include Black and Asian classical composers in the western musical tradition, has also been effectively spurned by what seems to be rich, entitled, lazy brats.
The fault therefore seems not to lie with the Oxford music course or with Black Lives Matter, but with an admissions policy that favours the wealthy, even when they are racist and xenophobic, over those from poorer backgrounds, who are genuinely dedicated and talented. If, on the other hand, the people making those complaints seriously believe them, then the response should be to educate them to dispel their prejudices, not accommodate them.
Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’ next week, according to the Radio Times for 14-20 November 2020, is Sudhir Hazareesingh’s Black Spartacus, a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture. L’Ouverture was the leader of slave rebellion in what is now Haiti in the late 19th century, which threw out the French and turned their former colony into the first Black republic. The piece about the serial on page 130 of the Radio Times by David McGillivray runs
Book of the Week: Black Spartacus – the Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
In 1791 enslaved Africans on the island now known as Haiti rose up against their French masters in the world’s first and only successful slave revolution. Their leader was the brilliant general and diplomat Toussaint Louverture, subject of a new book by Mauritian-born lecturer in politics at Balliol College Oxford, Sudhir Hazareesingh. Using correspondence and military reports in French archives, Hazareesingh brings startling new insights into the life of the man largely responsible for the establishment of the first black republic. Louverture, a real-life black superhero, fought not only the French but also the British and Spanish. “It was the greatest revolution of all time,” the author says. The serialisation is read by Adrian Lester.
The programme’s on at 9.45 each day, Monday to Friday. The blurbs for the days’ instalments are as follows:
Monday
1/5 Adrian Lester reads from Sudhir Hazareesingh’s biography of the former slave who headed an insurrection that led to the Haitian Revolution. The first instalment looks at Toussaint’s early life, his progress to coachman and his education by the Jesuits. Abridged by Libby Spurrier.
Tuesday
2/5 Following the Saint Domingue uprising, Toussaint show himself to be both a focused military leader and a man of compassion.
Wednesday
3/5 In 1798, Napoleon sends an agent, Gabriel de Heouville, to reduce Tousaint’s power in Saint-Domingue.
Thursday
4/5 Toussaint’s sweeping reforms of both public and private activity help to bring about huge rises in productivity and exports, but his authoritative leadership style inspires rebellions, led by his nephew Moyse.
Friday
5/5 Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint Louverture engage in a fierce battle of both wit and force over Saint-Dominge. After three months of fighting, Toussaint seeks to negotiate a truce, but is arrested and embarks on his first sea voyage – one way – to France.
Louverture was clearly a brilliant and gifted leader. His revolution was an inspiration to slaves across the Caribbean, and the sought to emulate his success in their own revolts. These also included the British West Indies, alarming the colonial authorities there and the government at home.
However, there was also a serious negative aspect to the revolution. Major Moody used the condition of the former slaves in Haiti after the revolt as part of the argument in his parliamentary report in the 1820s that slaves in the British Caribbean weren’t ready for their freedom. After the revolution, the government had been faced with a financial crisis due to possible loss of their export commodity, sugar. The country was therefore divided up between Louverture’s generals, and the former slaves were forbidden to leave their plantations. Each plantation was given a quote of sugar to produce. If they failed to produce this quota, then the generals and army moved in and started executing those workers. I believe they were burned to death. I don’t know whether this came after Louverture was removed from power, although it might have been during his rule when the book says that rebellions broke out against his ‘authoritative’ leadership.
Moody’s conclusion surprised contemporaries, because he certainly wasn’t personally racist. He lived in Somerset with a Black wife. His report is interesting because it also includes letters from a former American slave, who had been freed by his mistress in Louisiana. The former slave had travelled to Haiti, and obviously felt a strong attachment to his former mistress by writing letters to her about his new adopted country and its conditions.
The report also discusses issues that are still, unfortunately, very relevant today. He felt describes the greater numbers of Blacks than Whites in American prisons, and concluded that there is so much prejudice against Blacks in America and Britain that the only way they can possible succeed as equals would be if they had their own country. This is the view of Black radical groups like the Nation of Islam. Let’s work together to make sure it’s mistaken.
I haven’t come across this particular book before, but there have been other works recently published about the Black revolutionaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. One of these is The Black Jacobins. Louverture was inspired by the French Revolution, which attempted to end slavery as well as liberating the White serfs from their aristocratic masters. I don’t think the French were able to restore serfdom after the revolution’s failure, but they were successful in restoring Black slavery. This led to the growth of French anti-slavery movements like Amis des Noirs.
The Black Lives Matter protests across the world have prompted the authorities in Liverpool to examine once again their great city’s connection to the slave trade. According to an article by Jean Selby in today’s I, for 24th August 2020, the city is going to put up information plaques around the city on areas and places connected to the slave trade. The article’s titled ‘Liverpool to acknowledge its history of slavery’. I think it’s slightly misleading, and something of a slur, as the City has already acknowledged its connection to slavery a long time ago. It has an international slavery museum, which I think may have started as a gallery in its maritime museum way back in the 1990s. This has inspired Black rights and anti-racism campaigners to approach the council here in Bristol calling for a similar museum down here. From what I gather from the local news website, The Bristolian, Asher Craig, a councilor for St. George’s in Bristol and the head of the local equalities body, told them to go away and find a private backer first. This is the same Asher Craig, who in an interview on Radio 4 showed that apparently she didn’t know about the slavery gallery in Bristol’s M Shed, nor about the various official publications, including a 1970s school history book for local children, that discuss Bristol’s history in the slave trade, and told the Beeb she wanted a museum of slavery here in Bristol. According to The Bristolian, the campaigners are dismayed at the city’s refusal to build such a museum following the examples of Liverpool in the Britain and Nantes in France.
Frankly, I’m sick and tired of London journos writing pieces about places like Bristol and Liverpool blithely claiming, or implying, that only now are they acknowledging their role in the abominable trade. I can remember getting very annoyed with the News Quiz and some of the comedians on it over a decade ago when I similar story came up about Liverpool. Jeremy Hardy, a great left-wing comedian sadly no longer with us, said something suitably sneering about the city and slavery. But the impression I have is that it’s London that has been the most sensitive and most desperate to hide its past in connection to slavery. Nearly two decades or so ago, when I was doing voluntary work at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, I had the privilege of meeting a young Asian artist. She was working on a project commemorating the slave trade by making models of old factories and mills from the foodstuffs they produced, which had been cultivated through slavery. She told me that she’d approached a number of towns and their museums, and received very positive reactions to her work. They had all been very willing to give her whatever help they could, though some of these towns had only been in the slave trade for a very short time before being squeezed out by competition from Bristol and Liverpool. As a result, they often genuinely had little in their collections connected to slavery. But they were willing to give any help they could. But her experience with the Museum of London had been quite different. They made it plain that they didn’t have any holdings on slavery whatsoever. I’ve been told since then that things are a bit different, and that individual London boroughs are quite open and apologetic about their connection to the slave trade. But it does seem to me that it is London that is particularly defensive and secretive when it comes to commemorating its own history of slave dealing.
Back to the I’s article, which runs
Liverpool will address its ties to the slave trade with a series of plaques around the city explaining the history behind its street names, building and monuments.
The city council plans to acknowledge the role the port city played in colonialism and the vast wealth generated from the trafficking of human beings. According to the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool ships carried about 1.5 million slaves, half of the three million Africans taken across the Atlantic by British slavers.
Falkner Square, named after an 18th-century merchant involved in the slave trade, is among those expected to have a plaque installed.
“We have to be led by our communities on how to do this and do it in a way that is sensitive to both our past and our present,” mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson said as he announced the project yesterday. He was marking Slavery Remembrance Day – which commemorates the anniversary of a 1791 slave uprising in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
He continued: “I do not believe that changing street names is the answer – it would be wrong to try and airbrush out our past. It’s important that we have a sensible and informed discussion about theses issues. We need to judge the past with a historical perspective, taking into account today’s higher ethical standards and, most importantly, how everyone, from every community in the city, feels about it.”
And advisory panel, chaired by Michelle Charters, recommended the creation of Eric Lynch slavery memorial plaques, named in honour of Eric Lynch, a Ghanaian chief who is a descendant of African slaves and spent his life drawing attention to the city’s slavery history.
His son, Andrew Lynch, said: “These plaques are a tribute to Eric’s long years of work as a black community activist and educator, teaching the people of Liverpool to acknowledge and understand their historic inheritance in an honest and open way, and uncovering the contribution made by black people throughout our great city.”
This all sounds actually quite reasonable. I think it’s fair to put the plaques up for those wanting such information. And I really don’t believe those places should be renamed, as this is a form of rewriting history. You shouldn’t try to erase the past, although I accept that some monuments, like those of Colston, are unacceptable in today’s moral and political climate for very good reasons.
However, I think this says less about Liverpool’s history and more about the present desperate state of the Black community in Britain. Back when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum all those years ago, I remember talking about some of the materials we had on slavery and its history by West Indian academic historians. I heard from some of the staff that some of this was actually quite controversial in some of the West Indian nations, but for reasons that are completely the opposite to the situation in this country. They’re controversial, or were then, among Black West Indians, who feel that they’re racist against their White fellow countrymen and co-workers. Apparently after one book was published, there was a spate of letters in the local press by Black people stating that their bosses or secretaries were White, and certainly weren’t like that. I think if the Black community in Britain shared the same general level of prosperity and opportunity as the White population, there would be precious little interest in slavery and its commemoration except among academics and historians. It would be an episode from the past, which was now mercifully over, and which the Black community and the rest of society had moved on from.
I also think that demands for its commemoration also come not just from the material disadvantages the Black community in general suffers from, but also its feelings of alienation and marginalisation. They feel that they and their history are being excluded, hence the demands for its commemoration. However, I think the reverse of this is that such demands can also look like expressions of anti-White sentiment, in which the present White population is demanded to be penitent and remorseful about something they were not responsible for, simply because they’re White.
And there are also problems with the selection of the events commemorated International Slavery Remembrance Day. This looks like Toussaint L’Louverture’s Black revolution on Haiti. L’ouverture was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. It was he and his generals that overthrew the French authorities in what is now Haiti, giving the country its present name and making it a Black republic in which power and property could only be held by Blacks. It naturally became a shining beacon for the aspirations of other Black revolutionaries right across the Caribbean and even the US. Major Moody discusses it in his 1820s report on slavery, which critically examined whether Blacks were prepared for supporting themselves as independent, self-reliant citizens after emancipation. His report included correspondence from Black Americans, who had been freed by their owners and moved to Haiti, but still kept in touch with them.
Moody was not impressed with the progress of the revolution, and concluded that Blacks weren’t ready for their freedom. This shocked many abolitionists, as Moody himself was a married to a Black woman. But if you read his report about Haiti, you understand why. After successfully gaining their freedom, the Haitians had been faced with the problem of maintaining it against European aggression on the one hand, and economic collapse on the other. The result was the imposition of virtual enslavement back on the plantation workers, who had fought so hard for their freedom. The country’s estates were divided up among the generals. The former slaves were forbidden to leave them, and quotas of the amount of sugar they were required to produce were imposed. If the poor souls did not produce the required amount, they were tortured or burned to death. It seemed to me when I read the Blue Book Moody published, kept in the Museum’s libraries, that Moody’s decision against supporting immediate emancipation for the enslaved peoples of the Caribbean was based on a genuine horror of such atrocities and fear that this would be repeated across the West Indies.
I don’t think Marxist historians would be surprised at the brutality that arose after the Haitian revolution. Marxist revolutionaries like Lenin believed that history followed certain deterministic laws, and were acutely interested in the French Revolution. From this they believed that all revolutions followed an inevitable pattern. After the initial gains of freedom, the revolution would be overthrown and a period of reaction arise, created by a dictator. Just like Napoleon had overthrown the French Revolutionaries to create a new, imperial monarchy. In their own time, they were afraid that the new Napoleon, who would undo the Russian Revolution, would be Trotsky. And so they missed Stalin’s threat. The reintroduction of slavery by L’Ouverture’s generals is just part of this general pattern in the progress of revolutions. Nevertheless, like the destruction of personal freedoms following the Russian Revolution and then Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s, it does raise the awkward question of whether it should, like the Russian Revolution, really by celebrated or commemorated without significant caveats.
This aside, I’m sure that following Liverpool’s decision, there will also be demands for Bristol to do the same. There is already a slave walk around the docks in Bristol and a plaque commemorating the slaves exploited and traded by Bristol merchants. The M Shed has a gallery on Bristol and the slave trade, which includes a map of various streets and properties in the city and its surroundings built and owned by slavers and those with connections to the trade. And the latest monument, set up in the 1990s, is a remarkable bridge down on the docks. This has two horns either side of it, but has been named ‘Pero’s Bridge’ after one of the very few slaves traded by the city in the 18th century, who identity is known.
Sarah Vine plotting the Doctor’s downfall and intergalactic domination.
Here’s a bit of comic relief amidst the continuing grim reality of the Coronavirus crisis. Sarah Vine, Mail columnist and wife of Michael Gove, managed to give the online public a few moments of fun when she gave them a very revealing look at her and her husband’s taste in reading matter.
Vine’s proud of her husband’s membership of Boris’ cabinet, and has taken to giving herself the pretentious internet monicker of @WestminsterWAG, as she clearly regards being the other half of an MP as glamorous as being a footballer’s wife or girlfriend. And to show her and her husband’s astonishing good fortune, she took a picture of Gove taking the daily Downing Street briefing as it appeared on the TV in their home and posted it on Twitter with the caption ‘Surreal’. The TV was underneath a set of bookshelves, and it was their contents which gave such great amusement to those looking at her Tweet. Former New Labour spin doctor Alistair Campbell picked out a few particularly noticeable volumes, and tweeted at her that ‘having Hitler, Rommel and Napoleon next to Maggie is not a good look.’
Now there are a number of ways Vine could have reacted to this gibe. She could have made the obvious comment that reading about notorious people doesn’t mean you want to imitate them. The amount written and published about Hitler and the Nazis is colossal, but mercifully very few people reading about them are murderous racists and anti-Semites. Ditto for Napoleon. The Napoleonic period is fascinating because it is such a critical period in European history, when French armies marched across the Continent with the intention of building an empire. But obviously that doesn’t mean that everyone reading about the Corsican general has similar megalomaniac ambitions. As it was, she simply replied “Don’t be so absurd. They are books. You should try them sometimes – you can learn a lot from them. You will note there is also a Peter Mandelson”. And that’s where she should have left it. Unfortunately, she couldn’t resist posting another Tweet, saying “As a very special treat for my trolls and [Alastair Campbell] here is another bookshelf. There are about 20 more. Enjoy!” And the peeps on Twitter did just that. And it wasn’t pretty.
Owen Jones spotted a copy of The War Path, the prequel by David Irving to his Hitler’s War. That’s the David Irving, who really is an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Mehdi Hasan and another Tweeter noticed that she also had a copy of The Bell Curve, a book arguing that intelligence is linked to race. Jones further remarked commented on her reaction to his criticism about an article in the Spectator by Rod Liddle arguing that there should be more islamophobia in the Tory party. Vine called the article ‘Clever and funny’. Dawn Foster tweeted that she’d read Gove’s ‘virulently islamophobic’ Celsius 7/7 and written about his time as education minister, and it was obvious that The Bell Curve had strongly influenced his thinking. It was, she said, ‘dangerous, racist rubbish’. That’s nearly everyone said about The Bell Curve, including a great many scientists, which is why it’s been torn to pieces by critics. Libcom Dot Org also noticed that Vine and Gove owned a copy of Alan Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedom, adding the significant information that Benoist’s a central figure in the European New Right and Third Positionist movements. The latter movement is a revisionist strain of White Nationalism that doesn’t want Blacks and Asians to be deported from Britain and Europe. But they do want them to be segregated. Zelo Street in their article about Vine and Gove’s wretchedly poor choice in reading matter added that Benoist also has White Nationalist and Russian Fascist links as well.
Vine then got very huffy about all this criticism, and Tweeted “Extraordinary how many people on here seem to be so censorious of books and the idea of knowledge. In common with the Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition, Communist Russia – and pretty much every despotic, brutal regime you can think of. Says it all, really”. But political liberalism, in the broad sense of defending and upholding free democratic societies, in which people are not persecuted because of their religion or ethnicity, also means recognising and condemning ideological threats. It’s why Mein Kampf was banned in Germany until a few years ago, and why decent bookshops won’t stock copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s also somewhat rich for Vine to compare her critics to dictatorships and other savagely repressive movements when the Daily Mail has based much of its sales tactics on stoking similar outrage and demanding anything left-wing or otherwise controversial to be banned.
It also doesn’t change the fact that while the books on Hitler, Rommel and Napoleon don’t mean that Vine and Gove are admirers of right-wing megalomaniacs and dictators, the other books do show that they have a very dangerous taste for the ideas of real racists and Fascists.
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