The Polite, University Educated Racism of Novara Media

A few days ago I found a video posted on YouTube by Laurence Fox’s Reclaim the Media. This was a short piece of part of a debate he’d had about racism with Ash Sarkar, one of the women of the left-wing internet news and comment channel, Novara Media. This was about whether Whites could experience racism. Sarkar denied that they could, because they enjoyed White privilege. She maintained this stance even when Fox raised the issue of White working class boys, who perform worse academically than Blacks and other ethnic minorities and girls. I’m not surprised Sarkar continued to maintain this view. Novara have posted a couple of videos denying that White working class boys are underprivileged compared to other ethnic groups, and even that the White working class constitutes an ethnic group at all. Sarkar has said very proudly that she’s a communist, particularly when she was exasperated by the attitude of one of the TV hosts interviewing her. But it’s not entirely the Communism of classical Marxism, which saw class as the motor of history and oppression. It’s partly the postmodernist revision of Marxism of Critical Race Theory. This replaces class with race, declaring that Whiteness is a bourgeois quality that ensures that Whites enjoy a privileged position denied to people of colour. This attitude comes partly from the intersectional Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School. Frustrated by the failure of the American working class to rise up against capitalist, Marcuse instead urged radicals to look to the ‘people of the ghetto’, groups traditionally confined to the margins of American society. This included Blacks, gays and feminists. CRT denies that Whites can experience racism through a highly contrived redefinition of the term. In their view, racism = prejudice + power. In bourgeois western society, Whites have a power denied to Blacks. Therefore they cannot suffer racism. This is profoundly wrong and in itself deeply racist. It also has highly dangerous implications that may encourage, or at least demand that a blind eye be turned to real racist violence against Whites.

The term ‘privilege’ suggests aristocratic ease, of the type enjoyed by David Cameron. Before he became prime minister, this Eton-educated aristo certainly didn’t have to worry about getting a job. He was actually approached by the Crown to work for it. But the vast majority of White Brits don’t have this privilege, and especially not those at the very bottom of society. One of my old schools had an annex for its first year pupils in a run-down area of Bristol. This was in a grimy back street called Boot Lane, at one end of which was a public toilet frequented by tramps. These were men who enjoyed absolutely no social advantages at all, and their life expectancy was no doubt extremely limited. The life-expectancy of the homeless, I’ve heard, is about three years. Sarkar, by contrast, is middle class and university educated, as is her fellow presenter Dalia Gabreal. Gabreal, who also promotes the nonsense of White privilege, is the co-editor of an anthology of postcolonialist texts. They enjoy a privilege denied to the White underclass, but it’s a privilege that they, imprisoned by Critical Race Theory, cannot acknowledge.

The idea of White privilege also glosses over and ignores the fact that previous generations of working class Whites could be victims of grinding poverty until very recently. Examples of this can be found on YouTube in a series of videos about poverty in Britain in the 1970s. Whether Sarkar, Gebreal and the others of Novara realise it or not, the idea White privilege plays down this poverty, which could be extreme with the bland attitude that however tough it could be for Whites, it’s worse for Blacks. On average, this is true, but not always. While Novara has shown a deep concern for working class poverty and exploitation, the constraints of Critical Race and Postcolonial Theory means that it is unable to recognise or accept the fact of anti-White racism nor that Whites do not uniformly enjoy privilege.

While it comes from the Marxist left, Critical Race Theory’s view that whiteness is intrinsically oppressive is very much of the same type of ideological racism as fascism. This divides society into the race or nation and its oppressors. In the case of the Italian fascists, the true nation was that of Italy and its people. In Nazism it was Germany, and the enemies were the Jews. This binary opposition Noel O’Sullivan, a Conservative historian of fascism, traces back to the new style of political activism that began with the French Revolution. This divided France into the authentic nation of the ‘tiers etat’, the third estate – the common French people, and their oppressors, the aristocracy and clergy. He quotes one French revolutionary who made this very plain, as well as his intention to shoot the country’s noble oppressors. O’Sullivan makes the point that this opposition can be applied to other groups, as demonstrated in the magazine of a radical feminist group, Medusa. This declared that only women were human, and men were an inferior species. Critical Race Theory revises this racism so that the authentic, oppressed nation are Blacks and other people of colour, while the racial oppressors are White.

This attitude is extremely dangerous. The critics of Critical Race Theory and other postmodernist ‘isms’, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose, submitted a number of spoof papers making extreme claims to various postmodernist academic journals. One of these incorporated quotes from Mein Kampf, but with ‘Whiteness’ substituted for Jews. This was accepted. There have been a series of controversies over the other side of the Pond in which Black academics have announced on TV programmes or internet meetings that they want Whites to become extinct. And there has been real racial violence against Whites. Thomas Sowell describes a few in his book, Race and Culture, noting that the mainstream media either does not cover them, or if it does, the report is framed so as to exonerate the attackers. They acted as they did as a result of the oppression of White America. Racial violence against Whites isn’t confined to America. Over twenty years ago the number of racist murders of Whites was nearly equal to that of ethnic minorities, and the level of racist abuse and attacks against Whites exceeded those against other demographics. This was covered by the mainstream media until the BNP sought to exploit it. But many Black and ethnic minority activists do not want racism against Whites recognised. At a conference of Black and ethnic minority activists a few years ago, three of them criticised the government for including anti-White racism in official statistics. In their view, only racial abuse and violence against ethnic minorities deserved to be counted. Critical Race Theory’s contrived redefinition of racism does the same: it is intended to deny that Blacks can be racist.

Critical Race Theory is also dangerously defective in its Eurocentricismt It assumes that only White Europeans and their descendants in America and the New World can be racist. It ignores the fact that other cultures have also traditions of racial hierarchies and ingrained prejudice. For example, Muslim Arabs also developed ideas of the inferiority of Black Africans on the one hand and White Europeans on the other. India and China also have their own ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. Western Blacks have also developed a distinct racist ideology in Afrocentrism. There is a series of Afrocentric works promoting the idea of White inferiority in vicious, splenetic terms. At the same time, Black Muslim sects like the Nation of Islam and Ansaaru Allah also hold that Whites are racially inferior oppressors, who are due to be annihilated by God at the coming apocalypse. I’ve also come across British Muslim texts that are explicitly colonialist. One of these argued that just as the British allowed other peoples to enter their colonies and keep their laws and customs as a way of populating their territories in North America, so Muslims should be allowed to form autonomous communities in America and Europe. These forms of Black and extra-European racism are largely unknown to most western people, and there is real opposition to discussing them. The Labour politician, Diane Abbott, has said several times that discussing the different forms of racism amongst ethnic minorities would allow ‘them’ to ‘divide and rule’. But these tensions between different ethnic groups in Britain outside the Black/White dichotomy exist and have led to riots. A few months ago, there was rioting in the north of England between Muslims and Hindus. The acceptance of the idea that only Whites can be racist among liberal Whites has also been assisted by the idea of the Noble Savage. This goes back to the 17^th century, and views primitive, non-European societies as somehow nobler and more virtuous than western civilisation. It is also a product of the tradition of European and indigenous opposition to imperialism. This concentrates on the horrors of western imperialism but similarly ignores those of other imperialist regimes, such as the Ottoman Empire. The refusal to accept that other peoples are also capable of terrible racism, and the idea that only White racism is to be tackled, led to the police and authorities turning a blind eye for twenty years to the Pakistani grooming gangs.

I find the denial of anti-White racism, and the bitter racism of some Black activists deeply worrying. Because Critical Race Theory declares that all Whites enjoy such privilege and that the level of racism in society remains constant, it comes very close to the old accusation that all Whites are racist. While I doubt very much that it’s supporters would see it as such, it is very close to racial essentialism of the type that causes anti-Semites as intrinsically hostile to Whites. I am very much afraid that this will encourage anti-White attacks and pogroms, but there will be no action taken or condemnation of these because of the racial attitudes promoted by CRT. Sarkar, Gebreal and the rest of Novara doubtless believe that they are sincerely anti-racist and they probably are so in their personal relationship with Whites. But they, along with numberless others of the same views, hold a twisted redefinition of racism that legitimises racism and violence against Whites, while denying that this is possible at all.

The Lotus Eaters Reject Objective Moral Values

This is a bit abstract, but as it involves issues about the objective reality of moral values and justice against moral relativism, it needs to be tackled. A few days ago the Lotus Eaters published an essay on their website by Helen Dale, which denied that there were such things as objective moral values. This followed an conversation on YouTube between Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Gasbag, and the philosopher Peter Boghossian, in which Sargon was also arguing that objective moral values don’t exist. People, including myself, have taken the mick out of Sargon, pointing out that he’s not university educated and that at one point his standard response to his opponents seemed to be to ask if they hadn’t read John Locke. But Sargon’s bright and is well-read in political philosophy, albeit from the Conservative, Libertarian perspective.

Which seems to be where his denial of objective morality comes. Conservatives since Edmund Burke have stressed the importance of tradition, and from what I remember of Sargon’s debate with Boghossian, he was arguing that concepts like human rights and democracy are the unique products of western culture. These notions are alien and incomprehensible to other culture, such as Islam, which have their own value systems, notions of justice and ideas about their ultimate grounding. Now Sargon does have a point. Human rights seem obvious to us, because we have grown up in a society in which such notions have developed over centuries, dating back to the 18th century and beyond, going back to the Roman idea of the Lex Gentiles, the Law of Nations. This was the idea that there were fundamental assumptions about justice that was common to all nations and which could be used as the basis for international law. And the Enlightenment philosophers were confident that they could also discover an objective basis for morality. This has not happened. One of the problems is the values which are to be regarded as fundamental also need supporting arguments, and morality has changed over time. This can be seen in the west in the changing attitudes to sex outside marriage and homosexuality. Back in the early 20th century both were regarded as immoral, but are now accepted. In the case of homosexuality, moral condemnation has been reversed so that it is the persecution of gays that it rightly regarded as immoral. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin was aware of the changes in morality over time, and deeply influenced by the 17th century Italian philosopher Vico. His solution, as someone who bitterly hated Stalin’s USSR and its tyranny, was to argue that although objective moral values didn’t exist, there were nevertheless moral values that acted as such.

I can see some positive aspects to Sargon’s position. If it is accepted that western ideas of truth and justice are just that, localised western notions, that it prevents them from being used as pretexts for foreign imperialist ventures like the Neo-Con invasions of the Middle East. It brings us back to the old, pre-War American conservative values that held that America had no business interfering in the political institutions and concerns of other peoples. But it also leaves the way open for cultural relativism and the justification of despotic regimes. If there are no objective moral values, then there can be no firm moral objections to obvious injustices, such as the genocide of the Uighurs in China or the Taliban’s recent decision to deprive women of university education. From what I’ve been reading, Chinese nationalist communists dismiss such ideas of democracy and human rights as baizuo, which translates as White liberal nonsense. And the Fascists and Communists Sargon despises were also moral relativists. Both Mussolini and Hitler also declared that each nation had their own set of unique moral values and that liberal notions of justice and humanity did not apply to their regimes. In a number of his speeches Lenin denied that there were any eternal moral values, but that these changed instead with each historical epoch, as determined by the economic structure of society at the time. This opened the way to the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazi and Soviet regimes.

The Lotus Eaters are also staunch enemies of wokeness, but Critical Theory in its various forms also relativizes traditional morality and attitudes arguing that these too are merely the local intellectual products of the west, and specifically White heterosexual elite men. This has led to Postcolonial Theorists betraying feminists and human rights activists in nations like India, by refusing to criticise these cultures repressive traditions, or instead blaming them on western imperialism.

My own belief is that there are indeed objective moral values although human moral intuitions have changed over time. Notions of democracy and human rights may have their origin in the west, but they are nevertheless universal and universally applicable. This does not mean that other cultures may not adopt and adapt them according to their own cultural traditions. In the case of Islam, there are any number of books by the Islamic modernists arguing that modern notions of human rights are perfectly in accordance with Muslim values.

For the sake of genuine humanity and international justice and the eradication of tyranny, we have to believe that there are objective moral values protecting human life and freedom.

Open Letter by Brown American Professionals Denouncing Robin Di Angelo’s Racism

James Lindsay is, with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, one of the most determined and fiercest critics of the new postmodern doctrines of Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Studies and so on. These promise tolerance and liberation from prejudice, but, in reality, they just create further hate and discrimination. Critical Race Theory does this by defining Whiteness as a bourgeois property that gives White people privilege and automatically makes them oppressors, even if they are personally non-racist. Two years ago, on June 20, 2020, Lindsay posted this on his YouTube channel. It’s an open letter by Brown American professional people criticising Robin di Angelo for her anti-White racism in such books as White Fragility. It attacks her for poisoning people’s, especially children’s, minds by making them obsess about race and thinking about how people are complicit in a racist system. They state that America wasn’t built by White, or any particular people, but by people of all colours and walks of life striving for happiness, community, freedom and a better world. They state that they are not going to shut up while everything their ancestors worked for is torn down by a woman who can’t handle her own racism or by the White children who have been bamboozled by it. They don’t sign their names, but simply say that they are Brown professionals who worked their way up in a free country. They aren’t going to give their names, because of what would happen if they did.

This is one of the peculiar turns of events that has occurred in the controversy over Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. There are now Black intellectuals, activists and YouTubers defending Whites against their demonisation by Critical Race Theory. Many of them are conservatives, like Candace Owens and Amala Ekpunobi. Owen’s posted a video a few days ago claiming that she was thanked when in the southern US by a White woman with tears in her eyes. Others are ordinary Blacks who feel that the anti-White racist rhetoric is not only racist but diverting attention away from the real problems in the Black community caused by Blacks themselves. And these Black activists and commenters complain about the racial hatred and abuse they receive, with people calling them ‘Uncle Toms’ and other slurs I can’t use. And while I suspect that Lindsey is a man of the right, Helen Pluckrose is a woman of the left. She also had a piece published on Linsey’s site stating that the struggle against CRT and the other postmodern ideologies weren’t a case of either left or right but should concern everyone who supports rational argument based on evidence, individuality and freedom of speech, the key values of western civilisation introduced by the Enlightenment.

The letter runs:

‘To Robin DiAngelo:

We address you specifically, not because you act alone, but because you stand now as a figurehead of a movement, a representative of a particular school of thought—one among a few others, to be sure. We want to say we recognize that you are racist, and we’re ready to forgive you for it.

You proudly proclaim your racism in your writings, as so often racists do. We have read your work and can see the racism dripping from every page. We think you might be right, though. Maybe it wasn’t your fault. Maybe you were “socialized” into it. That’s not true of all of us, though, and saying so isn’t fair, and it isn’t right.

We understand the impact your work is having. You would turn us against each other by teaching us to see how we’re all “complicit” in a “system” of racism. You would have our children become obsessed with racism and poisoned with it. You do this so that you will not feel so alone. And for this crime against us and our children, we would like to sit down and have a word with you.

Many of our children have been led astray, taught to obsess over race, to attempt to see it all around them in every interaction and every object around them. This has only happened in recent years under the “educational” direction of “anti-racism” advocates such as yourself. We’re terrified. Those who have fully embraced this poison may be lost, possibly forever. They’re our children, and they’re already turning on us. Imagine for a moment how that must feel for every parent, every sibling experiencing this right now.

We write this in the pale hope of saving them, not to save you, and to stand in true solidarity with one voice—brown, white, and even black—to deliver a very simple message to you.

You are wrong.

The United States of America was not built for white people, and it most certainly was not built by white people, as you, yourself, seem to know so very well. But it was also not built by people of African descent, or Latino, or Asian, or by men, or women. The United States of America, was built by all of us. All of us striving as best we could for a common dream that seemed impossible to achieve, as our founders, whose memories are being trashed for it now under tutelage like yours, fought valiantly to bring about. The United States of America was built so that all people could live free; so that every individual could strive for happiness, community, freedom, and a better world for their own children.

This American journey was built brick by brick, law by law, for hundreds of years in this country, and it was built even over thousands of years long before any such country existed. It is deeply rooted in the history of all peoples, as we made mistakes, survived hardships, and tried to answer the questions of how we could best live. And from this history, these mistakes, these hardships, and these answers, we learned. From this knowledge rose a nation—more importantly an idea. We built this, all of us, together, and we can enjoy it, together. We’ll take the good and the bad, along with that of our ancestors from every corner of this planet, and we’ll keep striving, like Americans, to do better.

So, the message we want to say to you, Robin, is simple. No.

No. We will not sit in our homes in terror as everything our parents and their parents before us worked so hard to build gets torn down. We will not let your racism infect us all and tear us apart. We will rise up and say in one unified voice: NO.

We reject any world that fosters nothing but hate and division and seeks to destroy the legacy which was handed down to us, which our people—all of our people—built and grew into together. We reject your attempts to steal our voices and redefine racism through your white, or now brown, fragility lens. We forgive you for your racism even as we reject your racist language used against us, when we attempt to object. We can see how you treat us, telling our white spouses to hate us and us to resent them, making them suffer, making them believe they are oppressors who oppress us, who they love. We can see the blatant racism in all of this, and your word games can not hide it. We’re not so stupid as you seem to think.

We want you to know, that we see the harm caused by these racist ideas and we say, NO.

We will not shut up; we will not be silenced; we will not be intimidated by white children bamboozled by the insane racist ramblings of a woman who can’t handle her own racism; and we will not accept your racism being projected onto all of us. You may have to live with your racism, but no one else does.

To each of you that hears us, it is up to you to decide what to do now. You are an individual, but we should remember that we are all in this together.

Signed,

A group of professional brown Americans (if you must know) who worked their way up in a free country. We cannot sign our right names because, thanks in some significant part to you, we know what will happen if we do. Those who feel they can, can add theirs in the comments.’

The letter can be read at: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/open-letter-robin-diangelo-anti-racism/

Helen Pluckrose Explains to Conservatives that the Left Is also Resisting Woke Postmodernism

Helen Pluckrose is one of the trio of academics with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay who are determined to write about, expose and combat that woke postmodernist theories and ideologies now threatening academia and society. While James Lindsay seems to be a man of the right, with a real hatred of communism, Pluckrose is far more left-wing. She describes her values and beliefs as socialist, but has also said that she now describes herself as a liberal from determination to preserve and uphold liberalism’s essential philosophical values of free speech, logic, reason and individualism. These vital pillars underpinning modern liberal, democratic society are denied and threatened by the new postmodernist disciplines of Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory and so on.

These disciplines reject factual analysis, replacing it instead with language and discourse, and replace logic and reason with assertion and feeling. In her book with James Lindsay, Cynical Theories (Swift Press, 2021) she quotes various postmodernist writers, who make it very clear that they reject facts and logic because that’s not how Blacks and people from ethnic minorities view and interact with the world. Instead, according to these ideologues, non-Whites use instead legend and ‘lived experience’. This irrationalism is shared by White Fascism movements. The Nazis and Italian Fascists also celebrated irrationalism, particularly in the latter’s anti-positivist movement, instead proclaiming that there were certain truths that only members of the nation (Fascists) or Volk (Nazis) could know. Instead of universalism, the Fascists and Nazis also declared that the races had their own set of values, and that modern, democratic civilisation was alien to the Italian and Aryan, Germanic peoples. Despite claiming that they’re fighting racism, the supporters and ideologues responsible for Critical Race Theory repeat some of the same racism as the Fascist right, just from an anti-White quasi-Marxist postmodern perspective.

And I imagine that a number of Blacks and other people of colour are, or would be very annoyed by Critical Race Theory’s assumptions that they are somehow less rational, less capable of using logic, than Whites. This is, after all, the same assumptions White racial theorists made to justify the system of laws keeping Blacks down, in slavery and segregation.

Pluckrose has posted a long essay, ‘A Short Letter to a Misunderstanding Right’ on Lindsay’s New Discourses channel on YouTube. The right frequently claims that the left uniformly supports the postmodern, ‘Critical’ Theories. Matt Walsh does this, as do the Lotus Eaters. In her essay, Pluckrose explains how the Critical Theories have arisen and co-opted parts of standard left-wing ideologies and concerns, but attacks the attitude that the left is solidly behind them. She states that the left is a coalition of different groups, just as the right is. She explains why Communists, Socialists and pro-capitalist liberals also reject the Critical Theories because of their intolerance, their neglect of economics and abandonment of the working class. Gender critical feminists are also strongly opposed to them because they reject the reality of biological sex.

She concludes

‘Nevertheless, while most conservatives are more keenly aware of the problems with Critical Social Justice, they are slow to understand that, like on their own side of the aisle, “the left” is a coalition made up of several factions that do not agree with one another. Just as free-market libertarians cannot reasonably be blamed for the beliefs of anti-capitalist Christian conservatives, who in turn disagree strongly with anti-capitalist conservative Muslims, and center-right classical liberals and center-right social conservatives both also exist and disagree with each other and all the rest of these groups, so too is the left comprised of people with very different ideas who fully understand and consistently oppose each other. We frequently hear much confusion from some conservatives who seem to think Marxism and postmodernism are variations on the same thing and that (in the US) all of them fall into the broader category of “liberal” despite the gallons of ink spilled over the disagreement between all of these factions for decades if not centuries. Very often, we will hear: “The left is all [Critical] Social Justice (Warriors), and if it’s not, why aren’t any of the other lefties opposing them?”

In response, the Marxists, radicals, and most socialists respond with exasperation: with something like, “Are you serious? We were the first to address the issue of postmodernism. We’ve been telling you that postmodernism is a problem for half a century now. Read our critiques of it. Begin with Chomsky vs Foucault in 1971, move on to Fredric Jameson in 1991, and then have a look what the World Socialist Web Site has to say about it right now. Liberal lefties (like me) wonder what more we have to do for you to notice both our existence and our opposition to the irrationalism and illiberalism of postmodernism and Critical Social Justice. I’ve just spent five years criticizing them full-time while advocating liberalism, and yet conservatives who found me precisely because of the criticism (and who often then leave again because of the liberalism) will still ask me why the reasonable left isn’t doing anything, if it even exists. Most of “the left” rejects Critical Social Justice every bit as much as you conservatives do, and it would be both nice and wise if you would start recognizing it and get away from the factionalist power-games mindset yourselves.

So, let’s have a deal. If conservatives can agree not to blame liberals or socialists (or even the radicals, kind of!) for Critical Social Justice, which has co-opted all of our movements and efforts against our will, we on the left can agree not to blame right-leaning libertarians and classical liberals for conspiracy theorists and religiously social conservatives who try to ban teaching of evolution and who want to render homosexuals as second-class citizens again. Your side is a coalition of factions, some of which need cleaning up, and so is ours. Most of us on “the left” are realizing we need to fight those on our Critical Social Justice fringe, and we hope you’ll start to notice.’

It’s a great piece and needs to be read by anyone concerned about the way sections of the right are using these Critical Theories as a weapon to smear and discredit the left.

The essay can be read at: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/03/letter-misunderstanding-right/

Critical Race Theory, White Privilege and the Rhetoric of Ethnic Cleansing

As readers will have probably noticed, I have very strong objections to Critical Race Theory and particularly its concept of White privilege. Critical Race Theory is a postmodern revision of Marxism, dreamt up in the 1970s by Kimberle Crenshaw and a group of Black Marxist legal scholars in the 1970s. It replaces class as the instrument of oppression with race. ‘Whiteness’ is a bourgeois quality possessed by all Whites which guarantees them social, economic and political superiority to Blacks and other people of colour. Even if the individual White person is not racist. Racism, it also holds, has not declined, but is just better hidden. Whites must be made to know Black oppression and feel guilty about it. Much of the literature of Critical Race Theory and its activism is about deliberately humiliating Whites. For example, several years ago there were student riots at Evergreen College in Oregon. The college was very liberal, and there had been for decades since the 1970s an annual withdrawal of Black students during the summer months to mark the absence of Blacks during a critical phase in the civil rights struggle or so. By the middle of the last decade, this had changed into demands for the White students to absent themselves in favour of Blacks, in order to appreciate Black marginalisation. This was succeeded by a series of aggressive student demonstration in which Blacks and their White allies insisted on forcing Whites into inferior positions. At meetings, for example, Whites were required to sit at the back and not speak. Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist with liberal views, describes it as ‘Black supremacy’. Not all Blacks supported this aggressive demonstration of racial vindictiveness, and one of Weinstein’s students, a young Black woman, shouted at the mob that she wasn’t oppressed. Students of whatever colour, who didn’t conform, were chased by the mob. Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay also demonstrated the irrationality and vicious prejudice of this woke pseudo-scholarship in the spoof papers they sent to various woke, postmodern journals, which were eventually collected up and published as Grievance Studies. In one paper, they argued that White male students should be forced to sit on the floor in order to teach them about marginalisation and persecution. They believed this would be too much for the academic journal to which they had submitted it. Alas, no; it was accepted with a reply complaining that they didn’t go far enough: the young men shouldn’t just be forced to sit on the floor, but should be chained up as well.

Part of what worries me about the concept of ‘White privilege’ is that privilege is something usually said of rich minority groups, who haven’t worked for their position, such as the aristocracy. Or the half of the British business elite that has inherited the ownership of their companies, rather than having worked their way up. It also recalls the legal privileges that accompanied the European class system, particularly under feudalism, and the legal restriction placed on Blacks in Jim Crow America and in the White-ruled colonies, like Rhodesia, Malawi and South Africa, until the beginning of Black majority rule. For example, until the establishment of democracy in the 1920s in Britain, women were barred from voting and there was a property qualification on the franchise, so that the majority of working class men did not have the vote either. I also believe that there was a property qualification on serving on juries, which was only abolished by Woy, sorry, Roy Jenkins in his socially liberal reforms of the 1960s. Much of the ire directed at Jenkins from the right comes from his decriminalisation of homosexuality and his relaxation of the divorce laws. One splenetic right-winger- from the Daily Heil perhaps? – once described him as a destroyer of British society comparable to Stalin or some other totalitarian monster. Really? Just Jenkins on his own? With his ‘good claret expression’, to use the words of caricaturist Gerald Scarfe. The last time I looked, Britain’s buildings were all standing rather than reduced to rubble by the rampaging hordes, and Jenkins and the Labour party following him had sent a precise number of zero people to concentration camps or re-education centres. But a certain type of high Tory does want all this back. The Financial Times reviewed one such book, which looked forward to the return of the property qualification for juries so they would protect property rights, and the restoration of the old order before anti-discrimination legislation.

In fact there are very strong arguments against White privilege. For a start, east Asian such as the Chinese and Japanese, perform much better educationally and economically than Whites in America and Britain. In Britain the proportion of Asians in management positions, for example, is identical to Whites. In America, they earn more and occupy superior jobs. And while Blacks are sacked before Whites, Whites are sacked before east Asians. This isn’t because east Asians are superior in IQ. It’s because they seem to work harder and have a particular set of cultural skills that allow them to succeed. And in many instances, they earned their position through very hard work against prejudice and discrimination. One social study found that the Japanese in Canada were the most ‘privileged’ ethnic group. But Japanese Canadians had had a long struggle against punitive discrimination which was worse than that experienced by people of Japanese descent in the US. And immigrants to the US from the British Caribbean earn more on average not just to native Black Americans, but also to Whites. For Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Blacks are held back not by racial discrimination in the wider society, though he doesn’t deny this exists, but because the majority Black culture hasn’t acquired the necessary social and economic skills to uplift themselves And he is fiercely critical of multiculturalism because he believes it isolates and ossifies different ethnic groups into separate enclaves and cultural preserves, thus preventing from learning from and acquiring the skills of other, more successful groups. As for White privilege, it is hard to see what privilege a homeless White man possesses compared to tenured and respected Black academics and radicals like Crenshaw.

To me, Critical Race Theory and White privilege tackle the problem of Black poverty and marginalisation from the wrong end. Instead of seeing Black poverty as the anomaly which must be tackled, it sees White success as the anomaly, which must be destroyed if Blacks and people of colour are to take their rightful place in society. Thus White people must be brought down and Whiteness abolished. The Guardian, which promotes Critical Race Theory, as claimed that this doesn’t mean White people but Whiteness as the social quality that gives them their exalted place. But one of the writers anthologised in the collection of papers, Critical Race Theory, states that there is no difference between Whiteness and White people. And one of the fears of CRT’s critics is that after attacking Whiteness, the radicals will indeed move on to attacking Whites.

It seems to me that the Critical Race Theory and White privilege are essentially a continuation of the mindset that Whites enjoy their superior social position through mechanisms of power long after those legal mechanisms had been officially abolished and the ideology on which they were based was discredited. It’s an attempted to explain why, after the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the majority of Blacks are still poor. And the rhetoric of decolonisation over here seems to be a direct transference of the bitterness felt by indigenous Africans to privileged White settlers to mainstream British, White society. And that worries me, because of the brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the White farmers in Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s thugs at the beginning of the century. I also have to say that I’m worried about the trends in Afrocentric and other Black pseudohistory that claims that Blacks are the original inhabitants of the British isles. Simon Webb of History Debunked yesterday put up a post about the claims in a book on African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK, that there are folktales of Africans invading Britain before the Romans. Webb has his own racial biases and some the historical claims he makes are also false. But if he’s right about this, then the author of the book, Hakim Adi, a professor at Chichester university, is talking pure tosh. I am aware of no such folktales, not even when I was a member of the Society for Contemporary Legend Research back in the 1990s. The closest I’ve come to it was in the long-running and sadly missed Celtic warrior strip, Slaine, in the zarjaz SF comic 2000AD. This included a race of Black Atlanteans, the Rmoahals, described as giant aboriginals. The strip’s writer, Pat Mills, based them on a legend that the standing stones of the isle of Callanish in the Hebrides were built by Black-skinned giants who dressed in feathers. Aside from that, the only other source for this curious assertion may be a garbled memory of one of the waves of colonisation that swept over Britain and the continent during prehistory. The Neolithic reached Britain from the fertile crescent over two routes. One was directly across Europe itself, the other was across North Africa and then up from Morocco through Spain. But this occurred so long ago that it was lost to memory for millennia. Archaeologists have only now been able to reconstruct it by using genetic data. Has Adi heard a garbled version of this from within the Black community, from people who mistakenly thought this was a Black African invasion? It also reminds me of the claim made a few years ago that the ancient Egyptians settled in Birmingham before the Roman conquest. This appeared in the Independent, but has, I understand, since been discredited. It also seems to me to have a certain kinship to another piece of Black myth-making, that sailors from Mali discovered America before Columbus, but didn’t enslave the Amerindians. If this happened, it would be truly remarkable, as I’ve seen claims that the Malians didn’t have any ocean-going ships. And the Malinka were a powerful slaving nation, so if they did discover the Amerindians, there would have been nothing preventing them from enslaving them as well.

My fear is that this rhetoric and pseudohistory will cause Blacks, or a minority of Blacks, to see themselves as the oppressed, true inhabitants of Britain and attack the White British as colonialist oppressors. Even if, at present, they claim otherwise. When the Black Lives Matter movement broke out, its Bristol branch stuck up posters claiming that ‘We’ve always been here’ – which is hi8storically very debatable, although some Blacks have been present in Britain at various periods from the Middle Ages onwards. Claims of Black presence further back, such as the supposed Black skin colour of Cheddar man, are more conjectural. Webb has claimed that this reconstruction was based on a false interpretation and has since been retracted, but I have not seen him cite his source for this.

Marx himself held some extremely unpleasant racial views. He’s most infamous for his anti-Semitism, as shown by him sneering at his German rival, Ferdinand Lassalles, as ‘the Jewish ni++er.’ But he also had strong prejudices against European ethnic groups. He held that the Celts, Basques and the Slavs were backward peoples who had no intrinsic right to exist and national independence. When the 1848 Revolutions broke out, he was afraid that their bids for independence would stop the class revolution he wished to promote. In a chilling passage, he looked forward to the class war becoming a race war. This recalls the horrific ethnic cleansing and deportations Stalin inflicted on the national minorities in the USSR, including the Holodomor, the artificial famine in Ukraine which killed 7 million people.

Thomas Sowell in his book Conquests and Cultures talks about the ethnic cleansing by Muslim mobs of the Ibo people by Muslims in Nigeria and the horrific bloodbath of the Biafran war. The Ibos had previously been a minor, poor tribe but had seized the opportunities presented by western, Christian missionary education, which the northern Muslims had rejected as against their faith. As a result, Ibos were better educated and held better jobs and positions of responsibility even in the Muslim north. This was naturally resented, and the resentment grew into violence. Sowell notes that these tensions were heightened by the language each side used against the other. He writes

‘The problem was not simply that there were differences of opinion, but that there were not established and mutually respected traditions for airing those differences with restraint and accommodation. Vitriolic polemic in the press and in the political arena became the norm. Epithets like “fascist” and “imperialist stooge” became commo currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.’ (p. 127). In the West there are respected means of airing such differences, but the insults sound very much like the language used by the woke, radical intersectional left against its opponents.

And there is anti-White racism and violence. Two decades ago the number of Whites killed in racist attacks was nearly the same as members of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. There have been armed attacks by Blacks on Whites in the past few weeks and months. One was when a man opened fire on the passengers on a subway. Another was when a Black man deliberately drove his car into a parade in a White community. He left behind a manifesto which made it very clear that this was an act of anti-White terrorism. But this was not treated as such by the Biden administration.

I am very pessimistic about the success of affirmative actions schemes in creating a sustainable Black middle class. As I understand it, this was originally intended to be only a temporary measure. Once Blacks had gained entry into education, the sciences, politics and business on a level comparable with Whites, these schemes were to be dismantled as they would no longer be needed. But forty years after the Runnymede Commission recommended ‘positive discrimination’ in which Blacks are to be favoured by offering places with lower grades to universities and colleges, and preferential job offers if they have lower qualifications, the mass of Black Britain still remains poor and marginalised. I don’t, however, know how bad the situation would otherwise be if these policies had not been implemented. It could be they would have been much worse.

Nevertheless I do fear that these policies will continue to fail and that, in their anger and desperation, some Blacks will begin pogroms against Whites, encouraged by the rhetoric and arguments of Critical Race Theory.

A Thorough Demolition of Postmodern Anti-Liberal Social Justice Theories

One of the other books I’ve ordered from Amazon, and which I’m reading at the moment, is Helen Pluckrose’s and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Swift Press 2020). Pluckrose and Lindsay are two thirds of the group, with Peter Boghossian, of academics that are actively seeking to lampoon and refute the various pseudo-academic disciplines that have emerged from Postmodernism and Critical Theory. These theories, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, Disability and Fat Studies, promise to help make society fairer, but instead are doing immense damage, including to the very groups they profess to want to help. They consciously reject the Enlightenment ideas of reason, evidence, science and the individual and universal. This is particularly clear in Critical Race Theory, which denounces as a failure the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, with materialist Critical Race Theorists arguing instead for segregation. CRT, Postcolonial Theory and Intersectional Feminism also reject ideas of evidence and reasoned argument on the grounds that this is a discourse created by White men to keep everyone else down. Instead they promote myth, story and lived experience as authentic, non-White ways of knowing that should takes its place. Those advocating this nonsense include Novara Media’s Dalia Gebreal, who was one of the editors of Decolonising the University a few years ago. In the case of the Postcolonialists, their view of an irrational east is exactly the same as the western Orientalists they decry following Edward Said’s Orientalism. And the real social activists in India and elsewhere in the Developing World are very much aware of it. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, but from what I’ve seen, Lindsay and Pluckrose show again and again that these Theories are only making matters worse. Real progress for Blacks, gays and other marginalised groups has come from evidence, reasoned argument and universalism – the idea that there are universal human rights, which should apply to everyone regardless of race, creed, gender or sexuality/ gender identity.

In fact some of these ideologies are actively malign and reactionary. Postcolonialist activists, for example, do not lend their voice to activists in Saudi Arabia or India protesting the oppression of women and LGBTQ people in those countries and the Middle East. It’s because the ideology itself actively defends and promotes indigenous, non-Western cultures and their worldviews, which may vehemently reject modern ideas of feminism and sexual tolerance. They’re only interested in oppression in the non-Western world when this is due, or can be blamed on, colonialism. This is explains why Barbara Barnaby, the British head of Black Lives Matter, in her speech to a fringe Labour party meeting a few years ago, condemned the toppling of Colonel Gaddafy and the consequent enslavement of Black Africans, but had nothing to say about the revival of indigenous slavery further south, such as Uganda. Nor did she mention oppression by Black African and other non-Western regimes. Instead she demanded that refugees automatically be allowed into ‘Fortress Europe’ because ‘You oppressed us under colonialism’. But overt colonial rule in many countries ended sixty or so years ago, in the 1950s and 1960s. These nations achieved their independence, and the poverty, corruption and oppression these nations have experienced since then have been at the hands of indigenous rulers. A far better argument, for me, would be to say that, as former imperial subjects, refugees from these nations deserve to be given sanctuary in Britain, and some activists have used this argument. But Barnaby’s silence about oppression and violence by indigenous non-Western regimes is part of the general refusal of Postcolonial Theory to confront this brutal reality.

The book’s blurb runs

‘Cynical Theories argues that struggles for social justice are strongest when they are founded on respect for evidence, reason and free and open debate. It deplores the harm that closed-minded Social Justice ideologues, cancel cultures and social media pile-ons are doing to the cause of social justice and liberal democracy itself.

Pluckrose and Lindsay demonstrate that only through proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas can we challenge this harmful orthodox, and offer practical strategies to combat it.’

After the Introduction, it has the following chapters

1. Postmodernism ‘A Revolution in Knowledge and Powers’
2. Postmodernism’s Applied Turn ‘Making Oppression Real’
3. Postcolonial Theory ‘Deconstructing the West to Save the Other’
4. Queer Theory ‘Freedom from the Normal’
5. Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality ‘Ending Racism by Seeing It Everywhere’
6. Feminisms and Gender Studies ‘Simplification as Sophistication’
7. Disability and Fat Studies ‘Support-Group Identity Theory’
8. Social Justice Scholarship and Thought ‘The Truth According to Social Justice’
9. Social Justice in Action ‘Theory Always Looks Good on Paper’
10. An Alternative to the Ideology of Social Justice ‘Liberalism without Identity Politics’.

This book supplies a much-need critique of these thoroughly pernicious theories, which regrettably have gained considerable ground on the Left and in academia. Instead of bringing people together and actually helping those they purport to want to help, they are actually creating more division and hatred. James Lindsay, one of the book’s authors, recently described his experience of appearing on Dr. Phil, an American talk show, to confront various Critical Race Theorists on Benjamin Boyce’s YouTube channel. When they asked him what he would recommend instead to tackle racism, he replied that it should be colour-blindness, where people are rewarded on ability. He said they looked at him as if they’d sh*t themselves.

If we are to progress as a people and species, it can only come through reason, logical argument and a concern for objective truth, as well as genuine liberal universalism, which sees everyone as equally deserving of human rights.

And that means dumping these destructive and pernicious pseudo-ideologies.

James Lindsay on Five Key Points about Critical Race Theory

James Lindsay is one of the group of academics with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose critiquing and opposing the postmodernist ideologies being introduced to undermine traditional western society. These include Queer and Critical Race Theory. These ideologies, although they seem liberal and well-intentioned, aren’t about tackling prejudice and discrimination against gay and trans people, in the case of Queer Theory, nor tackling racism in that of Critical Race Theory. Rather, they were devised as part of a Marxist strategy of reaching out to other, marginalised groups in place of the working class, in order to create a revolutionary consciousness. The goal is not to make the situation better, but to use the consciousness of discrimination, or the psychological harm done by the ideology itself, in the case of Queer Theory, to radicalise young people and turn them towards Marxist revolution. It is only after this revolution has occurred that the advocates of these theories believe issues like gay rights and racism will be properly tackled. In this video from Lindsay’s New Discourses channel on YouTube, he talks about Critical Race Theory’s five key traits and how the listener could summarise it to inform other people about the theory and its dangers.

At over 53 minutes, it’s a long video, but from the 48 minute mark Lindsay summarises the main points. This is in addition to having to be very careful about language and the way it is used and abused by the Critical Race Theorists, the fact that they are liars, and call everything racist until they control it. The points are

1. Critical Race Theory is a form of Marxism that uses race instead of class as the governing principle of society and instrument of oppression. The theory’s use in schools is the same as Mao’s radicalisation of China’s young people during the Cultural Revolution.
2. This racism benefits all White people, whether they are aware of it or not, or like it or not.
3. Critical Race Theory exists to make more critical race theorists at the expense of everything else.
4. Racism is the overwhelming cause of all inequality.
5. Critical Race Theory influences all curricula and academic subjects in order to get itself taught, including maths.

He also makes the point that Critical Race Theory will not be removed except through a struggle. It is about race and power, and aims to monopolise the latter. It holds that racism doesn’t get better over time, but simply learns to hide itself better. In fact, it considers that racism is getting worse so that the situation now is worse than it was in the 19th century.

This all sounds like far-right paranoia, but Lindsay backs up his claims with quotations from the Critical Race Theorists themselves and other relevant Marxist ideologues, like Marcuse and Horkheimer. I also think that he and the other members of his group, while definitely not being Marxists, are liberals. Helen Pluckrose has said that she was a socialist, but now considers herself a liberal because of the need to protect free speech against these ideologies, but her political views haven’t changed. She and they have founded an organisation to help people fighting against Critical Race Theory. She states that she is certainly not an opponent of tackling racism, but regards CRT as very much the wrong way to do it.

What I find CRT’s most pernicious feature is the way it indoctrinates Blacks and other people of colour to believe that they are uniformly oppressed by Whites, and tells Whites that they are uniformly the beneficiaries of this racism and so have to acknowledge it and be regretful.

I don’t deny that racism exists and needs to be tackled. But this is just making it much worse.

Rightwingers Outraged at Acquittal of the Four Who Toppled Colston’s Statue

As a Bristolian with long personal roots in the city, I feel I’ve got to tackle this. The four people responsible for pulling the down the statue of the 18th century slave trader and philanthropist in a massive Black Lives Matter protest last year were on trial for it this week. They were charged with criminal damage, and yesterday were found ‘not guilty’ by the jury. And the right has been predictably incensed. The story’s on the front page of the Daily Mail, which reports that the jury may have been placed under pressure to acquit by the defence, which urged them ‘not to be on the wrong side of history’. The prosecution is therefore planning to appeal the decision. Nigel Farage has released a video on YouTube about it. Mixed-race Tory commenter Calvin Robinson has appeared on GB News talking about it. And inevitably the Lotus Eaters have also released a video about it, with Callum and one of Sargon’s other mates expressing their poor opinion of the whole thing. The message from the right has been the same: this decision imperils every statue in Britain, because it legitimises attacks on them through an appeal to the emotions of the attacker regardless of the letter of the law. Calvin Robinson in his interview on GB News agreed with the two journalists, one Black, one White, that you had to be very careful about limiting people’s freedom of expression. However the decision to acquit was, he explained, based on a legal loophole in the criminal damage law. This permits such damage, if the property damaged or destroyed itself serves to promote a crime. The argument made by the accused in a feature about them in the Groan was that the statue constituted a hate crime against Black Bristolians. The right-wing critics of the decision have therefore argued that this makes every statue unsafe, as an emotional reason could be found for any attack on them. The person, who vandalised Churchill’s statue last year could get off because, despite defeating Fascism, Churchill was a racist and imperialist. They have also made the point that the decision also means that Conservatives also have a right to tear down Marx’s bust in London, as he was also racist and anti-Semitic, quite apart from the millions murdered under Communism. Darren Grimes, the repulsive spawn of the Guido Fawkes site, said that he could also therefore tear down the statue of Friedrich Engels in Manchester.

Jury Freedom and the Historic Acquittal of Guilty Murderers

Yesterday Simon Webb of History Debunked also joined the debate, comparing the decision to the jury’s acquittal of the attackers of three policemen during a riot in 1820s London. The cops had been stabbed, and one killed, but the jury acquitted their attackers because the cops had attacked in a particularly aggressive and provocative manner. Webb stated that back in the 17th and 18th centuries judges could and did send juries back to reconsider their verdict, and even imprison them if they didn’t give the right verdict as directed. It was, of course, a great improvement to allow the juries the freedom to judge themselves rather than according to the opinion of the beak. But this did raise problems in cases like this. Indeed. Juries won the right to judge freely according to their own judgement following arguments for such free trials by the Levellers and particularly when William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania, was put on trial for preaching his radical views in Bristol. The jury repeatedly refused the judge’s order to find guilty, and were even imprisoned. They eventually won out, and the trial helped established true British justice.

Allegations of Bias against Witness David Olasuga

One of the other objections to the trial was that one of the witnesses was the historian, David Olasuga. whom the Lotus Eaters describe as a Black activist and who admitted that, had he been able, he would have joined the mob in toppling the status. There is indeed a problem with Olasuga as some of his historical interpretations are questionable. For example, he and Reni Edo-Lodge turned up in video by the Beeb laying a plaque in Liverpool to a victim of racist lynching. Except that Wootton, the lynched man, had been part of a gang of West Indians, who had launched an attack on a group of Swedes and Russians. When a cop intervened, the West Indians repeated stabbed and tried to slash his throat. They retreated to a house where someone, probably Wootton, shot three policemen, before he was chased down to the docks trying to escape. He was hardly an innocent victim. Olasuga has been one of the Black historians claiming that historically, Britain had a much larger Black community than it probably did. He claims that there were Blacks in Roman Britain. History Debunked has shown that this largely comes from one of the legions at Hadrian’s Wall coming from the Roman province of Mauretania. This has been confused with the present day country in West Africa. However, the Roman province of Mauretania was further north in Morocco. I think there are perfectly reasonable questions of bias in Olasuga’s testimony.

Political Bias in Prosecution of Vandals

And then have come the various commenters sneering and deriding Bristol. I’ve seen the usual rants about how it’s a ‘Communist’ or ‘left-wing’ shithole; it’s a lefty university town, and as terrible as Liverpool or London. Rather more interesting was one comment from a working class Bristolian, who had been having a meal at a cafe in the city, whose customers were largely Black West Indians. These people had all been solidly against the decision. I can well believe it. I don’t think the Black community Bristol or elsewhere in our great nation is a monolithic bloc. Just like other racial groups, like Whites, Asians or Jews aren’t either. As for the four defendants, they were White middle class liberal kids, who most likely didn’t come from Bristol. There was also speculation about what would happen if someone vandalised a statue to a Black personality, like Nelson Mandela. Would this be treated the same way? Not if the example of the vandalism done to a mural of Marcus Rashford was an example. Although the messages sprayed on it weren’t racist, it was nevertheless treated as a racist hate crime. Actually, you don’t have to look that far for a similar example. After Colston’s statue was torn down, a bust in one of Bristol’s parks of a Black writer and dramatist was vandalised and the cops were after those responsible.

Some Black Bristolians Genuinely Upset at Statue

As for the feelings of fear or outrage that the defendants claimed justified the attack, the Black interviewer on GB News and Robinson both questioned whether Black people are so emotional fragile that they would be upset simply walking past Colston’s statue. Some may well not be, but others definitely were. Asher Craig, Bristol’s deputy elected mayor, head of equalities and city councillor for St. George’s, was on Radio 4 last year giving her opinion about the statue and Bristol’s historic connection to the slave trade. The programme also talked to others about it, including one ordinary Black woman. She said that she felt physically sick having to walk past it on the way to work every morning. I understand and sympathise. I think her example was far better and more persuasive than the various political activists angrily demanding that it should be torn down. It was the voice of an ordinary, working-class woman, about how the statue affected her.

Arguments for the Preservation of the Statue

It also has to be stated that Black Lives Matter’s attack was deliberately against the wishes of Bristolians themselves. There had been several polls in the past about whether the statue should be taken down or not. The majority of people voted against it. Paul Stephenson, one of the organisers of the Bristol bus boycott in the 1960s against the bus company’s refusal to employ Blacks, gave his opinion on the issue in an interview with Philippa Gregory in the 1990s. Gregory had just had her novel, A Respectable Trade, about the Bristol slave trade adapted for television and there was an exhibition about the city and slavery then at the City Museum and Art Gallery. It has since been moved and is now on display, sans title, at the city’s excellent M Shed Museum. Stephenson has something of a mixed reputation. To some he’s a respected civil rights activists, while others regard him more a deliberate troublemaker. He declared to Gregory that Colston was a bloody mass murderer responsible for a ‘Holocaust in Africa’. This follows the statement of W.E.B. DuBois, the pioneering American Black rights activist, that slavery and the slave trade were a Black Holocaust. It sounds like hyperbole, a deliberately emotional exaggeration, but I believe it’s based on the accounts of 19th century anti-slavery activists about the fierce tribal violence generated by the slave trade, and the devastation of whole regions as a result. But Stephenson also said that he didn’t think the statue should be torn down. He believed it should remain standing with an additional note to remind people of his crimes. A similar argument was made by the Lotus Eaters, who felt that statues should be left standing, even though they may be to terrible people, because they’re history. And we need to learn from history if we are to move on.

It’s a perfectly good argument, and one advanced in the ’90s by radical anarchist band The Levellers. They took their name from the radical, proto-democrat, proto-socialist sect during the British Civil War. They also believed in ‘Godly reformation’ and so, along with the other merchandising at their concerts were copies of the Bible and Christopher Hill’s Marxist study of the British Civil War, The World Turned Upside Down. I particularly remember one of their songs that had the lines ‘I believe in justice, I believe in vengeance, I believe in getting the bastard’. But they also released a song protesting about the decision by Manchester’s Labour council to rename the town’s historic Free Trade Hall. They objected to it because it was the destruction of history and an attempt to rewrite the past. It’s strange and rather disconcerting that they should have the same view on this issue from a libertarian left perspective, as the Tories.

Lastly, it needs to be remembered that Colston was not honoured for enslaving Blacks. The statue was put up long after that was over. Rather it was because he was a great philanthropist, who gave much of his fortune away in charity. There were schools named after him and funded by his largesse. My old school used to celebrate Colston Day in his honour, when the children were given a few days off. A few were specially honoured and went to a special service at Redcliffe Church, where they were given a Colston bun.

Bristol Great City

Now for a few remarks on the decision and the views of the various right-winger, who have sounded off about it. Firstly, Bristol isn’t a shithole. It’s a large, great city with a proud history of trade, exploration, industry and invention with excellent museums and theatres. The Bristol Old Vic and its theatre school have a particularly excellent reputation and have produced some of the country’s great thesps. It has it’s problems. I believe that the Bristol’s Black community is one of the three largest in the country, along with Birmingham and London. It has its problems with marginalisation, lack of educational achievement, unemployment, drugs and violent crime, though this is by no means confined simply to Blacks. But it’s not particularly left-wing. Some areas, like Stokes Croft, have a reputation for radical politics. I’ve heard local people refer to it as ‘the people’s republic of Stokes Croft’. Other areas are Conservative, and all the shades of political opinion in between.

Academic Freedom and Marxist Indoctrination at Universities

As for the universities, the comment blaming them for the decision comes from the standard right-wing attitude that the unis are full of Marxists indoctrinating students. In fact, universities, courses and individual lecturers vary immensely. Some universities had a reputation, even in my day, for being hotbeds of left-wing activism, others were more Conservative. It also varies with the course you’re on. There hasn’t, traditionally, been much opportunity for far left-wing indoctrination in maths, science, medicine and engineering courses because of the nature of those subjects. Although it’s creeping in now in the form of ethnomathematics and the demands that the achievements of Black scientists and mathematicians should be particularly taught, it’s mostly been confined to the humanities. There have always been Marxist historians. These include the very well respected Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Saunders, and there is a specific Marxist view of history. You are taught about this on the historiography courses in history at University, along with other forms of history, such as women’s history, social history, what Butterfield called the ‘Whig view of history’ and more conservative and Conservative views. I’ve been taught by lecturers with feminist or left-wing views. I’ve also been taught by people with far more traditional views. I also know lecturer who determined to keep their political views out of the classroom. University is supposed to be a place of free speech and debate, and it’s important that this is maintained. Students should be encouraged to read sources and the historical literature critically, and make up their own views. This means an engagement with Marxism as well as other ideologies. I think Bristol university has particularly come under fire because it’s rather more conservative and traditional compared to the newer universities. It received funding from the Colston charities when it was established early in the last century. Hence I believe the granting of a chair in the history of slavery to a Black woman. It also has relatively few Black students, which contrasts with the population of the city as a whole. This is partly because it has very high standards, and as a rule Blacks generally have poorer grades than other racial groups. It is also no doubt because when I was young, going away was seen as part of university education and so you were discouraged from applying to the local university. Hence the university is now trying to give greater opportunities to study to more Blacks and ethnic minorities.

Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory and the Marxist Attack on Western Culture

Now I largely agree that the acquittal of the four defendants has set a dangerous precedent because it allows people to attack public monuments they dislike or which are controversial. James Lindsay, one of the group with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose that has attacked postmodernist Critical Theory, has argued that ideologies like Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory are deliberate attacks on traditional western culture and Enlightenment values. They are aimed at destroying the past to create a Marxist future, just as Chairman Mao did during the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. One of the ancient monuments the Red cadres smashed as part of the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ was the tomb of Confucius! This sounds like an idea straight out of loony right-wing paranoids and conspiracists like Alex Jones and the John Birch Society, until he backs it up by reading chapter and verse from the founders of such postmodernist Marxism, like Marcuse, Horkheimer and others. And yes, I can quite believe that vandalism to a monument to a Black politico or celebrity, like Nelson Mandela, would be treated far differently and as a terrible hate crime than the attack on Colston.

But regardless of the defence’s plea to the jury to ‘be on the right side of history’, I think there would always have been pressure on the jury to acquit. Colston was a slave trader and had been controversial for decades. They naturally wouldn’t have wanted to acquit people who attacked a monument on that score, rather than the philanthropy the statue commemorated. And the defendants make a good point when they say that ‘he no longer speaks for Bristol’. There were others in the city who opposed the slave trade. As well as the slavers and the West Indian planters, Bristol also had a large abolitionist movement. If you go a little way from the centre of Bristol into Redcliffe, you’ll find the Georgian church where Jeremiah Clarkson, one of the leading 18th century abolitionists, collected the testimony of Bristol’s slavers as part of his evidence against the trade.

Other Statues Not Vandalised

As for other statues, none of those in the surrounding area were touched. Not the statue to Edmund Burke, the politician and founder of modern Conservatism through his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Lotus Eaters are offering it, or reading through it, as their ‘book of the month’. I wonder if they’ll mention that Burke’s statue was signally left untouched by the rioters. As was the statue of a monk in Lewin’s Mead, which had before the Reformation been a monastic complex. They also failed to destroy the statue of Neptune and a sailor on the docks. Queen Victoria was left untouched on nearby College Green. They also didn’t destroy the statue of John Cabot outside the Council House, sorry, ‘City Hall’ and the Central Library. This was despite various ‘spokesmen’ for the Black community claiming that the City’s celebration of his discovery of Newfoundland and America, following Columbus, was a celebration of slavery. There may well be similar defences used on similar attacks on other statues, but I think such attacks will be far more difficult to defend. Churchill was indeed a racist and an imperialist, as well as personally responsible for sending troops to gun down striking miners in Wales. But to the vast majority of severely normal Brits he was also the man, who helped save Europe and the world from Nazism and the Axis. And that would also count powerfully in the case against anyone who vandalised his monument.

Historians also Successfully Defend Controversial Statues

As for testimony from historians, this can work against the iconoclasts. The BLM fanatics trying to get the statue of Cecil Rhodes torn down at Oxford university claimed that he was somehow ‘South Africa’s Adolf Hitler’. Now Rhodes was a grotty character and an imperialist, but this goes too far. Rhodes’ biographer tackled this claim on social media, at which the BLM protesters making it went quiet. They couldn’t refute it, and so went silent.

I therefore do not feel that other statues are necessarily in a greater danger than previously because of the acquittal.

Then there’s the question of any possible statue to replace it. There are rumours that it could be a Black person. Well, if there is, it should be of a Black person, who actually had contact and lived in the city. One of Bristol’s sporting heroes way back was a Black boxer. One of my aunts was friends with his daughter. I’d say this gentleman would be a good candidate for such a statue, because as a sports hero he united everyone from left and right, as well as being a citizen of Bristol.

Nigel Farage has suggested a memorial to the British navy. Absolutely. The British West India squadron did excellent work patrolling the seas for slavers. And they were by no means all racist. Captain Denman, giving evidence on a massacre of 300 unsold slaves by one of the West African slaving states to parliament, made the point that ‘it is remarkable given the advances they have made in the arts of civilisation’. He clearly believe European civilisation was superior, but had been particularly shocked because the African peoples responsible for the massacre were also comparatively civilised. Africans serving or aiding the British navy were also given the compensation payments awarded to British tars when they suffered injury and loss of limbs.

We also patrolled the waters between east Africa and India to stop western and Arab slavers, and one antipodean historian has written that in the Pacific, the royal navy was the chief protector of its indigenous peoples against enslavement.

It also needs to be remembered that one of the reasons for the British invasion of Africa was to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. I’ve no doubt that the main, if not the real reasons were simple hunger for territory and resources, and to stop those areas falling into the hands of our European imperial rivals – France, Germany, Italy and Portugal. But some of the officer involved took their duty extremely serious, such as Samuel Baker and Gordon of Khartoum. The Mahdi, against whom Gordon fought, and his followers were slavers outraged at the British government’s ban on it and the enslavement of Black Sudanese. There are therefore excellent reasons for putting up a memorial to the British navy and armed forces.

And I would also support a statue to Jeremiah Clarkson for his work in the city bringing the horrors of the trade to light.

In the meantime, despite the right-wing outrage at this act of vandalism, I think we should view the attack on Colston’s statue as a special case.

Claims of a general threat to British history because of it may well be exaggerated.

James Lindsay on Post-Modern Marxism and the Indoctrination of Children in Sex Education

This is one of the serious videos I want to post and discuss. What Lindsay says is alarming and should leave any decent person deeply concerned about the direction sex education is taking in America and increasingly over here. Because he argues that the recent inclusion of real pornographic material as educational tools and very detailed discussion of different sexualities and gender identities isn’t by accident, nor is it done, as it claims, to help gay or transgender students. Rather it’s a deliberate ploy by a noxious coalition of post-modernist Marxists and MAPs – Minor Attracted Persons, or paedophiles to the rest of us – to destroy childhood innocence. The intention is not to help children properly understand their developing sexuality and anatomy, but to increase their anxiety and unhappiness in order to create socially disaffected young people alienated from their parents and society, ready to start the revolution.

Conspiracy theories like this have been going round the Conservative right for donkey’s years, usually ascribing this to ‘cultural Marxism’, the Frankfurt School and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. I didn’t give them much credence, especially as the term ‘cultural Marxism’ is derived from the Nazis ‘Kulturbolschevismus’, ‘Cultural Bolshevism’, and was part of their noxious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It sounds so bonkers and extreme, that if it appeared in the pages of Daily Heil, I would have quite happily disregarded it. But Lindsay is an American mathematician and part of the group, with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, that has taken on postmodernist Critical Theory and its offshoots – Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, to show how pernicious and destructive these ideas actually are. He’s familiar with the literature, although he states his knowledge of it isn’t perfect and he needs to do more reading. But he cites the lead thinkers to back up this argument.

Lukacz and the Destruction of Childhood Innocence

For Lindsay, this all started with George Lukacz, one of the leaders of the 1919 Communist Revolution in Hungary. Lukacz started sex education in Hungarian schools with the deliberate intention of fomenting radical dissent amongst the students against traditional, Christian society and morality. He introduced pornographic material similar to what is now being promoted in American schools. There was a outrage a few weeks ago about one of the Young Adult books now being recommended as part of American Sex and Social Development Education. This was explicitly about the character’s exploration of queer sexuality and included a scene where one individual has oral sex with a girl wearing a strap-on dildo. He also introduced notions of different sexual identities. This is because Lukacz, and later postmodern Critical Theorists, hate the idea of childhood innocence. They see this as part of a mechanism by repressive capitalist society to repress children’s sexuality in order to redirect it towards capitalist work. They also have similar ideas about ‘White innocence’. They don’t like people growing up in environments where race is not an issue and where folks value each other for what they are, rather than the colour of their skin. This is another function of repressive, exploitative capitalism. Only Whites are racially innocent, as Blacks and other ethnic minorities have to live with the reality of a very racialised society. Lindsay states that this is nonsense, as the attacks on White culture over the past 30 years have shown.

Bela Kun’s Communist government was overthrown, and Lukacz fled to Germany, where he met the Frankfurt school of Marxist scholars, including Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Horkheimer and Felix Weil, who bankrolled the movement. These took up his ideas and later imported them into America after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Also influential in this movement was Gramsci and his ideas of cultural hegemony. Gramsci turned the Marxist doctrine of the economic base determining culture on its head. Faced with the failure of the working class to rise up and overthrow capitalism, he theorised that what was needed was to change the prevailing culture. Lukacz and the others saw five main obstacles to spreading Marxism in Europe. One of these was religion. They also hated the natural bond between parents and their children, which also acts as a stabilising influence. According to Lindsay, they see sexuality and people as an ‘identity without essence’. They don’t have a fixed identity, and so Critical Theory deliberately tries to destabilise this even further, to create more confusion and discontent, and break the bond between children and parents as part of a wider campaign to discredit traditional culture. Lindsay compares this with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, its attack on the ‘Four Olds’ and the use of children to inform on and persecute their parents. These ideas were behind the far left discontent on the 1960s. Capitalism had produced rising living standards, and the working class were no longer interested in overthrowing capitalism. Marxist intellectuals were therefore determined to find a new revolutionary class, and so began looking towards other social groups like gays. The sexual radicalism of the 60s was part of a wider Marxist attack on traditional social mores.

Capitalism’s Suppresson of the Libido

Lindsay recognises that the monogamy the Queer Theorists despise is difficult for humanity. People aren’t good at it. Nevertheless, he believes that there is a human sexual morality and that traditional Christian morality roughly approximates to it, but not perfectly. I think Lindsay is an atheist/ Humanist. He is also aware that Christians have persecuted gays. But Queer Theory isn’t about solving those problems, and the Marxist sexual radicals have promoted paedophilia. In the 1980s Judith Butler, one of the founders of Queer Theory, wrote a book defending paedophilia. He also talks about a book by Herbert Marcuse which tried to mix Freud and Marxism to challenge what he saw as capitalism’s suppression of the libido and redirection into capitalist work. This also aimed at destabilising the personalities of the young minds, which were to be indoctrinated with this teaching, but felt they would emerge as ideologically ‘mature’ individuals. Lindsay notes that this is about spreading political awareness amongst children. Marcuse’s use of ‘mature’ rather than adult is deliberate.

Most Teachers Want to Teach, Not Indoctrinate

Lindsay has nothing but loathing and contempt for these ideas and their promoters. He states at one point that they should be in jail, which is fascistic but understandable if he’s right about what’s going on. If this is being done to normalise paedophilia and to exploit young people’s discomfort about their emerging sexuality, it it’s not about genuinely helping gay and transgender children but about making their confusion and maladjustment worse, then it has no place in schools. In contrast to the scare stories about Commie teachers indoctrinating students, most teachers are severely normal people. They don’t wish to indoctrinate students but simply stand in front of a class and teach their subject. And these are boring, traditional subjects like maths, science, history, geography, whatever. I don’t know what the situation is in America, but in Britain Tony Blair brought in very strict legislation banning indoctrination in schools. All that is needed to stop the extremists doing it in Britain is simply to discipline and sack them according to the law. But I do agree that anyone deliberately promoting paedophilia to children should be banged up behind bars.

Mobilising People against Queer Theory

I think Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose are people of the left, not Conservatives. Pluckrose now defines herself as a liberal rather than a socialist, although she says her actual political ideas haven’t changed. Lindsay wants a coalition of people from left and right, Republican and Democrat, Black and White, to challenge and attack these ideas. People should be aware of what their children are being taught in schools. And if their kids are being fed literature like that wretchedly explicit book, they should confront the school board, film it and then try and place the video on YouTube. It won’t be accepted, because the platform will view it as pornography. Case proven.

Older Marxists Not Sexual Radicals

If Lindsay is correct, which he seems to be, then the right’s attack on ‘cultural Marxism’ is actually right, and definitely needs to be fought. But this doesn’t mean that anything else the right says – about free markets bringing prosperity, for example, is correct. The 60s were an era of prosperity partly because government was strongly involved in business and economic growth. And the Critical Theorists’ view of sexual morality is strongly contrary to the life styles and views of many of the older generation of working class Marxists. Instead of believing in free love, most of them believed in marriage and the family. When Andre Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, gave a lecture on free love to the French railwaymen’s union in the 1920s, his solidly Communist audience were very definitely not impressed.

What Lindsay says about the influence of Marxist critical attacks on traditional sexuality and its influence on 60s radicalism is important, if true. The attack on marriage and promotion of free love went far beyond Marxism into anarchism, situationism and similar movements, and I’d always assumed it was due to ideas that predated Marx and which were held across the radical left. In many cases, I think that’s true. But there does seem to be a definite Marxist strategy there as well. It explains why so many revolutionaries of that period were also rebelling against traditional sexual morality.

There is a danger here of starting a new McCarthyism in which anything vaguely left-wing is suddenly smeared as ‘Communist’, like the Right tried to do with Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in Labour.

But Queer Theory does seem to be utterly pernicious and really needs to be fought.

James Lindsay Versus the Postmodernists Who Think 2+2=4 Is Racist

No, I’m really not making this up. This is what some of the idiots who support Critical Race Theory actually believe. And it really does frighten me what will happen if this morons ever get the power they’re aiming for.

I came across the video from The Same Drugs in which host Meghan Murphy talks to James Lindsay. Murphy’s a feminist, who graduated in gender studies. She’s very definitely on the left and says that her views on welfare and the economy are socialist. However, she now describes herself as a liberal because of the immense importance of defending free speech and debate. Lindsay is also a man of the left. He’s a doctor of mathematics, although he says that he’s been away from the discipline for so long that he wouldn’t describe himself as a mathematician. He’s a member of the group with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose that attacks and refutes Critical Race Theory and the other forms of Postmodernism which reject rationality, evidence and reasoned debate because these are all supposed to be the oppressive values of White males.

I started watching this video, but didn’t get any further than about ten minutes because I was so astonished at what I was hearing. Lindsay apparently got into an internet argument with radical postmodernists and racial activists, who really do believe that 2+2=4 is a form of colonial oppression. Lindsay says the fight started when he put up a kind of Devil’s Dictionary in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce, giving satirical definitions of words sending up CRT and related ideologies. In this instance, it was about Critical Race Theorists rejecting 2+2=4 because by choosing four as the solution, other values were suppressed. This was then picked up by his opponents on the other side, who then posted on Twitter and social media that, yes, 2+2=4 was racist. One of these was the woman in charge of decolonising Seattle’s educational curriculum. Another was a Guardian hack, who snidely posted that it was rich of him to say that while using Arabic numerals. He points out that she couldn’t refute his mocking definition, because that really was what she believed. She could only respond by attacking him. And then he was met by a flood of people trying to prove that 2+2=5. When asked if you can do this, he replies by saying that it isn’t. All the proofs they’re using are wrong. This was then followed by people talking about how western traders cheated the various indigenous peoples around the world, who can’t count beyond three. Yes, they also exist. This was to show that 2+2=4 really was part of an ideology of imperialist and colonialist oppression. Lindsay states that the people arguing against him were maths educators rather than mathematicians, including someone on a science and technology course at Edinburgh University in Scotland.

This is genuinely frightening as it’s a rejection of one of the simplest, foundational sums of mathematics, and by extension, all maths simply for reasons of ideology. Of course people have been speculating that their might be other regions in the cosmos or multiverse in which 2+2=5 for some time. There’s a bit in the Tim Burton SF flick, Mars Attacks, in which Piers Brosnan’s scientist character explains this to a fashion journalist. Back in the 1990s I picked up a postmodernist book on maths, which claimed it was taking God out, and the body back in. And when I was at school there were various books for children which contained trick sums that gave stupid values for simple sums like 2+2=4. These were always based on a carefully concealed mistake.

Well, western maths goes all the way back to ancient Sumeria, Babylon and Egypt, and I’m very certain that these African and Asian cultures knew exactly that 2+2=4. As did the superb mathematicians of Islam, India, China and Japan. And I think it’s insulting to any Black people wishing to study maths and science that these idiots are now telling them that the foundational principles of western mathematics aren’t suitable for them and are a form of ideological enslavement which must be torn down in order to decolonise the discipline.

I am sure the people, who believe this nonsense regard themselves as intellectual sophisticates at the very cutting edge of maths and progressive politics. But I think they’re really just barbarians, who will wreck maths and science with pseudointellectual gibberish, destroying western civilisation for an intellectually bankrupt, racist ideology.