Egyptian Lawyer Suing Netflix for Portraying Cleopatra as Black

Netflix has caused a bit of controversy this week with its documentary about the legendary queen of Egypt by having her played by a Black actor. This is unhistorical, as the real Cleopatra was Greek, descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Ptolemy had set himself up as pharaoh after Alexander’s death. I’ve also heard the claim today that she also had red hair. There have been a number of posts by bloggers and vloggers across the Net showing that Netflix got it wrong. And now, apparently, an Egyptian lawyer is so angry about it and the threat it presents to Egyptian identity that he’s suing Netflix. He also wants the streaming service banned in Egypt because its content is contrary to Islam, and especially Egyptian Islam.

His argument is that the portrayal of Cleopatra as a woman of colour is Afrocentric, and derives from that ideology’s doctrine that the originally ancient Egyptians were wholly Black and only became lighter through later invasion and immigration. This is a correct description of the Afrocentric view of ancient Egypt, although some leading Afrocentrists, like Cheikh Anta Diop, also thought that the ancient Egyptians were a racial mixture of Black and White. The idea that the ancient Egyptians and thus Cleopatra were Black is fervently held by very many western Blacks. The Black activist Akala gave a talk to the Oxford Union a few years ago arguing for the view. The contrary view, that the ancient Egyptians were light-skinned Caucasians, is dismissed as a colonialist doctrine intended to deny Blacks knowledge of their true history. There’s a weird conspiracy theory added to this. I’ve heard Blacks claim that White, British authorities deliberately chopped the lips and noses off ancient Egyptian statues in order to disguise their negritude.

The lawyer is not just angry at Neflix’s portrayal of Egypt’s most famous queen, but he also fears that this is a truly colonialist attitude that will lead to the displacement of his people from their homeland. He states that Afrocentrism is a doctrine that teaches specifically Black Americans that they are the true Egyptians and demands their return to Egypt. This is certainly true of a number of Black Muslim sects, beginning with the Moorish Science Temple. However, he adds that this return to Egypt is also coupled with a call to expel or displace the present indigenous Egyptian population. I’ve done some reading on Afrocentrism, and haven’t found that as an Afrocentric doctrine. The founders of Black American Islam seem to have claimed to be either Egyptian, or to have been told the true history of ancient Egypt during visits to the country by Egyptian holy men. I haven’t come across any doctrine in the Afrocentric religions calling for the disinheritance and ethnic cleansing of present-day Egyptians. The insistence that the ancient Egyptians were Black has caused friction at some Egyptological conferences and symposia held in Egypt, but I’m not aware of anything more serious.

I’m not a Muslim, so I can’t comment whether Netflix’s content is contrary to Islam or not. Some Islamic countries, such as Iran, have very strict rules regarding what may be shown on the screen. Violence is forbidden along with relationships between men and women. Hence a few years ago there was a spate of Iranian movies about the adventures of children. Other Muslim countries have different attitudes. When Dallas was still a force on global TV, I was surprised by a statement from one of the Gulf Arab states that the show was enjoyed by its people, and they felt that Patrick Duffy’s character exemplified proper Muslim values. That must have been before the character had an adulterous affair. The accusation that Neftlix is contrary to Islam therefore seems to me to be an extra allegation just to get the service banned in Egypt. The real reason is the documentary’s perceived insult and threat to Egyptian ethnic identity.

It seems to me that the problem is that Netflix wanted to please Black American ideas about ancient Egypt, ignoring how the Egyptians themselves saw their identity. This is a form of colonialism. One of the doctrines of Critical Race Theory is ‘epistemic violence’, which holds that White supremacy denies the colonised, darker peoples a voice and the ability to describe their position. Well, this is clearly what the portrayal of Cleopatra as Black for Afrocentric reasons has done, although I doubt this would be recognised by Critical Race Theorists, for whom the victims of such violent colonialist discourse are always Black. This controversy is itself another refutation of Critical Race Theory.

Sociology Professor Shows How the World Has Different Views of Race to Americans

Here’s another interesting video from the same sociology professor, who showed that Korea and other societies outside Europe also had the ideal of pale features as their standard of beauty. In this video he shows that other peoples also don’t necessarily see race the same way as Americans. He talks of a trip he and his students made to Haiti. They had a couple of Black Americans with them, who the Haitians called ‘Blans’ – Whites. The Haitians regarded them as White, despite their dark skin colour, simply because they were Americans.

I came across much the same attitude in Nigel Barley’s The Innocent Anthropologist. Barley’s an anthropologist, and the book’s his hilarious account of his time doing field work with Dowayo of Cameroon. One of the other westerners in the area was a very racially aware Black American anthropologist. The man was very much into ideals of Black brotherhood, and so was keen to live the same way as the local people. They, however, regarded him as ‘the Black White man’, the African term for westernised Blacks. Rather than respect him for trying to live like them, they expected him instead to behave like every other American. They also despised him for being mean. The guy refused to have any servants to do his laundry, as his ancestors had been servants during slavery. But in Africa, if you’re wealthy you’re expected to spread it around by employing people. And so his refusal not employ laundrymen wasn’t seen as a gesture of Black dignity and solidarity, but simply him being tight-fisted. The guy also had been surprised to find out that nobody in that part of Africa had heard of a supposedly African festival celebrated at about the same time as Christmas. Thinking about the passage, it sounds like Kwanzaa. This is supposed to be an authentic African festival, but was actually invented by Black radicals in the 1960s, although it’s based on a Swahili harvest festival. Barley also talks about how he was blind to the racism within African society. For example, the fellow didn’t see the way the Fulani traders in the local market operated to keep other tribes out. There were other examples in the book. During conversations with some of the Africans, he was told that the nuns massacred in the Congo were killed because they were racist. When they were asked about the Dowayo, however, these same Africans denounced them as terrible pagans and ‘sons of dogs’ before asking him what was racist about that.

There are other ideas of race and other forms of racism not centred around colour, but this is too often ignored because of western ideas of race.

Simon Webb Claims that the Haye-On-Wye Literary Festival is Dumbing Down with the Inclusion of Stormzy and Dua Lipa

More from our favourite internet non-historian. History Debunked put up a piece today criticising the Haye-on-Wye literary festival for heading downmarket in the name of diversity. They’ve had a change of director, and according to him, the festival has been judged to be ‘too White’. And so make it more inclusive, they have included the Black rapper Stormzy and Dua Lipa, another pop star, who’s of Albanian heritage. He argues that there are plenty of Black and ethnic minority writers, like Vikram Seth, who he says is miles better than other, White writers, but they tend to be quiet, thoughtful types and so not calculated to appeal to the new demographic the Festival hopes to reach out to. This is an ominous sign, according to Webb, because the inclusion of those two has started a trend in which literature will be second place.

Okay, so I did what Gillyflower has advised me to do, and decided to check what was actually going on at Haye-on-Wye. I took a glance at this year’s programme. There seems to be a number of the thoughtful, serious ethnic writers Webb talks about, including a Black author talking about his decades of writing on the topic of race. I didn’t find the event with Stormzy, but I did find the one with Dua Lipa. She’s there talking about her life and career, but the programme also says she champions books and reading on her Service 95 podcast. This puts a slightly different complexion on it than Webb’s discussion. She’s there not just because she’s a pop star, but because she’s also a literary woman as well. If there’s an issue there, it’s the same one as when Mariella Frostrup started presenting a literary review programme on the Beeb. Is the presenter too lightweight? Well, if it takes a popular media celebrity to get people to stick their noses into books, I don’t care. And it doesn’t mean that the people who go to see her won’t also go and see some of the other, more high-brow speakers. I can remember hearing Terry Pratchett talk at the Cheltenham Literary Festival years ago about how the directors of that festival looked on him with disdain as if he were going to talk about fixing motorcycles when he began speaking there. When the Discworld books came out there was massive sneering at them from the literary establishment, including the panel on the late Newsnight Review when Tom Paulin showed his real literary prejudice against genre fantasy. But this was just literary snobbery and Pratchett became, at least in my biased estimation, one of their most popular speakers. British culture didn’t fall because he spoke, and it hasn’t prevented me nor anybody else going to see some of the other, rather more serious speakers. I don’t think the inclusion of Dua Lipa will do the same to British literary culture either.

And if we’re on the subject of popular music, I notice they have a Jazz band playing. I know that Jazz now occupies the same highbrow cultural niche as classical music, with radio programmes about it like Late Junction and Freeness appearing on Radio 3. Duke Ellington was also their composer of the week a couple of decades ago. But Jazz is popular music with its own clubs, if now massively overshadowed by pop, rock and the other genres. But I can’t imagine anyone complaining that the Festival would be turned overwhelmingly towards Jazz instead of literature because of the band’s inclusion.

If there is a problem with the Haye-on-Wye Festival, it may well be the same one Private Eye’s literary column identified years ago with the Cheltenham literary festival. The complaint then was that a large proportion of the speakers were celebrities, such as TV personalities, who had written a book but did not make their main living from literature. People like, I presume, the actor David Walliams, who has written a string of children’s books. I haven’t heard that criticism repeated, so I assume that despite the influx of media celebs, British literary culture has still held firm. I don’t doubt that the Haye-on-Wye Festival will still uphold literary standards with the appearance of Stormzy and Dua Lipa. The Cheltenham Festival has held poetry slams which have included rap as well as British Afro-Caribbean poetry, and it’s still going on.

Simon Webb Asks What the Scientific Arguments against a Racial Link to IQ Is, and Why Are We Afraid of Discussing It?

Our favourite internet (non)historian this afternoon put up a video asking the above question. Even though it only last just over five minutes, I got just halfway through it before I turned it off and went looking for something less contentious and more edifying. Webb’s argument is that all the opposition to anthropological studies linking race to IQ are ideological rather than scientific. I don’t know enough about scientific, or pseudo-scientific racism to be able to fully refute him there. But I guess a start could be made by reading the late Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, which is about how Darwinian evolution was utilised in the 19th and early 20th centuries to prove the inferiority of non-Whites and women. I can also remember reading an article in a student magazine in the 80s/90s by Marek Cohn that covered this topic. Cohn is, I believe, certainly not a right-winger. He argued, if I recall correctly, that the same data the racial scientists had used to argue that there were real differences between different races in IQ was then re-evaluated after the War and the horror of Nazism to argue the reverse. Which suggests that, whatever its supporters say, the evidence is at least ambiguous.

As for the question why were are reluctant to discuss any link between race and IQ, it’s because it has been used to justify terrible oppression and crimes against humanity. The reluctance isn’t complete. A few years ago Channel 4 screened a series which looked at these differences. In one programme they found that northern Europeans are more resistant to the cold than southern European and Blacks. They also found that east Asians have much less to resistance to alcohol than westerners. This was put down to the orient having tea, rather than alcohol, for generations as their drink of choice. Although I am aware that they also had palm and rice wine, like saki in Japan.

It also covered the extremely delicate subject of cognitive differences between Aboriginal Australians and others. The programme made it clear that this was a sensitive subject because of the way IQ and cognition had been used to oppress and disinherit these incredibly ancient people. However, studies have shown that the visual cortex of indigenous Australians contains 25 per cent more neurons than in people of other races. As a result, they have excellent visual memory. The programme showed Aboriginal people outperforming Whites in memory tests of objects placed before them. It was put forward that the Aboriginal brain had evolved this way to help them find their way in the trackless wastes of the Outback and desert. Landscapes that seem featureless and confusing to westerners are full of landmarks to indigenous Australians. Aboriginal children lag behind other races in education, and it was suggested that their teaching could be improved by taking advantage of this racial skill.

I think the strongest warning against finding some races inferior comes from H.G. Wells. Wells had his fair share of prejudices himself. Biographers have noted that he himself confessed to being a racist and an anti-Semite. But Wells also wrote powerful pieces against racism, extracts from which I have put up here. In one of his SF works, which actually looks forward to a future utopia in which the world has been united into a single state and people of different races mix freely and in equality, he states that if a people were found to be racially inferior, it would be better to exterminate them rather than have them live as slaves. It’s a sentence that chills the blood after the Holocaust.

But the point is clear: decent people don’t want to find a connection between race and IQ, because it has and can lead back to slavery and other horrors.

And that, I believe, answers at least part of Webb’s question. As he himself very likely knows.

American Senator Calls for ‘National Divorce’ between Democrat and Republican States – Is It All Over ‘Wokeness’?

Okay, I caught some American YouTubers discussing the possibility of a ‘national divorce’ in America the other night. I didn’t quite know what it was, but suspected it was about the dissolution of the USA. After all, it couldn’t be that all American domestic marriages had now become so terrible that a mass divorce across the Land of the Free was the only solution. It seems a congresswoman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, declared that the political divisions in the nation were so bad that the red and blue states – those held by Republicans and Democrats respectively – should separate. This would, of course, mean the dissolution of America. One YouTuber posted a piece last night wondering if it would be possible.

Okay, I’m British. I haven’t been to America, and what I know about the country comes from books, TV, magazines, newspapers and radio, as well as talking to American friends and people who have lived and worked in the US. So, I’ve got no particular expertise. But it seems to me that the idea is totally mad. Firstly, I’m not sure that the political divisions are necessarily that deep or that pervasive to warrant states’ ceding from the Union. Yes, there always have been a far left strand in American politics, particularly regarding race and gay rights. We took over affirmative action from America, renaming it positive discrimination. Much of the Critical Social Justice movement, which is really just a postmodern twist on Marxism regarding Black rights, gender and feminism and gay and trans rights and other issues, is imported and influenced by American developments. This is particularly true of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was beginning studying archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the American students on the course complained that we worse than her country. But some of the controversy in these and other areas just seems the result of really hysterical propaganda.

I remember what the bonkers American right said about Barack Obama. According to the nutters, Obama was a Black nationalist with a burning hatred of Whites, and was, depending on who you listened to, a Maoist Commie, a Nazi, a militant atheist and a secret Muslim planning to overthrow Christian America and make it subservient to Islam. One pair of Lutheran pastors in a church radio station went as far as declaring that he would be a dictator, who would kill more people than Mao. Alex Jones was prophesying that he would use an environmental catastrophe to seize power and force decent Americans into refugee camps.

The truth is Obama was none of these things. As people remarked at the time, he couldn’t simultaneously be a Marxist, Nazi, atheist, Muslim, Black nationalist subversive, and indeed he wasn’t. Despite the hoo-ha and the Nobel Peace Prize, he really didn’t do much for Black America. A few years ago, he said he always thought of himself as moderate Republican. He certainly acted like one, continuing Bush’s militaristic, imperial wars. Domestically he pushed through the charter schools despite community opposition in many areas. I think these are like the academies over here. Even Obamacare wasn’t the radical assault on private healthcare the Republicans screamed it was. It wasn’t a single-payer system, like the one advocated by Bernie Sanders. It simply made private health insurance more affordable to more Americans. It wasn’t even a Democrat policy – Obama took it over from Newt Gingrich, a Republican politico who proposed it in the ’90s.

And the same people are screaming that Biden is ‘far left’, when they aren’t suggesting he’s too old and doddery to hold the office of president. That accusation to me holds far more water. Biden is a bog-standard corporatist Democrat. He got in because the powerbrokers in the Democrat party didn’t want Bernie getting the nomination. Or somebody like the good senator from Vermont. But Biden pushed trans rights, and so he must be a communist.

I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other bits and pieces by and about Marx and Engels. You won’t be surprised that neither of them wrote very much, if at all, about gay rights. I think it was also illegal in Soviet Russia, punishable with seven years in a forced labour camp. I’ve also got the impression that it was illegal generally in much of the Communist bloc. Contemporary gay rights are very much a western, post-War development, and not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Margaret Thatcher voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968 or whenever it was, while Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan were opposed. Her former Personal Private Secretary, Matthew Parris, was one of the founders of the gay charity Stonewall. Section 28 was frightening, as it did look like the Tories wanted the mass imprisonment of gays, but it was brought in, so I’ve heard, because a school or schools in one London borough was teaching gay rights and there was a fear that this included paedophilia.

There are real issues with the contemporary trans movement. There’s been a devastating critique of the treatment of the children who came to the Tavistock Clinic in London. Many of them were just confused kids, often neuro-divergent. A very high percentage were autistic, depressed, in care, or came from families where one parent was a sex abuser. Eighty per cent of the boys were same-sex attracted, and ninety percent of the girls. Nearly all of these were nevertheless put on puberty blockers and progressed to surgical transition. It has been estimated that if the children had been treated properly, both medically and ethically, only two percent of them would have had done so. Gay opponents of trans militancy, like Barry ‘the EDIjester’ and Clive Simpson and Denis Kavanagh view this is a new form of conversion therapy, in which they gay is not prayed away, but dispelled with drugs and surgery. Many of the kids said they preferred to be trans rather than a gay man or lesbian woman. This is internalised homophobia.

There are also issues regarding women’s sports and privacy and dignity, as shown in the recent scandals about the incarceration of extremely violent, predatory, biologically male rapists in women’s prisons. But many of the critics of this aspect of trans militancy are socialist feminists. Left-wing ladies were against this long before Matt Walsh appeared and claimed it for the Republican right, demanding to know where all the feminist women were. They were there, just ignored. And people like Simpson and Kavanagh are worried about the absence of the left and ordinary people with just moderate political views from protesting this issue. They said in their recent Queen’s Speech video that the American right is the equivalent of our far right. If ordinary people don’t make themselves heard, they’re afraid it’ll be left to far right organisations like Patriotic Alternative, who’ll protest against Drag Queen Story Hour and there will be a backlash against gays in general. I fear this is happening already. Correct, Not Political not only protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, but against gay rights generally. And the ‘Terfs’ don’t necessarily hate trans people. The EDIjester talks about how he knew and partied the night away with trans people and drag queens back in the 1970s. In a recent video describing his experiences in Glasgow, Mr Menno, another gay critic of the trans movement, was moved to tears. So many of the trans people who came out to protest Kelly-Jay Keane and her women were trans-identified women, some of whom, despite their declarations that they were happy, seemed to be anything but. And J.K. Rowling, despite being a moron when it comes to Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, has never urged the hatred or murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. And to be fair, the book criticising the Tavistock, Time to think, also includes statements from people who transitioned, who were happy in their new gender.

Okay, this is the situation in Britain, but it also exists in America, where some of the most powerful opposition to the militant trans movement comes from left-wing as well as right-wing ladies. Helen Pluckrose, who is a staunch critic from the left of the Critical Social Justice Movement, holds the position that it should be possible to work out a compromise position between the trans rights advocates and their opponents, but she fears that this may not be possible considering how entrenched and intransigent the debate has become.

There have also been problems in America with rioting due to Black Lives Matter, as well the assassination, and planned assassination of various politicians by Antifa. Andy Ngo’s been putting up a number of videos about this, though considering his own record of falsifying reports sometimes a little scepticism might be in order. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports Black Lives Matter, or simply thinks more should be done to help impoverished Blacks and people of colour, is a Marxist revolutionary wanting to tear up the flagstones, raise the barricades and shoot cops. Similarly, despite well publicised cases, I don’t know how many school teachers in America, or even here for that matter, are draping the LGBTQ++ flags around their classrooms, indoctrinating kids in Queer Theory and taking them to inappropriate drag shows. Probably much fewer than the impression Walsh and his ilk would like to give.

And people don’t necessarily hold opinions that are uniformly right or left. Many Republicans now genuinely support gay rights, including marriage, as well as trans rights. And I can imagine that for some Americans it might just be a matter of differing priorities. For example, I’m sure there are some Americans, who vote Democrat because they approve of what exists of the American welfare state and some policies towards the poor, women and minorities, but aren’t necessarily in favour of the more radical social policies. Ditto for some Republicans, who may support, against the stereotype of the right, gay and trans rights, but are afraid of what they see as the left’s attack on personal freedom. Some of these people cross party lines on some issues, and how they vote may depend on what is of greater importance to them at that moment.

I can remember reading an interview with an American author, who said that America is a weird mixture of the radical and deeply conservative, often in the same individuals. Looking at it from outside, it seems to me that there’s far more that unites Americans – a common political discourse and tradition than divides them. Certainly not the point where the country’s dissolution should be a serious consideration. I really don’t think these divisions are so deep as the economic and political division over slavery that caused the American Civil War.

But I fear this is being pushed by the Libertarian far right. Way back in the early part of this century White Supremacists like Richard Spencer were and are calling for the creation of a White ethnostate. The extreme right-wing, anti-feminist YouTuber Theodore Beale, alias Vox Dei, was looking forward to the collapse of America and the emergence of such a Whites-only state. And others have been posting up pieces about the coming collapse of the US since. I also found a piece on YouTube ages ago, which featured an interview between one of the Libertarian intellectual leaders, who was looking forward to the creation of a Libertarian, low-tax, free trade, no welfare and everything privatised state in the American heartland. They didn’t have a name for it yet, but were provisionally calling it ‘Reagan’ after Ronald Reagan.

I’ve no doubt that if you’re a rich industrialist, who can afford private schooling and has no chance of being unemployed or needing Medicare or Medicaid to pay your medical bills, such a state would would be an absolute paradise. But if you’re poor and a member of the working class, you’d be a dirt-poor, exploited wage slave, just like the ‘factory slaves’ over here in the 19th century. They can fantasize about the benefits of competition all they like, but on its own it ain’t going to drive medical bills down, provide better schools or create better working conditions. As for the economy, one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to liberalise the Iraqi economy. This meant American multinationals seizing the country’s oil and state industries, and removing the tariff barriers protecting its economy. This was planned by the Neo-Cons to create a new, prosperous Iraq, as the kind of economic order they’d like in America.

It didn’t work. When the tariff barriers were removed, any country that could dumped its goods cheap in Iraq. Iraqi industry couldn’t compete. There was a massive wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to astronomical levels. If a similar state is created in the US, then that’ll also happen there. Only big business could compete, and the small businessman or woman would go under.

This is what I’m afraid is really driving the call for a new national divorce between right and left-wing American states. It isn’t abou8t irreconcilable political differences, but about the weird fantasies of the Libertarian extreme right about a state of their own. A state that in reality would be a dystopian nightmare. The panic about Critical Social Justice is just a means to push this.

And I’m afraid that calls for the dissolution of America would also be echoed in this country. Carl Benjamin and the rest of the Lotus Eaters are Libertarians, and I think they’d love to have a similar type of government over here. Indeed, one of them actually said so in one of their videos. If the calls for the dissolution of America become stronger, I think the right-wing nutters would demand something similar for Britain, despite their hostility to regionalism and the fact that England has been a united country since the reign of Edmund Ironside in the 9th or 10th centuries.

‘E Pluribus Unum’. I think it means ‘Out of Many, One’. The motto of the American nation. Well, I hope it continues that way and ordinary Americans ignore the panics caused by the extreme right.

Governor of California Discussing Paying Reparations for Slavery

Last week Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, proposed that the state should pay reparations for slavery. This would consist in a payment of $220,000 to Black Californians descended from slaves. Newsom had previous passed or proposed legislation for the payment of a monthly amount to homeless trans people for a fixed term of one year. This was because there was a disproportionate number of trans people living on the streets, and the payment was to allow them to begin to purchase or rent a home. Newsom’s proposal to pay reparations for slavery was discussed by the Lotus Eaters over here and there’s a video by Black Conservative Perspective in America criticising it. The Black Conservative was not impressed, calling it divisive and playing a clip of Black speakers before the California state legislature or whatever demanding more. One man wanted the payment to be in a fixed amount of gold for each enslaved ancestor. An angry man wearing the red fez and tie of the Nation of Islam ranted about how God had a particular hatred of America and if the money wasn’t paid, He’d destroy the country with an asteroid or something. The Black Conservative considered that these payments would be inflationary, that the money would go on cars and cocaine, and that it would never be enough. People would always come back asking for more.

These are legitimate criticisms. Simon Webb, of History Debunked, made a video attacking the reparations for slavery campaign a few months or so ago. He also thought that it would cause racial divisions rather than solve them, and illustrated it with this example. Say there were two people living next to each other, in identical houses and with the same amount of wealth, but one was Black and the other White. If the Black man received £40,000 simply as compensation for his ancestors being enslaved but not for anything he personally had done, it would cause the White man to become resentful. It might not be true everywhere and of every White person – some may well share the opinion that it’s right Blacks descended from slaves should receive reparations for the suffering of their ancestors. But many others may well become extremely resentful. It could easily result in insults, abuse and worse. When Bristol city council passed a motion a year ago calling for the payment of reparations, Deputy Mayor and head of Equalities Asher Craig received an enormous amount of abusive messages.

I’m also sure that the Black Conservative also has a point about some of the prospective recipients squandering the money. I don’t doubt that some Blacks would use the money wisely to improve conditions for themselves and their children. But I can also see others wasting the money on expensive luxuries, like top of the range cars. There have been a number of stories in the past about people who’ve won millions on the National Lottery and who’ve then spent it all with nothing to show for it so that they’re back as poor as before. This has been done by people regardless of race, White and Black alike. I am also afraid that if these sums were paid, the gangster element in the Black community would use it to expand their violence and drug dealing, as criminals of any colour would if suddenly given a massive cash boost. Perhaps some would use it to leave the gangs and crime behind and try and establish themselves as respectable, law-abiding citizens. You’d hope so. But I think rather more criminals would simply use it to finance more of their destructive lifestyle, which would cause further damage to the Black community. And I am also afraid that whatever was paid would never be enough, and that they would always come back for more.

Thomas Sowell in one of his books argued against slavery reparations. He felt that the people, who were victimised and responsible for it are now dead, and so beyond our ability to help or punish. He also argued that whatever profits America had made from slavery had vanished in the bloodbath of the American Civil War. Furthermore, the guilt for something as terrible as slavery could not be absolved simply by paying money. He also made the point that no society could survive a moral viewpoint in which it had to be constantly criticising itself and paying compensation for the acts of the past. I think these are excellent points.

When Bristol passed its motion calling for reparations, the practical measures made it seem more like a call for further affirmative action for the Black British community as a whole justified through the connection to slavery. The motion ruled out payments to individuals. Instead they should be paid to Black-led organisations which would work to improve conditions and create sustainable, prosperous Black communities. All Blacks were to benefit from this, not just those of Afro-Caribbean or slave origin. While it’s better than Newsom’s proposal in providing for their real, collective benefit of the Black community rather than just the compensation of individuals, there are real moral problems with this as well. By including all Black, it also makes the British state morally responsible for people we did not enslave and who may themselves be descendants of the very slavers who sold their human cargo to us. It also ignores the fact that other nations, like the Arabs and Indians, were also involved in the African slave trade and the fact that White Europeans, including Brits, were also the victims of enslavement in the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and the Barbary pirates. I sent email messages to Craig and Cleo Lake, the Green councillor who proposed the motion, but got no reply. This, in my opinion, shows their absolute contempt for those challenging the notion.

In the British context, it could be argued that any profits Britain acquired from the slave trade were spent on our efforts to stamp it out through the activities of the British West African squadron and its patrols as well as a wider campaign against slaving and slavery during the Empire. There is also the problem that some of the countries responsible for kidnapping slaves also want reparations paid to them, even though some of their chiefs became extremely rich from the trade’s profits. The Caribbean nations, or some of them, have also demanded reparations. Some of this has been to deflect attention from the failings of their own rulers, while I don’t doubt that the venal kleptocrats are looking at a source of further money they can steal and loot. There’s also a question of the amount paid. Britain paid £20 million in compensation to the slaveowners at abolition, something that has been bitterly resented by some Black activists, just as it was by some abolitionists at the time. This translates into billions in today’s money and we only stopped paying it off a few years ago. If we were to pay a commensurate amount today, I think it would bankrupt us. And I can’t see that being to anyone’s benefit in Britain.

So far I think Newsom is on his own on this issue, and it remains to be seen whether he goes ahead with it. But this could be one issue to watch, as it’s possible other states will take it up, as well as activists over here.

American Stamp against Sickle Cell Anaemia

This piccie below is for the stamp the American postal service put out in 2004 to get more Black Americans to test for sickle cell anaemia, a type of blood cancer. I understood that sickle cell anaemia, or thalassaemia, was the result of something going wrong with a natural adaptation people of African origin have in their blood, which gives it better protection than White blood against malaria. I don’t know if sickle cell anaemia is unique to Black people, or if it’s simply that Blacks are far more vulnerable to it. Either way, there have been calls for more Black people to give blood in order to help combat the disease. I found the picture in the art book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist, by James Gurney (Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing 2009). This is a ‘how to’ book for budding artists of the fantastic. Gurney’s the author of the Dinotopia books, in which humans and dinosaurs live side by side, with people using them for transport, as fire engines, complete with their long necks used as ladders, and so on. Thus, many of the pictures in the book, serving as illustrations of various techniques, are of dinosaurs. The book also teaches lessons in composition, lighting, painting techniques, as well as inspiration for cyborgs, architecture, alternative history, science fiction and so on. There are also sections on possible careers in movie concept art, book covers and museum design. The picture of the Black woman and her beautiful baby are in the pages on using live models.

I was prompted to put the picture up after Simon Webb posted a video about scientists discovering genetic differences in Black blood, which made it better for Black people to receive donated by other Blacks. For Webb, this supported his view that there are distinct races and refuted the doctrine that race is merely a social construct. Now I think he’s right that there are differences between people of different races. East Asians, for example, have a far lower tolerance for alcohol. The explanation for this is that while westerners developed brewing, the Chinese, Japanese and other peoples developed tea. Although it has to be acknowledged that they also had alcohol in the form of rice wine. Aboriginal Australians have something like 25 per cent more neurons in the part of the brain that processes visual information. This is believed to be an adaptation that allows them to be better in remember their way around the trackless wastes of the Australian desert. Also, southern Europeans and Africans are worse at handling the cold than northern Europeans. This was all explored in a documentary on Channel 4 a few years ago. In the case of the indigenous Australians, the programme explained that this was a particularly sensitive topic as previous experiments had been done exploring their cognitive abilities with the intention of proving that they were less intelligent than Whites. But these genetic differences aren’t so great so that the various races of humanity are as distinct from each other as animal subspecies, or at least that’s what I’ve read. As for the differences between Black and White blood, while it might be better for Blacks to receive blood from people like them, it certainly doesn’t mean that blood from the two races is mutually incompatible. Whites have successfully received blood from Blacks, despite some of the stupid fears at the time that somehow it would also turn them Black. Of course, what I think Simon Webb really wants is conclusive genetic proof that Blacks are thicker than White people, as per the Bell Curve. But Sowell in his book, Intellectuals & Race, that Asians aren’t more intelligent than Whites according to IQ tests done properly. He’s more ambivalent about racial differences in intelligence between Blacks and Whites but provides evidence that refutes the old argument that Blacks are intellectually inferior. He also makes the point that those psychologists who did believe in it, nevertheless thought their academic performance could be improved by better teaching methods.

These arguments aside, this is a great picture with a great message, especially during Black History Month.

Kwasi Kwarteng – Diversity Hire, or Just Another Member of Truss’ Government of Mediocrity?

It’s been a few days since I commented on a video by Simon Webb of History Debunked, so here’s one now. A few days ago, he put one up questioning Kwarteng’s qualifications for office as Chancellor of the Exchequer and wondering if he was only chosen because he was Black. Was his appointment simply a case of Truss giving him a job in order to show how diverse her government was? Given how disastrous the minibudget is, Kwarteng does not strike me as a brilliant economist. But then, neither does Truss herself, who strikes me as another absolute mediocrity. The same with Therese Coffey, who I wouldn’t trust to run a corner shop or local whist club. As for Jacob Rees-Mogg, I think he’s cleverer than the rest in that he has clever people working for him and is sufficiently slick with his patrician diction and general demeanour to conceal his absolute incompetence from much of the public. But none of them, absolutely none of them, strike me as intellectual powerhouses. Quite the opposite.

Readers of this blog of a certain age and taste in comedy will remember Glasgae toon’s guerrilla philosopher, Rab C. Nesbitt, and his biting view of Scots politics and the treatment of the poor and the underclass from the bottom of a pint glass. In one episode, Nesbitt crossed paths with the local Tory politician, a political nonentity looking forward to great things because Tory prime minister John Major was in office, and ‘this is the age of the mediocrity’. Ah, how that was the joke at the time! John Major was the grey man, a boring, uninspiring individual following the all-too vivid figure of Margaret Thatcher. Major himself wasn’t economically deft or competent, as his privatisation of the railways and the collapse of the pound during Black Wednesday showed. But compared to Truss and her crew, he was statesman of positively Churchillian proportions.

A week or so ago I went to an online meeting where members of the Labour left, like Richard Burgon and members of the TUC responded to Truss’ minibudget. They pointed out what a right-wing nightmare it was, along with her highly authoritarian attempts to strangle the unions with fresh legislation. Truss was promising nothing to the British working class except more poverty while massively cutting taxes for the rich. But the panel was also encouraged by the fact that people were determined to resist, and mobilising strikes and protests up and down this Sceptred Isle. And as for Truss and the rest of the minions, they saw them as the last of the Thatcherite True Believers. Thatcherism has run its course. It’s now looking threadbare. People are abandoning it. And Truss and co are the last of the market fundamentalists, more right-wing than Thatcher herself. And that’s saying something, given how she was a fan of real Fascists like General Pinochet!

If I read what the Labour people were saying rightly, this means that, as the last of the true-blue Thatcherites, Liz, Kwarteng and co are the scrapings from the bottom of the Tory barrel. In which case, Kwarteng didn’t get his post because he’s a diversity hire. He got his job because he shared the views and the same lack of ability as Truss and the rest of her followers.

And unfortunately, that means we’ve got to suffer his and Truss’ doctrinaire incompetence.

Their colour is immaterial. All that matters is their grotesque hatred and victimisation of the poor to benefit the extremely, obscenely rich.

Get them out now!

The Black Prof Who Proposed a Trans-Time Radio

Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a video yesterday asking if Black people wrote about anything other than race. He contrasted a book, Don’t Touch My Hair, written by a young Black woman studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies, with pop-science books written by Richard Feynman and Michio Kaku. He argued that there were other ethnic groups who had suffered just as much as Blacks, but these nevertheless wrote about something other than race and racism. It’s a good question, as Black Conservatives like Thomas Sowell have argued that Black people have taken the wrong road to improving themselves. He states that rather than being intent on taking political power, they should instead of have concentrated on raising their economic status through building business, education and so on, as the Jews, Chinese and other ethnicities have done. In the case of the Jews, there’s clearly a large amount of Jewish literature about anti-Semitism, but also about other subjects. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, for example, is about Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell.

I’m no expert at all on Black literature, but there are a couple of Black SF writers: Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler, and looking through Waterstone’s the other year a found Dark Matters, an anthology of Black SF. I don’t know how much SF written by Black authors concerns racial issues. I got the impression that it was a significant theme in Butler’s work, though this also includes alien contact and genetic engineering. Delaney’s bisexual, and his novels also cover gay issues, though at least one is about an immortal wandering a devastated Earth.

At the moment there are very few Black scientists, which the discipline is trying to change. However, I do remember that way back in the 1990s, at about the same time the remake of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine came out, a Black American lecturer at a Community College was in the scientific news for his proposal for a type of time machine. This used a supercooled gas to create an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen condensate. This is a weird type of plasma in which the ions in the gas all behave as single one. The ideo was to start the ionised gas whirling in one direction, and then send an electron into it travelling in the opposite. Stars and Black Holes are so massive that they drag space-time around after them when they revolve. This is why Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and its predictions about the way gravity distorts the fabric of space-time has been useful in predicting the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. One of the suggestions for achieving real time travel is that a spacecraft could travel in the wrong direction against the rotation of a Black Hole and thus against the direction of the bits of space-time it’s pulling with it, and so travel into the past that way. The scientist suggested that if you suddenly saw two electrons in the condensate, it would mean that the electron had travelled from the future back into the past, where it joined itself. The experiment and its proposer were featured in New Scientist and there was even a programme on Channel 4 about it and the Time Machine film, looking forward to a future in which we in the present could communicate across time with the future. The experiment was due to be taken into space for testing aboard one of the space shuttles, but I think the shuttle that carried it was one of those that disastrously blew up, thus leading to a cancellation of the programme.

I’m not sure that a cross-time telephone would be a good idea. It raises awkward questions of predestination. If history cannot be changed, how would humanity cope with the news from the future about crimes, wars and disasters yet to happen, but which we would be unable to avert? And if history could be changed, this could lead to chaos with messages coming back to us from the future, which would affect the present and thus their past. One solution to this is that if we attempt to change the past, it leads to the creation of an alternative universe following the consequences of the change while the first universe continues with its set progression to an immutable future. Gregory Benford used this in his book, Timescape, about a physicist receiving messages from the future through one of his experiments, warning him and the rest of humanity of an ecological disaster that would destroy Civilisation As We Know It. The messages have been sent by his future self, and in that future civilisation is indeed collapsing and leads to the hero, his friends and family taking refuge in a farmhouse as society prepares to collapse. In the other, alternative time path, he is able to convince the world that the messages are genuine and persuade the world to use the techniques sent back to him and his colleagues to destroy the algae blooms devastating Earth and humanity is saved. I read in a book on the SF pulp magazine, Astounding, and its editor John W. Campbell, and most prominent writers Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard, that Benford had indeed been researching the possibility of time travelling radiation, dubbed Tau radiation in the novel, so I think the book may have been based on his own research. Since the shuttle explosion, nothing’s been heard of the real, cross-time communication experiment. If it had gone ahead and worked, the prof who invented it would have got a Nobel prize, no problem, and the world would have been very different.

But the point here is, beyond the issues raised by time travel, that a Black academic certainly was actively pursuing something that didn’t have anything to do with race. And while I dare say that race and racism is an issue that informs much Black SF, it isn’t the only issue. I also recall a video I found on YouTube contrasting the situation today, where the arts are being increasingly defined and compartmentalised by race, with that in the 1960 when Black writer James Baldwin published one of his novels. The characters in the book were mostly White, and the book was praised by the critics as a great piece of modern literature. Baldwin was praised as a great novelist in his own, individual right, and not as a great Black novelist. He was praised for his literary skills, rather than simply because of his race. This is one of the reasons Sowell and other Black Conservatives don’t like books by Black authors being promoted and included in the canon of great works simply because of their race. They want talented Black writers and artists to be respected because of their individual merits, and are afraid that they will have their deserved reputations tarnished because of more mediocre literature promoted simply because of the authors’ race.

You may also remember that a little while ago, BBC 4 showed a 4-part series, the Lost Civilisations of Africa, fronted by a Black academic. I think he was an art historian, rather than archaeologist, but he sported the Indiana Jones-style hat. Going through my local branch of Blackwells, when it still existed, I found the book that accompanied the series. Now I realise that it could be argued that this was about race, as the presenter was discussing Black civilisations, just as another Black presented did in another programme about the African city of Timbuktu and its wealth of medieval philosophical and scientific literature. But these programmes are no more about race than a White presenter talking about the general history of Britain and Europe, or a Chinese presenter talking about the history of his country.

It seems clear to me that Black people are capable, and certainly have written about other matters quite apart from race. It simply appears that way at the moment because of the way anti-Black racism has become one of the dominant contemporary issues following Black Lives Matter and the rise to prominence of Critical Race Theory.

Incidentally, BBC 4 is one of the BBC channels about to be culled due to cost-cutting measures. I’m not surprised, as it’s devoted to highbrow subjects like history, archaeology, literature and the arts. I can’t say I’ve watched much of it, but I do remember that it has broadcast programmes like The Lost Civilisations of Africa, as well as a number of other programmes about the Lost Civilisations of South and Central America. There was also one fascinating programme on historic maps and what they told you about the attitudes and politics of the time they were made and who made them. I’m afraid the cancellation of this channels represents another attack on high culture and serious arts programming, in order to appease the Beeb’s right-wing critics who want it privatised anyway. It’s an assault on genuine Reithian values by people who would like to keep this country uneducated and uniformed in the name of making TV another conduit for Thatcherite propaganda, delivered by Rupert Murdoch.

Agent Stool Pigeon Tears Apart Alex Belfield in Answer to Fans

Last week was not a good one for mad YouTuber Alex Belfield, as he was suspended from YouTube for a series of violations. It appears he has now gone off to Ustreme with his friend, Jim Davidson. Belfield is very much a man of the right, ranting about the Channel migrants, whom he calls ‘dinghy divers’, calling for the privatisation of the NHS and criticising the Covid lockdown as well as other diatribes about race and Black Lives Matter and the trans craze. He has some kind of feud going with individuals from the Beeb which has resulted in a long series of court cases. He takes every chance to talk down the corporation and demand its privatisation and sneers at its staff as ‘Guardian-reading, oyster-eating, champagn-sipping, university-educated Naga Manchushy types’. He hates middle class left-wingers, and presents himself as a White working class lad from a pit village whose managed to succeed despite opposition from a woke, left-wing middle class establishment.

But he has his critics. I’ve put up a number of pieces on here criticising him, and have had a number of replies from his fans. Some of them are polite, but most are just abuse. And it seems I’m not alone. He has another critic in the shape of ASP – Agent Stool Pigeon – on YouTube. I found this video on the gentleman’s channel in which he answers Belfield’s fans by tearing further into their hero. I got the impression that he’s done this several times before, and that this is an answer to their complaints.

After denying that he’s making money from Belfield, he states that most of the mad YouTuber’s content doesn’t contain a thread of truth. Belfield simply looks at the day’s headlines and then makes up the rest. He tells his listeners that they could do the same and save themselves the time and expense of watching Belfield. All they have to do is go to the supermarket, pick up a paper, read the headline and then make up their own story. And then walk back home. They’ll have saved themselves money and had a walk. He also makes the point that while Belfield tells his viewers not to trust the mainstream media, all his stories come from that same media. He doesn’t do anything original. He leaves out information that contradicts his points and doesn’t provide links, though he will give a screen shot of the headline. But he’s also groomed his fans so that if someone questions him, he’ll set them off on a pile-on against that person. He did it the other day in Tweet about the Times journo he said banned him from YouTube.

The Pigeon also states that Belfield attacks and slams people all day to make money not caring whether what he says is true or not. But he’ll block anyone who questions him. He will never interview anyone who questions him. He’ll give his story on stage or on screen when no-one can interrupt or question him. The Pigeon also advises people not to give money to people on YouTube. But people have given donations to Belfield, who has not shown what he’s done with the money through providing bank records and so on. He points out how hypocritical this is coming from Belfield, who regularly attacks the Beeb for not showing what it is doing with the money donated to it. He compares his hold over his fans to that of a cult leader, who’s trained his followers to think like him and give him all their worldly possession. But after Belfield’s ban, he communication with his fans has come to a halt. There isn’t anything on YouTube and nothing on his Twitter feed except repeated requests to buy tickets for his shows, or join the mailing list for his shows, The Stoolie points out that all Belfield does is push their buttons to amplify their anger, while using some of the most disgusting and unfunny innuendos. His jokes come from 1977.

The Pigeon also corrects the view that the Beeb is taking Belfield to court. It’s not. Some of the Beeb’s employees or ex-employees are taking the mad YouTuber to court for defamation, and this could be expensive. If he loses, he’ll have to pay damages and court costs. He also being sued by 8 people on 12 counts of stalking. Belfield claims that the whole world is against him, but things like this don’t happen for no reason. And now he wants people to spend a pound a week for him to recycle the headlines. And all the while he’s laughing at them.

The video doesn’t consist of anything beyond the Pigeon’s dulcet Liverpudlian tones and caricature of Belfield. But it is a very effective demolition of him.

It’s also interesting reading some of the comments by people, who’ve also lost faith in him or seen how he cynically twists the news. For example, Swoop said: ‘Here’s one you’ll like: During one of Belfield’s livestreams last year he was spouting a load of rubbish about how the Army being called into Liverpool meant that people we’re going to be getting visited at home and having covid tests forced upon them by soldiers……I actually managed to get through to the phone in and asked him where on earth he was getting this rubbish from, when he inevitably became insulting I told him to put his money where his mouth is and make a bet on it. Since then I’ve not been able to get through again. Funny that innit? Alex Belfield owes me £500. Correction: Alex Belfield owes the RAF Benevolent Fund £500.’

And there’s this from Chocolate Frenzie: ‘

I followed Alex Belfield for over a year- sent him money twice and then a few months ago he had a rant and said something along the lines that he didn’t care about his followers continuing to follow him- I was so hurt I stopped listening to him after that – as for his phone in well I gave up on them a while back as I couldn’t stand listening to him making innuendoes to the female callers – goes a bit too far – drinks in wits out’

Alex C commented: ‘Agree 100 percent with every word on this video..well done..he grooms as you say,,he mind controls . He does not care one bit about the people he fleeces.He is driven. The things that please me… He was a radio 2 dj ..with hundreds of thousands of listeners,, And his circle keeps shrinking. Everytime he burns a bridge his world shrinks,less people…despite the money he yearns fo4 lots if people to adore him. He is twisted, bitter,,,and is a huge star in his own head. Remember he was once Bankrupt. Remember he was until his 20s plus a morbidly obese man. Remember he uses your money to live a great life. But his sheep enjoy being fleeced.’

And there’s more, much more, from people stating out that according to the Times it was the advertisers who pulled the plug on him. One of the things they disliked was his misogyny. Another commenter states that Belfield claimed to have set up a charity account for all the donations, then admitted he hadn’t.

If even some of these allegations are true, then it’s devastating and Belfield definitely shouldn’t have an audience.