Simon Webb and Calvin Robinson Attack the Tory Party

A day or so this blog’s favourite internet non-historian put up a video explaining why he would prefer to ‘die in a ditch’ rather than support or join the Conservatives. As you would expect, it was about immigration. The video’s title called Rishi Sunak ‘an enemy of Britain. This was because, in Webb’s view, Sunak was using the controversy over the channel migrants to cover up the far greater numbers immigrating to Britain legally. The numbers in the small boats were trivial compared to the 200,000 refugees from Ukraine, the number of students entering Britain with their spouses and families, and other migrants which pushed the real immigration figures up to nearly a million. Actually, I think the number of students, who came here but didn’t leave is about 500,000, so the figure could be something like 700,000 using the numbers he quoted.

Calvin Robinson, the cos-play priest, also turned up in a video for GB News or one of the other very right-wing outlets declaring that the Tories need to be destroyed. Why? It seems he doesn’t regard them as Conservative any more. He was defending himself from the other members of the panel by saying that Conservative principles would survive. My guess is that he’s talking to the same kind of people that call the Tories the Consocialists and complain about them being too woke. Robinson is an opponent of LGBTQ+ rights. The last video I came across was of him making a speech at the Oxford Union or somewhere presenting the case against the Anglican Church marrying gays. He’s right about the letter of scripture condemning homosexuality, just like it also condemns heterosexual fornication and adultery. But the letters from liberal clergy I’ve read about the issue argued that the nature of the family changed radically in Scripture, so that they could not formulate a clear theology of the family. You can see that in the texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. In the Old Testament, polygyny was the norm, with the patriarchs and kings having multiple wives. When you get to the New Testament, this has changed so that the Jewish family of the period seems to have been largely monogamous with men generally having only one wife. They also argued that gay marriage in church was not without precedent, as it had been known in medieval eastern Europe and the Byzantine empire. I also remember that when the US legalised gay marriage, there were a number of videos posted by ordinary, God-fearing Americans stating that he didn’t radically change anything. Gay people hadn’t suddenly fallen out of the sky to do ‘homosexual thing’, according to one man, who went round his farm showing that they hadn’t suddenly appeared and were hiding in his haystack. A woman simply said that it didn’t change her conditions: she was still in a Christ-centred straight marriage with her husband.

It looks to me like the hard right may start abandoning the Tories for Reform or Reclaim. At the same time, left-wingers purged from Labour, or ordinary Labour supporters with traditional Labour views who are made to feel unwelcome and alienated by Starmer and turn to Conservatism may well go to the Greens or alternative left-wing parties like the Socialist and Trades Unin Alliance. And I really couldn’t blame anyone if they gave their vote to the Socialist Party. Kernow Damo, a left-wing Cornish YouTuber, has put up a video praising the Greens because of their retention of left-wing policies.

It’ll be interesting to see tomorrow’s election results, as this could be one where small, fringe parties start picking up votes.

Why Have Anti-Racists Ignored the Bullying of Hindus by Muslims?

The Torygraph ran a story yesterday claiming that over half of Hindu schoolchildren in Britain had been bullied by their Muslim classmates. This included throwing beef at them, a particular insult given the Hindu veneration for cattle. The victims were supposedly told that the insults and violence would stop if they converted to Islam. The blog’s favourite YouTube non-historian, Simon Webb, posted a video about it on his channel this morning in which he added his own peculiar viewpoint on it. He claimed that the bullying was being ignored by Guardian-reading liberals, who would have otherwise been extremely annoyed and organising protests if the bullying had been by White children against Blacks and Muslims. I’m sure he’s right there. However, he claimed that the anti-Hindu bullying was being ignored because Guardian readers had convinced themselves that Hindutva was fascism, and because India was friends with Israel. This is nonsense. Many academic historians of Fascism across the world have concluded that Hindutva, militant Hindu nationalism, is fascistic. One of the Hindu nationalist prayers appears in a collection of fascist texts because it exemplifies the mystical strain of fascism. The RSSS, a paramilitary Hindu organisation, was modelled on Mussolini’s black shirts. I’ve put up a piece about ultra-nationalist Hindu priests putting bounties on the head of dissident Indians and calling for the death of blasphemers. There have been mass rallies calling for the abandonment of India’s secular, pluralist constitution and its transformation into a Hindu state. Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are the target of militant Hindu nationalist violence, with Muslims and their mosques especially targeted. I also remember a particularly repulsive incident back in the ’90s when one local Hindu nationalist politico announced his support for Hitler against the Muslims, and used the Nazi version of the swastika. But western liberal hatred of India fascism almost certainly isn’t behind the liberal left ignoring such anti-Hindu bullying.

Playground violence between different Asian groups has been around for a long time. I heard back in the 1980s that in one of the schools in a multicultural ward of Bristol the real conflict and violence wasn’t between Black and White, but between different Asian groups. I don’t know if the violence was based on religion, ethnicity or caste. I do remember, however, that talking about it to friends there was a real opposition to any recognition that Asian racism could be as bad or worse than White racism.

Part of the problem is that the anti-racist movement arose specifically to tackle White prejudice, hostility and discrimination against Blacks and other people of colour. It therefore has immense difficulty recognising that non-Whites also have their own racial prejudices and can also be responsible for racist abuse and violence. Some of this comes from the way the right-wing press in the 1980s framed the 1980s/81 race riots and continuing racial controversies as due to Black racism. Diane Abbott has said several times that she wasn’t going to tackle racism within ethnic minority communities, because this would lead ‘them’ to ‘divide and rule’. The result is that racism from non-Whites is played down or ignored. One Jewish writer for the right-wing online magazine, Spiked, wrote a piece describing how she also received anti-Semitic abuse and treatment from ethnic minorities. But this wasn’t reflected in the public discussions about anti-Semitism, which only dealt with it when it came from Whites.

This exclusive focus on White racism does not represent the complex reality of racial attitudes in multicultural Britain. This is grossly unjust, and needs to change, however uncomfortable it may be to official anti-racists like Diane Abbott.

Simon Webb: Mass Deportations Are Abhorrent and Immoral, as Will Demand Concentration Camps

I know how strongly most of you out there feel about the right-wing internet non-historian. You’ve said plenty of times that you wish I’d ignore him and deny him the publicity. It’s good advice, but I’m ignoring this time because I think he’s made a very good point, aimed solidly at the people who need to be told it. He posted this video three days about concentration camps in Britain. He’s written a book about them, and very definitely does not approve. This is important, as some of his readers believe in policies that would demand their return.

Webb states clearly that he finds concentration camps deeply abhorrent and is very strongly against them. He cites his support of Israel as evidence of how much he hates them. While I accept that he does despise concentration camps, Israel is still a racist, apartheid state dedicated to ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. But so far they haven’t set up concentration camps for them. He then goes on to describe how the British government during the First World War set up concentration camps for enemy aliens, Germans and Austrians. They weren’t like the Nazi camps, but nevertheless, conditions were appalling. The food was at starvation levels far below the amount of calories the average man needs per day. It also consisted largely of soup, which was served out of the same buckets that were used to slop out the rooms. The whole point of these camps was to encourage the Germans and Austrians to emigrate elsewhere after the War. This policy was successful, and by the mid-20s the Austrian population in London or Britain was greatly reduced.

Picking his words extremely carefully in case someone gets the wrong impression and thinks he’s in favour of them, Webb states he’s talking about how horrific these camps were in order to discourage anyone thinking about the mass deportation of foreigners. Because that policy would demand that they be rounded up first and put in such camps while awaiting deportation.

He’s clearly aiming this video at some of the real Nazis who read his material, people who do need to have this message hammered across. The people that claim that mass non-White immigration is all a plot by ‘the tribe’, ‘people with long noses’ ‘the small-hatted people’ and other not-so-subtle references to the Jews. No, the Jews aren’t responsible for mass immigration. And nobody should be backing mass deportations of people simply for being the wrong colour or putting them in concentration camps. Hopefully, the people who need to be told this will accept it from him – possibly – whereas they wouldn’t take it from anyone on the left. Which is why I’m putting it up here.

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.

Home Schooling Crackdown: Who Is the Government Really Worried About – Alienated Whites or Muslims?

As some of the great commenters on this blog have pointed out, Simon Webb of History Debunked is a great advocate of home schooling. He makes no secret of this, and talks often about how he home schooled his daughter. He also used to run a blog called ‘Home School Heretic’. A few days ago he posted a piece about how the government was introducing legislation to make home schooling more difficult. He believes, or suggested, that this is a government attempt to enforce ideological conformity on the population by preventing parents from opting out of the official education system. He quoted part of the new legislation, which stated that it was concerned about the home schooling leading to the growth of parallel societies.

Now I do know people, who have home schooled their children because of concerns about the local schools in their area. Their children did really well, got their ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels and went on to university. As far as I can make out, they share the same values as the rest of mainstream British society. Back a decade and a half or so ago, there was a panic over the growth of Creationism and Intelligent Design. Various atheist and sceptics’ groups were panicking about what they saw as ‘science denialism’. A number of fundamentalist Christian groups also pushed home schooling as a way adults could avoid having their children indoctrinated with evolution and so put on the path to state mandated secularism and atheism. That furore eventually blew over. But a friend, who taught religion, told me that most Creationists were Muslims, as were, I think, most home schoolers. But all you ever heard about on the BBC and the mainstream news was about Christian Creationists. The wording of the document Webb was complaining about suggests to me that the government is really concerned about alienated Muslims taking their children out of school to give them a very conservative upbringing, but dare not say it outright. I’ve had the general impression that Christianity, because it has largely been the religion of the White majority of this country, is now a whipping boy for fears about the growth of radical religious movement in ethnic minorities. Christianity can be criticised without accusations of racism or Islamophobia, and Christians won’t, as a rule, start sending death threats.

For example, the right-wing media and vloggers have been discussing this week the criticism directed at somebody Forbes, the woman now tipped to replace Nicola Sturgeon. Forbes is a church-going Presbyterian with very traditional, social conservative views. She doesn’t approve of sex before marriage, gay marriage or the transgender ideology. And so various newspapers, including the Scum, have been denouncing her as unsuitable for the post of Scots First Minister. The same thing happened to the Lib Dems’ Tim Farron. He went to an evangelical church, which also viewed homosexuality as a sin. He was constantly asked, as no-other politico was, whether he shared their views with the implication that if he did, he shouldn’t be in politics. And the attack on religious individuals now includes gay groups, who disagree with them but maintain their right to hold such opinions. The EDIJester posted a piece this morning, which included the story that the LGB Alliance, a gay advocacy group, had been contacted by the Beeb for their comment. Their chief spokeswomen replied that they disagreed with her beliefs, but religion is a protected characteristic and she has a right to hold them. This was not what the Beeb’s producer wanted to hear. The Alliance was contacted again, and told that they would not be using them in the programme. If this is true, then the Beeb wanted to present it as debate in which Forbes would be denounced for her views by all gay groups.

The BBC has also produced very biased programmes misrepresenting religious issues before. A few years ago I picked up a book about political bias at the Beeb written by a Conservative. It was published during Blair’s government, and presented a convincing case. And one of these was a documentary about the Roman Catholic church’s abstinence-only policy towards contraception in Africa. The programme argued that this was causing Black Africans to suffer unwanted pregnancies and catch AIDS purely because of religious dogma. In fact, the abstinence-only policy, surprisingly, has been successful in cutting down on both. There is a very strong cultural hostility in African society to contraception. Nigel Barley, in his book The Innocent Anthropologist, remarks that there’s a joke that the only thing that will go through the Nigerian postal system and not be interfered with is a packed of condoms. In this environment, where contraception will be refused in any case, it makes sense to stress abstinence. But this conflicted with the received opinions of western liberals, who produced a deliberately deceptive programme.

In the case of Forbes and Farron, all that should be needed to be said is that although they personally may disapprove, they will not interfere in previous legislation. I think Forbes may have said that, but it obviously isn’t enough. But I do wonder if the same questions would be asked if she belonged to a non-Christian religion. I suspect she wouldn’t.

In the meantime, I think Webb can stop fretting. I don’t think the government is really worried about ultra-Conservative right-wingers like him. I think the real, unspoken fear is about Islam.

The Wellcome Collection and Its Purge of ‘Racist’, ‘Sexist’ and ‘Ableist’ Artefacts

Some of the great commenters on this blog have criticised an article I put up a few days about a video posted by our favourite YouTube (non)historian, Simon Webb, in which he attacks what he considers to be the ‘woke’ destruction of the Wellcome Collection by its new director, Melanie Keen. Keen has removed from display objects she considered to be ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ and ‘ableist’, and according to Webb, they’ve been replaced with one Eruditu, a female shaman. A number of the commenters have questioned whether Webb was telling the truth, particularly as they were unable to find any reference to Eruditu. However, it is true that Keen has indeed taken down objects and material that is considered problematic from the ‘Medicine Man’ gallery. The Art Newspaper published this piece on it by Tom Seymour on 28th November last year, ‘London’s Wellcome Collection accused of cultural vandalism after closing ‘racist, sexist and ableist’ display of artefacts ‘ The piece is subtitled ‘The institution asks “What’s a museum for?” as it shuts display devoted to objects amassed by its founder’. It begins

‘The Wellcome Collection, the London museum run by the Wellcome Trust, is to permanently close a curated display of medical artefacts amassed by its founder on the basis that it “perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories.”

The announcement, made on 26 November, pertains to a permanent display in the Wellcome Collection, a museum on the Euston Road, London, which opened in 2007. The display had been on show for the last 15 years, and was titled Medicine Man, a reference to its founder, Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936.

The exhibition was closed, permanently, on 27 November. The future usage of the artefacts remains unknown at this stage.

The decision has been met with dismay by some members of the museum community and the wider public who have likened it to cultural vandalism.

Medicine Man showed a selection of curated artefacts from the collection of Henry Wellcome, the founder of the trust and an American pharmaceutical entrepreneur whose company, Burroughs Wellcome & Company, eventually merged with other pharmaceutical organisations to form the modern-day drugs behemoth GlaxoSmithKline.

Wellcome amassed more than one million items relating to the history of medicine throughout the course of his life. The Wellcome Collection was founded as a place to display his collection, which he left to the trust in his will, to a visiting public for free. He also founded the Wellcome Trust, a registered UK charity that focuses on biomedical research. The charity is the largest in the UK, with assets of £36bn. The trust is credited with key findings in the development of drugs that combat the spread of certain cancers, as well as HIV.

Henry Wellcome’s collection was vast and varied. The Medicine Man display included the possessions of famous historical figures: visitors could view a toothbrush used by the French military commander Napoleon Bonaparte, shoes owned by the social reformer Florence Nightingale, the death mask worn by the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and the skull-handled walking stick of the Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin, founder of the theory of evolution, who saw the stick as a ‘memento mori’—a reminder of human mortality.

On show was also ephemera used by less ennobled people, like the good-luck charms and amulets carried by British, Russian and Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. Or an illustration, originally created for British news magazine Sphere, showing British soldiers being treated at a field hospital in Verdun, France, during the First World War.

But some of the artefacts in Henry Wellcome’s collection, as well as the way they were was displayed in the museum was, from the off, “problematic,” museum staff have said.

“The story we told was that of a man with enormous wealth, power and privilege,” the museum said in the course of a Twitter thread published last week. The thread opened with the question: “What’s the point of museums? Truthfully, we’re asking ourselves the same question.”

In a series of tweets and pictures, the museum made direct reference to a series of artefacts that it felt were racist. These includes a 1916 painting by Harold Copping titled A Medical Missionary Attending to a Sick African, which depicts an African person kneeling in front of a white missionary.

“The result was a collection that told a global story of health and medicine in which disabled people, Black people, Indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited—or even missed out altogether,” the thread read.

The closure of the display “marks a significant turning point, as we prepare to transform how our collections are presented,” the Wellcome Collection said in a statement on their website. The collection is now embarking on “a major project that will amplify the voices of those who have been previously erased or marginalised from museums, bringing their stories of health and humanity to the heart of our galleries,” it said.’

See https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/11/28/wellcome-collection-accused-of-cultural-vandalism-after-closing-racist-sexist-and-ableist-display-of-artefacts

There have also been accusations of institutional racism within the museum itself and especially racist behaviour and microaggressions against Black staff.

It therefore seems to me that there has been a purge of material for the ideological reasons stated by Webb. I’ll try and look further into the new display with the modern shaman, Eruditu. If this does exist, it may be that the museum is staging it as a corrective to what it sees as the Eurocentric bias of the previous display.

Wellcome Museum Purges Display on History of Medicine to Include African Shaman – A Piece of Cultural Relativism That Will Also Damage Blacks

This comes from a piece our favourite YouTube historian, Simon Webb, put up on History Debunked a few days ago. He was attacking the new policy towards the museum that has come in with its new director, a woman whose degree is in the arts. Before, according to Webb, the museum was excellent, covering the history of western medicine in rigorous detail and including displays of operating theatres. Much of this, however, has been junked because the new director has deemed it ableist, racist and colonialist. The gallery to its founder, Wellcome himself, has also gone because he did not hold the current, mandatory beliefs. In their stead a gallery has erected containing two photographs showing the horrors of colonial experimentation on Black Africans along with one Mrs Eruditu, a self-professed African shaman, who conducts healing ceremonies and will counsel visitors to the gallery traumatised by the pictures. Webb calls her a witchdoctor, and describes her as completely mad, as she believes inanimate objects also possess consciousness. She doesn’t like the British Museum and the Egyptology displays, because the exhibits there have told her that they want to be underground. Nor does she approve of the display of a Native American totem pole in the Musee Nationale in France, as this has told her psychically that it wants to be out in the open air. Webb states, quite correctly, that western medicine has produced amazing advances in combating disease and extending the human life span. This new policy is a direct attack on that.

I think Webb, if he’s right about the Museum’s new policy, and he seems to be, has an excellent point here. He views it, no doubt, as another attack on western culture in the name of anti-racism, anti-imperialism and post-colonialism. He is, unfortunately, also very likely right about this. There have been pieces on YouTube by other right-wingers attacking the current policies of the Museums Association, which are all about this. I’ve got a feeling that Manchester Museum has also fallen to these new policies, and that they are also reviewing their collections as a result. But this policy is also harming Black and particularly Black African advancement in ways which the founders of the ‘Science Must Fall’ movement, which is ultimately at the heart of this, probably don’t understand.

The ‘Science Must Fall’ movement was a South African campaign to decentre western science because it rejected indigenous knowledges about the world rooted in myth and legend. There was a video on YouTube of a student debate in one of the South African universities, in which a Black female student urged her White comrades to decolonise their minds and accept that tribal rainmakers could indeed make it rain. People are welcome to whatever mystical or religious beliefs they choose, providing these don’t break the law. But they are separate. Back in the 90s, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a biologist and palaeontologist, attempted to end the war between science and religious by stating that there were No Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). Science dealt with fact, and religion with issues of meaning and values. Of course, militant atheists of the Dawkins type disagreed and thought that it was a capitulation to unreason. Gould’s wrong in that religion and science do overlap, but as a general point I think it’s fair. Science and religion, as a general rule, are separate.

I am also sure that the new director is right, and that Blacks were experimented on by surgeons and doctors in the past. It certainly happened in America, where one of the great surgeons of the 19th century experiment on Black women without anaesthetic. I read somewhere that H.G. Wells was partly inspired to write The Island of Dr. Moreau by accounts of a German doctor experimenting on Black Africans. But you have to be very careful in making such judgements. A while ago I provoked an angry reply in a piece I had written for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. I was talking about the history of medicine in the context of space exploration. One of the books I had consulted for the piece described one particular pioneering doctor of tropical medicine as a quack for his theories and treatment of diseases. Unfortunately for me, one of the other senior members of the Society knew him, and wrote to me stating that he was a dedicated, humane man of science. The problem was that he was facing completely new diseases unknown in the west and which nobody knew how to treat. This is a good point, and I wrote to the aggrieved gentleman apologising for the inadvertent smear and issued a correction to the Journal. I wonder if some of the other pioneering doctors and surgeons, whose work has similarly fallen into disfavour, were like the man I mentioned – a sincere medical man, working in the unknown.

Underlying the attempts to decentre western science are two related attitudes. One is the fact that many displaced, colonised peoples have been harmed by the destruction of their own, indigenous world view. This has left them without meaning, resulting in alcoholism and drug addiction in many indigenous communities like the Amerindians in the Americas and Aboriginal Australians. The other is the belief in the Noble Savage, in which indigenous communities like them are somehow better, and more noble than moral than White, western society. The attempts to decentre western science and include indigenous myth and religion are attempts to restore dignity to these colonised peoples.

But African paganism also has its dark side. The priests of one of the cults in Nigeria were actively involved in the slave trade, to the point where the Nigerian equivalent of the saying that someone has been sold down the river literally translates as they ‘have been stolen by the Oracle’. There is also a widespread belief in witches and witch hunting all across the continent. Many of the accused, as in the pre-modern west are women, and some of the trials are just as deadly. In one Nigerian ritual, the accused woman is given the Calabar Bean, a poisonous vegetable. If she doesn’t vomit it out quickly, she’ll die, and so be judged a witch. There have also been professional witch hunters of the same stripe as the infamous Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, of Civil War England. Way back in the 19th century one of the Zulu kings went on a witch-hunting campaign. Witchsmellers, the indigenous Zulu witch hunters, were engaged and duly pointed the finger at a number of suspects, who were duly executed. A European official talked to the king, and said this all looked very dubious, and wondered if the witchsmellers were right in their accusations. The king laughed, said he wondered too, and had all one hundred of them executed as frauds.

And then there’s muti, which is really sinister. This is the sacrifice of humans, often young children, for their body parts, which are sold to the sorcerer’s clients to bring them good luck. I put up a piece I found on one of the YouTube channels about the amazing efforts of a Black British woman against it in Uganda. But it also appeared in Britain back in the early part of this century. The cops dragged the spine of a murdered boy, Adam, wrapped in various pieces of coloured cloth out of the Thames. The cloth’s colours were those of the muti cult, and it looked like child, probably 12 years old, had been sacrificed. And some African anthropologists have defended such murders. A little while ago one of them presented such a paper at an anthropological conference in Manchester. They claimed that these sacrifices were morally acceptable because Africans had a collective morality that saw that the sacrifice of an individual could benefit the community. Bear in mind that we are talking about the murder of children, whose body parts, including their genitals, are considered most effective if they have been hacked off while the victim was still alive. I believe that the anthropologist presenting the paper was asked to leave.

Indigenous African religion has also been the tool of White supremacist governments to keep Black Africans firmly in their very subordinate place. A few decades ago, a Zulu shaman, Credo Mutwa, had a book published in this country, in which he explained his mystical beliefs and practises. From what I’ve read, it was a mixture of native Zulu lore and western occultism, aimed at the New Age crowd. It was reviewed by the sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, who were very scathing. Mutwa, they claimed, had been a stooge of the Apartheid South African government during their retribalisation campaign. This stressed the indigenous, separate identities of the various South African tribes, who by then had become a Black proletariat. The intention was to keep the Black population divided so they were too weak to successfully challenge the Apartheid government.

Magonia have also several times stated that these books extolling the joys of indigenous life without western science and technology are all aimed at westerners, who have no intention of living like their ancestors did. I think it’s a fair point. The satirist Alan Coren expressed similar sentiments, set in a European context, in one of his pieces for Punch back in the 1970s. It’s about a very middle class, academic couple, who take over a French village and undo centuries of civilisation in order to return to them to what they see as the inhabitants’ natural, pre-Christian, pre-scientific state. But they themselves have no intention of rejecting scientific modernity. The piece ends with one of them stating he intends to write a paper on it. I think the same mindset is at work here.

As for Eruditu’s beliefs about the British museum and its exhibits, this is just animism, pure and simple, the belief that every rock and object has a soul. But I’ve heard very different things about the unhappy state of some of the exhibits. I’ve got a strong interest in psychical research, and a few weeks ago went to an online meeting about ghosts and hauntings in the British Museum. The Egyptology section has something of a cult as some of the visitors there are worshippers, who leave offerings. One spiritualist visitor, a medium, is supposed to have said that the mummies like being on display, as they feel they have a role to teach, but are frustrated at not being able to communicate with the living. This, of course, is completely the opposite of what Eruditu has said, and you can take or leave either or both depending on your attitude to mysticism. I many people are unhappy about the dead being excavated and put on display in museums, and don’t need a mystic to tell them this. But Egypt is certainly one of the great, founding civilisations of humanity, and Egyptology has massively extended our knowledge of the human past and this civilisation’s undeniable achievements and contribution.

Back to Africa. Way back in the 1980s I read an article by a Black African historian, a Muslim, who had presented his own series on the continent’s history on the Beeb. He lamented the fact that the west’s scientific and technological knowledge, inherited from ancient Greece and Rome, was not being transmitted to Africa. He’s right. After all, India and China have made massive strides in development this century because they have embraced science and technology. Sun Yat-Sen, the Chinese revolutionary who founded the Kuomintang, said at the beginning of his movement that ‘We say hello to Mr Science and Mr Democracy’. Sadly, democracy in China got left behind, but science has been taken up with a vengeance so that the country is now a centre of serious technological innovation in space and robotics. And it was helped in this by the early translators of western scientific texts, who referred to it not as western science, but as ‘the new science’. Something similar may well be needed in Africa.

This attempt to decentre and stigmatise western science and medicine has the potential to seriously harm Black advancement. I do think that there is a genuine potential for science and technology in Africa that is currently untapped and stifled. And Webb complained a few months or perhaps a year ago about a piece in New Scientist, in which a Black, female scientist called for more Blacks in lab coats. This movement, which sees Blacks and other indigenous peoples as non-scientific, runs counter to that. It reminds me of some of the scathing criticisms of non-western cultures by the early orientalists, who felt that these peoples would not be capable of assimilating western culture.

And I dare say the promoters of this movement would accuse me of racism, but I am afraid that there are real dangers of encouraging the dark side of African religion and spirituality through an uncritical acceptance of such shamanism.

If Webb is right, then the new director has not only ruined a once great museum, but she’s part of a larger movement that poses a threat to the whole tradition of the Enlightenment, a movement that genuinely endangers scientific advancement for some of the world’s peoples, who most need it.

A Respectable, Academic Examination of Jews in the American Slave Trade

Simon Webb put up a piece yesterday about how one of the London bookshops had a whole bookcase devoted to the transatlantic slave trade. I’m not surprised at this development. Bookshops are businesses, after all, and exist to sell books. And transatlantic slavery is very much a subject of contemporary controversy and debate, and so you can expect that there’s a demand for books on it. Especially in London, with its large Black population. Nor am I worried by some of the books that branch of Waterstone’s or whoever are stocking. One of the books on the shelf shown in the thumbnail to the video is Slavery and Slaving in African History This is a very respectable academic discussion of the subject. It traces the history of slavery in the continent right back into prehistory and describes historic and contemporary indigenous slavery in Africa, as well as obviously the transatlantic slave trade. Webb is concerned, rightly in my opinion, that many discussions of Black slavery omit the involvement of Black Africans themselves. This book certain doesn’t play that aspect down, and I can imagine that any militant anti-racists seeking to put the blame solely on the west would be very disappointed with it. But it also contains information on contemporary African organisations, set up by former slaves, to campaign against the continued existence of human bondage on the continent.

The history section in Bristol’s branch of Waterstone’s also contained a sizable number of books on slavery. Madge Dresser, one of the lecturers of the University of the West of England, former Bristol Polytechnic, ran a course on the transatlantic slave trade. She also published a book, Slavery Obscured, on Bristol’s continued participation in the slave trade after it had been banned. I made a note of the books on the shelves, as well as a few others I found interesting at the time.

One of these was Saul Friedman’s Jews and the American Slave Trade, which is an academic rebuttal of the lies of the Nation of Islam that the Jews were responsible for the American slave trade. The description of it on Amazon runs

‘The Nation of Islam’s Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan’s charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.’

Friedman is the sort of scholar the mighty Jacky Walker was talking about in her discussion of Jewish involvement in the slave trade on the interwebs, which was picked out and used by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to smear her as a terrible Jew-hater – despite the fact she’s Jewish and her family are Jewish! At nearly £37 for the paperback edition, and £127 for the hardback, it’s certainly not cheap. Nevertheless, it’s necessary. I haven’t read it, but looking at the blurb it looks like a very good book to recommend to anybody with an interest in this area. And especially those who might be taken in by the lies of Farrakhan and his cronies.

Here’s the link to the Amazon page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jews-American-Slave-Trade-Friedman/dp/1138526576.

Simon Webb Now Pushing NHS Privatisation

With the NHS crisis the Tories the Tories have created, the sharks really are circling in the water. Nana Akua of GB News seems to be one of those plugging its privatisation, along with broadcaster, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. And now they’ve been joined by Our Favourite Internet (non)Historian, Simon Webb. He put up a post this morning with the title ‘What’s So Bad About Privatising the NHS?’ It’s short, but I haven’t watched it on the grounds that I’d find it too infuriating. Webb is, of course, far right, and seems to get most of his views from the Torygraph, which has also been pushing this nonsense. As someone who takes history seriously, Webb should know what an immense difference the NHS and the welfare state made to the lives of ordinary Brits. I’ve blogged about it, citing my sources. But some of those I’ve used were by social worker types, the kind of people the Tory party has been trying to discredit for donkey’s years, and so someone like Webb would simply ignore them out of hand. But I’ve also used books from the time looking forward to the foundation of the NHS, as well as Jackie Davis’ and Ray Tallis’ excellent NHS – SOS. In contrast to what the privatisers will tell you, private healthcare is not more efficient. It’s less. Private hospitals are smaller, and in order to make a profit private healthcare largely ignores the long-term sick in order to concentrate on people who are mostly well. When private healthcare companies have taken over doctors’ surgeries in this country, they’ve closed down those they consider unprofitable, leaving thousands without a doctor. Also, private healthcare spends a large proportion of their running costs on administration, so as a consequence these costs have risen in the NHS as a consequence of its privatisation.

At the moment there seems to be a trend among the political class to be looking at the continental healthcare systems, where medical costs are paid by a mixture of state and private health insurance. But this also neglects the simple fact that these countries also spend much more on their healthcare generally than we do. The privatisation of the NHS won’t improve healthcare, but it will give private healthcare firms the support of the state sector, which is what they want.

And it seems to me that what the Tories really want is a completely private healthcare system, funded by private health insurance, like America. And that really would be disastrous. Except for their corporate friends, of course, who would get all those great profits.

A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. Here’s their description. The pamphlets are available from me, if you want one, while the book’s available from Lulu.

Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.

The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.

Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.

This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.

Here’s the video I made years ago for my book against the privatisation of the health service.

I also put up this video, which only four people have watched, asking people to vote Labour to defend the NHS. I hope people will, as some Labour MPs will defend it. But I’m not at all sure about Starmer.