Academic Article Refuting the Myth that Mary Seacole Was a Rival To Florence Nightingale

Okay, I realise I’m diving into the internet non-historian’s territory with this piece, but historical accuracy is important. There’s been a push for decades now to promote Mary Seacole as the Black rival and counterpart to Florence Nightingale. This view claims that she was as popular and acclaimed as Nightingale, but has been unfairly forgotten. Only recently have Black historians and activists managed to rescue her from this neglect and restore her to her rightful place in history. I first came across her c. 2001 or so, when I found a programme on her listed in the Radio Times on Radio 4. Since then there have been numerous books on her, you can find her autobiography on Amazon, and she appeared in last season’s edition of Doctor Who, running her hospital in the Crimea in an alternative timeline where the British were fighting the Sontarans. There are buildings and educational institutions dedicated to her, and a few years ago the BBC screened a documentary about her, following a group of mostly Black nurses as they campaigned for a bust to be put up celebrating her.

But this is very much a myth. Her autobiography makes it very clear that she was a businesswoman and a hotelier, rather than a nurse. When she went to the Crimea, it was to open a hotel, mostly catering to the officers. She did some nursing, but she only ventured onto the battlefield three times after the battle was over. She did so only after she had stopped serving refreshments to the tourists and spectators who had turned up to watch, and then mostly tended the officers. The internet non-historian has posted a number of videos debunking the myth about her. But academic historians have also published critical examinations of her. I found this paper, by Lynn McDonald, from the department of sociology and anthropology, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, ‘Mary Seacole and claims of evidence-based practice and global influence’ and published in Nursing Open, vol. 3, number one, in September 2015. The abstract for the paper runs

‘AimThe aim of this paper was to explore the contribution of Mary Seacole to nursing and health care, notably in comparison with that of Florence Nightingale.Background Much information is available, in print and electronic, that presents Mary Seacole as a nurse, even as a pioneer nurse and leader in public health care. Her own memoir and copious primary sources, show rather than she was a businesswoman, who gave assistance during the Crimean War, mainly to officers. Florence Nightingale’s role as the major founder of the nursing profession, a visionary of public health care and key player in advocating ‘environmental’ health, reflected in her own Notes on Nursing, is ignored or misconstrued.DesignDiscussion paper.Data sourcesBritish newspapers of 19th century and The Times digital archive; Australian and New Zealand newspaper archives, published memoirs, letters and biographies/autobiographies of Crimean War participants were the major sources.ResultsCareful examination of primary sources, notably digitized newspaper sources, British, Australian and New Zealand, show that the claims for Seacole’s ‘global influence’ in nursing do not hold, while her use of ‘practice-based evidence’ might better be called self-assessment. Primary sources, moreover, show substantial evidence of Nightingale’s contributions to nursing and health care, in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and many countries and the UK much material shows her influence also on hospital safety and health promotion.’

It compares her and Florence Nightingale’s activities in the Crimea

‘The Crimean War: Seacole and Nightingale compared

When Seacole arrived in the Crimea, she set up a business in a hut, popularly known as ‘Mrs Seacole’s’, which was a restaurant/bar/store/takeaway/catering service for officers, with a ‘canteen for the soldiery’ (Seacole p. 114). While getting her business ready to open, she kindly gave out hot tea and lemonade to soldiers waiting on the wharf for transport to the general hospitals, ‘all the doctors would allow me to give’ (Seacole 1857a p. 101). She made her herbal remedies available to all, but the ingredients were unspecified. Her memoir gives three full chapters (13, 14 and 18) to the meals, catering and services she provided to officers, while there is only passing mention of soldiers, but no details of what she provided for them.

In her memoir, Seacole described precisely three occasions when she gave assistance on the battlefield, postbattle: 18 June, 16 August and 8 September 1855 (Seacole pp. 155–61, 164–67 and 169–72). Yet this is frequently made out to be a regular occurrence. A book by nurses, for example, states that she ‘frequently ventured out onto the battlefield, selling goods and caring for wounded soldiers from both sides’ (McAllister and Lowe 2011 p. 26). A book for schoolchildren describes her ‘main job’ as searching ‘the battlefields for wounded and dying men, even while the guns were still firing’ (Castor 1999, p. 34). An encyclopaedia entry has her caring ‘for British soldiers at the battlefront’, and a ‘familiar figure’ transferring ‘casualties from the front’, for which she won ‘decorations’ from three countries (Encyclopedia Britannica 2014).

Both Seacole personally and her business got favourable newspaper coverage in the The Times and other newspapers. Many more examples have been added from provincial newspaper archives (Staring-Derks et al. 2015); the first two authors are ‘ambassadors’ for the Seacole statue campaign, the third its vice chair. These authors, however, draw inferences from the coverage that do not survive scrutiny of the sources themselves, nor of other available sources from the time.

Most of the items on Seacole retrieved are mere passing mentions, with no content on nursing, hospitals or healthcare. That Seacole and her ‘assistant’ were among the ‘first settlers in the purveying line’ was noted in an Australian newspaper story. The commanders-in-chief of the British and French armies, Codrington and Pelissier, were said to have been seen in her ‘establishment’, also ‘Billy Russell’, the war correspondent W.H. Russell, ‘and every officer of the three armies’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1856). This is business and socializing, not the running of a hospital for ordinary soldiers.

Seacole was noted as being present for the awarding of the Order of the Bath to senior officers and that she was introduced to the official who made the presentations on behalf of the Queen, Lord Gough (Daily News 1856b). She recorded the event in her own memoir, adding that she sent a cake to army headquarters for it, ‘decorated with banners, flags, etc.,’ (Seacole p. 169). Lord Gough, on the other hand, made a point of calling on Nightingale at her hospital (Rait 1903 vol. 2, p. 335). Some of the newspaper items simply refer to the location of her hut, a known landmark, for example, that a ‘stone struck her door, which is three and a half or four miles from the park’ (The Times 1855c) and that there was a police station nearby (The Times 1855e). Other mentions are of her catering, for example, that she was the only woman at the horse races, where she ‘presided over a sorely invested tentfull of creature comforts’ (The Times 1855d).

The world’s first war correspondent, W.H. Russell, was a customer at ‘Mrs Seacole’s’, liked her and paid tribute to her kindness to the soldiers. He recounted spotting her on the battlefield, when he was there interviewing soldiers (The Times 1855b). Seacole quoted his compliments in her memoir (Seacole pp. 171–2), for which he also wrote a warm introduction. All this is to Seacole’s credit, but repetition of his praise does not make her battlefield visits more frequent or make her into a ‘battlefield nurse’. In the four volumes of Russell’s dispatches published later, Seacole appears only once, briefly (Russell 1856 pp. 187–8). When he returned to the Crimea in 1869, escorting the Prince and Princess of Wales on a state visit, their carriages passed near ‘the site of ‘Mother Seacole’s’ (Russell 1869 p. 564). A review of a book recounting another return visit noted ‘the heaps of broken bottles by Mrs Seacole’s store’ (The Times 1869a).

Russell’s mentions of Nightingale, by contrast, are frequent, many of them in considerable detail. His dispatches, as The Times coverage generally, relate the terrible conditions she and her nurses faced and her use of The Times fund to purchase desperately needed clothing, bedding, supplies, food, etc., for the hospitals. Many stories describe the failings of the War Office which Nightingale had to overcome. The Times also printed letters from her and many more about her, from people at the war. A count of mentions in The Times shows more than seven for Nightingale for every one of Seacole. There are too many on Nightingale to include in this paper, but they are available on a website: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~cwfn/archival/times-letters-and-mentions.pdf

Seacole’s own account of her trip to and time spent in the Crimea are largely of her business, its challenges and the officers it served. Newspaper coverage of her activities similarly was largely of the business and its various problems:

•A short item announced her intended ‘hotel’ for ‘excursion visitors’ (The Times 1855a).

•An American newspaper story described her ‘hotel for travelers’, with the reporter’s promise ‘to board withher next year’ (New York Daily Tribune 1855).

•At the first British assault on the Redan, she sold food and drink to spectators, then gave first aid (Seacole p. 157).

•On her second foray onto the battlefield, she gave first aid after selling goods to spectators (Seacole pp. 164–7).

•Seacole is noted, in a memoir, for providing lunch for a cricket match (Astley 1894, p. 145).

•Her third and last foray onto the battlefield –all were postbattle –took place at the second failed British attempt on the Redan (Seacole pp. 169–72).

•For New Year’s Day of 1856 she held a party and took plum pudding and mince pies to the nearby Land Transport Corps Hospital (Seacole p. 187).

•In April 1856, the fighting by then long over, Seacole went out on excursions to see the Crimean countryside; a newspaper story recounts Russian soldiers giving her a religious medallion (Aberdeen Journal 1856).

•In May 1856, a newspaper story reports that she made a ‘grand tour’ in the Crimea, that she was able to leave some stock behind her and that she was given ‘a medal’ by the sultan (The Times 1856b); possibly this is a reference to the religious ‘medallion’ above noted.

•In June 1856, when troops were leaving the Crimea, she was cheered by soldiers as they passed by her hut (The Times 1856c).

•A newspaper story in July 1856, as she was leaving the Crimea, said that she planned to establish a store at Aldershot, a British army base (The Times 1856d); she was seen by an Australian fellow passenger on board the Indus, which sailed from Constantinople to Marseilles (Argus 1857a).

Coverage of Nightingale’s work during the war was extensive and favourable. In The Times alone there were over 200 stories or letters on her over the course of the war. The early stories reported her departure, then the terrible conditions the nurses faced at the Barrack Hospital –the lack of bedding, clothing and supplies, overcrowding and poor nutrition, with much on her use of The Times Fund and other donations to meet needs.

Coverage in 1855 moved on to Nightingale’s trips to the Crimea and its hospitals, her illness, convalescence and return to work. There was much coverage of the improvement in hospital conditions, the work of the Sanitary and Supply Commissions, with Nightingale’s assistance. She was much cited in hearings in London of the Roebuck select committee investigating the state of the army, reported in The Times and in papers in Melbourne (Age 1855), Sydney (Empire 1855, Sydney Morning Herald 1855) and Adelaide (South Australian Register 1855).

Stories in 1856 took up improved conditions for soldiers, with the establishment of the ‘Inkermann Cafe’ and reading rooms, then plans for her return to England and her first work back home to address the problems. There are letters by Nightingale to the editor and some to family members they sent on to a paper. She was frequently mentioned in letters to the editor by people who had visited the war hospitals.’

And concludes

‘The real ‘global nurse’

The evidence shows that the serious work to found the profession of nursing was led by Florence Nightingale, who did major work also on hospital safety and the institution of public health care. Post-Crimea, she conducted research to determine how to reduce death rates, then founded the first nurse training school in the world, which in time sent out trained nurses and matrons to establish professional nursing in many countries. Without ever going to India, she worked for decades on improving health care there, along with social and political reform, famine prevention and relief. She documented the high rates of morbidity and death in colonial aboriginal schools and hospitals. Her work was global and it was globally influential.

Primary sources on Seacole have shown wide interest in her life and circumstances, but not any contributions to nursing or health care. International coverage is similar to that in the U.K. Her book was favourably discussed, wherever it was reviewed, but nowhere treated as more than enjoyable reading. Excerpts appear to have been selected for general interest. By contrast, international coverage of Nightingale over the same period shows her to have been taken as a major contributor to the establishment of nursing and the reform of hospitals and a vigorous advocate of broader social and health care reforms, both for the military and the civil population. There was much coverage also of her work on such other concerns as the vote for women, health in India and relief in numerous famines and wars. Seacole should be credited for the contribution she actually made and Nightingale for hers.

Finally, there are lessons to be drawn from the analysis about the reinterpretation of people’s contributions over time, or revisionism. The tendency to consider that all people in a particular era share the same values and prejudices is overly simplistic. Nightingale was white and of a privileged family background, but she was highly critical of British imperialism and views of racial supremacy. Her papers on aboriginal peoples show this. Her work on Indian health concerns was accompanied by support for Indian nationals; for example, she wrote a campaign letter for the first Indian to be elected to Parliament.

Not everyone shares the prevailing set of attitudes and some indeed oppose them. Clearly there would be no social change if this were not so. Change requires leaders both of the privileged group and the one seeking recognition-independence-equal rights. Nightingale, thanks to her family, was especially conscious of race issues –her grandfather was a leading abolitionist. She can be seen as carrying those concerns forward, indeed as an early contributor to anti-racism.’

Seacole was an enterprising and kind businesswoman and a celebrity at the time, but she was in no way comparable to Nightingale, who was the real force at Crimea and behind the reform of nursing, as well as a pioneering anti-racist.

For further information, see file:///E:/(PDF)%20Mary%20Seacole%20and%20claims%20of%20evidence-based%20practice%20and%20global%20influence.html

Black Employment Charity Accused of Spreading Anti-White Racism and Extremism

I’m afraid this video comes from the wretched GB News, which, in the words of one Labour politician, has two points of view: right and far right. This is a report on Access UK, a charity set up to find work for Blacks and has received £250,000 of government funding. Unfortunately, it also seems to actively promote extremism. The report shows a clip of video, in which a young woman tells White people that the rest of the world regard them as a plague because of colonialism. The characterisation of Whites as a plague is clearly racist, but this does not necessarily mean that the woman herself is, if she’s just reporting it.

The organisation also promoted the view that ancient Egypt was Black, which GB News describes as a ‘conspiracy theory’. I’ve had Black friends and co-workers believe it too, most of whom I wouldn’t describe as extremists or conspiracy theorists. It’s also held by a number of White liberals as well, including the Afrocrentric historians Basil Davidson and Martin Bernal, the author of Black Athena. The only way I can think that it can be described as a conspiracy theory is that some of the people I knew who believed it also believed that there was a terrible conspiracy by the British or whoever to cover up the fact that they were Black. One of the ways they did this was by chipping off their noses and lips. This just strikes me as ridiculous paranoia, as if you look at a lot of ancient statues, a number have chipped or missing noses or lips, as well as other parts, from sheer wear and tear. Recent genetic research suggests that the Egyptians were 98 per cent White with two per cent Black genetic heritage. As we’ve seen with the furore over the Netflix series about Cleopatra, the Egyptians themselves see their ancient ancestors as White. Meanwhile, the Egyptological establishment itself is profoundly uninterested what colour they were, preferring more substantial questions and issues such as their history, architecture, literature, religion, governmental structures, art and the everyday lives of ordinary people back in the days of the pharaohs.

GB News claims that the idea that ancient Egypt was Black comes from the Hotep movement. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I haven’t heard of that movement before, and in the belief in a Black Egypt dates from long before them. It first emerged with Black American clergy writing in the early 19th century. They claimed that Egypt was Black in order to rebut White supremacist claims that Blacks were culturally and racially inferior.

Access UK also seems to have had links. with other radicals. One of their videos shows them talking to a man who set up his own paramilitary group. The video here shows Blacks in stab vests marching. I haven’t heard of this individual before. My guess is that he’s probably American because of the greater tolerance the American state gives to paramilitary organisations like the militias. That said, Sasha Johnson was trying to found something similar in the UK before she was shot by four unidentified gunmen in a party at her home.

GB News reads out a comment for the organisation’s head, Nana Ageyman, which states that they’re an anti-racist organisation that condemns all forms of racism and they value their White allies.

The clip ends with a comment that politicians are now looking the money given to other organisations as well.

I can’t say I’m surprised. There seems to be a background of real anti-White hatred in a number of Black organisations. Last week one of the Black American YouTube channels carried a clip of the CEO of a Black publishing company, Kamau Kambon of Blacknificent Books, telling an audience somewhere that the real issue was how they exterminate Whites everywhere, because otherwise Whites would exterminate them. This was followed by a clip of a meeting against gentrification where the mayor of a Black majority district boasted about White people leaving his town. There were 11,000 Black politicians in America, he said, and they needed to ‘get radical’. These expressions of racial hatred towards Whites started long before Black Lives Matter, and included equally genocidal statements from some White liberals. But they haven’t improved with the current racial climate.

Archaeologists Restore the Brown Pigment on Ancient Egyptian Statuary

One of the incidents Frank Furedi cites as an example of the woke attack on key White cultural and intellectual figures, who include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Newton, is an exhibition of ancient Greek statues by the Cambridge Archaeological Museum, which called attention to their ‘Whiteness’. I always understood that in their time, ancient Greek and Roman statues which richly painted. They only appear white because the pigment has worn off with time. This produced an interesting comment from Trev, one of the great commenters on this blog. He recalled that when he did Cultural Studies, he was told by the lecturer that the paint was deliberately scrubbed off due to some programme of cultural reclamation or appropriation.

This seems to me to be highly unlikely. I’ve never heard or read about any such thing. It sounds very close to a myth you hear from time to time from the Afrocentrists, that the noses and lips of ancient Egyptian statues were deliberately chipped off by the Europeans in order to hide the fact that they were Black. This seems unlikely to me too. The noses and lips of statues frequently got chipped off through natural wear, as shown by the statues of White figures from the ancient world. And if there was this terrible campaign to disguise the ancient Egyptians’ Blackness, why did so many statues and images of them with dark complexions and sub-Saharan African features survive. The small head of Queen Tiyi is a case in point. As portrayed, she looks very Black African, and this has added force to the discussion about the possible Black African origins and heritage of the Egyptians. In ancient Egyptian art, the men are conventionally portrayed as reddish-brown in colour, while the women are yellow. When they depict Europeans, such as Cypriots, they’re painted pink. So, if Europeans were so determined to hide the fact that the Egyptians were Black, why wasn’t there at least some attempt to scrub them of this colour? I see no evidence that this was done. In fact, I’ve found evidence to the contrary.

One of the extracts from the writing of archaeologists and travellers from the 18th century to the 20th included in the book The World of Archaeology, ed. and introduction by C.W. Ceram, is from Amelia Edwards’ 1889 A Thousand Miles Up The Nile. This extract describes her and the other archaeologists using coffee to restore the brown pigment from a statue from which they’d recently chipped plaster. She writes

‘At this juncture, seeing that the men’s time hung heavy on their hands, our Painter conceived the idea of setting them to clean the face of the northernmost Colossus, still disfigured by the plaster left on it when the great cast was taken by Mr Hay more than half a century before. This happy thought was promptly carried into effect. A scaffolding of spars and oars was at once improvised, and the men delighted as children at play, were soon swarming all over the huge head, just as the carvers may have swarmed over it when Rameses was king.

All they had to do was remove any small lumps that might yet adhere to the surface, and then tint the white patches with coffee. This they did with bits of sponge tied to the ends of sticks; but Reis Hassan, as a mark of dignity, had one of the Painter’s old brushes, of which he was inordinately proud.

It took them three afternoons to complete the job; and we were all sorry when it came to an end. To see Reis Hassan artistically touching up a gigantic nose almost as long as himself: Riskalli and the cook-boy staggering to and fro with relays of coffee, brewed ‘thick and slab’ for the purpose; Salame perched cross-legged, like some complacent imp, on the towering rim of the great pschent overhead; the rest chattering and skipping about the scaffolding like monkeys, was, I will venture to say, a sight more comic than has ever been seen at Abu Simbel before or since.

Rameses’ appetite for coffee was prodigious. He consumed I know not how many gallons a day. Our cook stood aghast at the demand made on his stores. Never before had he been called upon to provide for a guest whose mouth measured three feet and a half in width.

Still, the result justified the expenditure. The coffee proved a capital match for the sandstone; and though it was not possible wholly to restore the uniformity of the original surface, we at least succeeded in obliterating those ghastly splotches, which for so many years have marred this beautiful face as with the unsightlyness of leprosly.’

Amelia Edwards, ‘Coffee at Abu Simbel, in C.W. Ceram, The World of Archaeology (London: Thames & Hudson 1966) 170-1.

I’ve no doubt that archaeologists nowadays would be horrified at the use of coffee and there would, or should be concerns about the safety of the workers on the scaffolding. But the point remains: it looks very much like there was no attempt to conceal the natural features of the Egyptian statues.

I’m extremely sceptical about Cultural Studies. From what I understand, it emerged from the cultural criticism of the Marxist Frankfurt School given a Postmodern twist in the 1980s. It’s part of the whole Critical Studies movement, which looks at texts for racial, sexual and anti-gay oppression. Which is not to say that all the lecturers teaching it or impressed with it are Marxists. I know for a fact that they aren’t, as it was taught at my alma mater in Cheltenham by people, who very definitely weren’t. Not all of it’s bad by any means, but some of it reads too much into texts and it needs to be treated with caution.

Head of Queen Tiyi, favourite wife of Amenhotep III. From: Esmond Wright, General Editor, History of the World, vol I, from the Prehistory to the Renaissance (Feltham: Newnes Books 1985) 91.

Frank Furedi on the Woke Cancellation of Chaucer, Newton and Other Key Figures for Racism and Colonialism

A few days ago, Frank Furedi published a piece about ‘woke’ academic attacks on key figures of the British literary and scientific canon because someone in a series of universities, schools and museums had decided that they were racist and colonialist. This included Chaucer, who was denounced as a rapist, racist and colonialist, Shakespeare, and Milton. Milton was an opponent of slavery, but he didn’t escape censure because he believed Whites were more beautiful than Blacks. Newton came in for it, because despite discovering gravity and revolutionising physics, he ‘may have benefited from colonialism.’ Sydney Opera House apologised for classical music. It was racist, because traditionally White culture views it as the highest musical form. Then there was the case of the Cambridge Archaeological, Museum, which staged a display of Greek statues drawing attention to their ‘whiteness’. The classics department at the same university also the role the classics have played in the development of racism. The article also described how one American high school English teacher boasted online about getting the Odyssey banned from the school library. At the same time, the science departments at British universities are under pressure to decolonise their curricula, because science was a tool the British Empire used to exploit and oppress its subject peoples. This is all being pushed by the Quality Assurance Agency, which also wanted Maths students to be told that some of the statistical techniques had been pioneered by eugenicists. It demanded instead that its teaching should also promote diversity. Furedi rightly considered this an attack on key figures in western culture motivated by the contemporary anti-racism craze.

I’m not a fan of Furedi. I think he started out as one of the Living Marxism crew, before joining the Libertarian hard right with the rest of them after the fall of Communism. But he’s right here. He writes that the ‘decolonisation project of British universities has no interest in academic learning. Its objective is to discredit and take down the leading historical figures in the sciences and humanities. When I say take down, I mean literally take down. In an attempt to emulate the Rhodes Must Fall campaign targeting the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, students at Cape Town University adopted the phrase ‘science must fall’! It appears that discrediting science is a small price to pay for decolonising some of the most precious achievements of humanity.’

And concludes

‘The campaign designed to discredit and de-authorise the humanities should concern us all, for what is at stake is the status of a cultural legacy that has endured for thousands of years and inspired people throughout the ages. If we lose sight of the artistic, literary and intellectual contribution of Ancient Greece and Rome, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we risk falling under the spell of cultural illiteracy. We owe a great debt to the humanities, for they provided the foundation for developing human civilisation’s moral and scientific insights.

The assault on knowledge threatens to corrode and discredit the intellectual foundation of our civilisation. Orwell’s prediction that by 2050 Newspeak will triumph no longer seems farfetched. Every time an academic subject or a field of intellectual or artistic endeavour becomes decolonised, we risk losing sight of what we have lost. As I noted elsewhere, society is coming under the spell of historical amnesia. That is why we must raise the alarm and take action to protect our arts and sciences from the cultural vandals stalking our institutions.’

It’s not hard to find rebuttals against these cancellations. Past people had very different cultural values, and it is wrong to expect them to share those of ‘woke’ 21st century militant anti-racists. But their attitudes towards race and colonialism does not invalidate their work, any more than any other aspect of their personal lives. Isaac Newton is a case in point. He was an extremely difficult, bigoted, quarrelsome individual. He deliberately lectured in Latin so that as few people as possible could understand his theories, and had a venomous hatred of Roman Catholicism. His descriptions of what he hoped would happen to Catholic nuns apparently is very misogynistic. He also had a long-running feud with the German scientist and philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, over who invented calculus first. During the feud, they both reviewed each others’ books under pseudonyms, along with other underhand tactics. But this doesn’t invalidate Newton as one of the key figures in the history of western science.

As for Milton, many peoples across the world believe that their own race is the most beautiful of all. This includes Black peoples, who regarded Whites as ugly, as described by anthropologists. But Milton’s Paradise Lost is a classic of British, and indeed world literature. As is another of his works, the Areopagita, which is one of the first pleas for freedom of speech. I think the various people and institutions intent on censoring and controlling what we say for ideological reasons should be forced to read it, along with Mill’s On Liberty, until they can recite in their sleep.

Moving on to the ‘whiteness’ of Greek statuary, it’s been known for a long time that in their heyday they were painted in bright colours. They only appear white because the paint has worn off over the millennia. And you can find white statues from earlier cultures in the Middle East going back to the Sumerians.

All these attacks ultimately come from the Critical Social Justice conception of ‘Whiteness’. White culture is innately racist and oppresses people of colour. Anti-racists should therefore insist on its decolonisation in order to create a more inclusive and diverse culture.

But in these attacks on key western figures and culture, it has moved beyond simply recognising the value of other peoples and their discoveries into an attack on White culture itself.

David Starkey Claims the Left Want to Replace the Holocaust with Black Lives Matter to Destroy Western, White Culture

David Starkey is also one of the speakers at the National Conservatism conference, and once again has stirred up controversy because of his comments on race. According to the Independent, the Tudor historian said that the left is jealous of the Holocaust and wants to replace it with Black Lives Matter. And they’re not interested in protecting Black lives, but it tearing down western, White culture. The article says

‘Left-wing activists are “jealous” of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery, a leading historian has said.

In a speech to the National Conservatism conference in London, David Starkey claimed that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy “white culture” and “do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust”.

He said: “The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery.”

The historian’s comments brought swift condemnation, with Daniel Sugarman, public affairs director at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, tweeting that they were “pathetic attempts to drive a wedge between communities” that “will not work”.’…

‘In his speech to the National Conservatism conference on Wednesday, Dr Starkey renewed his criticism of Black Lives Matter, denying that the movement cared about black lives at all.

To applause from the audience, he said: “Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be.

“They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.

“The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this.”

He added: “The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.”’

Starkey’s wrong about the left seeking to replace the Holocaust with slavery, but he does have a point about Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter being used to discredit White culture. Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour, was unfairly charged with anti-Semitism by the witch-hunters in the Labour party a few years ago because she dared to ask questions about how other genocides, such as the Black Holocaust of slavery, would be commemorated as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. She said this in a Labour party workshop about the proper commemoration of the Day, which stated that there would be no restrictions on what anyone could say. I think she’s technically wrong to describe transatlantic slavery as a holocaust. The Holocaust and similar genocides are deliberate attempts to wipe out nations and ethnicities. That wasn’t the case with transatlantic slavery, which aimed at the forced use of the enslaved peoples’ labour. This doesn’t remove the fact, however, that the violence and cruelty involved in the transatlantic slave trade was horrendous and it contributed to increased warfare and conflict in Africa, as tribes competed to capture slaves to sell to Europeans. The ceremonies on Holocaust Memorial Day also include the remembrance of other genocides, and Walker definitely did not want to replace the Holocaust with the slave trade, merely add it to the other atrocities also commemorated. Walker’s case, which was an attempt to silence a long term and principled critic of Israel, is the only one I know that comes anywhere close to a demand to replace the Holocaust with the commemoration of slavery. And she didn’t do that. When left-wingers have denounced the commemoration of the Holocaust, it’s been because of the way it is used as a propaganda device to muster support for Israel against the Palestinians. Who are being ethnically cleansed from their traditional home.

Starkey has much more of a point with Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Black Lives Matter was a response to a deep felt issue – what was perceived as racism in the American police which resulted in the greater shooting of Blacks. In fact, Black and other Conservatives have challenged this, and shown that more police get shot than Blacks, and more Whites are shot and killed by cops than Blacks. The organisation itself is Marxist, and rejects capitalism and the traditional family. In America, it’s also been rocked by scandal as its leader, Patrice Cullors, has used the millions donated to the organisation to enrich herself, her relatives and lieutenants. There have been a couple of similar scandals in Britain. A Black Lives Matter activist from Bristol is being sued for similarly taking donations. And a few days ago it was reported that the British Film Institute is taking a BLM-supporting film maker to court. She received funding from them to produce a documentary about Black liberation and the BLM movement, but hasn’t done so. Moderate and Conservative Black commenters have also criticised BLM for ignoring the problem of Black on Black violence and killing, which seriously afflicts many Black communities in America and Britain. Innocent Black people are still being murdered, but the movement ignores those lives unless the killers are White.

At the same time, Critical Race Theory holds that Whiteness is a bourgeois quality that automatically gives White people a privileged position in western society, which is intrinsically and systematically racist. The amount of racism in western society hasn’t changed, but only become more hidden. Hence demands to ‘destroy White privilege’ and for Whites to ‘be less White’. Slavery has become part of this, because the current disadvantaged state of Black communities in America and Britain is attributed to the slave trade and its legacy. Hence the demands for reparations. And yes, it is being used to delegitimise those nations. The 1619 Project about the influence of slavery and racism in America deliberately took that date as part of its name, because it considers it the true date of the founding of America. This was when the first Black slaves were imported into the nascent British colonies. At the same time, Britain is also coming in for criticism because of slavery and imperialism. For campaigners, the two or intrinsically linked, despite the fact that the later British empire and its annexation of Africa was partly motivated by a crusading zeal to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. Apart from the toppling of slavers like Edward Colston in Bristol, there are campaigns by Critical Social Justice activists to censor art and literature connected to slavery. And one of the problems is that slavery and imperialism is framed as something that only Whites do to people of colour. One of the arguments used by the slave-owners against the abolitionists was that slavery had been practised across the world down through history, and its abolition would leave Britain vulnerable to other nations and empires that had no such moral scruples. I’ve put up videos from the Arab, Turkish and Iranian world about their Black citizens, who also have their origins in those countries’ slave trades. Dubai, to its credit, has a museum to its history of slavery and slave trading. But few in the west seem to be aware of this and there is an active opposition amongst western anti-racism campaigner to tackling the resurgence of real slavery in Africa and elsewhere in the world. One of the left-wing writers in the I, Emma Maltby, rejected such demands as a distraction from the goal of achieving racial equality in the west. And Critical Postcolonial Theory rejects any criticism of extra-European societies traditional cultures as racist. Radical ideologies like Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory are part of the wider movement of Critical Theory which is a postmodernist revision of Marxism that seeks to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy and the gender binary as part of the intersectional leftism called for by the German-American Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s.

I’m not a fan of Starkey, and he’s way off with his complaint about leftists trying to replace the Holocaust with slavery. But he does have a point in that slavery is being used as an ideological weapon against traditional western culture as part of a wider, postmodern assault on the Enlightenment values of individualism, rationality and reasoned debate. And this not only bothers those on the right, like Starkey, but also people on the left, like Helen Pluckrose, one of the trio of critics of Postmodernism and its assault on western culture with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. They have pointed out that CRT and related ‘isms’ differ strongly from the traditional anti-racism and feminist movements.

You can therefore criticise them without necessarily wanting the extremely right-wing economic and social order called for by people like Starkey.

For the Independent article, go to: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/left-wing-wants-to-replace-holocaust-with-black-lives-matter-says-david-starkey/ar-AA1biu58?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=dcceda18ad0848e7b25a84d6a580c758&ei=52

Eygptian YouTuber’s Criticism of Netflix’s Portrayal of a Black Cleopatra

Early today I put up a post about an Egyptian lawyer suing Netflix because its documentary about Cleopatra cast her as a Black woman. He isn’t alone in his objection. There are reports that the Egyptians put up a petition on Change.org condemning the documentary. This garnered 85,000 signatures before it was taken down by the internet petitioning organisation for breaking their community guidelines. This video comes from the Fun Killing King channel on YouTube. It’s by an Egyptian, who lays out the historical reasons why Cleopatra wasn’t Black. She was descended from the Ptolemies, descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals. They practised incest and lived in Lower Egypt, so they were probably weren’t racially mixed. If they were, the Egyptians with whom they would have intermarried would have been lighter skinned than those further south. Contemporary portraits of her show her with Caucasian features. He states, though, that as a Mediterranean woman she would probably have been darker skinned than the Romans.

He also makes the point that Egypt was very mixed in the racial composition of its citizens. Some were White, but others, particularly in the south, had more sub-Saharan African citizens. This is demonstrated in their art and statuary. He shows the tomb paintings the Egyptian middle class commissioned c. 300 AD, which show many of their subjects as Mediterranean rather Black African. He is annoyed at outsiders appropriating Egyptian history for themselves, and blames Jayda Pinknett Smith, Will Smith’s wife, who is an Afrocentrist and one of the show’s producers and its narrator.

He states at the outset that he is has no objections to Black leads, and later argues that documentaries like Nefflix’s, which appropriate ancient Egypt for Black Americans, overlook real Black history. They ignore the Kushite Black pharaohs, who conquered and ruled Egypt and its empire in the Middle East until they were finally defeated and expelled. They also ignore later, powerful African empires like Mansa Musa’s in Mali. The Fun Killing King compares the Afrocentric portrayal of Cleopatra to the Kushite invasion at one point, which adds further evidence that at least some Egyptians see this as a colonialist enterprise.

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.

Historical Slavery Commemoration Groups Plans Slavery Museum in Bristol

Bristol was, along with London and Liverpool, one of the major centres of the transatlantic slave trade. According to last Friday’s edition of the local paper, the Bristol Post, for the 24th February 2023, a group of activists and radical historians have put forward plans to turn the former Seaman’s Mission on the city’s harbour into a museum of slavery. The building is owned by the brewery Samuel Smith’s at the moment. They’re intending to sell it, but are demanding £1 million. The museum is the idea of the Abolition Shed collective, who admit that at the moment they don’t have the money for it, but have submitted plans in order to start a public debate about it.

The Collective is composed of the Bristol Radical History Group, the Countering Colston Group and the Long John Silver Trust. They are backed by the architects Marshall & Kendon, who have drawn up the plans for the suggested museum and education centre. The architect’s planning brief said

“The Abolition Shed Collective believe they have an imaginative reuse the historic buildings are crying out for – an Interpretation Centre or Museum for a Memorial to the Victims of Enslavement to be sited nearby – right where this history actually happened in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

“To tell the story of anti-slavery campaigners that, combined with African agency and resistance of the enslaved themselves, brought an end to this heinous crime against humanity. Bristol was the pre-eminent slave trading port in the world between the 1720s and 1740s, and this vital fact is little acknowledged , it was also home to one of the strongest pro-slavery lobbies in the country that did their best to continue the slave-system right up to Emancipation in the 1830s and beyond.”

The group first tried to get a museum set up in the O&M shed building, but the city council sold it to developers. The city’s elected mayor, Marvin Rees, is also unconvinced that the city needs such a museum. The Collective’s Mark Steeds said that the intention was to create a place where people could learn about the city’s past and commemorate its victims.

“This is about getting this issue out there and discussed. We want to start a conversation about Bristol, its history and how we can all acknowledge and learn from it. Too often, whenever there’s a talk about street names and statues, it becomes divisive. What we want to do is have somewhere everyone can go and learn more about about this part of Bristol’s history that is not really told, acknowledged or remembered, ‘he added. (p. 6).

This could be interesting. Bristol’s Black community has long complained that the city is somehow covering its participation in the slave trade. The city’s deputy mayor, Asher Craig, said in a Radio 4 interview a few years ago that she wanted a museum of slavery for Bristol. In practice, when one group came to her with plans for one, she turned them away and told them to find the money elsewhere. The Bristol Cable, a small local paper, has complained that Bristol should have a museum of slavery comparable to those at Liverpool and Nantes. I’m sceptical, because it seems to me that such museums are less commemorative than a form of moral reproach and recrimination by the Black community at Whites, and present slavery as something only White people did to Blacks. But this could be different, if it also talks about the Abolitionist movement in Bristol.

My Email to the Local Labour Party about the False View that only White Europeans Were Responsible for Slavery

I had an email from my local branch of the Labour party in Bristol this morning informing that they will be out this weekend canvassing people about the issues that matter to them. I wish them the very best of luck. Twelve years of Tory misrule have just about wrecked this great country and are forcing millions of ordinary, hardworking Brits into poverty. Not to mention the continued exploitation and impoverishment of the disabled and unemployment through benefit sanctions, work capability tests and all the rest of the welfare reforms that they have pushed through to enable them to stop paying benefits to people, who genuinely need it, all on the flimsiest of pretexts.

But one issue in Bristol that particularly concerns me is the way the slave trade is represented in exhibitions, the media and in education. Bristol was one of the major cities in the UK slave trade, along with London, Liverpool and I think Glasgow in Scotland. Although the slave trade was banned in 1807 and slavery itself abolished in 1837, it still casts a very long shadow over the city, just as it does the country generally. This was shown three years in the BLM riot that brought down the statue of Edward Colston and in a motion passed by the city council calling for reparations to be paid to the Black population. What concerns me about this is that it seems to me that a distorted image of slavery has arisen, in which White Europeans and Americans are seen as uniquely responsible and culpable for it. I am worried about the apparent lack of awareness that it existed right across the world and long before Europeans started enslaving Black Africans for labour in the plantations of the New World. It also appears that the BBC is determined to push this distorted image, as detailed by the group History Reclaimed and their document identifying the bias in twenty BBC programmes, several of which were about slavery. These included the edition of The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan when he went to Sierra Leone and Enslaved, presented by Hollywood actor Samuel L. Jackson. I therefore sent a reply stating my concern about this issue and the way it was handled by the local council. This runs

‘Dear Neil,

Thank you for your email letting me know that the party will be out this Saturday canvassing people in Bedminster about the issues that matter to them. I am afraid that long term illness prevents me from attending. However, apart from the continued cuts to public services forced on the mayor by central government cuts, there is one local issue that is of deep concern to me. This is the presentation and public knowledge of the history of slavery. Slavery has existed since antiquity and across the globe. Some of the earliest records come from the ancient near eastern town of Mari, which detail the sale of slaves and other properties. You can find lists of slaves on noble estates from ancient Egypt. Slavery also existed in the Muslim world, India and China. It also existed in Black Africa long before the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade. In some African societies, the proportion of the population that was enslaved varied between 30 to 70 per cent. By and large the slaves acquired by White European and American merchants were purchased from Black African slavers. Duke Ephraim, the king of Dahomey, had an income of £300,000 a year from slaving. There are records of British merchants to Africa being offered slaves Black chiefs. After abolition some of the slaving tribes attacked British trading posts in order to make us resume purchasing their human wares. Britain also paid compensation to former African slaving nations after abolition. In the 1850s we also fought a war with Dahomey in order to stop them enslaving the other local peoples.

But I am afraid I find little awareness of these issues in Bristol and among people generally. I am worried that this is creating a false view of the trade in the public, in which slavery, and particularly Black enslavement, is wholly the fault of Whites. This includes a lack of awareness that White Europeans, including British people and Bristolians, were also enslaved during the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and the Barbary pirates from Algiers and Morocco from the 16th century on till the French conquest of Algeria in the 1820s. I feel very strongly that this is creating an ideological motivated demonisation of Whites, especially if coupled with Critical Race Theory, which holds that all Whites are racist and will remain so.

I also feel this situation has been exacerbated locally by the motion passed a year or so ago calling for the payment of reparations for slavery, introduced by Green councillor Cleo Lake and seconded by Deputy Mayor and head of Equalities Asher Craig. This called for funding to be given to Black organisations rather than individuals, so that they can create sustainable, prosperous Black communities. This is obviously a noble aim, but the stipulation that the money should cover all Afrikans, as councillor Lake styles all Blacks, in the context of reparations means that Britain has accepted a moral responsibility for compensating people,. who were never enslaved by us, and which includes the vary African nations that committed the raiding and brutality that supplied the slaves. It also has nothing to say against the celebration in some African countries of these slavers, like Efroye Tinobue in Nigeria. It also erases from history the White victims of slavery.

I sent emails last year to Mdm. Craig and Councillor Lake pointing out these defects. I regret that I never received a reply. But this issue still has a particular urgency in Bristol. In previous correspondence, Asher Craig informed me that the local government was planning a new, ‘One Bristol’ curriculum for schools, which would foreground Black people. I have absolutely no qualms about Black Bristolians receiving the educational help they need, nor being included in our city’s history. But I am afraid that this curriculum will place the blame for slavery solely on White Bristolians and that this will lead to further racial division and prejudices.

I would very much like the local council to ensure that whenever slavery is taught or exhibitions on it mounted, its antiquity and the fact that other peoples, such as Black Africans, Arabs, Indians and so on were also involved, and that Whites were also the victims of the trade. This need not be an extensive treatment, but it should be there.

I hope you will take on board these concerns and recommendations, and wish you and the other party members all the best campaigning on Saturday.

Yours faithfully,

David Sivier’

I’ll let you know if I get a reply.

Matt Walsh on the Celebration of Villains like Alfred Kinsey and the Women Warrior Slavers of Dahomey

Yeah, I know, it’s Matt Walsh, one of the major figures in popular Republican propaganda. The great commenters on this blog have warned me about reblogging material from the right, as I shouldn’t let myself become a mouthpiece for them and they never reciprocate. Helen Pluckrose, a left-wing critic of the postmodern ideologies of Queer and Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Studies wrote a piece for James Lindsay’s New Discourses calling for the right to stop demonising the left and recognise that much of the work refuting these highly damaging ideologies was actually being done by leftists. She’s absolutely right. But yes, Walsh is still using it to take swipes at the left. And the Lotus Eaters have put up a piece about how ‘Socialists Are Terrible People’. The thumbnail to the video shows Hasan Piker, who is an obnoxious pratt. There was a clip of him on one of the right-wing channels raving about the ‘glorious Muslim enslavement of Whites’.

But I feel I have to put up videos like this one from Walsh because they are tackling important issues which I don’t see being done from the left. Or at least, not the mainstream British left. In this video Walsh attacks the way traditional western heroes, who were often people with very serious flaws, are being removed and replaced with people who are villains, but suit the ideology now being pushed. He gives two examples. One is the erection of a statue to sexologist Alfred Kinsey at Indiana University, where already a building or a wing has been named after him. The other is the film The Woman King, about a female general in the corps of women warriors, the Amazons, of Dahomey. This soldier, Nasicka, leads the resistance to the French invasion of her homeland.

Walsh points out that Kinsey was paedophile, who paid child rapists as his informants. He was convinced that children and babies were sexual beings. One of the tables in his Report on Sexuality of the Human Male, or whatever it was called, records the sexual responses of children from 5 months to 15 years old. This was based on information supplied to him, and which he paid for, by child rapists. For Walsh, this utterly invalidates everything Kinsey has ever done, and definitely means he should not be celebrated. I find it hard to disagree with the latter statement.

As for the women warriors of Dahomey, Walsh discusses how the critics are raving about the film because it ticks all the boxes – women warriors and Black Africans, who represented as fighting for their freedom against the evil Whites. He invents two quotes from critics supposedly saying that it made them ashamed to be White and having White children as an example of the excesses the critic’s praises nearly reach. In fact, Dahomey was a state geared to war and the enslavement of other Africans. Captured slaves were either put on plantations to grow food for the army, or were sold to outsiders, including Europeans. The Amazons were part of that slavery war machine, but the film grotesquely portrays them as abolitionists. If the slaves weren’t sold, they were killed. Walsh cites the Encyclopaedia Britannica about Dahomey, but the same facts can be found in any number of other, mainstream, standard histories of Africa. He is also right when he says that the British fought a war against Dahomey to stop them slaving. Again, totally true. Uncovered Editions published a collection of the British government papers about the war in 2001 as King Guezo of Dahomey, 1850-52: The Abolition of Slavery in West Africa. And the Dahomeyans did massacre or hold mass human sacrifices of unsold slaves. Sometime in the 19th century they massacred 300 of them, which shocked Europeans, including seasoned explorers like Captain Denham. Denham told a British parliamentary inquiry that the mass murder was especially shocking, given the advances these civilisations had made in most of the arts of civilisation. Which to me shows that Denham, while seeing western civilisation as superior, did not regard west Africans as uncivilised savages.

Walsh mentions that Hollywood frequently takes liberties with history but regards this glamorisation of an African slave state as particularly grotesque. It is as if a film rewrote history to show the Confederacy as the heroes fighting against slavery. Again, true. I can see why the film is being widely praised coming as it does after BLM and the new denunciations of White supremacy, racism and imperialism. I’m very much aware the reality behind many traditional western heroes is far different from the legend. Folk heroes like Dick Turpin and the western gunfighters were brutal thugs. And I’m also aware of the old newspaper maxim about the heroes of the Old West – if there’s a difference between fact and legend, print the legend. But equally, if there are two choices, two causes or individuals equally as bad, you’re quite entitled to choose neither. Just because Hitler was a monster doesn’t mean that you have to support Stalin.

And so just because western imperialism was responsible for some monstrous evils, you don’t have to glamorise and celebrate Black imperialist, slaving monsters.