Do Daily Mail readers write Guardian online comments

Bit of change of emphasis after that rather po-faced last rant. Two posts back, TW put a link to Joseph Harker’s column in the Guardian.

This was a good piece, even echoing my point that slavery was the abomination rather than the slave trade, but going on to say that the legacy of slavery still impacted on British people today, through its effect on people of Caribbean background. This is even moving towards providing a decent justification for the public apology.

However, the comments that it elicited were sometimes bizarre. It’s a serious temptation to point out some of the underlying follies, but why bother? Oh bugger, I’m going to put a few quotes in anway (didn’t you just guess that?) :-

from Haardvark: “I have never read such a pathetic piece of self-pity in my entire life. “ Hmm, even allowing for web hyperbole (the cosmos knows I’m guilty of that often enough) this person has obviously never read a newspaper. (All those confessionals from celebs who find the strain of being impossibly rich and idolised by millions too stressful and have to act like maniacs, then go into rehab, for a start. Now that’s “pathetic self-pity”. Guardian writer talking about society as a whole – it doesn’t quite qualify, does it?)

From CoeurdeLion :I am not sure where Mr Harker gets all this bile – it is difficult to pick out any hard facts from his scattergun approach to writing….. I feel that Britain today is one of the least racist societies in the world today, bettered perhaps only by countries like Brazil. If you break down success in Britain by ethnicity, you actually find blacks (particularly African) doing better even than whites in participation in higher Education, with Asians doing best. Bile? I defy anyone to find evidence of “bile” or a “scattergun approach to writing” in the pretty elegantly written and constructed Harker piece. Did they even read it, or just go off on a rant as soon as they saw a few words that sparked an emotional explosion in them? No answer needed. And Africans doing better in higher education (well, s/he doesn’t even say doing better but participating more)? As I believe I said in my last piece – people of mainly African ancestry, almost by definition, are not the descendants of people enslaved for the Atlantic slave trade. This doesn’t invalidate, or even contradict in any way, what Harker says.

It’s racism that makes people of European/African/Amerindian background seem exactly equivalent to Africans. Insofar as our identities and expectations of life are partly constructed from the cultural values and experiences of our ancestors, there are few points of similarity between the lives of Africans and people from the Caribbean. The histories of their ancestors are very very different. In fact, the main thing they have in common is basically the experience of being on the receiving end of racism.

from sandywinder: When are the whingeing blacks going to start looking to the future rather than constantly harping on about the past? Excuse me, but wasn’t it the government and the Church of England that started this apologising?

from halgeel84: The doozy Perhaps the reasons why blacks have a lower percentage of persons who perform well academically and a higher percentage of persons who commit violent crimes are related, at least partly, to genetics even though it is an unpopular and very politically incorrect explanation.? Bad science alert, even – more precisely – evil pseudoscience alert. I really can’t even start to address this nonsense.

Now, there were plenty of the posts that you would normally expect from Guardian readers, in response to this stuff. So, relax, the Guardian has not yet become the liberal face of the BNP overnight.

All the same, it’s quite instructive to see-

  • a more literate version of the Jade-Goody et al vileness.
  • a reminder that racism, even pseudoscientific racism, is always happy to raise its ugly head from licking its butt, whenever it’s given the least opportunity
  • a reminder to this blog that it’s barely possible to challenge official hypocritical nonsense, without giving aid and comfort to the enemy

On a more general level, the democratisation of discussion, that has started to become possible because of the Internet , can have undesired effects. For a start, there’s always a potential Lord of the Flies-style downside. History shows that there is probably no force more repellently inhuman than a general population that believes its self-identified tribal/cultural/ethnic group is somehow more human than another group. (Slavery, Holocaust, Ruanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and so on.)

If you are looking for a way to stir up a mass of people to support your desire to seize power or take over a piece of land, this is blatantly the way to go. (In your faces, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, you naive rationalists)

I am assuming that these blogistas aren’t frequent Guardian readers – too many long words, for a start, not to mention the existence of a good few other papers that wouldn’t leave them incoherent with rage, every morning. All the same, these views exist and are pretty common. Some people even believe they represent non-politically correct “common sense” are what others are too cowardly to say. I don’t believe that suppressing these views is the solution. It’s better to identify them than to cover them with a layer of pink icing and pretend they don’t exist.

What do we do about this sort of thinking is another question.

Obviously, a brief but necessary culling of people who fail a simple test of worthiness to be “human” – based on their intelligence, rationality and level of goodwill towards other people – is the first thing that springs to mind.

(Note for the hard of thinking, this is sarcasm. I am being sarcastic.. Well, use a dictionary, then. It’s a bit like irony but not as complicated.)

Remorse without retribution

There is something of a global fashion for aplogising for things you haven’t actually done yourself to people who aren’t alive to hear the apologies.

I’m all for Britain becoming aware of the bad parts of its history. All the same, most of our ancestors were peasants or the industrial poor, kicked off the land by Enclosure Acts or thrown out of craft work by emergent industrialisation orbegging in the streets or pressganged into virtual serfdom on ships, while the slave trade was going on. Are we supposed to apologise for being British? Or being white? Isn’t it pretty racist to assume that as “white” people, we are somehow responsible for what other “white” people did. I can pretty well guarantee that my ancestors weren’t profiting from the slave trade, or I’d be a lot better off now.

Racism grew as the ideology to support the inhuman treatment of the enslaved. Are we to internalise this vile belief system and think that we are somehow a different breed of human from the Africans who were captured?

There is no genetic basis for theories of race. How often does one have to keep saying this? There is more genetic variation within any given “race” than between “races.” The whole concept ignores the fact that we are all “mixed race”. Almost no people on earth have lived in isolation, without the benefits of genetic diversity, for any measurable time. The existence of a “white” race is a pernicious myth. Surely anyone with any pretence to education or intelligence knows this. If not, what are we doing in our schools?

We should certainly try to understand the nature of British racism – developed as a justification for slavery, at a given point in time, it evolved into a subtly different justification for colonialism and has continued to evolve throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to support different social forms – e.g. when the UK needed labour in the 1950s and imported lots of “colonial subjects,” it soon had to start to drop most of the racist nonsense. Racism still continues to flourish and to take new forms to reflect our different social and political situation (it’s now mainly directed at Muslims rather than Afro-Caribbeans, for instance.)

I believe that understanding the nature of racism is crucial for the future of the planet.

I also believe that apologising for things we (that is US, as living human beings) didn’t actually do is pretty hollow.

There is plenty more bad around the relations between Britain and Africa.

For example, the profits from engagement in the slave trade made England such a wealthy country that it was able to take the lead in industrialisation. The failure of England to dominate the palm oil trade – so necessary to an important phase of late Victorian industrialisation – was due to the negotiating success of African traders, who consistently got the better of the European traders as soon as they realised palm-oil was crucial – OPEC-style. this led to European colonial invasion of West Africa. Comonial rule in Africa was very shortlived but left a devastating legacy of invented states and collaborationist local elites which still impacts on African politics to this day.

If there are current resonances here, they seem to be in the realm of grabbing control of oil through warfare…… Oh, and supporting it with a belief system…….

Is there any point in apologising for all of British history? A genuine apology should surely include some attempt to make amends. Who should Britain make these amends to? The descendants of the slaves? In what form? Send money to America? Probably not a good idea.

To Africa? Surely, by definition, Africans WEREN’T enslaved. When the European powers messed up Africa, slavery was well over. But Africa could do with some assistance, beyond the adoption of its best-looking babies by female celebrities, the wearing of Red Noses and even beyond lots of people paying to see has-been rock stars.

There were no slave plantations, brutally suppressed slave revolts or Jim Crow race laws in England. These are American evils. Out of them grew a classification of humans as Black or White. This is not just patently absurd – flying in the face of the evidence of one’s eyes – it shapes our thinking in subtle ways. It is not necessarily more or less racist than the multicoloured shades of racial distinction that exist in the many other countries. It is certainly different. Most US black people would be self-evidently “white” to most Africans (outside South Afriica or Zimbawe) or North-east Brazilians. Are we so imbued with US culture that we can’t even look at our own history without seeing it through their eyes?

Here I feel that the uniquely British role in the triangle trade created historical outcomes which are quite distinct from the North and South American legacies, but that we are somehow taking the American guilt on board here and apologising for it along with our own national guilt. But, guess what, we’re not doing anything useful about it.

In fact, the UK government has made racism more or less invisible, for example, by changing the goalposts so that “anti-racism” is now “diversity,” by shutting down the Commission for Racial Equality and by mouthing siilly apologies for things that happened two centuries ago. Social equality is barely advancing. Many times more “black” kids are being excluded from school, for instance. Integration of cities like Bradford is becoming less and less likely.

Our ruling class may feel a bit better about itself for saying it’s sorry. Does this achieve anything to anyone else’s advantage? As a nation, England did a lot more to challenge global slavery, when we started to sink any ships caught trading slaves, not long after the UK ban. This actually achieved something concrete – it started to make slave trading too unprofitable to be attractive.

Saying sorry

Difficult topic this, but at least it is taking my mind off the problems I am having trying to get Linux installed, so I will try to limit the sensibilities I offend here.

I bought the Guardian newspaper today and it has a few news items which revolve around calls for Britain to apologise for the slave trade. Page 12 (or read the online version) is dedicated to an item called “Marching to London to hear a single word … sorry” which is about a group of people on a protest march, the letters page has more than it’s fair share on the topic (“Slavery, abolition and apologies” online) and on the comments pages, Joseph Harker has a piece titled “A shameful open sore.”

All very interesting and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that slavery is a horrific thing for anyone to endure. The activities of those involved in slave trading were (and still are) deplorable and it is shocking that slavery still exists in the world.

However, I do not for one second feel the need to say sorry over this.

It seems to me that we live in a society which is enamoured with public displays of contrition – no matter how irrelevant or empty these may be. It seems to me that it is more important that public figures keep saying “Sorry” about things, than actually being sorry and wanting (and able) to make amends. The western world is still somewhat suffering from “middle class guilt,” in that people who live reasonably affluent lives see the suffering of others (mainly others in different countries – the suffering at home is easily ignored) and create a feeling of guilt about it (I blame Catholics…). Personally, I have two issues with the calls for “sorry” over the slave trade.

The first is that, to me, this furore over the Slave trade is taking it to a farcical conclusion. The trade in African slaves to work on European plantations was horrific. It was deplorable. Sadly it has a precedent in human history. Pretty much all human cultures have practiced slavery in some form. Ancient Greeks did it (Wiki), the Romans did it, the Vikings did and so on (does Exodus ring any bells?). Deplorable it may be, slavery is certainly something which happens a lot. It can be argued that the classical civilisations were a bit less racist in their collection of slaves and that the African slave trade is wrong because it is characterised by nothing more than pure racism – the slaves were not the vanquished after heroic battles, nor were they poor people trying to ensure they didn’t starve. Interestingly, not all the African slaves were “captured” by the evil Europeans – lots were sold to them by other African nations. However, if we accept the argument that the biggest reason to say sorry of the African Slave trade is the racist nature of it, this implies that slavery is OK as long as you keep multicultural slaves…

Now, that minor point aside, if it can be argued that Britain has to say sorry for it’s part in the slave trade, I would also like to call for the Italians (especially the ones living in Rome) to apologise for bringing Carpathian slaves to Britain and forcing them into servitude. I also feel the Germans should apologise for subjugating the indigenous population between the fifth and tenth century AD (I refuse to use BCE/CE), the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians should apologise for their raiding parties killing people and taking away women as slaves, then a big apology from them for steal a patch of what became France from the Franks and invading England, deposing the legitimate king. Thanks to the Normans we have a class society in the UK which kept the majority of the population in servitude, while not called slaves the differences were minimal. In a similar vein, I am sure every world culture can follow this request to a reductio ad absurdum.

This leads me neatly to my second point. I was not involved in the slave trade. No one alive today was. Any apology I, or the PM or any other Brit makes, is meaningless. I might as well apologise for Stalin’s purges, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the Killing Fields in Cambodia or any other of the numerous atrocities in which I had no part at all. When I say sorry, what does it do? Does it mean I feel really bad and wont do it again? (Ok, sorry, I promise to never gun down Chinese students again) Does it mean the people who suffered at the hands of the slave traders three centuries ago will suddenly be free? (No) Does it mean they can rest better in their afterlife? (Meaningless and still No).

It means nothing. Saying sorry for something you had no part in is totally pointless. From my family tree it is unlikely any of my ancestors were even involved. During the slavery years, the average Briton was far from the free thinking member of an open and accountable democratic society as they are today…. It was only in the sixteenth century that Villeinage was removed from Britain (unless you were Catholic…) and even then the majority of people were too poor, too powerless and to subjugated themselves to have any opinions on the slave trade in Africa. This creates the possible argument that the Royal Family / Aristocracy should apologise but most of them are German anyway… If they were going to apologise, then the remaining African nations have to as well – who do you think the slaves were bought from?

All in all, I think slavery is a terrible thing. I feel sorry for all the people throughout history who have been slaves (whatever their skin colour or nation of origin, I dont like to discriminate) and appreciate they suffered terribly.

I am not going to say “I am sorry” though.