Some thoughts on the recent furore over ‘decolonising’ buildings, syllabi, history et al and the accompanying flagellation about historical figures, the British Empire, slavery and so on ad infinitum. The most recent episode of this seems to have been started by the spread of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) movement from the USA to elsewhere. I don’t think you can reasonably argue that there isn’t a massive problem in the US with gun violence in general and school mass killings and police executions of black males specifically. Furthermore it’s long standing, seems to be getting worse and has not been and is not being addressed at an official level. Which explains the rise of BLM and the violent protests. When you see the policing of BLM protests/riots and compare it to the policing of the 6th January Capitol invasion you can see their point – not to condone or excuse violence – but I can see why people may see violence as possibly the only response left to them.
So BLM in the USA? Arguably necessary, perhaps goes further than might be desirable but there is an argument for defunding the police and doing something differently – for instance stopping recycling of surplus military equipment like armoured cars into police departments might help. So we come to the BLM UK offshoot – which seems to share the same aims – end white supremacy, defund the police and so forth. It seems that there is a commonality of many objectives across a range of activist causes where there is a headline issue: Climate Change (Extinction Rebellion), or treatment of Black Americans which then has other objectives added in; overthrow of capitalism, defunding the police among others. It’s my suspicion, certainly as far as the UK is concerned, that this is deliberate to make the issue attractive to the professional activists/protestors aka the ‘Usual Suspects’ thus gaining a good attendance at any events. That said I don’t believe the situation in the UK is analogous to that in the USA in terms of casual shooting of black people. So I then have to wonder what the argument is for defunding the UK police? I’m not going to claim that there isn’t racism in the UK because there is. But there is also discrimination on gender, age, sexual preference/identity, religion and geographic location. Does any one of these trump all others? I would argue not. Do they all need addressing? Of course they do and I suggest that greater integration and education are the ways to do this. I don’t think that you need to dismantle the capitalist system either as the hard Left rhetoric of BLM advocates.
So to slavery and the demands for compensation. To digress slightly, have you noticed that nobody seems to actually ask for anything anymore it’s always demanded? In life, my experience has always been that I get a better result by asking politely for something rather than demanding it but maybe that’s just me. Let’s start by agreeing that slavery is completely wrong, immoral and unethical. The argument for reparations is not so clear to me. In my opinion, to qualify for reparation or compensation you should be able to show how you personally have been disadvantaged. That is difficult when the events happened hundreds of years ago because how far do you go back into the past? The Roman Empire? Ancient Greece? How do you demonstrate that you have been wronged by that? Obviously some UK aristocratic families made their fortunes as a result of the Trans Atlantic slave trade. Some also made their fortunes as a result of the Industrial Revolution with it’s child labour, inhuman working conditions and low life expectancy. I’m struggling to see much ethical difference. Finally Anti Slavery International estimated that there were 40.3 million people in modern slavery in 2016 – which would be the highest number in history. My question is therefore whether our focus should be on tackling modern slavery rather than raking over the past.
Next I turn to the vexed subject of the British Empire. We seem to be told all the time how bad it was, how wrong and we shouldn’t celebrate it. It’s a point of view that I don’t accept. As far as I can see it grew by accident and through trade as much as by design and all the world powers were busily engaged in colonising and Empire building. I’m not sure why you would expect people in the past to have 2021 attitudes to recognise what they were doing was ‘wrong’ – in their minds they were serving their country. Secondly the British Empire was not, anywhere, at any time, like the Belgian Congo where your children could have arms chopped off if you failed to meet your rubber tapping quota. Did bad things happen? Yes, South African Concentration Camps, the Amritsar Massacre the Opium Wars as a sample. However without the British Empire I struggle to see how Nazi Germany would have been defeated in the Second World War. Arguably the need to keep forces in North Africa and France reduced the available strength to undertake the invasion of the USSR. The Wehrmacht came close to taking Moscow as it was – with those extra troops it’s certainly possible that they could have taken, and held, European Russia up to the Urals. Britain would almost certainly have fallen before Barbarossa took place and without an effective European ally would the USA have engaged in Europe at all or focussed on the Pacific theatre? A group of ‘academics’ in Cambridge came to the conclusion that the British Empire was ‘far worse than Hitler’s Germany’. I suspect 7 million Jews might disagree had they not been exterminated. Perhaps it’s just as well the WW2 veterans are nearly all gone before they saw their efforts traduced like this.
What of the British Colonial legacy? Well on the plus side let’s chalk up India – world’s largest democracy, space programme etc. so we can count that as a successful outcome. but then we have Pakistan and Bangladesh, the one bordering on being a failed state and the other one of the poorest states. All three were carved out of the Raj with the same Colonial legacy of systems, language (English as a universal second language) and infrastructure and yet have reached radically different outcomes. Why? Consider Hong Kong; it started life as basically a pirate outpost supporting the Opium trade yet achieved great economic success as has Singapore, another colony. Nigeria on the other hand should, thanks to it’s oil resources, have been one of the richest countries in Africa but corruption has prevented that. To a degree this can be explained by the construction of African states by reference to geographic features rather than tribal or ethnic boundaries but not entirely.
In conclusion, I think that trying to rewrite history to fit modern day binary preconceptions is ultimately futile and akin to finding a quote to justify pretty much anything in the Bible. All you do is nullify the central purpose of history that of education to avoid, hopefully, repeating past mistakes.