Via Timmy, more self-loathing leftist bollocks from the Observer.
Is Britain simply too ashamed to fund a memorial to slavery?
It is time that the country fully acknowledged its role in this vile practice
Here we go again. If you took this bollocks at face value, Britain was the only nation to ever indulge. It was Britain that ended the practice by using the Royal Navy to police the high seas. The idea that modern Britons are, in some way, culpable is absurd. The idea that we need to self-flagellate over it is equally absurd and I have no intention of doing so. It occurred and was stamped out some 200 years before I was born. So, no, I do not need to acknowledge anything, I do not need to apologise and I do not need to pay anyone anything and refuse, point-blank, to do any of the above.
At least some historians have argued that the Industrial Revolution in Britain was financed by the profits from this “nefarious trade”; certainly, my research indicates that Lancashire became the wealthiest county in England by processing slave-grown cotton. If our government can spend about £50m on Holocaust memorials and teaching materials, it should spend at least the same on memorials for the enslaved and on education materials. And even fund reparation for slave descendants.
Given that it will be money stolen from me, it should do nothing of the sort. Slave descendants do not need reparation as they are benefiting from higher standard of living than if their ancestors had never left Africa.
Reparations to the victims of slavery should simply be calculated using the records showing the slave owners who received “compensation” for loss of human “property”, tracing their living descendants and presenting them with the bill.
As the total number of descendants will be more numerous than the ancestors, and inherited wealth has accumulated far more rapidly than the average rise in living standards, there will be plenty of money left over for the current beneficiaries to continue their privileged lifestyles. There will also be ample money left over for memorials.
Fuck off. Anyone presenting me with a bill will be given a firm response along the lines of Arkell v Pressdram.
And, as Tim points out, we already have a memorial. Anyone visiting Westminster Abbey can cast an eye over it if they so wish. Or is it that statue of a white Englishman is just not PC enough?
The ‘sins of the father’ angle pisses me off, as well. Frankly, these twats should stop preaching crap in red brick universities and leave decent folk alone.
Unless the Italian government can be made to pay me reparations for the actions of those rotten Romans which so traumatised my ancestors some 2000 years ago.
I’m not greedy, around £10,000.00 would suffice.
Plus of course, interest compounded at 5%p.a. since that nice Signor Caesar called us “Weeny, weedy and weaky”.
Yeah, what about those Normans? And the bleedin’ Vikings? Where’s my compo for all that rape and pillage they might have inflicted on my ancestors, eh?
Free money always beats the hell out of a days work in Idleville.
When the parasites outnumber the host, and they are fast doing so with millions more who will do anything to join them, the body will wither and die.
Has there been a funeral and wake for the loss of our country yet?
There bloody should be.
Some years ago, when he was the head of some diversity driven bollocks, Trevor Phillips mooted the point that the descendants of slaves should receive financial recompense to compensate for their ‘troubled upbringing’ from the white people of this country. I wrote to tell him of my (white) great, great, grandfather who was shipwrecked off the coast of East Africa. Together with other survivors, he managed to get ashore and sought help from the first people they saw. Instead of help, they were taken prisoner and turned into slaves. The tribe, and especially the Chief, rose in prominence as they were the only ones with white slaves. Unfortunately, my ancestor did not survive the experience as, according to the few who managed to escape or were rescued, he was literally worked to death. I enclosed copies of documents relating to this and asked Trevor if, as a man of the same colour as those who mistreated my ancestor, he would send the compensation by cheque, postal order or cash? Never even received a reply. Funny that!
If these people didn’t have double standards, they would be bereft of any.
Any “memorial” should be to the unspoken and forgotten heroes who at the cost of their own lives served in the Royal Navy stamping out this trade wheresoever it was found. Of course, Jack like his ships, was always “Out of sight and out of mind”. If the rest of these charlatans and shysters want a “monument” to their chosen “Cause of the Week” they are, of course, welcome to fund and construct it themselves without shanghaiing the rest of the long suffering taxpayers into footing the bill for this weeks Ego Trip.
However, a discussion of the meaning of slavery has merit. In the modern context, the state has shown that it is willing to harvest children from their parents. Is that not slavery?
What about all the tax collecting work which states compel individuals to do on their behalf at at the expense of the collector? Is that not slavery?
The heart of slavery is not colour but compulsion by the local power. It is colour blind, so maybe it is time to make the varieties of it better known. Now, which ethos still accepts slavery and sees them as consumable items?
Yes, let’s have a chat about slavery, a subject which has gone quiet of late, and try to decide what form monuments might take and how much reparations might be due. And what we might need to teach some people in school.
Be funny if it turns out that Obama’s Kenyan forebearers were in the biz as suppliers rather than cargo.
http://aconservativelesbian.com/2009/07/13/obamas-kenyan-ancestors-sold-slaves/
(Apologies for the long article linked to, but even the comments under it are worth reading. Please be aware that at least one commenter argues that her ethnographic analysis is factually wrong, which would knock down much of her argument).
We abolished the slave trade. Why can’t these arseholes get over it and just move on. I’ve got an ancestor who was a bigamist but I’m not going to apologies to his descendants for it. It wasn’t my fault.
When are the germans going to apologise for starting WWII?
“When are the germans going to apologise for starting WWII?”
Don’t go giving the revisionists ammunition; they might work out that we declared war on them and so it was all our fault.
We did declare war on Germany actually. The Germans never bothered to declare war on any one (except the US.) They just got stuck in and attacked them.
Dear Mr Longrider
Taxation is a politer form of part-time slavery.
DP