The news of Boris Johnson’s, as yet only promised, resignation has not impacted my mood, or my worldview, nearly as much as you might have thought. The man wore the rank of PM, but was never a leader.
Agenda 2030, 2050 and the Great Reset/Build Back Better, Greener, whatever/ Levelling Up, more green blah, blah, blah, slow but deadly march into one-world governance and luxury digital communism will continue. (Have you ever suspected that Carbon Tax will lead to, ultimately, a tax on breathing?)
Hate the game, not the players. The fight against the abuse of power, and the folly of egomania is eternal. I am finding comfort in the meaty and commendably up-to-date analysis by Os Guinness in his book ‘The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai’s Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom’. I cannot recommend it highly enough, for those considering the philosophy of the predicament we currently face.
As I write, the conservative party is still fighting over the command of the Titanic. I, instead of worrying about this futile distraction, have been reflecting on my visit to the White Star line’s home port earlier in the week. I’ve visited Liverpool Maritime Museum on two other occasions and thoroughly enjoyed the architecture, the exhibits, and the purchasing of over-priced nautical souvenirs that will likely spend most of their lives hidden in my cupboard.
My visit on this occasion was, however, tainted. The Liverpool Maritime Museum has given over its entire top floor to create the International Slavery Museum.
This ‘museum’, open since 2007 was recently expanded. It is well funded, and the exhibits are of high quality, in keeping with an overall well-managed museum. However, the problem comes not from what is said, but from what is missing.
The museum presents a highly edited and politicised collection of ‘facts’, without any context or comparison. One learns more about the Civil Rights Movement and BLM ‘protests’ in the US than about anything British or Maritime.
The kingdom of Benin is noted as an example of a complex political structure that long predated ‘war-torn Europe’. A centre of art, learning and technology, with Africans ‘especially skilled in subjects like medicine, mathematics and astronomy’.
I know many seafarers who’ve worked in modern-day Benin, with stories that would your blood curdle. Its history, as the major slave exporter from Africa, is even worse.
As reported by the Guardian, the museum staff have clearly been harassed into a deeply politicised ‘editing’ of history. It is clear the real historians who work there are aware of the extraordinary sacrifices made by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, as their website still advertises their possession of a painting of HMS Antelope. While the website does note that the Squadron managed to free 150,000 slaves by patrolling the Gulf of Guinea, over a period of about 50 years, this achievement was not a major feature of the museum.
The fact that slavery was practised ubiquitously, by all civilisations, for all of human history, until the British outlawed it in 1807, was not mentioned. The fact that 17,000 British seafarers died to intercept and rescue these slaves was decidedly underappreciated. The fact that slavery was never practised more lightly in all of history, and was never fully legal in the UK, was not mentioned. The fact that the first and most passionate of all public campaigns to change British law was led largely by Christian housewives getting together in London and leading the abolitionist crusade, was not mentioned – despite it’s obvious interest to the women’s liberation movement. The fact that Britain risked war with other nations, regularly violating their territories, and almost sacrificing the oldest political alliance on earth to achieve it’s ambition of outlawing slavery worldwide, for all time, was not mentioned. Or the fact that the UK had its first Indian MP in; or first (in modern ‘intersectionalist’ terms) ‘Black’ Mayor of London in 1772 – 4 years before the USA can claim to have existed?
We had our first ‘this, that or the other’ ethnicity, sexuality or religion of MP decades before any of these so-called ‘ progressive-thought-leader, western liberal democracies’ did. And how many female heads of state?
These attacks on the past are tedious, but they are important because they are attacks on our future.
Another exhibition that was missing, despite having run for over 10 years was the Hello Sailor exhibition. A detailed account of how the Merchant Navy has been a safe-haven for homosexuals, fleeing persecution or execution in their home nations. Something that remains as true today as ever. That this interesting exhibition has been removed at a time when our society is in debate over how far trans rights align or conflict with gay rights shows how politically sensitive museums can be. Although part of me suspects they might remove such an exhibition precisely because it tells a story of how tolerant our history has been, compared with other nations. There wouldn’t be enough to protest about if we knew that our society was actually solving problems over time, would there?
It is an incontrovertible fact that Britain has led the way on universalist morality, ever since the peasant’s revolt and the restoration.
Don’t you think that ethnic minorities of the UK would like to know that they are amongst people with a long historical tradition, and Valliant philosophical underpinning, that supports the freedom of all people because of the lesson learned hundreds of years ago? Don’t you think they can handle such information?
I spoke to a woman of African descent, and a Welsh politician of foreign descent about these issues this week, and they were completely fascinated by this ‘hidden history’.
‘Why did nobody tell me?’ they asked.
That we had a black lord mayor of London almost 100 years before the end of slavery in the USA, or the first Indian MP 24 years before the same date. Or the fact that the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy freed 150,000 slaves, versus the 13th amendment freeing only 100,000 slaves, begs the question: ‘is freedom more the product of democracy, or a constitutional monarchy?’ Although I think the real question is ‘what is freedom?’
Britain only paid the debt for the West African Squadron in recent years, and even the most basic economic analysis shows that Britain as a nation spent far more abolishing the slave trade than it ever profited from it.
Well, whatever. In this age of ‘truthiness’, surely what really matters is that ‘groups’ who are not doing well at the moment, can edit the truth for the gain of political power. Who cares if a few half-truths are told in service of righting historic wrongs?
Except, without specific and accurate detail, it’s not historic.
Most slavery that exists today is still found in Africa, and the middle east. Chad only outlawed slavery in 2015 or something. I have personally sailed with people who were essentially indentured servants. When I worked in Qatar (who only outlawed slavery in 1952), I had a largely Indian crew who had paid almost 95% of their salary to an ‘agent’, who got them work at sea. They were making ILO minimum wage, about $600 USD per month at the time, and paid a decreasing percentage over a number of years to an ‘agent’. A practice made illegal by the MLC convention but which continues to this day. As a naïve second officer, I tried to get my guys off the ship and home, but their poverty was such that the status quo didn’t seem so bad to them. Even though they were kept on board the ship 6 months past their contracted repatriation date, bringing home (I think) less than a quarter of their pay.
The reason that the media and popular museums in the west are only permitted to discuss the suffering of slaves in the ‘Transatlantic Slave Trade’, as opposed to the Ottoman, Arabic or African Slave trades, is because it serves the current political agenda. They seek to erase the virtues of our history as a nation, so that they may replace it with a politically decided ‘original sin’, that only further government/corporate-fascist intervention can remedy. ‘They’ being all those who reject western philosophy and support ‘leftist’ (not liberal) ideas. Leftist meaning those who would use the almighty power of the State to enforce submission to political policy, with no room for disagreement. Leftists are majoritarians, who do not need your consent before deciding what is ‘best for you’.
When we discuss ‘who will replace Johnson’, we encourage this nonsense to continue. As though changing the company logo stickers on the side of the train, will alter its’ destination.
This brings me to the other major omission in our discussion of the evils of slavery, as a nation. The thing that is most important to be discussed properly, but is most determinately avoided, is the discussion about ‘why slavery is wrong’.
What answer can post-modernists or intersectionalists give when they speak only of deconstruction and never construction?
The new racism of affirmative action and DIE policies is an inversion required by revolutionaries who wish to retain a power structure but exploit it for themselves. Hence the modern neo-Marxist obsession with group identity. Ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity and renounced nationality being the four quarters of this already tarnished coat of arms. Religion, opinion, unique knowledge, and philosophical disposition now deemed irrelevant forms of ‘diversity’.
Do we discuss how Plato was once captured as a slave, and how his Stockholm-Syndrome-BDSM-like response to that event affected Western attitudes to slavery and class? Or how our Judeo-Christian tradition, with Hebrews escaping the slavery of Egypt (Samaria), and Christ being executed in the manner of a slave gave us a unique and singular drive to defeat slavery? Or how the universalist formulation that there is only one source of morality, and it is not human, affected our ideas of authority. Or how the Abrahamic tradition insists that we are all made in the image of the divine, and so no man or woman has the right to dominance over another, affected the peasants revolt, Cromwell, the restoration, and the revolutions of the past 400 years?
The idea that slavery is wrong is not obvious or self-evident. The arrogance we see today from Malthusian technocrats, or adherents of statist theologies, is one that stems from a philosophy that one group of people can have a unique or superior knowledge and/or ability to others, and therefore have a moral right to treat others like livestock.
Only universalist, objectivist morals, or Christianity, can claim to be philosophies that say ‘all are equal’ before the law and judgement. Even here, we depart from our Hebrew cousins (including my wife and in-laws). The transcendentalists, stoics, Gaia-worshippers, Greek philosophers, and post-modernists also depart our company at this point. Their version of the truth, looking only at past evidence of cause and effect, dictates that ‘whatever has been, is what must be right’, and offer no moral reasoning to oppose slavery.
Indeed, slavery persisted for so long, all over the world, because of philosophies that looked at the status quo of nature and concluded that things should be this way. That slaves are inferior to their masters, precisely because they are slaves.
We see the same attitude from our technocrats, bureaucrats and elites today. Their contempt for ordinary people is palpable in every government policy, and every patronisingly edited museum display.
The reason that we avoid all discussion of first principles, is because our society is carefully trying to enjoy the benefits of philosophy, without paying the proper dues to the teachers. We wish to enjoy the fruits of freedom, without actually offering freedom to anyone but those in political favour.
The simple fact is that slavery is wrong because human beings own themselves. They are sovereign. They alone suffer the consequences of their improper actions. They alone benefit from good fortune. No diktat or decree can ever change the fact that individuals are individuals.
The idea of individuality is a Hebrew invention, adopted by Christians, and propagated throughout the West by English Common Law. The idea of ‘human rights’ is an idea that is global, only because of the British Empire. There is no other source of this idea that remains present in our modern day cultural landscape, that is international in scope.
To cut off the philosophical understanding of why slavery is wrong, or morality must be universal, is to saw at the branch upon which we all sit.
If a human being owns his or her own body, then they are responsible for the harm their body might cause. We in the modern West all implicitly accept that a man who beats his wife should be punished appropriately. This belief is not universal. It is a belief that the man is responsible for the consequences of the pain delivered by his hands, and that his wife is a sovereign entity, with as much right to exist without pain as the man himself.
Attempts by government to ‘declare’ rights, in treaties or acts of parliament, are corruptions and distortions of reality. Their very existence declares the arbiter of political power to be the ‘giver’ of rights. Therein lies the flaw of the secular view of the American system. Therein lies the flaw of both modern society and the revolutionary mindset.
Our society is falling apart, because our laws and customs have become incoherent. If we hold slavery to be wrong, does that not mean that consent is our highest value? How then can we justify non-medical abortions, when assisted suicide of a consenting adult is illegal? How can we claim to be a free people, fighting the tyrannical Russians, when our state regulates every aspect of our behaviour, property and increasingly our speech?
The reason God is ‘a person’, in the Judeo-Christian tradition (and this is something the Jews get right, that we don’t), is precisely because it means that it is impossible to know God. The idea that you can claim to know whether God is a man or a woman, even in our days of mandatory gender confusion, is so absurd that secularism rightly scoffs at this 1980s ‘debate/trope’.
If you have ever really known another person, then the one thing you ‘know’, is that you will never ‘know’ them fully.
Anyone with Children knows this. The idea that your child is the arithmetic combination of parts from yourself and your partner, is clearly false. The simple fact that your children surprise you, and surpass you, at random and in unpredictable ways, serves to highlight the absurdity of naturalism, determinism, stoicism, transcendentalism, and post-modernism. As if dreams were not enough.
But for all the suffering, hysteria, trauma, and war that clearly lies ahead for the world, I am not in the least bit worried.
If truth is our cause, we cannot fail.
The reason I was travelling South was for a training course in ‘mobile media’. On this training course, I met some seriously interesting people, from age 16 to 60-something. They were heroes, every, single, one of them. Citizen journalists, small business owners, and free thinkers. This group of people was open minded, but confident in their ethical grounding. Truth seekers, not aggressive, but seriously discussing how to make the world better. Generally opponents of Corona-tarianism, but philosophical enough to recognise that some good has come from the recent over-reach of government into people’s lives.
We met in Barry, South Wales. The people here have seen the slaughter of the Druids by the Romans. Invasion by the Angles. the Saxons, the Danes, and the ‘english’. They are still speaking Welsh. I don’t see many people still speaking Latin, or Anglo-Saxon.
They are victors, though the history books may tell you otherwise. Or at least, survivors.
As the 2016 joke said ‘if you think the news is fake, imagine how bad the history is’.
My concern is not with the transitory and illusory issue of what person occupies the supposedly ‘top-job’ of secular-high-priest of the Untied Kingdom.
As God addressed the ‘nation’ of the Israelites, lost in the desert with no territory of their own. As ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ was Queen of a ‘people’, not of a territory. We need to engage with identity politics. We need to identify the group of people who believe that all people are equal before the law, and who believe that the law is based on an unchanging universal ethic.
Governments are not nations. Their ‘priestly class’ of ‘ministers’ are simply employees who face no repercussions for disappointing a customer. Boris Johnson only underlines the ‘too big to fail’ philosophy that actively encourages and subsidises incompetence and fraud.
The reason the hypocrisy of party-gate cuts so deeply with the British people is because we have a deep cultural understanding of what freedom is. Indeed, the reason that Scotland was never defeated by the Roman Emperor Severis, was not because he could not defeat us Scots in battle. Rather, because we had no ‘centralised ‘State to defeat. Each person and each tribe was sovereign. Therefore, defeating one part of the country, meant nothing to the ancient Scots, who fought on, even if their highest Clan Chief was defeated.
This spirit is alive and well today, in British people. As it always will be. And the people of communist classifications like ‘BAME’, or ‘Ethnic Minority’ will join us, as they have for 400 years, in standing up against political tyranny because our highest virtues are not something that politicians can provide.
They will realise what the wizards of woke have only partially appreciated. The power of the truth – unvarnished, that includes all virtues, as well as sins – is the only thing that has the power of the word.
The truth will set you free if your answer is complete!
Answers flow freely from accepting basic facts like: ‘all human beings own themselves’. The next obvious conclusion is that ’all human beings own the product of the labour of their hands’. Fair enough, right? Especially for the self-employed?
The metaphor of ‘the economy’ wears thin, as people realise that they are all alone in their suffering as prices go up, and the value of the currency goes down. (We are currently at stage 9 in the Road to Serfdom).
Financial institutions are exempted from failure. (Where traditionally mortgage debts, etc, would be absolved, they are now purchased and continued). The working person is not. Their social credit score, (Experian.com) is based not on solvency but on a history of indebtedness.
The changes of the current political situation are a difference not of kind, but of degree.
People upset with Roe Vs Wade may have spent the past two years arguing for mandatory vaccination. The principle of bodily autonomy was their best argument for no-fault abortion. Because they convinced the State that bodily autonomy was no longer important, their logic backfired, and Roe Vs Wade was overturned. The Left argued itself full circle by insisting that people had no right to control their own bodies, if ‘society’ was threatened in any way. Not considering that the US Supreme Court might consider the non-medically necessary ending of 500,000 lives per year (majority female), as ‘a threat to society’.
The arguments for Covid restrictions face the same basic problems of logic and historical fact. How can a ‘novel’ virus be such a ‘novel’ threat if it is named version 2 (SARS-COV-2)?!!!
How can Covid-2019 remain a ‘novel-virus’ threat in 2022when the ONS reports a 99%+ presence of antibodies in the population?
How can the NHS be threatened by Coronavirus 2 years after ‘Nightingale Hospitals’ were erected all over the country, even thought they were never needed for Covid hospitalisations? A cynical person might conclude from the fact that they were only ever utilised as vaccination centres, that there may have been some sort of agenda all along?
Why were there no excess deaths at all, when averaged out as far back as the 1990s, until vaccination was pushed?
Why get the Army – the only corporation in British society legally allowed to end the lives of others without liability – to inject people with a ‘medicine’ that had only the most scanty emergency medical approval?
Why tax people at unprecedented levels?
Could it possibly be because you knew that the value of the currency had already lost 99% since WW1, and you thought you might like to thin the herd before everything collapses? You know, and avoid the traditional war, because nukes can actually affect the ruling class? As opposed to conventional war?
The Liverpool Slavery Museum avoids talking about slavery because it is a harassed tool of communism. It makes no argument from first principles, that slavery is wrong because people own themselves. Such thinking would precipitate an uncomfortable feeling in too many over-taxed working people of Liverpool, of whichever ethnicity. GDP Is a euphemism. The income tax, (‘’temporary’ since the Napoleonic wars, under British law, because consistent property rights would not allow such a concept), does economically only 50% or so of the damage slavery would do to a population. However, the moral sin is greater, since, a person bled at 50% of their income instead of 100, will produce more. The profits of their labour thereby go to fund things that may very well go against their conscience. Poverty is therefore reinforced as a virtue more for the socialist, than for the free person.
I will not repeat the arguments and evidence of others, late on a Sunday night. The most important thing to realise (for those outraged by our governments’ responses to Covid), is that these over-reaches are all logical when you accept politics as the highest authority. The propensity for human beings to paint themselves as the ultimate authority on any issue is always born of the arrogance of ignorance. And it was ever thus.
The answer is to do what the people on my training course were doing. Improving their ability to make a counterargument. Learning how to build a network of like-minded people, whose happiness does not rest on the whim of political favour, but on the trust of knowing and owing, each other.
The concepts and principles of autonomy, freedom and ethics may seem like dying embers of a distant campfire from today’s perspective. However, we need to steel ourselves and know when we are being lied to.
Take comfort in the fact that this has all happened before. The conspiracy theories on the internet that show how there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of years of ‘control’ by a specific set of families should give you comfort, not despair. They should show you that the Georgia Guide Stones battle is one small skirmish in a long, likely never-ending, war of control.
And yet, here we are. Survivors. Going on.
Historically, the ‘warrior class’ were always the ones who rose to the top during times of hardship. All of human evolution from more primitive apes seems to have been geared towards dealing with the perennial problem that those who enforce the law, tend to exempt themselves from it.
The reason the fight is so hard just now, with Cybersecurity about to become a bigger issue for all Western people, is that we have reached a maturity of technology where we no longer need the State for any relationship or activity that could be achieved voluntarily elsewhere.
This means that the modern nation-state is threatened by the wide distribution of technology that we currently enjoy, to a degree that has never before been seen. The concept of the need for a nation-state has never been so threatened, as it is now.
So don’t worry too much about what idiot puppet is about to replace Johnson. Buy books, read the, and speak up.