The Year Zero witch hunts continue, now sucking into their vortex of dangerous nonsense even the most celebrated abolitionists should they catch even the slightest taint of association with slavery, merely due to living their lives in the pre-abolition era. Doug Stokes in the Telegraph writes on the absurdity of the inclusion of abolitionist David Livingstone on Glasgow’s list of ‘problematic’ personages.
How did David Livingstone, arguably one of Scotland’s most famous abolitionists, end up on Glasgow’s iconoclast topple list?
Glasgow City’s newly released report, Slavery and Atlantic Commerce, seeks to focus “on individuals (almost exclusively men)… whom were residents of Glasgow and its associated towns and rural hinterlands, and… involved with Atlantic slavery between c.1603 and 1838”. Just released, but commissioned after the rise of the BLM movement, it identifies Scotland’s list of sinners “memorialised in civic space” and linked to slavery, no matter how tenuously.
Dr Livingstone, the ‘rag to riches’ hero, made it his life’s mission to help end the horror of chattel slavery. However, as a 10-year-old boy, he worked in a cotton mill owned by Henry Monteith, one of Glasgow’s most important cotton manufacturers. The report notes that Livingstone was insufficiently critical of his employers. The wages he toiled for were “provided by Scottish cotton manufacturing which was itself dependent upon Atlantic slavery economies”. Moreover, the mill where the hands of the boy Livingstone spun cotton “paid relatively high wages to its workforce”. At 19, he had the audacity to be “promoted to a cotton-spinner which funded his education”.
Much is made of the seeming endless virtue signalling of our cultural and political institutions. Still, the more profound question is what purpose these constant bouts of self-flagellation serve where they even suck in moral giants such as Livingstone?
The new politics of race, slavery and decolonisation is part of a more profound collapse in the moral confidence of Western civilisation. Its story of moral certainty, sin, guilt and deconstructive redemption casts anyone who challenges them as beyond the pale. The new politics of race and ‘decolonisation’ are not about delivering social justice but are part of a broader status-orientated class war.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
One has to be lenient with these woke people. How should they know that unskilled labourers have to work in order to avoid starving, more so, when they even want to be able to pay for an education, and that this means taking jobs which are on offer? Or that the situation of 19th century factory workers was so bad and involved some much hard, physical labour that it was once suggested to enslave them out of clemency instead as factories owners would then have an economical interest in keeping them alive and healthy? They never had to work in all of their lives (and will never have to work) and their knowledge of history is restricted to what their leaders allow them to know, ie, only what supports the great, political cause.
I suspect that envy plays the major role in all this. People who have not been publicly noticed are attempting to glorify themselves by attacking those whose achievements have been rewarded with a statue – to be looked at by the public, to be noticed even after their deaths.
This is not moral indignation at work. It’s a particularly spiteful form of jealous attention-seeking, linked to breathtaking insensitivity to historical contexts.
Exactly
As a native of that city it saddens me this is occurring. I am at a loss as to how to stop these people.
There are a long list of people they have targeted, including James Watt and Robert Peel. Victoria and Albert must be next. Their equestrian statues are in George Square.
Yet all involved in the public sector entities that spawn this are cut from the same cloth as the SNP and green brigade. There is a fanaticism that seems difficult to penetrate.
Virtually no one opposes this either, which is perhaps saddest of all. Our national heritage written off as racist or not appropriate for the modern age. Judged by those with no comparable accomplishments as Livingstone or any of the rest our ancestors saw fit to commemorate.
What do we do?
Stop voting for the Party of Davos, would be the first thing.
Many of us don’t. It is often difficult to find anyone who does.
With respect, almost all voters do. Blue, red, green, yellow or orange, they’re all essentially the same. Regulars on this forum may be the exception but we’re not the rule.
I threw my vote away on the Scotch Libertarians last time, although I’m not even sure that it’s worthwhile bothering any more.
I know what you mean. I have opted for a few tiny parties with sensible ideas myself. But virtually everyone votes for one of the mainstream parties. I was meaning specifically it can be hard to find anyone admitting to voting for the SNP, although clearly many do.
Indeed Borgy.
I learnt a coarse, but perfect metaphor for the current political class of all spectra, from a friend in Texas….
The Uniparty, better known as two cheeks on the same arse.
When you see across the pond that 43% think Sleepy Joe is doing a good job you can only shake your head in disbelief.
And we can hardly criticise the financial shenanigans north of the border when all parties in Westminster take money from China & Russia & when we see Johnson employ a rabid remaining knee taking lobbyist for Huawei as his adviser.
Johnson has done nothing to stop the illegal immigration by dinghy while having the whole country under house arrest for 2 years, which is costing £5M a day. Continues to allow the Eu’s annexation of NI & still allows industrial fishing by Dutch fishermen in our waters. And who presently seems more concerned about Ukrainian independence than implementing what the UK voted for in 2016.
And yet he & his party will still receive support along with all the other corrupt parties in Westminster.
This is such a contradiction I wonder if it is the beginning of the end of cancel culture.
A good point. Many have always said the hard left would collapse as a consequence of internal contradictions. Perhaps it is more accurate to say this is the consequence of denying objective reality and indulging in subjective reality. If you can choose your sex you can choose to believe anything.
This isn’t the hard left – it’s an effete, metropolitial liberal-left which seems to have eclipsed all traditional left-wing influence over the past couple of decades.
Its proponents (who are mostly the Waitrose set) aren’t too bothered about a single parent living in some tower-block slum and trying to scrape a living on zero-hours contracts. What the liberal-left get het up about is the whole wokery agenda. They are constantly seeking more ways to take offence on behalf of somebody (or nobody, it really doesn’t matter!), so that they can engage in a good bout of virtue-signalling. As this story shows, their efforts in this line are becoming ever more extreme.
And ironically, although they are keen to push liberality in some areas, that absolutely does not extend to anyone who disagrees with them on anything, who will be treated with utter contempt and sidelined as much as possible.
We always hope, but when has doublethink been a problem?
or a way of distracting us?
Neo-Feudalism could be best defined as a stealthy form of slavery.
DISGUSTANG. He should have just claimed furlough benefits rather than actually doing any work for The Man.
I’m not sure it’s even that.
To me the behaviour is more akin to a riot. It is frenzied, irrational behaviour that keeps escalating and is out of control, fuelled primarily by anger, where the rioters don’t really know what they want or what they are really raging at. They have no clear conception of what they are trying to achieve. It’s just a purposeless expression of anger and discontent.
It needs to be handled like a riot. These people cannot be reasoned with or pacified in any gentle kind of way.
We either have to let them have their moment until they self destruct or it fizzles out.
Or it has to be dealt with with overwhelming force, which quite frankly I don’t see happening any time soon, but could happen if ordinary people got fed up enough.
I expect it will fizzle out but not before plenty more damage is done.
I agree. It is irrational. And it would need a strong force to stop it. Most seem indifferent. Who cares about a few statues?
But I also agree it is not sustainable. Destruction never is.
It’s more than just statues. There are historical precedents, where swathes of the population have succumbed to a form of hysteria. The circumstances now are, of course, different in precise details, but the underlying causes, as far as can be seen, are similar.
This mumbo-jumbo bollox has nothing to do with class war and everything to do with the wholesale destruction of a country and its history.
This is mind-bendingly ignorant and wilful; deepest, darkest malevolence.
i.e. classic Alinsky.
Let me get this right. Livingstone was a guy that campaigned forcefully AGAINST slavery and yet because he worked in a cotton mill at the age of 10 that was owned by someone complicit (but not directly involved) in the slave trade that his statue should be toppled and he should be cancelled? Seriously? Stop the f***ing world, I want to get off.
It’s better to get the others off. They just mindlessly imitate what’s also being done in America, hence, that’s good old US cultural imperialism. A particular destructive variant, as it’s basically De-nazification worked wonders for Germany, let’s apply it to some other bad guys we also really disapprove of.
Erasing the history of some country on the grounds that it’s irreparably contaminated because of A Really Bad Historical Event which was the logical outcome of all which happened before it, and replacing it with a cult of eternal inherited guilt is how the Germans were treated after 1945 (or really, after 1968, when the ancestors and (still) motors of the current woke generation first started to make public noises). About 35 years later, they actually came into power and could start to realize their political projects on a grand scale.
Unfortunately, their greatest political project so far – revive the 1918 flu pandemic by live-action role-playing – just acquired a new lease of life as Johnson (according to the Telegraph of today) again caved in to the Test! Test! Test! people and is planning to let them have their taxpayer-paid blackmailing kit yet longer, possibly forever.
By this reasoning, anyone in the UK who wore cotton between 1603 and 1838 was similarly linked to slavery. Women too. And LGBTQIA+. Oh dear.
Its war, us v them
wake up pussies
I look forward to the day that those responsible for the present day moral degeneracy, especially the effete libtards and mentally ill activists, with their endless denunciations, cancellations, and general idiocy, are themselves the subject of what will be a far more brutal and deserving backlash. They must pay for their monumental arrogance and the damage they have caused. They will be wiped out during the first wave of reprisals, with no mercy shown. I’ll laugh.
Dearie me. And ye thought it would stop with my statue being toppled. Most amusing are the actions of those who hath to invent new problems because thine lives be too easy.
It isn’t that their lives are too easy, there is a revolution to conduct and making certain imported people angry at the indigenous will help achieve their aims.
Soon enough, I fear, it will be noticed that Australia has a shameful history of white supremacists who invaded indigenous territories.
Those people used to be known as explorers.
Already happening. What’s fascinating in all this is that long-dead people are being made responsible for some genuine contemporary problems.
There are issues, in Australia as elsewhere, of disadvantage: of children denied fair access to a good education and good, reliable health care, by their circumstances.
Those issues are the responsibility of people living now, and they are complex responsibilities.
How can these issues be addressed without creating dependency and learned helplessness, without creating unnecessary bureaucracies and increasing state power?
We’re not even close to having a serious public conversation about this; because the issues are hijacked by virtue-signalling careerists who are flattered by governments which prefer lip service to addressing problems.
Are the sleepy masses starting to notice that they are being replaced by the third world yet?
Are they noticing how the imports are being taught to hate the indigenous by those in power?
What do you think the end game is?
I am noticing the first thin tendrils of awareness among my own control group, a kind of social barometer of average types I use to guage awareness of these things. It is there, but resisted.
Alas, as with covidmania, there is huge resistance to the notion anyone might be actively planning harm against us. Mistakes and incompetence, yes. Malevolence, no.
In recent times I’ve revisited essays and other works focusing on Nazi Germany. In particular the criticisms aimed at those who waited too long. Much of this has been airbrushed to support the Hollywood version of events, that the full horror of the Reich caught them unawares. The reality on the ground was different and slower. People cannot believe these things are happening. They continue to disbelieve even when being loaded on to the cattle carts, separated from their children. Those ignorant of history and doomed to repeat it.
But I have seen some surprising moments of awareness. In Glasgow, where the statue above is displayed, we see a growing army of sub Saharan Africans, many of them literally appearing in the last two years during a supposed pandemic. They are swiftly housed and set up. They are not dressed in rags. To be blunt, I’m shocked at how many I see in M&S foodhall. So much for being refugees. And I’m not alone in noticing this. It is not much but it is something.
I used to think that it was because solving real problems is hard. Its so much easier to solve long dead problems – “Apologies to executed witches” costs nothing, in money or effort. Much harder to find ways to help and support living people who need it. Looking forward and trying to make things better for everyone is an enormous task, probably impossible to achieve, failure is built in, and since we can’t be seen to fail, we should do something we can succeed at.
The ending of any great past injustice such as slavery can only have been on the backs of people who originally benefitted from it (since anyone with money or power must have benefitted in some way) who decided it was wrong and set about changing things. It certainly wasn’t ended by the slaves alone. It can’t have been. Britain led the way in ending slavery. When they go after Wilberforce, we’ll know.
When, in the second lockdown, my daughter’s school was doing slavery, They didn’t talk about Wilberforce and his like. She became so distressed that I wrote the school and told them we wouldn’t be doing it, we’d do Darwin instead. She did a PowerPoint on Darwin. His theories and his anti-slavery sentiments. I wanted her to see that there must have been white English folk who pushed for change.
The problem is, if they pull down the history rather than learning to understand and interpret human behaviour then I fear you are right – soon no one will remember that there were abolitionists. Or suffragettes’ husbands. Or upper class French who hated the corruption of their own monarchy. They will begin to believe that the suffering underlclasses changed the world on their own.
“The wages he toiled for were “provided by Scottish cotton manufacturing which was itself dependent upon Atlantic slavery economies”.
No. It was dependent on cotton.
have they gone after John newton yet?
He was actually involved in the slave trade until he repented, became a Christian and -a among other things -w rote “Amazing Grace.
It was discovered that he once went into a coffee house which was also patronised by slave traders