Irish telecoms billionaire Denis O’Brien – formerly of Cork, nowadays of Davos – has made headlines in recent weeks with his luxury-belief demand that Britain pay countless sums in reparations for slavery towards various Caribbean islands where he now pursues his business interests, calling the slave trade “a Holocaust that went on for 300 years”. It can’t have been a very efficient one, then. Why not dip into your own deep pockets and hand out the poverty-stricken locals some free cash of your own if you feel that strongly about it, Denis? The Irish once owned some slave colonies in the Caribbean too, you know, not just their evil imperial overlords from London.
O’Brien’s arguments may be poor, but at least he attempts to justify his petition within the superficially logical frameworks of morality, justice, economics and history, albeit all of a rather twisted kind. Other reparations champions today, however, prefer instead to invoke that all-time magic word ‘science’ to validate their pleas, ‘science’ being automatically taken by many who hear it to mean ‘objective truth’, even in areas, like reparations, where it has no rightful application or relevance.
Should we be surprised to hear of such a dismal development? In these days of extreme wokery, those remaining morally sane Westerners are often heard to complain that “it’s like we’re living in Soviet Russia”. This is now even so with our science, not just our politics.
As I found when writing my new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (just released now in e-book format – you can read an extract in the Daily Sceptic here) there is great potential for ideologically motivated zealots to abuse scientific theories and data for their own partisan political ends – ideologically motivated zealots like reparations-hungry modern black extremists, for example. Scarily, many such persons today are unknowingly following in the direct footsteps of the USSR’s most infamous pseudo-scientist, the Ukraine-born biologist and agronomist Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976).
Lysenko believed in an idea known as Lamarckism, after the French evolutionary theorist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who felt the qualities acquired by an organism in life could automatically be inherited by their offspring – to simplify comically, imagine a female bodybuilder spending so long pumping iron that she gives birth to a fully-grown Arnold Schwarzenegger, or a Jewish baby being born without a foreskin (that this does not happen to Jewish infants has actually been seriously advanced as an argument against Lamarckism’s validity!)
Fields of Dreams
Lysenko applied Lamarckism to agriculture, devising methods of so-called “vernalisation” for crop-seeds, deliberately exposing them to low temperatures and moisture prior to sowing. Then, surviving seeds could potentially be made hardier and able to grow in harsher conditions, like in frozen Siberia. Although vernalisation is a somewhat genuine phenomenon, Lysenko’s specific overblown and misguided methods ultimately proved overblown and unworkable – but Stalin liked the sound of them, so they were used across the USSR anyway, leading to mass famine.
As I have recently shown elsewhere, other Leftists (and Vladimir Putin today) saw in vernalisation the potential to create their long-desired Homo Sovieticus – a brand-new, superior species of “New Soviet Man”, or Russian Master-Race. Improve human beings via Marxism in one generation and, by Lysenko’s logic, their children should be born bearing these same innate improvements too, like Muscle-Baby Arnie, until eventually we ended up with an entire race of socialist supermen.
Following Stalin’s death, Lysenko soon fell from favour, but today something curious has begun to occur: like Marxism itself, Lysenkoism is suddenly back in fashion in the West under a new name, only this time (mis-)applied along dubious racial grounds (as is ethnically-motivated fascism, in some ways – see my other extracts here and here).
Distressed Genes
In today’s increasingly Soviet America, the newly-coined field of epigenetics (the quasi-Lysenkoist idea a baby can inherit at least some of its parents’ or grandparents’ life-acquired characteristics, albeit not their body-building muscles or lack of foreskins) has recently been embraced by certain malcontented black people under the rubric of an entirely imaginary condition called ‘Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome’ (PTSS).
For a black person in America actually to have been a slave, they would now have to be very old indeed, even older than Bill Cosby, as the practice officially ended in 1865 – I think there was some kind of Civil War fought over the issue or something. So, for them to be able to claim compensation for something that never actually happened to them, a new line of logic has to be brought in instead: re-enter Lysenkoism disguised as epigenetics.
Rather than what did not kill them only making them stronger, as with Lysenko’s frost-exposed seeds, say some reparations-hungry black persons today, what did not kill them has in fact only made them weaker – Nietzsche in reverse. The end result of this claim? “Science now says we deserve compensation!”
The key book in popularising this entitled howl was 2005’s Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing by clinical psychologist and (inevitably) qualified social worker Dr. Joy DeGruy, whose very title sounds like the Platonic Ideal of any given week’s featured title on Oprah’s Book Club. But what do this text and others like it actually say?
Vernalised Victimhood
Recent studies have purported to demonstrate pre-natal stress can be transmitted from black American mothers to their babies in the womb, thereby altering their genes, stress levels which activists attribute to lower incomes and living standards than those enjoyed by the average white American.
As liberated black slaves were released into a prejudiced world post-1865, and their descendants endured discrimination and poverty for several generations afterwards, this allegedly led to a cumulative build-up of what might be termed “anti-vernalisation”, with the 150-plus years of accumulated stress having a deleterious effect upon the current generation’s inherently traumatised genes.
As slaves also endured poor diets, their babies and their babies’ babies were born not with super-genes, like Lysenko’s much-vaunted crop-based super-seeds, but with weak genes, like those of that archetypal black pseudo-victim, the lifelong petty-criminal drug-addict George Floyd. Black U.S. babies are, even now, more likely to have lower birth-weights, causing enhanced risk of cardiovascular problems later in life. But why?
Because, we are told, during their original passage to America, chained Africans in the holds of slave-ships typically suffered conditions like diarrhoea and fever, which deplete the body of salt. Thus, the slaves who survived tended to be those with genes favouring salt-retention. The trouble is that having lots of salt in the body increases hypotension, so today’s African-Americans are more likely to suffer high blood-pressure than others, meaning they are still suffering the long-term epigenetic effects of slavery.
Babes in the ’Hood
While disputed, some such findings are not wholly implausible. Yet they are then wildly overextended to claim such poor epigenetic inheritance also ‘explains’ phenomena like the proven higher violent crime-rates of black neighbourhoods, or the lower educational achievements of African-Americans as a whole compared to most other races; an alternative colloquial name for PTSS is “Hood Disease”.
To critics (e.g. me), this line of thought has several severe problems:
- Firstly, it patronisingly robs black people of any sense of moral agency or responsibility for their actions, treating them like perpetual children and allowing the feckless and criminal amongst their number to forever pose as helpless victims of genetics.
- Secondly, and obviously, not all black people are weak, violent, criminal, dim, sickly or poor and to claim they are ironically seems somewhat racist.
- Finally, the PTSS hypothesis presumes black people have never interbred with whites, Hispanics or any other races in America, thus mixing their ‘traumatised’ genes with the ‘healthy’ ones of others. It also presumes that all black Americans are the descendants of slaves. Neither of which proposition is even remotely true.
But never mind all that. The good news for eager black financial chancers is that, by abusing Lynsenko-style epigenetics in this way, their spurious demand to receive billions of dollars’ worth of collective compensation for something that didn’t even happen to them is magically raised to the level of objective science, not mere partisan desire, and thus rendered entirely above debate – you know, just like climate-change catastrophism and transgenderism.
Slaves to Their Own Worst Natures
Plus, malign black Marxist groups can further argue a non-existent ‘white supremacy gene’ is also passed down epigenetically from generation of white Hitlers to generation of white Hitlers. If whites inherit white supremacy, and blacks inherit fear of white people, it follows black citizens will be epigenetically terrified of white cops, who will in turn be naturally pre-programmed to shoot them dead or kneel on their necks at the drop of a hat. Therefore, you must defund the police, science proves it.
Inevitably, these neo-Lysenkoists have their useful idiot allies amongst the U.S. political class. In California, two recent State resolutions have passed pandering to such radical sentiments, partly on the fake grounds that epigenetics proves slavery and white racism have left blacks with “transgenerational trauma” and “molecular scars adhering to our DNA”, a line sceptics have aptly dubbed “a new form of militant bio-power”.
And if you disagree and happen by some sad misfortune of birth to be Caucasian, perhaps you too have inherited the white supremacy gene from your slave-owning ancestors (even if, like most white people, they didn’t actually have any). Remember: to disagree will only be to deny the science, in Al Sharpton’s America equally as much as in Josef Stalin’s Russia. I’m denying it anyway. So should you.
Edited and extracted from the author’s new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets out now in hardback (Pen & Sword/Frontline Books, ISBN: 9781399073158) and e-book.
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I doubt they are at all interested in covid per se, just in the opportunities it presents, same as everywhere else but in spades as they have form. Why would we believe official figures from China about covid, more than any official figures? The idea that they could succeed in suppressing covid to the extent they claim, in a populous, connected country, in simply absurd, as is the idea that it spread around the world from Wuhan but not internally in China.
As a plandemic it worked rather well
Exactly. Most struggle to understand the motivation behind it. Why would anyone care what I’m up to? I have nothing to hide.
But the control freakery used to be understood better. Some people are broken. The unrelenting void in their own minds can only be healed by controlling the world. Many of them gravitate to government and it’s associated organizations.
Almost every single Chinese student I have spoken to over the years has wanted to work for their government or an agency thereof.
Only the wildest dream of an alternative, escaping to America to earn their fortune in the private sector.
Most of them, by far, take rubbish degrees like Business Administration which they pass by learning the “correct answer” by rote. This does not bode well for the future of the Chinese economy or built environment.
Won’t rote learning always be a big part of Chinese culture (whatever political regime they have) because there is no other way to learn how to read Chinese script with its thousands of logograms?
‘They contained it because they were so wonderfully authoritarian, brilliantly barbaric, admirably oppressive and decisively decisive!’
A. Guardian reader.
The sealed countries, including China and New Zealand, will be where omicron mutates as it spreads when it achieves its breakthrough there. The rest of the world will have dropped most or all restrictions and moved on. The danger is then of a highly pathogenic mutant variant appearing in one of these sealed countries. And so, the prospect of China being the source yet again….
What is leaving me completely stunned is that “the west” is passing up a golden opportunity to get one over China big time. All we would need to do is collectively rally behind the idea that covid is over, that it’s just a flu, get rid of literally every single restriction and return to full normality.
China (and whoever wanted to copy it) would then be left completely stuck. Our economies would boom, theirs would languish. Better still, their people, who aren’t idiots and do get outside info, would start getting very restless.
And that’s when I know the WEF, Davos, “conspiracy” narrative is spot on. Because that open approach would be great for the ordinary people, regular businesses. But that is not the priority of people in authority. Their priorities are control of the population and nurturing a cosy relationship with the giant corporations. i.e. The Chinese model.
I have no doubt that the oligarchs, politicians and technocrats running western nations fantasise about implementing Chinese style governance, and see themselves as a westernised, marginally more enlightened CCP.
They don’t want to beat China with western liberal values, they want to copy China and partner up with them.
Precisely. Western liberal values are a bothersome beast – people get such funny ideas about freedom.
They openly talk about the post democratic age, have done for years.
Poor hamsters.
First they came for the hamsters, but I did not speak out
Because I was not a hamster, but my Mother was a hamster so I ought to have spoken out.
Then they came for the elderberries…
It’s a Monty Python meets Martin Niemöller world we live in now. Soon they’ll be coming for Pepper Pig…
It’s time to send Michie to China on an extended research trip; possible duration about 30 years, with no home leave. As Head of the mission, she might include Ferguson, Whitty and Vallance in her entourage, along with any other deserving persons.
Back in the day when Philby, Burgess, Maclean and all that lot were actively pursuing the agenda of a foreign communist power, they had to keep it quiet because it was considered treasonous. These days, it’s done in the open, be it the CCP or the ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’ WEF.
The Chinese don’t need Michie or Ferguson so after maybe receiving a few CCP honours they will end up like Kim Phillby, cooped up in a tiny flat ekeing out two bottles of Chinese vodka over a week.
The very nature of Zero Covid policy means that countries following it don’t admit immigrants, so it’s unlikely that any of its advocates in the West would be able to go into exile in a country more amenable to their values.
Not at all like Philby (who eventually found a home in the Soviet Union) or even the Nazi war criminals who found refuge in South America.
I, rightly or wrongly, have now mentally filed the last two years under ‘Virus Hoax – Morons Inc. 2020-2022’, where it will join many other compressed files, for reference purposes only.
2022 – you must be a glass half full type.
Good line. I’m going to nick it.
It was only the epilogue I’m afraid.
Hubris and hamsters – ummm – USA, UK, most of mainland europe for two years and at least a handful for the other 198 (at least).
The key lesson is to convince those immersed in BBCland that the Covid virus was to usher in the passports and associated social control measures, not the other way around. In this china has succeeded, although they already had their evolving social control methods already in place.
I don’t hold out much hope for this as I recall how many people around me only got injected with experimental drugs so they could book a holiday not because they lived in mortal fear of a deadly pathogen. That is the truly depressing part of this, how cheaply they were bought. How readily they embraced astonishingly poor propaganda. Like most people I literally don’t know anyone who died from this thing, and know only two people who got it and had heavy colds with zero longterm effects. Despite my own energetic maskless attempts to expose myself I never succumbed. My Vitamin D and zinc, magnesium and K2 regimen unfortunately saddled me with a robust immune system
What to do? For me the only meaningful takeaway is to understand some people will always be immune to the propaganda. That’s all. Most will succumb. That is the real virus.
Yes, we desperately need a propaganda vax to prevent contagion, it’s not enough just to turn off the tv.
Exactly greenpass was extended by a year in EU!
Vitamin D.
Note the first ‘linked article’ on the Dail Mail article above this one. GoFundMe
“Vitamin D works after all !”
Wow, thanks DM, who else knew?
(Well it was a couple of hours ago but it’s gone now. Can’t imagine why.)
They were like Esau and, in effect, sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.
There’s an increasing number of articles here in the UK reporting about dogs catching convid.
The regime has followed the communists every step of the way over the last two years, let’s hope they don’t even think about suggesting animals need to be culled.
Ferguson already has a horrifying track record on using his dodgy stats to cull enormous numbers of healthy animals in the past.
Avian flu outbreaks in areas that just coincidentally have 5G masts installed, with warning posters on them saying that radiation exposure causes flu-like symptoms.
Avian Flu spread prevention orders are commonplace in the UK; last year it spread from S/W England to cover the whole country but were never revoked so remain in place.
5G installation also spread over the last 2 years….
Evidence for a connection between coronavirus disease-19 and exposure to radiofrequency radiation from wireless communications including 5G
That would really throw a spanner into the brains of the modern, metro person. If dogs were suddenly considered a major spreader of covid, would they finally accept to live with the virus rather than culling them?
What am I saying… they’d plug them with 3 doses of Moderna and pretend that there is nothing unusual about young dogs dying of heart attacks.
If they go after people’s dogs, then that really would cause a revolution!
That would be a dream come true for me. I hate dogs, they are noisy, irritating and shit everywhere.
A bit like peolpe.
You’d think that it would have occurred to someone in China to create a Vaccine whilst it was creating a virus wouldn’t you? I love the “It was in a letter” bit, brings a whole new meaning to Viruses being in the Mail! That kind of thing has made me laugh all the way through with ideas like “YOu won’t catch it sitting down, it only gets you as you go the loo” and “You’re safe in the swimming pool but on the side of the pool”.
I’ve a strong suspicion that any lockdowns in China were strictly performative and staged in fairly random locations for the benefit of the idiot Western media. The CCP would have had the data early on and I simply don’t believe that a regime of this nature would wreck its economy over a possible 10% max increase in all cause mortality over a short period of time. Given the brutality of its one child policy (nice name for mass infanticide and millions upon millions of forced abortions), it just doesn’t make sense.
The argument against that I suppose is that the CCP right back to the sparrows campaign and the Great Leap Forward has a long history of insane, hugely damaging policies of self harm. We’ll never really know.
Indeed – why would anyone think the CCP leadership care much about notionally saving a few lives?
It’s never made any sense to me on those terms. Spreading the foul, insane and evil doctrine of lockdown to the West had its uses though. This is worth a read:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda
Looks like the CCP downtick bots are on the case
They’re famous for snooping and spying on everything.
Up yours you lying sneaky bastards!!!! Snoop on that
No, no. The lockdowns were real.
Beijing had pretty substantial restrictions for several months and work from home guidance for many months.
Absolutely. Many think the CCP are geniuses. They are but much in the same way that Mao was. A genius at taking control, keeping it and abusing the population without them saying a peep.
My hunch is that there is also a strong incentive to hide any infections in the municipalities. The CCP has made it clear that any hint of a breakout will be considered a failure and result in a destructive containment strategy. Therefore, any right thinking citizen or member of the CCP is going to do everything they can to hide infections from the central authority.
Started watching the winter olympics but had to switch off as I could stand seeing mass masking.
I saw a snippet of Women’s Ice Hockey and it was dismal – empty arena. Even in Canada I imagine no-one is much interested in it, so perhaps it was empty because it’s not very appealing to locals, but maybe the whole thing will largely be spectator-free. Elite sport in general is unwatchable for me now – virtue signalling, politics, corruption, whingeing, entitled athletes. corporate bollocks, and now covid nonsense.
Just reading about Nadal’s win made me want to throw something.
Just been for a walk in a University city that has a lot of chinky students, well over 90% of them masked up just walking around outside. They must be reveling in bringing their pathetic “culture” here
Read the book ‘Hidden Hand’ about the slow stealthy CCP takeover of the west. It amplifies the brief details here.
It’s sometimes hard to know whether a particular person is reporting to the CCP or the WEF.
I’ve read it and it just confirms what I’ve been saying for 2 decades. I use to travel with my job and I was concerned 20 years ago about the influence of China around the world. In Pakistan I use to go to the Chinese restaurants as the quality of the food was much better than in local restaurants.
I guess Pakistan’s bitter rivalry with India (of course one of the baleful legacies of British colonialism) will have made it easier for China to puppetize Pakistan…
Clean North Sea Gas v Dirty Russian Gas
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/02/05/clean-north-sea-gas-v-dirty-russian-gas/
by Paul Homewood
Saturday 5th February 2pm
Windsor Great Dog Walk for Freedom
behind one simple sign
“Covid Rules Are Barking”
All Canines and Humans welcome
Even if you don’t own a dog please come along
meet Alexander Park (near Bandstand) Barry Rd/Goswell Rd
Windsor SL4 1QY
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Zero covid policy is a hybrid economical warfare against the rest of the world! Just look how many items and raw materials we are dependent on. So in name of covid they limit export and collapse the supply chain.
I think in the long run, they’re doing us a favour, tbh.
As I’ve been saying for nearly two years; in his goterdamerung moment bozo will command the slaughter of all newborn domestic pussycats.
This will be his revenge against those who failed to save him at the ballot box out of some ‘pussyfooting’ concern about him eating cake in No.10s Rose Garden.
Constitutional experts and later historians will be living off that for ages as Mirror Group News buys up the husk of Myspace for archive photos of Cute Cats to.print some every day by way of illustration.
“The U.S. Defense Dept developed SARS-CoV-2 in North Carolina. The 4th Branch (Intelligence Community) wanted to use it. The Pentagon restarts funding for development of SARS-CoV-2 in partnership with Wuhan, China – setting up the cover story. The 4th Branch (Intelligence Community) then uses the virus by releasing it in/around Wuhan. Everything after that is simply part of the 4th Branch covering their tracks. Wuhan, China becomes the patsy.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/02/did-the-fourth-branch-of-government-release-sars-cov-2-then-blame-china/
Ron Unz articles supporting and predating most of the above and the main articles series all listed here.
https://www.unz.com/runz/is-the-tide-finally-turning-on-covid-as-an-american-biowarfare-attack/
I hate the Chinks with a passion, people are waking up far too slowly to what they’re all about and cutting them too much slack.
When I think it’s bad in England at least I be glad I don’t live in China, (or Scotland haha). A good article worth reading in full just for the song lyrics at the end. Made me smile, something I definitely need these days.