You may have heard that there are bunch of statues that have been taken down recently. I think that’s a good thing. Some other people disagree. On 12 June 2020, the British comedian John Cleese—who is known as a member of the comedy group Monty Python and as the co-writer and lead actor for the sitcom Fawlty Towers—issued this tweet:
Cleese followed this up with another tweet in which he said this:
There is a lot to unpack here. Cleese is obviously joking, but, through his misunderstanding of what protesters want and why, he has inadvertently raised some very serious questions that I think are worth addressing.
Why people are tearing down statues
First of all, John Cleese is evidently missing the point here. The statues that people are tearing down now are not statues of people who merely incidentally happen to be connected to slavery; they are statues of people whose very identities are undeniably and inextricably associated with slavery and who are best known for promoting and defending the institution of slavery.
Most of the statues that are being torn down in the United States are statues that were erected to glorify the Confederacy and people intimately associated with it. As I discuss in this article I wrote in November 2019—which I highly suggest you all read once you are done reading this article—the whole reason for the Confederacy’s existence was slavery.
The Confederates themselves made it absolutely, unambiguously clear that the reason why they seceded from the Union was because they wanted to keep their slaves. Mississippi’s Declaration of Causes for Secession explicitly and unambiguously states near the very beginning:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”
In the infamous “Cornerstone Speech,” delivered on March 21, 1861 at the Athenaeum in Savannah Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederate States of America, unambiguously declared:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
“This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind—from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.”
It is abundantly clear from all the surviving historical sources that the Confederacy was all about slavery. The people who built the statues that are now being torn down knew this. They built those monuments specifically because they wanted to glorify white supremacy. Now people are tearing them down because they think white supremacy is wrong.
Again, the purpose of building monumental statues isn’t to remember history; the purpose of building monumental statues is to glorify people, to divinize them. Tearing down Confederate statues isn’t about “erasing history”; it’s about not glorifying the people who took up arms against the United States to defend slavery.
ABOVE: Photograph of Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederate States of America, who made it very clear in his “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was all about preserving slavery
Meanwhile, the statues that are being torn down in Britain are statues of people who made their fortunes through the brutal enslavement of black people—black people who, might I remind you, were bought or captured in West Africa, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in cramped ships, and sold in the Americas to slave owners who forced them to work without pay, usually under extremely inhumane conditions for the rests of their lives.
On 7 June 2020, protesters in the city of Bristol in England tore down a statue of the slave merchant Edward Colston (lived 1636 – 1721) and dumped it into Bristol Harbor. On 9 June 2020, in accordance with the will of the people, authorities in London removed a statue of the slave-owner and slave-factor Robert Milligan (lived 1746 – 1809) that had previously stood in front of the Museum of London Docklands.
Again, the people whose statues are being torn down aren’t people who just incidentally happened to approve of slavery; they’re people whose entire livelihoods were based on slavery. These are not people we should be glorifying. Their statues should be taken down. If the statues have artistic or historical importance, they should be put in museums, where they can be properly contextualized and viewed as historical artifacts rather than current political symbols. If they don’t have artistic or historical significance, they should be melted down.
ABOVE: Photograph from CNN of protesters in Bristol, England, dumping a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the harbor
The ancient Greeks and slavery
Next, I should correct John Cleese about how the Greeks generally felt about slavery. In general, it wasn’t so much that the Greeks were universally opposed to the abolition of slavery because they all agreed that slavery was necessary in order for civilization to exist; instead, it was more that the idea of abolishing slavery just didn’t really occur to anyone.
As I discuss in this article I wrote in October 2019, the ancient Greeks generally agreed that it wasn’t enjoyable to be a slave and there are some subtle hints in surviving passages of ancient Greek literature that indicate that a small number of people even thought that slavery itself was immoral. (Aristotle briefly mentions at one point that there were certain people who believed that slavery was “contrary to nature.”) Nonetheless, as far as we can tell from the surviving sources, there was never any kind of organized movement for the abolition of slavery.
That line about tearing down statues of Socrates and Aristotle…
Now, I know that John Cleese was only joking about tearing down statues of Socrates and Aristotle, but I think that this is a question that is actually worth asking: “Should we tear down statues of Socrates and Aristotle because they supported slavery?”
With Socrates, I’d say definitely not. For one thing, we don’t really know very much about what Socrates thought of slavery because he never wrote any of his ideas down. As I discuss in this article from March 2019, nearly everything we know about Socrates comes from what his students Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BC) and Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BC) wrote about him.
Plato and Xenophon’s writings give us a very general picture of what Socrates was like as a person, but they don’t necessarily give us an accurate picture of everything Socrates believed, since both authors use Socrates to present views that the historical Socrates probably never espoused. Based on the fact that Socrates was an ancient Greek, though, and the fact that he is not specifically noted to have spoken out against slavery, we can probably safely assume that, at the very least, he wasn’t a vocal opponent of it.
Nevertheless, in our own culture at least, Socrates is not known for having defended slavery; instead, he is known for having questioned social norms and forced people to question the ideas and beliefs that they held dear. I would say that questioning ideas and social norms is an ideal that we still value today. Therefore, in my opinion, there is no good reason why we should be tearing down statues of Socrates.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble head of Socrates on display in the Naples Archaeological Museum
Aristotle: an arch-defender of slavery
With Aristotle on the other hand, we know for certain that he was a vocal defender of slavery. In fact, Aristotle is perhaps the most vehemently pro-slavery writer whose works have survived from antiquity. The only reason why we know that there were people in Greece during the fourth century BC who thought that slavery was “contrary to nature” is because Aristotle mentions them with the specific purpose of proving that they are wrong. He writes in his Politics 1254a, as translated by H. Rackham:
“Hence whereas the master is merely the slave’s master and does not belong to the slave, the slave is not merely the slave of the master but wholly belongs to the master. These considerations therefore make clear the nature of the slave and his essential quality: one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a person is a human being belonging to another if being a man he is an article of property, and an article of property is an instrument for action separable from its owner.”
“But we must next consider whether or not anyone exists who is by nature of this character, and whether it is advantageous and just for anyone to be a slave, or whether on the contrary all slavery is against nature. And it is not difficult either to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically. Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.”
In other words, Aristotle not only believed that slavery was completely moral and justified, but also that some people were naturally meant to be masters and other people were naturally meant to be slaves.
From the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century until the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, this exact passage from Aristotle Politics was routinely cited by supporters of slavery to justify the brutal enslavement of people of sub-Saharan African descent by western Europeans and their descendants.
Few people have done more to legitimize slavery as an institution than Aristotle and the fact that he supported slavery will forever stand against him.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble portrait head of Aristotle
Should we be tearing down statues of Aristotle, then? I don’t know. Certainly, everything Aristotle wrote about slavery is odious and utterly contrary to the values that we as a society now hold dear. On the other hand, Aristotle is a truly monumental figure in the history of science. Some people like to attack Aristotle’s scientific work because he got a few things wrong, but what Aristotle’s detractors don’t realize is that the entire scientific tradition as we know it today is rooted in his philosophy.
Aristotle conducted extensive research on the natural world. He based all his conclusions on either his own empirical observation or on reports from others that he believed were based on their empirical observation. Moreover, he recorded his findings for future generations and his method of empirical observation eventually developed into the scientific method we know today. He was, in a lot of ways, the first true scientist.
A lot of people will try to tell you that Aristotle never made any observations and that he just thought about stuff and assumed that whatever he thought was true; this is demonstrable false. If you actually read anything Aristotle himself wrote, you’ll find that he talks about empirical observation and evidence almost constantly. (Indeed, you’ll notice that, even in the passage I quoted above, Aristotle tries to cite the empirical observation that some people are more inclined than others to obey commands as proof that some people are meant by nature to serve others as slaves.)
The popular modern notion of Aristotle as a theorist who didn’t care about evidence is based on the extremely unfair misrepresentation of Aristotle’s work by later writers such as Galileo Galilei (lived 1564 – 1642) and Bertrand Russell (lived 1872 – 1970). For past four hundred years, various hostile writers have distorted and oversimplified Aristotle’s ideas to make them seem a lot stupider than they really are.
Whether directly or indirectly, Aristotle has influenced literally every scientist in the western tradition—including, ironically, Galileo. Obviously, Aristotle’s scientific work does not in any way excuse his defense of slavery. If anything, it demonstrates that, sadly, the history of science is inextricably intertwined with the history of racism, slavery, and cruelty.
Seeing that most sculptures of Aristotle are extremely old, have great historical value, and are already in museums, I don’t think that it would be productive to destroy them. We might want to think twice about erecting any new statues of Aristotle, though.
ABOVE: Portrait of the Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei, whose misrepresentation of Aristotle as a theorist who didn’t care about empirical evidence remains influential even today
What reparations is really about
Moving on to John Cleese’s second tweet, I actually agree with him that talking about “reparations for slavery” is silly. The fact is, we can’t make reparations for slavery; no one can. It is too late for that. If we were going to make reparations for slavery, we should have done that 130 years ago when there were still people alive who had actually lived in slavery while it was still legal. Now there is nothing we can do to compensate those people, because they are all long dead. Helping out their distant descendants will not do anything to help them.
On the other hand, the case for the United States government to pay reparations to black people isn’t really about slavery; it’s more about the systemic racism and oppression that black people have faced over the course of the past century and that they still experience to some extent today.
There are people who are still alive who have been severely negatively impacted by the racist policies of the United States government and I think that, at the very least, it is completely fair for those people to demand reparations. Here is an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates published in The Atlantic in June 2014 that presents a very compelling case for reparations. You’ll notice that Coates’s argument relies primarily on the harm that racism has caused to living people, rather than the harm it caused to people who are long dead.
Are reparations that most important political issue right now? No, of course not. Reparations certainly won’t make systemic racism go away. Nonetheless, it would be huge symbolic step for the United States government to acknowledge that its policies have done great harm to black people.
The Romans and Britain
Even leaving that whole matter aside, Cleese’s claim that the Romans “enslaved the British for 400 years” is only partly true at best. The Romans did conquer Britain and they did force some British people into slavery, but they didn’t enslave everyone—or even the majority of the British population—and they didn’t establish a racist standard that only British people could be slaves.
Furthermore, the Romans conquered and enslaved people of many other nations. Indeed, before they expanded outside of Italy, the Romans first had to conquer all the other peoples in Italy. If you say that Italy owes reparations to Britain because the Romans conquered Britain, then the city of Rome must owe reparations to the rest of Italy as well because the Romans conquered Italy too.
What the Romans did to the peoples they conquered was certainly unjust and it is worth having a legitimate conversation about the Romans’ cruelty. Nonetheless, comparing the Romans’ treatment of the British to the enslavement of black people in the United States is clearly a disingenuous attempt to minimize the horrors that enslaved people were forced to endure.
ABOVE: Illustration from c. 1854 depicting white slave traders inspecting a black slave in preparation for the slave to be sold.
Sir Isaac Newton and the slave trade
It is true that Sir Isaac Newton did invest an extremely large amount of money in the South Sea Company, which did indeed trade in slaves. Newton was just an investor, though; he wasn’t actually a slave merchant himself. Furthermore, Newton is famous for his work in physics, not for having invested in the slave trade. When you mention Newton’s name to someone, they immediately think of Newton’s laws of motion or Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Very few people would immediately think, “Oh yeah, Newton, that guy who invested in the slave trade.”
As I have said before, the statues we choose to keep on public display should represent the ideas we want to glorify. Most of us associate Newton with science. Science is something that we still value greatly today. Therefore, I think statues of Isaac Newton should remain standing.
It’s also worth noting that Newton definitely didn’t get rich off the slave trade. In fact, he did exactly the opposite; in 1720, the so-called “South Sea Bubble” burst and the value of stock in the South Sea Company dropped drastically. Newton is estimated to have lost somewhere around twenty thousand pounds in the crash. That’s roughly equivalent to three million U.S. dollars in 2003. It was an ungodly amount of money.
To give you an idea of how much money Newton lost, at the end of his life, it is estimated he was only making around two thousand pounds a year, meaning he lost ten times his entire yearly income as a result of his investment in the South Sea Company. Newton was so devastated by how much money he lost that he is said to have forbidden anyone from even using the phrase “South Sea” in his presence for the rest of his life.
ABOVE: Copy of a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller from 1689. Newton lost an enormous amount of money that he had invested in the South Sea Company when the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720
“The statues that people are tearing down now are not statues of people who merely incidentally happen to be connected to slavery; they are statues of people whose very identities are undeniably and inextricably associated with slavery and who are best known for promoting and defending the institution of slavery.”
This isn’t entirely true. In the UK some/many people think that statues of Cecil Rhodes should be taken down; he wasn’t a slaver (but he was an imperialist and racist and arguably a white supremacist). A few people are even arguing that statues of Churchill and Nelson should be removed, not because they were connected to slavery but because they both expressed racist views (and the former arguably helped to cause a terrible famine in India).
Good points. Do I misinterpret you if I think you hint at something like “if we begin to judge people of the past according to our current morality criteria, this process will never end”?
unfortunately there are nuances in the article so you have to actually read it.
I think you are wrong about Aristotle. Spencer. It is true he talked about experience often, but the question is what he did about it. Anyone that wants to defend Aristotle in this aspect needs to account his absolute failure in his dynamics. According to Aristotle dynamics, a rock should fall straight to the ground the instant it no longer touches your hand. The explanation Aristotle gave to why this was not the case is stupid, it is obvious he did not actually believed it. He knew perfectly well it could not be the air the one pushing the rock, you need a tornado to move a rock and if every time we threw a rock we created a tornado we would have realized by now. Aristotle at the very least should have admitted the posibility that he was wrong in this topic, but he did no do such a thing. If Galileo would have shown him that a rock twice as heavy as other one does not fall twice as fast, he would not have changed his mind, just like Aristotelian intelectuals didn’t. He would have made a post-hoc modification to his theory, saying there is some unknown factor acting.
Aristotle influence in science was extremely negative, although possibly necesary, as just a logical phase in science development that humans had to overcome. Science is based in a craftsman approach to reality, not a philosophical one. Understanding perfectly a very small region of reality, even if that lead us to contradictory theories to explain different phenomena. Philosophy works in the opposite way, trying to find a common theory for everything. Science could have never developed with such approach, the lack of rigorous intelectual consistency was fundamental for the science revolution. The same day Boltzmann and some other physicists were debating whether atoms existed or not, in a Chemistry conference they were debating if the methane molecule was tetraedrical. One science (classical thermodynamics) saying that atoms were impossible and the other saying they were evident. Absurd for a philosopher, but clearly irrelevant for scientists.
For science to develop it needed to get rid of philosophy. This could very well be a simply due to historical context and that in the future science should take the philosophical approach (many physics believe so, with the idea that all is reduced to physical interactions), but at the time it was a dead end. The work of spanish philospher Gustavo Bueno is very enlightened in this aspect, I really recomend you to read about this theory of the “categorial closeup”. It’s the only epistemological treatment of science that can actually explain what we see in the history of science.
First of all I want to apologize for my English beforehand, it’s not the best, but I will try my best.
About the thing about Aristotle being ‘stupid’ on some of the topics he addressed, so did Galileo. Before I address the ‘stupid’ things that Galileo believed I would like to point out that the idea of two objects of different weight falling at almost the same time was not new to Galileo. The first to make that observation was John Philoponus, a christian neoplatonist of the 6th century, and in fact, Galileo took that idea from Philoponus for his work on mechanics, even though he disagreed with him before in 1590. Galileo also took for granted that the comets were an atmospherical occurrence despite the fact that the work of previous astronomers concluded that they were astronomical rather than atmospherical. He went further with that in his fight with the Jesuit astronomer Oratio Grassi, who correctly observed that the comets were celestial phenomena. Another “stupid” thing Galileo defended was his tides argument. He said that the tides were the result of the earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun, despite the fact that in 1609 Kepler correctly suggested that the gravitation of the Moon causes the tides, basing his argument upon ancient observations and correlations.
Despite all that I don’t believe that what Galileo said was “stupid”, it was erroneous and was mostly the result of his own bias rather than the conclusion of a meticulous rational and empirical process. But like Aristotle, Galileo established good things for the science of his time. Aristotle made the first step towards a coherent methodological process of rational thinking, that went evolving into a more empirical system of quantitative results. That, I think, is far from being an “extremely negative” influence. The points Mr Spencer made, were completely valid in this case about Aristotle.
Once again, I apologize for my spelling and expressions.
Professor Edith hall’s defence of Aristotle is that, being the kind of thinker he was, she believes he would be obliged to change them if she was able to argue with his here and now. Even the passage that Spencer quotes is strangely ambiguous despite it sounding as unequivocal as Spencer claims. The fact that he mentions “expedience” is one thing that gives me pause. I also get the impression that Aristotle has to massage what he says because his job is to educate rich young men in a way that they and their families expect, which means he cannot say anything against the interests of that class of people. Also, his method is to assume that common belief probably has some truth to it, and that the onus of proof is on the person who wants to contradict it. I know that I would exhibit the psychology of a slave if I had lived the life of a slave. An outside observer might reasonably assume that my slave thinking and behaviour was my “nature”. Finally, Aristotle thinks that the actual state of things is a reality to consider. He denies that external factors need not affect the happiness of the virtuous person. Rather, he says that conditions must be conducive if someone is to succeed in living a good life. On another matter, do we think that in Plato’s version of Socrates in the ‘Euthyphro’, slaves are not much to be cared about?
How did slavery start? Africans raided fellow Africans, and sold them to the European merchants in exchange for European goods and weapons. The Europeans never came to Africa en mass and conquered the Africans, in fact most Europeans never really ventured inland due to diseases, and the fact that Africa was uncharted restricted them(the Europeans) to the coast. Most slave raiders and kidnappers were Africans. When the British parliament abolished slavery, most African kings gathered and wrote a collective letter denouncing the abolishment and declaring it their god-given right to trade in slaves. Africans started the African slave trade not the Europeans and profited massively from it so the idea of reparations is absurd. We Africans started this monstrosity and our ancestral leaders should be held accountable (if we can ever hold them accountable)
It’s true that most of the African people who were shipped across the Atlantic to be sold as slaves in the Americas were originally captured by fellow Africans, but western European traders are the ones who bought them, shipped them across the Atlantic, and sold them in the Americas.
People in western Africa knew that there was a huge foreign market for African slaves, which drove them to capture more people, force those people into slavery, and sell them to western European traders. Without the demand from western Europeans, the slave trade could never have become the enormous international market that it became. Western European slave traders may not bear all the blame here, but they are certainly not innocent.
In any case, people who are arguing for reparations are not arguing that the United States government should pay reparations to black people in Africa, but rather that the United States government should pay reparations to black citizens of the United States—in other words, to descendants of the people who were brought here as slaves. Of course, as I said in my article, the case for reparations is really less about slavery and more about the racist policies that the United States government has enforced against this country’s black citizens within the past century.
Spencer, try to apply good faith here. Greeks were reduced in slavery by Greeks from other cities, Africans by men from other tribes and by arab merchants, etc.
What you make white people guilty of is the successful development of Europe then of the US, which made all this continue at a bigger, industrial scale. That’s it.
There are no “poor victims” that “white devils” should compensate. That would be ideology at its most deviant.
And as any ideology it is blind to what refutes it – we Europeans invented the “Human rights” and “Liberte Egalite Fraternite” that uneducated mobs now throw in our face.
I never called anyone “white devils.” Likewise, I never said anything at all about all white people being evil, about all white people being “guilty,” or about all black people being morally good. You are reading things into my work that I neither said nor implied at any point.
Now, I have said that some white people throughout history have committed terrible crimes against black people, which is something that is pretty much undeniably true. Maybe it’s true that some black people would have committed the same crimes against white people if they had the opportunity, but that’s irrelevant to the point. The point is that those crimes have been committed, some of them quite recently.
The United States government has enforced racist policies that have harmed black people and people who have been harmed by those policies have a right to demand reparations. This isn’t such a radical idea; the United States government has actually paid reparations to people it has harmed in the past. For instance, the government has already paid reparations to Japanese people who were interned during World War II.
The fact that OJ Simpson got away with killing a white couple by playing the race card proves white supremacy no longer exists.
No, O. J. Simpson’s acquittal does not in any way prove that “white supremacy no longer exists”; all it proves is that an ultra-wealthy football star with a team of the best lawyers in the country can get away with things that ordinary Americans can’t.
Yes, OJ Simpson did have a lot of cash to spend on attorney fees but his chief defense was playing the race card, not the celebrity card.
We still have affirmative action, which discriminates against whites and, for some reason, Asians. We also have entire media networks such as CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, NTY et.al which do everything they can to make the boogie man of systemic racism appear real. The Nick Sandman case is the best example, but I can think of many others. The fact that a group of white high schoolers got death threats by (mostly white) celebrities (who have millions of loyal followers) merely for standing still and smiling awkwardly at a Native American man leads me to believe that if white supremacy is a thing, it is about as powerful as Joe Biden’s memory. It’s also worth mentioning that the tanning industry is worth billions of dollars. White Supremacy seems okay with white people spending money to look less white. I am not saying that there is no racism against non-whites. Of course there is.
The question is whether a systemic problem like police brutality is automatically linked to racism. I am also puzzled as to why white liberals don’t see a problem with Muhammad owning black slaves. Of course, there are no statues of Muhammad per se to tear down, but there is the Koran, a book which is occasionally burned by fundamentalist Christians much to the chagrin of the liberal media.
Sebastien quote: “Spencer, try to apply good faith here. Greeks were reduced in slavery by Greeks from other cities, Africans by men from other tribes and by arab merchants, etc.
What you make white people guilty of is the successful development of Europe then of the US, which made all this continue at a bigger, industrial scale. That’s it.
There are no “poor victims” that “white devils” should compensate. That would be ideology at its most deviant.
And as any ideology it is blind to what refutes it – we Europeans invented the “Human rights” and “Liberte Egalite Fraternite” that uneducated mobs now throw in our face.”
Spencer is far more patient than I could ever be with this nonsense (and ignoring the offensiveness of your questioning his faith, you should look to your own).
I’ve long been gobsmacked by the Tū quoque fallacy being deployed by those who in the next breath play the “white civilization is best” card – your invocation of “liberte” and the Enlightenment.
You cannot have it both ways. On the one hand, we are wonderful for inventing Human Rights, but on the other hand when we violate our own Principles, well, those Arabs and Romans did it also so what’s the fuss?
The fuss is that one group KNEW by their own words that humans had rights, liberte, egalite, and in the next instance violated those rights on a global scale, and continue to do so (while hiding behind mile high walls of humbug).
I hope that’s enough Good Faith for you today.
Nicely written article as always.
Thank you so much!
Sometimes you say things that are so out of touch with reality that it’s hard to take you seriously. Whatever talents that Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Nathan Bedford Forrest might have possessed they used in service of white supremacy. Lee may have been a talented commander and general, but he used his talents for an evil purpose. Adolf Hitler had a talent for inspiring crowds, but we don’t build monuments to him because he used that talent to make himself a dictator and to orchestrate the systematic murder of roughly seventeen million human beings (including approximately six million Jews and approximately eleven million others).
“Black criminal and White+Jewish bioleninist supremacy” isn’t a real thing. What the protesters want is equality and justice for all people. Unfortunately, because you are blinded by racial prejudice, to you, equality and justice for all people looks like “bioleninist supremacy”—which, as far as I can tell, isn’t a real thing that anyone is seriously advocating for.
Finally, your contention that racism is good for black people because it is somehow the only thing preventing black people from destroying their own cities is just face-palmingly silly and clearly rests solely upon the demonstrably false assumption that black people are all violent savages who need to be controlled. I highly recommend that you spend some time talking to actual black people. You’ll very quickly discover that they are no more inherently violent or savage than any other people.
Again, your work is full of interesting details and local analyses – but you completely miss the big picture. And by superficially looking at things you end up advocating:
1- mob power (any group deciding to apply violence and destroy a statue, i.e. a work of art and a piece of history)
2 – revisionism i.e. deciding to clean up history according to our current beliefs and fashion.
The simple fact that you ask the question “should we put X (whoever that is) in trial?” and if guilty in our current 2020 view, erase him from history is extremely toxic and short-sighted.
It is insane, and the opposite of the respect of culture and history.
By the way I don’t think Cleese is joking or even slightly amused by what is happening these days.
Spencer, I think you missed something about Cleese’s argument on Isaac Newton. One of his fellow South Sea Company investors was Thomas Guy, who founded Guy’s Hospital in London (and made his money selling books not slaves). His statue has been removed on the basis of his indirect link to slavery via the South Sea Company. Hence the Isaac Newton analogy Cleese raises.
There was a case for removing the statue of Edward Colston but the problem was the way in which it was done. Essentially, the removal of the statue was the work of a criminal mob. In the UK there has been very widespread agreement on the need for the lockdown and social distancing measures. Some of the rules have involved great hardships such as the prohibition on visiting sink and dying relatives. But, as I said, there has been almost complete acceptance of these rules in the UK.
Then the rules suddenly changed. Now it is OK for people to gather in their thousands – as long as it is to promote an “appropriate” political cause. Even when the promotion of such a cause involves obvious dangers to public health. In reality these public demonstrations are by definition criminal gatherings, and that is before the rioting and vandalism even start.
Presumably, the purpose of political activism is to change people’s views. Well, I can tell you that the demonstrators are going the wrong way about it. There is very deep resentment in the UK at what has been going on, even if that isn’t always reflected by the media coverage.
Be that as it may, what about the debate on statues? There may be a case for removing statues of those who were actively involved in the slave trade. But if that is to be done, it should be done by the authorities and not a criminal mob. We need to be very careful about this, however. Removing the statue of someone who merely expressed views which we now find unacceptable should not be countenanced. The most important lesson to be learned is that it is unwise to give in to the baying mob.
The pyramids were built by slaves. Shall we tear them down next?
Actually, contrary to popular belief, none of the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves. The pyramids were built by free Egyptian workers who were well-compensated for their labor. We know this in part because Egyptologists have excavated the tombs of some of the workmen who built the pyramids, as well as the homes where they lived while they were working on the pyramids. It is clear from these findings that the lifestyle of the workmen who built the pyramids was actually quite lavish by the standards of the time.
The popular misconception that the pyramids were built by slaves has been propagated especially through Hollywood films, which often portray Israelite slaves as building the pyramids. In reality, as far as we can tell from surviving Egyptian sources and archaeological evidence, there was never any large body of Israelite slaves in Egypt at all. I talk about how the Book of Exodus is fiction in this article from April 2020.
I find the argument that US slavery stood out because it was based on race somewhat unconvincing. By that measure, one could even say that the Nazis weren’t all that racist since they only planned to enslave and exterminate other whites. Were slaves not typically taken through raids/warfare from other tribes that were clearly no part of one’s ingroup? Most of Rome’s slave population was not homegrown.