(This is an old Reddit post, with slight edits and a little extra at the start)
It's a year since the Colstonstatue was toppled, starting a transatlantic iconoclast movement that, some argue, went a bit nuts. (At one point someone even started a petition against a statue of Ghandi ffs!) I would like to set the record straight as to how it all started, because a lot of people now describe this movement as some kind of ultra-woke, cancel culture nonsense, when in fact, it started as a VERY good thing indeed.
In many ways, this was a very local affair. Here in Bristol, England, half the city is named after Colston - streets, schools, even pubs and office towers...
And the man was a horrible shit. A mass murderer who ran a corporation
called The Royal African Company - a company which trafficked in human
misery and made fortunes out of mass murder and slavery, a man whose
crimes rival those of any Nazi - but which he gets away with because he
did it long ago. OK, he did it long ago, does that mean we have to deify
the bastard?
Local businessmen had erected the statue and made him into a city father over a century after his death
- and continued to defend him well into the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Year after year you'd hear these bloated borgeous scumbags
defending a man who belonged in an unmarked grave following execution,
not on a plinth in the centre of town. The council did nothing to
address the widely held issues people had with the guy, and eventually,
local people took matters into their own hands.
You
can't understand the Colston affair without understanding Bristol's
local politics. The city has a sizeable black community and a long
history of inter-racial solidarity dating back to World War 2, and the
powers that be, from the Merchant Venturers
(dodgy local freemason types who kept bits of Colstons' corpse around
to worship) to our useless centrist council, did sod all about it. To
understand what Colston meant to black people, it was as if they'd kept a
statue of Eichmann up in the middle of Warsaw "because history".
Bristol
was in many ways built on slavery and black people know this. It's part
of local black culture to curse our status as a "slave port" -
especially Afro-Carribeans, the literal descendants of those enslaved by
Colston. There has been the bare minimum of official acknowlegments of
the citys' part in this crime against humanity, until recently the only acknowlegements
of it were: a tiny plaque in an out of the way part of the Docks, a
mural nobody noticed, and a footbridge patronizingly named after some
bastards' house slave - this in a country that is obsessed with history!
I
backed the toppling of Colston and still do. It was a great moment for
my city, where people came together in solidarity to do something that
had needed to be done for a long, long time. This wasn't "cancel
culture", this was grass roots, democracy at work. People had tried
everything, and nobody did anything about it. And then one day... they
did.
This isn't America (thank
God). Colston wasn't George Washington, he was a grubby, nasty piece of
shit who would be hunted down like a dog if he did what he did today. He
didn't deserve a statue, he deserves to be used as a toilet. Yeeting
him into the docks was the best thing that Bristol did in a long time.
Nothing "stupidpol" about it - quite the opposite, that day there was an
incredible atmosphere of solidarity and love, I haven't seen anything
like it before or since. Please don't assume we're as stupid and
ahistorical as Americans - we know exactly what we're doing.
Evolutionary psychology is often considered a Right-wing discourse - a reactionary, racist pseudo-science that defends the status quo and allows vast swathes of people to be written off. It could well be misused as such. But scientific truth is true whether it's ideologically convenient for you or not, so I have to ask myself... what if there's something to it?
What follows is the culmination of my own darkest thoughts, and an attempt to answer the classic question: "Why the hell do poor working class people keep voting Tory, why do they support the rich, attack other poor people, and generally assist in their own oppression?"
In no way do I want any of it to be true.
Growing up, I noticed a few things. The white kids were either posh, or thick. If you weren't thick, you were automatically "posh", "middle class", "a keener"...and this was a BAD thing. The black kids didn't have that sort of divide; they were just black. Where we established a pecking order of bullies and bullied, they stuck together - if you were racist, they'd all kick the shit out of you. Fair do's.
Later, at college, I noticed that the computer science and technology department, where all ambitious and intelligent people went, had a disproportionate number of black students, who were far more hard-working and studious than the gang of dole-ites and stoners who made up my own affinity group. This was surprising to me because at the time (the 1990s), black people were being encouraged by the media and popular culture to get involved in crime and were very much stereotyped as criminals.
Have you ever wondered why the English working classes are so stupid? Why white, working class people in particular are so slavish, so devoted to drudgery and back breaking work? Why those who do break the habit of work are so utterly irresponsible, why when they can't work, they smash up nice flats and go on drugs, why they get pissed up all the time? Why they seem to have no creativity and no culture other than patriotism and vapid celebrity bullshit?
Because the industrial revolution was a crime against humanity.
It was bred into them. Literally. Nineteenth century industrialisation was like a breeding programme for stupid people.
In order to get a workforce, ordinary folk were run off of their land in the Enclosures and herded into giant cities. The only way of making a living there was basically to work yourself to death in a factory. These jobs were not only back breakingly hard... they were BORING.
Think of it. Every day, except possibly Sunday, you screw in bolts on an assembly line... or something equally mind numbing. It's noisy, hot, and crowded. If you make a mistake, you either (a) cause an accident, in which case you die, or are crippled and cannot work, or (b) get fired, in which case you die.
This is because chronic unemployment was a killer in those days - instead of going on the dole you had a choice between a life of crime and the Workhouse...
Most crimes were punished by removal from the gene pool - either via the death penalty or transportation to a penal colony.
The Workhouse was essentially a proto-concentration camp (complete with mass graves) in which, among other things, husbands and wives were split up and inmates were NOT allowed to have sex. So for non-criminals, chronic unemployment also resulted in removal from the gene pool... and intelligence strongly implied unemployment, because nobody with half a brain could have possibly lasted in those jobs for longer than a few weeks at most. Certainly not long enough to have children.
And if you were just smart enough to escape? You were also out of the gene pool. You either went to America, or (far less often) you became middle class, leaving your old life behind.
Thus, selection pressure changed the English proletariat. It blunted their sensoria, as those sensitive to the clamour and noise of the factory would have been bred out, it diminished their intelligence and shaped their minds as those who couldn't fit into the drudgery of work ended up unemployed, and so forth.
This explains so much of people's everyday behaviour - not only the popularity of extremely loud, atonal music and noisy vehicle engines, but also people's credulity, the way people have total faith in absolutely ridiculous lies, our vapid culture, our emotional attachment to the State... because submissive and stupid people got to be genetically successful, while rebellious and / or intelligent people were not.
And this explains the failure of social democracy over here (and its success on the Continent). In Europe, they didn't have anything like our industrialization.
European industrialization took place piecemeal and evolved over centuries, rather than being imposed over a couple of decades. European ruling classes were not able to brutalize and enslave anything like that number of their own people until the Fascist and Communist regimes of the 20th century, if at all.
This is why the French working class are so radical - they had no Fascism OR Communism. Indeed, they enjoy a great culture and recent history of Resistance to Fascism in place of our authoritarian "Battle of Britain" siege mentality.
So in Europe they do not have a docile, submissive working class. In Europe, if you give someone a free flat, they do not smash it up, or sell it on and join the yuppies - they have solidarity, not individualism. In Europe, if you try and take away peoples' rights, they protest and often successfully put a stop to that sort of malarkey.
Because in Europe, the working classes have not been bred to be slaves.
This is the tragic thing about working class racism. What our ruling classes did to Africans was some truly Nazi-like evil, and what they did to their own people was some Brave New World bullshit as well - It's not a competition!
Nominally free, 19th century Englishmen would have no escape except death or emigration. Nominally free, the smart ones died, were transported, or left for a new life in the Colonies, while the dumb ones bred... and bred... and bred... and bred....
The UK population quadrupled over the 19th century, and that of England trebled
And now we're a country awash with dummies, whose only use is as a nominally privileged, docile labour force (akin to the Kulaks of old) and voting bloc for reactionary politicians (we call them the "Gammons" over here).
What do you think the ruling classes are going to do with them, when things get tough? What did they do in the past? Ever hear of World War One? The Trenches? Ypres? Millions of people were murdered by the system in a few short years - that's how these scum solve the population problem, they hurl it into some meat grinder of a war. Or encourage them to catch some disease...
This is an unpleasant theory, I know. I don't like it either. But it explains so much - particularly, it explains the affinity of Anglo culture generally for neoliberal capitalism and the far Right. Because Anglos have been stupefied by a kind of selective breeding that took place during our period of industrialization; Eugenics in reverse.
It bears repeating, and social justice activists must understand this: Anglos have a terrible history not just of enslaving others, but also each other. We are cannibals, and the horrific thing about it is, this strategy has been extraordinarily successful. 330 million Americans, 68 million Brits, 30 million Australians and New Zealanders, 37 million Canadians... that's nearly half a billion people who think they are free, but who are deeply, genetically, unfree. Some Brave New World bullshit indeed...
I always wondered why I was different. It's really lonely being working class, or at least, not middle class, and smart, or at least not stupid. Now I know why - my great grandfather and great grandmother came here from Egypt, whose populations were not subject to the same selection pressures, my grandmother was a second-generation immigrant. My grandfather was Welsh and came to England in the 1930s; not much is known about my mothers' family, but they appear to be somewhat French and lower middle class. My people are the smart Anglos - immigrants who anglicised (Great Grandfather Mahmoud changed his name to Richard and shagged his way through three continents before copping it in Canada), smart but sociopathic and thus easily able to climb the greasy pole... apart from my immediate family, who come from a black-sheep progenitor, and that's how I got here.
It's like the Anthropic Principle in reverse; I'm here to observe this stuff because my ancestors weren't part of it. They weren't part of that horrific extermination of thought and mind that took place in the 19th centurty.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LEFTIST PRAXIS
It's no coincidence, then, that the Communist Manifesto was written here - by two Germans.
So - What does this mean for Leftist praxis? Nothing good. It's possible this rigid social system is ripe for revolution, but it's bound to end in Soviet-style tears, because the English proletariat are not the superior ubermensch they think they are - they're the descendants of industrial slaves, who have literally been bred to be stupid and authoritarian. Like the Russians, they will recreate the system all over again.
And that, as they say, is why I drink. That's the reason, if I'm forced to define myself ideologically at all, why I'm some weird combination of social democrat and post-left anarchist.
Sure, it'd be great revenge if Big Daddy Stalin came back from the dead and mashed up the fuckers who screwed up this country so bad that people literally believe in the Flat Earth - but what's the point of a revolution if it's just going to change the face of the man who kills you?
