Colston: Correcting some misunderstandings

 (This is an old Reddit post, with slight edits and a little extra at the start)

It's a year since the Colston statue 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.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Normies VS NEETS: Why do people hate the unemployed?

(This is another repost of an overly long Reddit comment that was too good to lose. Might put it in a magazine or something later)

Very Short Answer: Resentment.

 

Short Answer: They want to be like us, but they don't have the guts. It's easier to resent those who have escaped the system than to resent the system itsself.

 

Long TL;DR Answer: Resentment. Also they just like having someone to dunk on. If you're a wagie it's a bit like being a woman in medieval culture - you're looked up to in theory, but in practice you are treated like dirt. You're essential to society, which literally needs you to reproduce itsself - yet you're society's bitch.

 

It is a peculiar quirk of the human mind that it likes to take short cuts. The mind concentrates on what appears in front of it, that's how magic tricks work. In a slave society, people see slavery and subjugation as normal - even their own! It's cope - if you can't escape, you make a virtue out of necessity and come to see your own subjugation as not only normal but necessary. (Examples: Black Republicans. Working class Tories. Female ISIS recruits.)

 

So the system enslaves people, but people don't resent those who enslave them, they admire them - instead, they resent free people, whom they see as "unfairly" escaping the "natural" conditions of bondage.

 

Thus, if you're a wagie, when someone comes along who is the same as you yet has managed to escape slavery, you're gonna hate those fuckers.

And much like medieval women, who fetishized "purity" and "motherhood" (because they had no choice) and despised "prostitutes" and "witches", wage-slaves fetishize "hard work" and "productivity", and also despise the "lazy" and "antisocial" NEETs.

 

Because NEETs, like the witches and whores of ye olden times, represent what society's slave class wants yet can never have - freedom.

 

Look at what they say about us "They don't work yet they got better stuff than what we have!". Of course this isn't true, what they actually resent is that we don't really care about having what they have. We know what's really valuable - our right to choose to do what we want with our lives.

Medieval witches flew around on broomsticks - a powerful symbol of magic and freedom. We're the witches of industrial society, flying away from their prison-world on broomsticks of imagination!

 

And that's why they hate us.

On The Great American CRT Controversy (not old video monitors)

(This is an old Reddit comment with an extra bit at the start for context)

Critical Race Theory is not complicated. It's basically a well-meaning, liberal attempt of American academics and activists to come to terms with the racist atrocities of the past (including the recent past).

It has a lot going for it, sure. However, it probably does have to be taught with some delicacy; in any event, liberal education did exist before it, and it will exist again whether this particular approach gets binned or not. Racism is too big a part of American society to just be ignored, the question is whether it gets taught in this particular way.

 In the same way, conservative education (if you can call it that) will continue to exist whatever the outcome of the current controversy. (unfortunately)

Rightwingers want to ban Critical Race Theory because CRT is unpopular, especially with their base.

 

Banning it is an easy win - they'd be stupid not to come out against it.

Meanwhile liberals like CRT because it is very popular with their base. Promoting it is an easy win - they'd be stupid not be for it.

 

It's like when politicians in Japan argue about teaching WWII atrocities 80 years after the fact, or when Russian politicians rehabilitate Stalin, while our own Prime Minister is a big Winston Churchill fan because it only annoys the far Left and Churchill is still a beloved figure in England. (He's even on our £5 note!)

 

Rightwingers are into national pride and all that shit, and their base love 'em for it - and it's easier and cheaper than actually doing something useful, like I dunno, cracking down on gangsters or fixing the economy.

 

In the same way, your leaders don't have the ability to solve your country's systemic and ongoing problems, inculding very serious matters like eco collapse and economic stagnation, partly because they're so corrupt and sclerotic, partly because they're constantly obstructing each other, so they argue about this stuff instead. 

 

It's a displacement activity , like scratching your head.