THE PSYCHOLOGIST : The BBC’s Slavery Campaign

The BBC’s Slavery Campaign

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but Britain’s BBC has been running a campaign for the last several months (at least), trying to get Britain to don yet another hair shirt, this time over its supposed ‘role’ in slavery – the trade it actually dispatched its navy to stop. So now the BBC asks for your responses to its wonderful campaign. . .

Should reparations for slavery be paid?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, says the Church of England needs to consider whether it should pay reparations for its own part in slavery. The Church's missionary wing owned slaves on plantations in the West Indies.

Tony Blair has expressed Britain's "deep sorrow and regret" for its role in the slave trade.

But the Church is now considering a more significant act of restoration.

What do you think of Dr Williams remarks? Should reparations be paid? What are the main consequences of slavery today? How should we mark this 200th anniversary?

Just a few responses from readers around the globe (and the overwhelming majority, I’m delighted to report):

A "sins of the father" argument is untenable; a "possible sins of the great-great-great grandfather" argument is absurd.

The fact remains that slavery existed in Africa since time immemorial, and was only suppressed during the time from the early 19th century to the mid 20th, whatever the rest of the world's debt to slavery, I say as an American that Britain paid its debt many times over by holding back the trade for as long as it did. Rule Brittania!

It happened hundreds of years ago, get over it. End of story.

Would all these descendents be better off living in Africa today or in the UK or America? The only thing holding the descendents back from the success that other minorities achieve is that today's Black "Leaders" greed is similar to that of the Black Leaders who sold the slaves in the first place. Assimilate in your society and throw off the shackles of low expectations!

So the British should make reparations for the slave trade. Very good. We'll pay up just as soon as the Roman Empire makes reparations to the British for making us their slaves.

Who ever suggested that reparations should be done is a complete moron!
It would be like me trying to sue someone for the torment my ancestors went through, I'm damn sure those Romans enslaved them and as their decendant I have the mental scars!

The world is NOT a nice fluffy place, it never has been, slavery was perfectly acceptable back then it was the way the world worked "I'm can kick your butt so do my bidding!" So reparation is like sending your grandkids to prison for your crime!

IN A WORD----------NO you ,bbc have opened a hornets nest with the publicity and as for that silly bishop why sould we pay for something that happened 200 years ago for instance, the church of england would be bancrupt, harewood house and its vast land, would have to be sold off come on it is fast going too far

My ancestors came to the USA from Europe at various times in the past - All settled in the north, none were slave owners - Some of my ancestors in the USA during the civil war fought on the northern side - some died. Some of my ancestors were abolutionists and participated in running the underground railroad which smuggled slaves to freedom via Canada. Why should I or any other guiltless person be required to contribute to reparations for the great great grandchildren of former slaves

Why pay reparation for something that happened 200 years ago. once again the bleeding heart liberals at the bbc spew this rubbish out on every news bulletin. look at the money WE give in aid and watch how it disappears to corrupt African governments. i did not vote for a government that wants to squander our money in an Africa that is still so corrupt. most of these slaves were sold to the traders by their own people.

No, reparations shouldn't be paid. Society changes and at the time of slavery, society accepted the use of African slaves. 1000's of years ago, White slaves were common place in Rome and Ancient Egypt also had their slaves. Should reparations be paid for that time in history as well? Reparations are silly .. to punish the society that freed the people is insane and will only create hostilities and second guessing to the value of the people asking for reparations.

If i read one more idiot on here suggesting i pay compensation for a 200 year old slavery problem, then thats it, i'm off to Scandinavia to sort out remuneration for the Viking pillaging and then down to France to demand an explanation for 1066!

The English were enslaved by the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans, and today the majority are tax slaves of a Labour Government voted for by 22% of the electorate. So as Scotsmen Tony Blair and Gordon Brown should be apologising to the English tax slaves whose money they have wasted. Reparation should be made to students in England to repay student loans.

The only role Britain played, as a nation, in the slave trade, was to single-handedly enforce its end. Rather than making reparations, maybe Britain, as a nation, should be sending an invoice. . .

Update: the Bishop of Rochester has his say:

Politicians, religious leaders and social activists have all joined in to bewail the undoubted horrors of slavery and to apologise for British complicity in this social evil.

Those marching have been shackled hand and foot and have been wearing sweatshirts saying: "So sorry."

And yet this should be a time of celebration and of thanksgiving for Britain's role in bringing this great oppression and cruelty to an end. Why do the leaders and people of this country find it so difficult to acknowledge their achievements and to recognise the true source of their moral commitments?

If a civilisation is constantly criticised, run down and apologised for, the danger is that its virtues will cease to flourish.

Why? Because they're leftist tossers. And this is what leftist tossers do. . .

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

The BBC’s Slavery Campaign

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