Glasgow University is giving 20 million quid to the Caribbean to organise a ‘slave history’ centre at a university there. That’s the good bit. All donations are good, to worthy causes, and all advancement in education and academia is a good thing. So we’re happy about that. Its when they band abound terms like ‘reparations’, that it gets a bit more annoying. And all the guilt associated with the whole exercise which takes something noble and reduces it to something akin to paying a fee to have your carbon footprint reduced after taking a private jet flight. It don’t make the carbon go away, just makes you feel less guilty about it. Justifies it in some way. Makes it ‘all better’.

Well it doesn’t.

Glasgow University feels guilty because it was given very generous donations by men made very rich by the slave trade. Back in seventeen hundred and whatever. So now, 200 years later, they feel guilty about it.

There’s so much about the world ‘back then’ which, when viewed through the modern day prism of political correct values, was fairly disgusting, evil and rotten. How would post-modern feminism view the Neanderthal approach to courtship of bashing a woman on the head and dragging her back to his cave to rape her? Ahhh, but that was different… because… because… because values were different then, Neanderthals less evolved.

But evolution is not just dispensing with a tail and replacing it with a smart-phone. Its cultural, its based on societal values and the morals they create. The Spanish Inquisition was not a good time to be a Muslim. Nor an Anglican. Nor nuffink other than a Catholic. Torture, brutality, murder, all endorsed by church and state. The Crusades didn’t do much for international diplomacy either.

And slavery was not new. It goes back to biblical times (my bible was published in 1983, so certainly before then) and further back too in all likelihood. Conquering armies enslaved the people they beat. Invented the term ‘loser’. The only difference with the slave trade was that it was a commercial enterprise set up by horrible, rich white men, to kidnap entire villages and ‘sell’ them to (mainly) American farmers. Which is as vile as it is pure evil. When judged by today’s standards.

Back then the entire world view was different. ‘Uncivilised’ people, ie those of colour who didn’t speak BBC English, were seen as physically, mentally, culturally inferior. Science endorsed this view, created it, proved it empirically and thus justified an enterprise like slavery. Because science too was the exclusive domain of rich white men in ‘civilised’ Europe.

And it is ALWAYS wrong to make moral judgments of history based on today’s values. There are NO exceptions. I’m not saying in any way that the slave trade was anything but a massive and inhumane tragic disaster for countless African villages and countries, the consequences of which are still massive today as so many people quite literally ‘don’t know where they come from’. But you don’t have to feel guilty for the actions of men who were living at that time, with those particular thoughts and ideas.

So set up a slave history university, help those (by now) millions of people to trace their roots, if possible. But do it because you want to, not for ‘reparations’ and fucking guilt for something you had absolutely no control over.

Happy Sunday, more cricket, proper football and sunshine. Ahhhh…

A xxxx