A Barbarous Democracy
On June 9th, noted right nationalist and chief Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage was asked by Piers Morgan: “Nigel Farage, just to clarify, why did you compare Black Lives Matter protesters to the Taliban?”
Farage responded:
“The BBC have consistently over the last week refused to tell people the truth about Black Lives Matter. The slogan, Black Lives Matter, and the wanting to end injustice and inequality is a laudable aim. The organization Black Lives Matter is a far left Marxist organization, whose chief aim is to close down and defund police forces — so that we would live under anarchy.”
Even Piers Morgan, not exactly a support of “ Marxism”, was taken aback. The conversation was in the context of the tearing down of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. LBC fired Farage, cancelling his radio program three days after this exchange.
Meanwhile, just the day before, Sky News Australia interviewed Brendan O’Neill, a self-proclaimed “libertarian Marxist”. Host Peta Credlin quoted British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s comment about the protests in which he claimed that while protesters should be allowed to peacefully protest, they have no right to attack police, and the protests have therefore descended into “thuggery.” Before moving to interview O’Neill, Credlin plays some “shocking” footage from “clashes” near Downing Street and claiming 14 police officers had been injured. A bicycle is rolled into one of the horses and the mounted officer backs away.
Reuters via the New York Times reports that two of these 14 officers were seriously hurt, and one officer underwent surgery after running into a traffic light and being knocked off her horse while charging into the crowd to “disperse” them. The horse went on to run free and trample a nearby citizen, a fact which seems to only have been reported by tabloid newspapers despite photo and video evidence.
Although the chyron running below the footage displays the words “UK SLAVE TRADER STATUE PULLED DOWN”, O’Neill goes on to lament a lack of state authority. Baffling fellow libertarians everywhere he states in disbelief:
“The police have run away from some of the confrontations. The police in Bristol actually stood back and allowed the people to tear down the statue. And I think what a lot of members of the public will be wondering is who’s running this country right now. Is it the government or is it this kind of woke, PC mob of people who, I think are using the awful killing of George Floyd to express other ideas that don’t really have much to do with that.”
It is fascinating to see two political commentators grow pale as a bicycle rolls towards a mounted police officer, and then be awed by the idea that the much-televised execution of a black man in the United States — one of the last bastions of slavery — should have some political connection to the toppling of a statue depicting a prominent slave trader in Britain. Calling the protesters the “woke Taliban” O’Neill reads the protests as iconoclasm — the destruction of idols — in the spirit of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Perhaps O’Neill is not wrong when he compares the statue of Edward Colston with the Buddhas of Bamyan — both do appear to function as idols for their respective communities, as judged by the shock and dismay suffered by a certain English segment of the Commonwealth. How is it that it has come to this: the “mob” as Credlin calls them has seen fit to undemocratically defile a monument to a man who, despite his philanthropy, is cruelly remembered for his slave trading. These people are “barbarians”.
It is true that slave labour was vital for the building of empires from antiquity through to the modern era, and so is a cornerstone of civilization and a beacon to civilized peoples everywhere. The barbarians are the mob of people who live in these civilized societies, and a strong state is required to beat them into submission so that they understand that they are not to be involved in government, in “mob rule”. This used to be difficult to utter in public, but these civil people seem to be getting a positive enough reception — perhaps moreso in Australia than in the U.K. itself.
O’Neill himself advocated for riots last September if Brexit was not swiftly carried out, saying “I am amazed that there haven’t been riots yet, that’s the most amazing thing to me,” and “There is a fine tradition in this country of radical protest… when people’s voices have been ignored. I think we have reached that level now.”
This should be expected of someone who calls themselves a “libertarian Marxist” and who writes for a crypto-fascist magazine while receiving funding from the American right libertarian Cato Institute, ultimately funded with Koch Brothers money. One moment he calls for state repression to show the people the power of the state, and the next he is calling on the people to rise up.
In a way this is not contradictory. As a nationalist O’Neill would like the U.K. to break away from Europe not just for fiscal reasons which are debatable but for English ethnic reasons. He may not really care about any sort of legal right or protection per se, but he’s for reinforcing public discontent so long as it suits his own agenda. When public distrust and discontent is used to denigrate slave-holding, the police must be used to crush them.
People like this are happy to manipulate the police to beat up people they deem “thugs” when appropriate, but the Chief Constable of the Avon and Somerset Police praised his officers for choosing to avoid violent confrontation and allowing protesters to bring the statue down. After all, he remarks, can you imagine how bad it would look if the police were seen beating protesters to defend a slave trader?
Unfortunately that is precisely what the U.K. federal government desired, and the Police Federation joined the Prime Minister in condemning the actions of the protesters and shaming the Avon and Somerset police for not attacking the protesters.
Even the Society of Merchant Venturers, of which Edward Colston was a member, has agreed that it was appropriate to remove the statue. This seems like a grudging admittance of impotency however, because the society had previously stopped attempts to add a second plaque to the statue denoting Colston’s activities as a slave trader and his participation in government, garnering the support of the mayor and a local historian. This is ostensibly the democratic method hinted at by those opposed to toppling these sort of statues, but this is a clear case that money and influence often settle so-called democratic matters rather than the say of the “mob”. Bristol had tried and failed to do something about the statue through official channels, and frankly the people of Bristol were defeated.
Simply tearing the statue down seems to have been the only way the people could do what they wanted. Without the compliance of the police, the wealthy individuals of the Society of Merchant Venturers can only nod in assent — not because they really do agree that the statue should be removed, but because they’ve been robbed of their democratic right to ignore the will of the people.
From 1672 to 1698 the Royal African Company held the monopoly right to trade slaves in the Americas. During Edward Colston’s tenure with the Royal African Company, during which time he would become the deputy governor of the Company, Colston is said to have delivered 84,000 people as slave cargo to British colonial possessions, some 19,000 dying during transit.
It so happened that Colston’s family owned some of these very slave estates which he would come to inherit, along with the chattel slaves which worked the properties — that is, he was not just a slave trader, but a slave owner as well. He was also a partner in a sugar refinery which processed sugar sourced from slave plantations. Not only did Colston make generous loans to the English gentry all over the country, but he made a loan to the Bristol Corporation, buying himself a place in the municipal government in Bristol along with membership in the Society of Merchant Venturers.
Colston’s philanthropy is of an odd sort, having donated his sugar refinery to the city of Bristol to be converted into a workhouse, where impoverished citizens toiled to produce textiles and pins. The work was not actually profitable and had to be supported by more donations from Colston and other wealthy citizens, irreverently condemning the poor to bizarre busywork rather than delivering the “charitable” funds directly. He would go on to use his wealth and influence to construct more poorhouses in Bristol, institutions which held the poor in regimented camp conditions, designed to be uncomfortable in an effort to inspire the poor to find work that often did not exist. This kind of unusual torture earned Colston and his compatriots the appellation “guardians of the poor”.
Originally published at https://reeducation.substack.com.
