History

News broke in May 2021 that the remains of 215 children had apparently been found at a former Indian Residential School site in Kamloops, British Columbia, through the use of ground-penetrating radar. It ignited a dramatic chain of events in which more than 2,000 unmarked graves were supposedly discovered at other former residential schools between 2021 and 2022. A media fervor began, including a New York Times expose and various BBC reports. There was even an apology from Pope Francis in July 2022 on behalf of Catholic priests involved in the old residential school system.

Others, however, have pushed back against this narrative. Three years later, no remains have been exhumed and identified, leading to justified scepticism about the initial claims. “Canada is already very far down the path not just of accepting, but of legally entrenching, a narrative for which no serious evidence has been proffered,” C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan wrote in Grave Error: How The Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools).”All the major elements of the story are either false or highly exaggerated,” the authors argue.

Alas, some Canadians decided to play judge, jury and executioner without a fair trial and considering all the evidence. Blame has largely been placed at the feet of the Catholic Church – and houses of worship have been targeted.

So they’re burning down churches based on simple lies about those Indian graves. And yet if you were to listen to the misinformation experts it’s only the right which misinforms, right?

Further, as I’ve been pointing out. If the graves did exist this would just be normal. We’re talking about schools stretching back up to two centuries. Back when the child death rate was high – up to 50% were expected to die before puberty. It would be odd if no children died in such schools, not odd if they did.

“New York City has a moral obligation to confront its historical role in the institution of slavery, including harms and long-lasting consequences,” Ms. Maser said in a statement.

As the effects upon now are zero then that’s that then, we’re done.

But persistence studies also breed something dangerous: determinism. If ancient history is so influential, what hope do we have to shape our destiny? Which is why I love a new paper by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, examining the lasting economic impact of slavery. Their findings look like the normal persistence story: black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved before the civil war have had significantly worse economic outcomes ever since, compared with black Americans whose forefathers were free – even in 2023, descendants of enslaved people had incomes $11,620 lower than other black Americans.

But this is a story about continuing choices too. Why? Because the direct effect of your ancestors being enslaved fades by 1940. What drives the lasting disadvantage is that those whose ancestors were enslaved were more likely to live in states that went on suppressing black Americans even after the abolition of slavery – via infamous Jim Crow laws, which lasted in southern states until the 1960s.

Quite so. Therefore reparations for slavery aren’t justified.

Reparations for Jim Crow could be, maybe, justified. But that’s easy, we just make the Democratic Party pay them.

I don’t know what the answer is here. Anyone else?

predicting civil war, including one that stated, with staggering historical ignorance: “Civil war is coming. There has never been a country that has remained peaceful with a sizeable Islamic presence.”

It’s easy enough to detail places that didn’t cope well – Partition of the Raj say. And limit the conversation to places that had a growing then sizeable such presence – no point in pointing out that Saudi’s been stable for 1400 years (-ish).

So, a history test – which places have had an Ismlamic minority growing into a sizeable presence and not had civil unrest because of it?

It adds that “descriptions of the states that represent Asia and America also reflect this Victorian view of European supremacy”.

Umm.

The 176ft Albert Memorial opposite the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington Gardens, west London, was built to honour Queen Victoria’s late husband in 1872,

In 1872 the European civilisation was supreme. And?

Prince Albert’s memorial is “considered offensive” because it reflects a “Victorian view of the world that differs from mainstream views held today”, custodians say.

Strangely, the mainstream view is the same today. That’s why those not blessed by European civilisation as yet are coming here in their tens of millions. It’s only amongst grievance studies graduates that the view differs.

Well-Preserved Bronze Age Shipwreck ‘Changes Our Entire Understanding’ of Ancient Mariners
The vessel was found far from land, challenging previous assumptions about the seafaring capabilities of its Bronze Age builders.

Finding the failures isn’t a wholly accurate guide to what worked……

Stephen Fry likens removing Parthenon marbles to Nazi Germany taking the Arc de Triomphe

Or like France taking the Obelisks of Luxor, maybe?

The sugar economy in São Tomé and Príncipe was critical to the construction of a modern world built on Black bondage. As Cruz put it, it’s the “first time that you have slaves who were enslaved Africans. It’s the beginning of the concept of slaves being Black,” though slavery itself is an age-old practice.

The Arab slave trade had been plundering south of the Sahara for 500 years by this point.

Sigh

The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, says his family history as descendants of enslaved people will inform his work in government, as he seeks to deepen the UK’s relations with the global south and the Commonwealth.

“I will take the responsibility of being the first foreign secretary descended from the slave trade incredibly seriously,”

Given history we’re all descendants of the slave trade – both sides of it.

It’s as with all Europeans being 15th cousins or whatever it is, all humans being 17th etc.

But I can imagine it is true:

He praises the diligence of the report’s research, carried out by the accountants Grant Thornton, on details of the Bounty’s investments, but raises the absence from its work of a different, crucial dimension which peer reviewers would have noticed.

This is the fact that, in 1723 – three years after the South Sea Bubble had burst – Parliament passed a statute splitting the South Sea Company in two. One was the trading company. The other was the company which sold what was in effect government debt, paying interest on annuities.

The Commissioners’ report says that “anyone investing in the Company before 1740 was consciously investing in these [slave-trading] voyages.” Prof Dale says the opposite was the case. Those buying the annuities were consciously not investing in slavery. The statute’s purpose was to make this possible by what is now called “ring-fencing”, preventing any financial or legal relationship between the trading and the annuities. This was done, it seems, because the trading (of which slaves formed a big part, but not the whole) was high-risk. The smash of 1720 had showed how toxic the mixture of government debt with high risk could be.

After the Act, Queen Anne’s Bounty put all its money into the annuities – just the sort of lower but safer return you would expect a sober ecclesiastical organisation to seek. Once the split had taken place, it bought no shares in anything connected with slavery.

Between 1720 and 1723, it is true, the Bounty did invest £14,000 (about £2.4 million today) in the unsplit company and so, for a time, could have profited from slavery. As it happened, however, it did not. When Parliament divided the South Sea Company in 1723, it split the Bounty’s shares equally, too. The Bounty sold off its trading company shares quite quickly but retained and greatly expanded its annuities.

I can imagine it is true because in all this research into those slavery times the economics – even accounting – ixs truly, grossly, awful.

In the 1619 project they get Matthew Desmond (? anyway, a sociologist) to do the economics and he thinks that GDP counts intermediate goods. Sigh. Just this week I’ve been told that bribe of £20 million to free the slaves was 50% of GDP – no, 5%.

People missing the split of the SS Company? Sure, I can believe that.

When royals marry among themselves, it brings an unexpected peace dividend
Torsten Bell

The more monarchies across Europe were intertwined, the fewer wars there were

Millennia of stationary bandits marrying off daughters to the sons of the stationary bandit next door. One the ground that if his son is fucking my daughter then perhaps he’s less likely to come kill me. You know, one grandpops killing the other is a bit tricky to explain?

People deliberately created such familial networks in order to achieve such peace. For millennia.

Got to hand it to the Resolution Foundation. They have caught up eventually.

Even before the war in Gaza broke out, people in the besieged Palestinian territory had some of the world’s worst rates of mental illness.

Israel and Egypt’s blockade of the Mediterranean strip is now 17 years old; a generation has grown up knowing nothing but cyclical escalation, a dire lack of public services and next to no freedom of movement. Research published by Save the Children in 2022 found that four out of five children in Gaza said they live with depression, grief and fear, and three in five were self harming.

Since 7 October, the charity found that there has – unsurprisingly – been a dramatic deterioration in children’s mental health. “Children here have seen everything,” one father, Wasseem, told Save the Children researchers. “They’ve seen the bombs, the deaths, the bodies … We can’t pretend to them any more. Now, my son can even tell what types of explosives are falling.”

I’m sure it is vile. I’m sure it’s very serious. I’d even agree that something more than PTSD might be useful as a description.

According to Dr Samah Jabr, chair of the Hamas-run Palestinian ministry of health’s mental health unit,

Ideologically aligned…..

Jabr’s has been inspired by the work of the mid-20th century psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon.

Wiht an idiot ideology, however fashionable it is in leftie circles.

A study published last year in Middle East Current Psychiatry agreed with Jabr that PTSD and continuous traumatic stress disorder (CTSD) among Palestinians “cannot be changed unless the root of the problem is solved by ending 74 years of living under occupation”.

Well, yes, could be. So, the Arab nations take in the refugees – rather than their being stuck on that patch of sand forever – and the problem is solved, no?

‘Our bills have tripled’: UK’s first Turkish mosque fights to survive in London
Young people are slowly stopping attending Dalston mosque that could be forced to accept developers’ offers, says owner

Gosh.

The mosque was first built in 1903 and was initially used as a synagogue for the Jewish community. By the 1970s, the building was abandoned and taken over by Erkin’s father, Ramadan Güney, who turned it into the UK’s first Turkish mosque. “In those days, it was thriving, it was heaving with people and support. There were no financial issues back then,” said Güney.

Building changes use a couple of times a century. Ho Hum.

Güney said: “I’m not here for money, if I was, I would have sold the building and gone. It’s a mosque, it shouldn’t be up for sale, it shouldn’t be interfered with. It’s a sacred place.”

But you bought it Matey.

Big tobacco is back, aided and abetted by the Nationals. We can’t let them win on vapes
Monique Ryan
…
From 1 July the only vapes available in this country should be those prescribed by medical practitioners and dispensed by pharmacies. As a paediatrician who has witnessed the extraordinary increase in childhood vaping addiction in Australia, I wish our government had the courage to do this years ago. As a politician, I’m watching with concern the pushback from the tobacco and vaping lobby – and the political parties they support.

Cretin. Because of course legal vapes won’t be the only ones on sale.

Apparently the Australians have given up on teaching kiddies about Canute and the tides. Stupid Cnuts.

From a PR email:

Forget port-swilling Victorians: 1 in 40 Brits have gout and cases in young adults have increased 30%

If you thought gout was an outdated condition affecting portly, red-faced Victorians, think again.

Sigh. It was Georgians – in those cartoons etc – who were always portrayed with gout. Not Victorians.

I’ve heard one story that Pitt would down 6 bottles – half a case – after dinner. Which seems excessive even for that time period.

So it’s not about slavery, is it?

Caribbean nations are set to demand that Britain make reparations for indentured labour in addition to slavery, in a major expansion of the campaign to address colonialism.

Countries that have pushed for payments on slavery are now planning to seek reparative justice surrounding the 500,000 indentured workers shipped from India to work on sugar plantations after African slaves were freed.

It’s about having had the temerity to leave our isles and go to other places. We should all have stayed home, obviously.

Time accelerates and I struggle to understand how there can be 15 years between Love Me Do and the Sex Pistols, but nearly 30 years since the release of Common People.

Historians have generally assumed that the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1867, but it actually continued into the following decade, according to new research.

Dr Hannah Durkin, an historian and former Newcastle University lecturer, has unearthed evidence that two slave ships landed in Cuba in 1872. One vessel, flying the Portuguese flag, had 200 captives aged from 10 to 40, and the second is believed to have been a US ship with 630 prisoners packed into its hold.

That smuggling continued into both Cuba and Brazil is well known. I’ve a book published 20 years ago which gives details.

This is not to say that it was right that it continued, only that it’s well known that it did.

My elderly relatives first fled for their lives in 1948. In Gaza right now they are walking the Nakba again
Ghada Ageel

Palestinians fled in 1948 because the massed Arab armies tried to invade. And the Jews, agressive little buggers that they are, fought back. So, you know, don’t be on the side of the invaders of Israel?

In 2023 Hamas incaded Israel. Now Palestinians are fleeing. We seeing a pattern here yet?

It is South America’s only English-speaking nation, home to the fastest-growing economy in the world. But now, just as vast oil discoveries are set to transform Guyana, a threat to its very existence looms from its troubled neighbour.

On Sunday, Venezuela is holding a national referendum calling on the population to declare support for a claim, going back more than a century, that two thirds of the landmass of modern Guyana should be absorbed by Venezuela.

The problem with socialism is that you always do run out of country to impose it upon…..