History

Except, while there was an airlift of supplies, there was no Berlin blockade.

In the National Archives at Kew, I found documents from 1948 showing, in the Foreign Office’s words, “the blockade of Berlin is NOT a siege” and that “movement in and out of Germans is possible all the time”, for example to obtain food. A press campaign, however, pushed for “a massive and sensational story of air power applied to humanitarian ends”. The US secretary of state, George C Marshall, argued via telegram to “utilize to the utmost present propaganda advantage our position”, “stressing [Soviet] responsibility for … threatened starvation of civilian population”. The story was so effective, it became a cold war myth that stuck. In the UK, teenagers still learn for their GCSEs that Berlin was blockaded by Stalin and risked starvation.

Blockades and sieges are different things. As is allowing the movement of population but not of coal/food.

Yes, yes, I know he’s a noted historian and I’m not. But I’d suggest that his findings are a little less revisionist than he’s saying they are.

In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, it stands out: a huge, collective endeavour based on voluntarism and cooperation, with an underlying vision that’s unapologetically utopian – to build “a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. It has weathered teething troubles (such as a “joke” edit that suggested a loyal aide to Robert F Kennedy was in fact involved in his and his brother’s assassinations) to become a place in which civility and neutrality are the guiding stars, and levels of accuracy match those of academic textbooks.

Wales’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is an attempt to distil the secrets of its success. They include things such as having a strong, clear, positive purpose (the slogan “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” is a surprisingly powerful reminder that keeps editors honest); assuming good faith and being courteous; refraining from taking sides and being radically transparent.

These past few years – since 2017 according to some – has seen a determined attepmpt to take over Wikipedia and trun it into an ideologically biased place.

Not because the particular left that are doing this are uniquely awful people but because any centre of power – and whoo, boy, isn’t a definer of the truth a centre of power – will be taken over by those who desire power. It’s inescapable. That’s why don’t have centres of power.

“There’s this misconception that there weren’t any Black soldiers at Waterloo,” said the museum’s art curator, Anna Lavelle. “That’s not the fault of the public – it’s not been in the historical discourse. And yet Thomas James is one of many.”

James’s story deserves to be celebrated and he should be better known, she said. “He was willing to get hurt and put his life at risk for other people in his regiment.”

James, an illiterate percussionist in the 18th Light Dragoons, was likely to have been born enslaved in Montserrat, the West Indies, in 1789. Little is known about his early life. By the time he enlisted in 1809, he had made his way to Sussex, where slavery had been abolished, and was describing himself as “a servant”.

Slavery was abolished in England in 1104. Well, mebbe 1138. Normans at least.

By the time of the transatlantic trade slavery simply did not exist in England. Not eve, really, because of the Nomran abolishment, but because there was no law that allowed a human to be considered property. Nothing in either statute or common law. So the ability for someone to be a slave simply wasn’t there.

When the Virginians started the real slavery down the generations thing – 1640s – given that they were starting from that same common law point they had to invent the concept and then enact it.

Today’s Ireland is experiencing significant ethnic and racial diversity for the first time in its history, and the country’s new look has undoubtedly made some Irish feel uncomfortable.

There have been a couple of attempts – the Normans, the Plantation – and it’s not wholly certain that either of them worked out wholly all that well.

In 1955, the American columnist William F Buckley Jr declared that a conservative is someone “who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’.” But today’s conservatives are not only trying to resist the advance of history, they are attempting to pull the train of history backwards and reopen the case on what constitutes a democratic society.

If we think that it went wrong somewhere then yes, we might well want to go back and repair the error. And?

Civil rights in the US and decolonisation in the UK weren’t just about race. Read the work of Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney or Fred Hampton and it is clear that these movements were driven by concerns for housing, healthcare, dignified work. If we want to defend the wins of the 20th century, we can’t let history be rewritten in the 21st.

Descsribing that drooling moron, Nkrumah, as a win doesn’t really work.

Dr Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire.

Apparently British universities are teaching Nkrumah positively, not as an exemplar to avoid. Sigh.

The Pope and the Like a Prayer star share a common ancestor who was born about six generations ago, making the pair ninth cousins.

OK, well, at ninth cousins we’re all related to much of an entire continent. But this:

The head of the Catholic Church had 17 African-American ancestors, according to the research, which revealed complex family connections to American slavery.

Eight of the Pope’s identified ancestors were slaveholders, with most of them being black.

Fun eh?

Police force accused of anti-white bias teaches officers about slavery

Given that everyone will already have spent 12 years in state schooling we’d hope they already know about slaverybut still. Teaching them seems fine.

Well, subject to that little test of what is it that they teach them?

An officer who participated in the course said in a promotional video that “one of the most surprising” parts of the training was “learning about Britain’s history, particularly with the slave trade and with western Africa”.

He said: “It was something that I have not learnt about through my education and now having some exposure to it, I’m really keen to learn more about it. But I do find it really surprising that we haven’t been taught about that, as it’s such a big part of the history of the UK.

“That in itself really highlights some of the issues that now exist between institutions like the police and lots of other institutions within the UK and our communities that we police, for instance, the black communities.”

Erm, are we recruiting our police from the spectacularly ill educated then?

Still, no doubt the West Africa Squadron makes an appearance. Right?

Inside the Texas supermax prison that could be coming to Britain

Will this be a business visit or it’s coming on holiday?

Imagine this: a continent scarred by centuries of violence and exploitation, now standing united to demand justice. This weekend, the African Union (AU) is kicking off its annual summit with a bold, historic declaration: 2025 will be the year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations. This marks the first time in its history that the AU has placed reparations front and centre.

At first, you might wonder: is this really the right moment? Former colonial powers have shown little interest in addressing their past, and global leaders like the US president, Donald Trump, are actively dismantling international institutions. But maybe this is exactly the right moment for Africa to demand accountability, and for Europe’s democracies to finally offer a meaningful response. As the world grapples with shifting power dynamics, Africa’s call for justice is more urgent than ever.

The people who sold the fucking slaves are demanding compensation for having sold the fucking slaves?

You what?

A British shipping company that became the largest in the world at the height of empire continued to use the labour of enslaved people after the abolition of slavery, research has found.

The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC), which received a royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1839, used enslaved workers on the tiny island of St Thomas, which was a Danish colony at the time and is now part of the US Virgin Islands.

Slavery in the British empire was abolished in 1833 but RMSPC continued to use enslaved labourers on St Thomas, its main “coaling hub”. The labourers had to use dangerous gangplanks to unload Welsh coal imported on the island.

Well, OK.

Except until when? Slavery continued in hte Danish territories until 1848. So, anyone in St Thomas using slaves between 33 and 48 was indeed using slaves after the Empire abolished slavery – and also, wholly legally.

No, they do not tell us until what date…..

Foreign Office ‘to open talks on slavery reparations’
Officials from David Lammy’s department set to meet Caribbean delegation demanding trillions of pounds, sources claim

Given the success they’ve been making over Chagos we’ll be handing over the keys to the Mint soon enough, eh?

‘More complicated than we think’: the untold story of LGBTQ+ rights in the American Revolution

So, glorious buggery, two spirit and lesbos in the American Revolution.

The actual example given being of a British army chaplain who sued all and sundry to implying that he was a bugger.

Which isn’t, when you come to think of it, a great victory for LGBTQIetc. “You Boy, how dare you call me that?”

How to mark the new year — Tudor-style
Decapitating queens was a low point, but there are a few 16th-century traditions that are worth reviving — like giving fancy jewellery on New Year’s Day

Well, yes, etc. Except The Times manages to make it all the way through without even mentioning that New Year’s Day back then was March 25th, Lady Day. Julian calendar, see?

The magic of winter in West Cork, where music, food and drink lift the spirits

When our son was very young, we spent several Easter holidays in Baltimore, a beautiful harbour village in West Cork. We took the ferry across Roaringwater Bay to Sherkin Island and Cape Clear, where Fastnet Rock Lighthouse looms in the distance, wistfully known as Ireland’s Teardrop by mournful emigrants setting off across the Atlantic in centuries past.

Ah, yes, Baltimore. The town which was entirely stolen by Arab pirates, everyone sold into slavery:

The town was depopulated in 1631 in the Sack of Baltimore, a raid by Barbary pirates from either Ottoman Algeria or Salé (Morocco).[8] Between 100[10] and 237 English settlers and local Irish people were abducted and sold into the Barbary slave trade,[11] of whom only two or three ever saw Ireland again.

But slavery’s something that Whitey is uniquely responsible for, right?

Why is the Arab conquest not as shouted about as the European ones?

At the same time, Sudan is a year and a half into a bewilderingly savage war. Even in the occupied West Bank, almost every single Palestinian I met asked me about Sudan, their sense of the war there sharpened by their own experience. “It’s such a shame,” one man told me, “[and] so unnecessary. It’s always our leaders who want to fight, never the people.” Wherever it is, it feels like one war, the causes of which are complex, but the consequences for those experiencing it are simple. We are all in familiar trouble.

Zoom out further and the scene across the Arab world looks historically bleak. Fires big and small are burning everywhere. Many countries – Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Syria – are either divided by low-grade rumbling conflicts (Syria is once again escalating), or struggling through humanitarian crises.

Odd, isn’t it?

To many on the tiny German island of Borkum, the Christmas festival of Klaasohm is a harmless nod to their pagan roots.

But the annual chasing of women down the streets with cow horns is facing cancellation after a television expose revealed violent beatings.

Borkum Lads Club, which has organised the festivities since the 1830s on the North Sea Frisian island, was forced to apologise for “historical actions of past years” and said it distanced itself from “any form of violence against women”.

During the festival, six members of the club – who have to be unmarried men born in Borkum with at least one island-born parent – dress up as the “Klaasohm” monster wearing woollen costumes and rampage through the town to hunt women.

The members are then tasked with beating the women’s backsides with a bull’s horn, all while being accompanied by a man in milkmaid-style clothes known as the Wiefke.

Of course, every woman on the island knows of this and plans their forays outside around it. Some, no doubt, in order to get bottom beaten.

Sir Pterry and the Megapode is, in fact, documentary.

Commonwealth’s next chief will be ‘open to British slavery reparations’

The Commonwealth apparatus is exactly where you’d find that sort of politically trendy grifter.

They are set to pick from three candidates, all from African nations, who have all voiced support for the UK paying some form of reparations.

Tho’ how reprations get justified to the people who sold slaves to our traders is a little difficult….

Black history must be made mandatory in England to counter hatred and help prevent racist riots, a leading campaigner says.

Lavinya Stennett, who founded the Black Curriculum, warned of the real risks of black history and a diverse curriculum being relegated to just one month, or only being implemented in schools with diverse students and in metropolitan areas.

She pointed to the riots that broke out in England and Northern Ireland in the summer as the consequences of failures to ensure that diverse teaching is widespread and available to all.

Why would, should, we privilege the history of under 4% of the population? Why shouldn;t there be twice as much time for Asian history? And given what they really mean by “black” – caribbean – why not more time for Polish history given the ethnic backgrounds of the population?

Yes, I know, we’re not supposed to make these points. But to repeat – why this privilege being demanded for black history?

A Caribbean leader has called for David Lammy to be given the power to secure reparations from Britain over its role in the slave trade.

Sir Hilary Beckles, the chairman of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) reparations commission, said the Foreign Secretary should have a free hand on the issue of compensation.

Academics and lawyers have claimed the reparations bill owed by Britain for its part in the slave trade could be worth anything from £206 billion to £19 trillion.

The Foreign Sec is supposed to be our rep to J Foreigner, not their to us.

Sir Hilary told Reuters: “It is our intention to persist with this strategy of calling for a summit to work through what a reparatory justice model ought to look like in the case of the Caribbean.

The correct answer is, of course, “Bugger Off”. People of West African ethnicity living in the Caribbean are better off than people of West African ethnicity living in West Africa. And you cannot compensate someone for having made them better off.

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.