[Previous entry: "EXORCISING COLONIAL DEMONS – HOW THE U.S. LOST TO THE WESTERN SHOSHONE AT THE U.N."] [Next entry: "General Rejection of Bolivia Bombing"]

03/25/2006:

"On the Anniversary of Slave Trade Abolition: Easy on the euphoria"

...Certainly, the slave economy underpinned the riches of 18th century society. It also had a dominating influence across the British politico-financial establishment. Institutional investors in slavery included the Hanoverian royal family, numerous Oxbridge colleges and even the Church of England.

This needs to be the starting point for any commemoration. As Professor James Walvin has commented: "My worry about 2007 is that there will be such a euphoria of nationalistic pride that people will forget what happened before, which was that the British had shipped extraordinary numbers of Africans across the Atlantic."

...Despite its barbarity, ending this lucrative trade was an uphill struggle. Few today would go so far as to hail it, as one contemporary did, as "the most altruistic act since Christ's crucifixion", but halting trafficking had serious economic costs. Yet the moral certitude of Wilberforce and his evangelical allies convinced MPs, many of whom had slaving interests, of the ethical case for abolishing "the foul iniquity".

However, this had as much to do with purifying England from the taint of slavery as any great humanitarian concern for slaves. There was little sense of racial equality, and a new image of the ever-grateful black subject subsequently developed - seen to greatest effect in Josiah Wedgwood's cameo of a slave kneeling in chains. The inscription read: "Am I not a man and a brother?" But few among Wilberforce's Clapham Sect honestly thought so.
guardian.co.uk


Islamophobia at Downing Street: Tony Blair's Bipolarity
This week, Tony Blair launched a scathing ideological attack on Islamism. Describing the conflict between Islamism and the world as a, "battle for modernity," he quoted the conservative American historian, Samuel Huntington, in order to refute him. Contrasting his interpretation of a "conflict about civilisation" in a historical chiaroscuro with Huntington's "conflict of civilisations," Blair blasted Islamism as the fountainhead of the world's escalating level of ultra-violence.

Promising to make further keynote speeches to address the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East, Blair sought to defend the pointed attacks on Islamic fundamentalism by George Bush and Christopher Hitchens as the raison d'etre for the war in Iraq. In his latest lamentation on the exclusively Islamic sources of ulta-violence, terrorism and war, Blair echoed the mantras of the coterie of deeply Islamophobic neoconservative intellectuals who emerged from the right-wing witches' cauldron of Leo Stein at the University of Chicago.

Blair's diatribe was the performance of a committed idealist, a demagogue mesmerized by his own ideology and not that of an intellectual, an academic, a mainstream politician or a statesman. Blair inhabits that shadowy region of Christianity that sees itself as totally separate and apart from the other faiths stemming from the house of Abraham: Judaism and Islam. In Blair's vision of Christianity, there are no Muslims who accept the messianic status of Jesus; no Christians who launch terrorist atrocities and no Jewish terrorists, either.

In the mind of Tony Blair, the trouble with world terror stems exclusively from the ideology and culture of Islamic fundamentalism. In Blair's deeply bipolar world, Christianity and Judaism are blameless for the rising tide of terror.