Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

History is a slippery business. You need to use both microscope and telescope. Empires have come and gone throughout history. Slavery has been pretty constant throughout. Islam has conquered many lands including their presence in S Spain.
This is the history of humanity -we do some good, we do some bad.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou

"What it seems to me to be saying is that those who left British shores to colonise other lands, who perpetrated all those atrocities of which they complain, have now appropriated the very identity of those they colonised."
"They therefore feel that the blame for all those atrocities against the indigenous people of their adopted land can be safely diverted onto the largely blameless ordinary people of their original land."

This is true up to a point, but I think there's also another layer of complexity, in that not everyone who ended up in the colonised lands were colonisers in the strict sense of the word. A lot of the white Australians were transported there, often for petty crimes born out of poverty which it seems extraordinary to us now would involve a sentence that draconian.

A lot of the Scots in Canada were dispossessed and thrown off their small tenant farms during the clearances - it suited the genuine colonisers, the people with business interests abroad and big estates back home - to produce this pool of indentured labour for their business and mining interests, while freeing up their estates for more profitable lines of business (sheep).

So the white settlers (barring the whites right at the top of the socio-economic tree) were often simultaneous exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed.

An extremely interesting thread which covers stuff I've thought about for a long time and recognises the complexity of the human condition. Without the simple minded mud slinging usually found on MN

“ My question is: should Britain be immune to being colonised [in a different way] by the machinations of global capitalism. After all, they did inflict it on other places with real people whose own lives, ancestral lands and traditions were turned upside down.”

I never understand this argument.

What it seems to me to be saying is that those who left British shores to colonise other lands, who perpetrated all those atrocities of which they complain, have now appropriated the very identity of those they colonised.
They therefore feel that the blame for all those atrocities against the indigenous people of their adopted land can be safely diverted onto the largely blameless ordinary people of their original land.
They can then feel virtuous as well as guilt-free.

No quite a lot don't call themselves Australian. The problem is the national day of supposed unification and multiculturalism is held on the day of dispossession.

Re. Indigenous Australians - do they mostly identify with being Australian?
So a celebration of being Australian doesn't have to be a celebration of being "white European" Australian, right? Or is that just a feverish civnat dream?

www.livescience.com/63997-dna-ancestry-test-results-explained.html

www.snopes.com/fact-check/dna-testing-companies-admit-altering-tests-screw-racists/

The first link is good and explains that those DNA tests have a high margin of error because of how they are interpreted.
The second debunks the urban myth that they add black in your results just for fun.

Yes I agree, that's a great point. Certainly in Australia on the [authoritarian] left, identity is only OK if you are marginalised. Hmm. Food for thought.

One of the consequences of this that I've worried about for a while is that we can't celebrate the past highly significant achievements of the union movement because they were made mostly by white men. So young people are growing up not knowing what a union is, or why it needs to be valued.

Now I'm seeing why! Very interesting thread.

One of the things about oppression and marginalisation is that it creates a strong sense of identity in a people. That sense of otherness and separateness can stand in the way of equality as much as the sense of identity in the privileged group, even more so in some ways because the latter may not feel they have something to lose by integration, but the former group may feel quite deeply that they do.

You can also see that certain types of customs and practices can almost permanently set people apart and create a sense of identity so long as they are maintained. Judaism has some elements of that, some scholars have suggested that might be one of the main purposes of many Jewish customs and laws but it's clearly been an effect. Or in societies where there are people who are considered unclean, or individuals marked out as maintaining more purity, whether that's passed on through birth or some other method.

I strongly believe that some of the effects of identity politics are having a similar kind of effect. It becomes impossible to forget that we are not equal and we are even prevented from behaving as if all groups are equal or trying to make that true. We are setting up all kinds of new hierarchies based on racial and other essentialist categories. IMO much of the increase in racial and other tensions we've see over the last years comes out of this, and I've become really afraid that this is going to get worse, perhaps much worse.

But that's me talking about me, in the UK. I think you're in Canada, aren't you? So when you say "we are so uncomfortable with doing so ourselves", I don't have a full understanding of what's packed into your "we".

I suppose what I meant is that according to those who distrust anything that looks like patriotism, or love of country, we are supposed to feel uncomfortable.

From a Canadian perspective it's a bit odd, because we share the exact same push around the sense of a colonial heritage defining our past. To be proud of your English heritage is rather suspect and, that constitutes a significant number of people and a large chunk of our history.
In as much as other white Canadians can separate themselves from that, pride in heritage is ok - so Acadians outside of Quebec, Ukrainians, Scots, Irish. (The Quebecois are rather different, more like France.)

We are allowed to talk about "Canadian Values" and celebrate those, but they've increasingly been defined in terms of a rather narrow liberal perspective, while those who would argue with them in some way are considered unCanadian by their promoters, the Canadian attitude to questioning gender ideology would be an example of that. M. Trudeau, unintentionally with some real accuracy, tells us that what Canadians values is increasing diversity which is a form of entropy.

The significant difference for Australia is that the direct consequences of colonisation remain within living memory

Yes I know all that. My point is to consider whether the metropole should be unencumbered by the consequences of their legacy.

Binterested I watched one of these genealogy shows, (I wish I could remember which, perhaps 'Finding Your Roots'), and a woman found out she had slave and white man as ancestors. She was braced for the worst, but found out that they were actually in love, the woman was bought her freedom, they got married, had children who were educated and lived as a normal family. There were also free black people in the South, although I don't claim to be an expert and so would leave others to step in, but there was some mixing without the confines of slavery. I'm not suggesting this was the norm, I don't know enough, but there are many stories that we never hear because of the simplified version we get fed.

I’ve done one of those DNA tests also. I’m white and English as far back as anyone can remember yet there were also these bits of Spanish and African and Asian. I took from it not that I am descended from slaves and let me now re-examine my identity but that I am human and this is the ancestry of the human race.

I imagine we are all descended from slaves of some description if we go back far enough. We are also all descended from women and they were certainly enslaved. It’s all a bloody history.

I used myheritage.com, I don't know if it's a particularly good one or not, it was an impulse buy!
I think who you are is a result of your life experiences to date and that your position in society is determined by the people around you, not by your internal sense of self. If nobody really knows that you have a relative who was X a few generations back then what practical difference does it make to your life?
I found it interesting that it threw up something unexpected and then raised some of the questions above. It didn't radically alter my sense of my own identity, more just confirmed how much of a false construct race is. I'm sure it would be a white intersectionalist's ultimate wank fantasy to find out they were an African slave descendant, which is pretty sick when you think about it. The idea of payback for colonisation doesn't consider how peoples' lives were so intertwined, the whole problem with identity politics is that the categories it puts people into are so simplistic.

I think it would be interesting to understand the legal difference between wives and slaves. Wives literally belonged to someone else as did their property and their children. There must have been some legal distinctions but what were they? The key legal concepts must have been very similar.

Which DNA test did you use? I'm tempted to try it just because my ethnicity is misidentified so frequently, and I do have one relatively recent ancestor whose background nobody in his life really knew, that I kind of wonder if there's something to it. It would be interesting to know, just for my own curiosity, but if it turned out that I do have ancestry linked to one of the ethnicities that people sometimes assume I am would that require some sort of massive reassessment of identity? I don't think so - I think who you are is a result of your life experiences to date and that your position in society is determined by the people around you, not by your internal sense of self. If nobody really knows that you have a relative who was X a few generations back then what practical difference does it make to your life?

Which just makes me think that my opposition to a lot of the TRA dogma is rooted in being materialist to the bone and thus viewing most postmodernism, not just the gender bits, as pointless intellectually self indulgent waffle.

I did a DNA test and found out completely unexpectedly that I have a small percentage of African DNA. This is more common than many may realise, particularly for whites in the Southern states (I have some American roots)
www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7431391/guess-where-white-americans-have-the-most-african-ancestry
Whilst the way in which this racial mixing came about is unknown - and yes, these tests aren't concrete so it could just be a glitch - according to the test it would have occurred 5-6 generations ago, which would put it in the era of slavery. So let's consider that I am the descendent of a black slave, as a white British woman, how I am supposed to deal with that emotionally, in terms of my identity, and if we are to play the game of identity politics, where does this put me on the scale of oppression? Should I claim reparations, as many in the States wish to? Or is the claim for reparations seen as warranted only based upon the colour of someone's skin? If so, then it's really not about ancestry at all, but about the racism black people experience today. Wouldn't it just be better, as someone upthread mentioned, to invest more heavily in areas of deprivation and offer scholarship schemes, tackle police brutality etc with a focus on the position of black people in America now, using measurable data and schemes to improve their chances in life, rather than trying to right the wrongs of the past in this convoluted way? FWIW I certainly don't think I should get reparations if I could prove I am the descendent of a slave, but I also don't feel I should bear the burden of carrying the guilt of slavemasters either. Why should I be punished for the white heritage and not given condolences for what my black ancestor suffered, if the blood of both runs in my veins? For many black people who are slave descendants, they will also have slave owner ancestors, exactly the same as me, but no-one in their right mind would expect them to feel guilt about that.

I often wonder what the experience of Japanese people is in the UK, it’s not something you hear much about in the media.

My best friend is Japanese and gets a funny look when people start talking about privilege in simplistic terms, because she grew up with rather left wing parents who made Japan's history as a colonizing force in Asia very clear to her, and since she grew up there she finds the idea that Japanese people are a discriminated against minority in a blanket sense very odd because obviously that's not true in Japan. Her daughter otoh was brought up in a majority white country and has a very different perspective on a lot of the privilege stuff.

I know this was said earlier but I think it's always worth bearing in mind that since the US has sort of exported its view of social relations, especially via universities, some of the weirdly not a good fit stuff we're seeing in terms of attempts at social analysis is just assumptions built on an American model not fitting other countries very well.

Isn't part of the problem though that every individual alive today is the descendent both of people who benefited at the expense of other people, individually and as a group, and also which was exploited for the benefit of other people, both individually and as a group?

That’s certainly true, and problems arise when people (such as Guardian columnists) decide that skin colour is the sole determinant of advantage or disadvantage, and whether your ancestors were oppressors or oppressed.

Why is this different, is it because the colonisation of Australia is more recent? Surely it should be whatever is best for the people of Australia regardless of ethnic origins too?

The significant difference for Australia is that the direct consequences of colonisation remain within living memory. If you are from an aboriginal background, and are over 55 years old, you would have been born at a time when you didn’t even have an automatic right to Australian citizenship, and quite possibly would have been part of the stolen generation. This creates a set of dynamics relating to race and identity, which are fairly unique to Australia.

(As a side note, celebrations such as Australia Day set up massive tensions between the indigenous population and recent immigrants. On the whole, recent immigrants are fond of Australia Day, as it’s the notional day that they receive their citizenship, and is seen as a celebration of shared identity and inclusiveness. Aboriginal people tend to see Australia Day as a celebration of their oppression and occasional genocide. It’s a situation that is difficult to resolve to the satisfaction of everyone.)

Going back to Friday (I have finally caught up, the last few days have been slightly frantic) I'd just like to say that I used 'kith and kin' entirely innocently with no idea that it was a thing during the whole Rhodesia/Zimbabwe business (despite the fact that I am definitely old enough to remember that, and do).

Just teasing out issues from a colonial perspective. I have sympathy for Britons on their ancestral lands because they are my ancestral lands too I suppose - it's the origins of my culture.
But I think about the Romans, the Vikings, the Normans and the German ones. Britain is not "untouched"; it is the product of countless invasions and cultural alterations. Should further change be resisted or accepted? I don't know.

But does any cultural group in the globalised world today say they have a right to live without external interference into their cultural practices?
Why would Britons in Britain claim they have that right more than others? Because they have brought some benevolent concepts to the world, like free speech?

Also I think I have a broader concept of colonisation than others. It can happen by stealth or by agreement from the state, like I suppose the spice trading cities near Singapore in the 1600s. It doesn't have to be bloody.

hipsterfun
I wish I shared your optimism. I think as groups being more fractured and identity becomes so fraught, as I mentioned before the fortunates will disengage rather than risk a faux-pas and the subsequent outrage. So those with the cash and the knowledge and the time to effect real change will just decide "it's not worth the hassle helping X group that hate me already".
Global capital doesn't care what colour its victims are, so long as there is an endless supply of troops. Corporations and the global financial industry are only ever tamed by governments, and governments are only ever tamed by large organised pressure groups (like lobbyists, or like unions, or like voting blocs). The more we splinter, the less power we have and the easier we can be picked off by vultures.
In a society where the majority have no capital, no voice and no protection, there's no chance to hit "reset" and give everyone opportunities because we're all turned against each other, scratching each other's eyes out for scraps. That environment breeds more racism not less.