Jason Stanley explaining why Critical Race Theory is poisonous.

Jason Stanley writes in the Economist- 

POLITICIANS USE critical race theory (CRT) in much the same way that they use Keynesian economics:

Keynesian 'pump priming' is used to create an artificial boom- higher stock prices, lower unemployment- before an election. CRT can't be used in this way. It has zero impact on the Economy. However, it has the potential to create a majoritarian back-lash. Thus playing up the mischief done by the thing might scare up votes for Right Wing candidates.

 as cudgels in a propaganda campaign to advance their cherished political goals, with little regard for the actual philosophies at issue. 

The vast majority of people can't change their race- i.e. 'pass' for something other than what they are. Thus, Race is an uncorrelated asymmetry. By making the claim that a minority is owed reparation of various sorts and that a 'zero-sum' game is involved, the majority can be scared into closing ranks against something which they believe will harm them.

On the other hand CRT can impose a cost on 'virtue signalers' from the majority by compelling them to put their money where their mouth is- or at least surrender jobs and funds secured on the excuse of fighting Racism. 

CRT, a doctrine more caricatured than understood, rests upon the distinctly unradical claim that American institutions have systematically fallen short of the country’s egalitarian ideals due to practices that perpetuate racial hierarchies.

The claim is foolish. American ideals established and strengthened racial hierarchies- if that is what the majority of White Americans wanted. No doubt, there was political equality- for White men- in the sense that one man had one vote but that is all there was. 

It was always the case that there was economic inequality between White men. Furthermore, some had more power of various sorts than others. However, there was no hereditary caste system within those not disqualified by the 'one drop' rule. Still, there were barriers between Catholics and Protestants and Italians and Anglos and so on and so forth.

 It began in the 1970s as a way to analyse the intersection of American law and race; 

without actually analyzing either. It focused on getting more non-Whites hired. If there's money available for combating Racism, we want our folk to get that money. But, equally, if there's money to be made combating Liberalism, we want our folk to get that money. This is not about the law or philosophy or scholarship, its about who gets the job and how much it can be made to pay. 

its creators were legal scholars such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. 

who were really keen on their folk getting the jobs and getting the money though they well knew Liberalism was bullshit. 

It has since expanded its purview to analyse American institutions more broadly.

So as to get the jobs and get the money for our folk, not theirs. 

CRT stems from the need to provide a language for what institutions actually do,

they provide jobs and hence money. We want them for our peeps coz money is sweet like honey.

 rather than how people in those institutions describe themselves.

Conservative, Liberal, Klansman, Marxist- we don't give a shit. Jus' give us the fucking jobs and the fucking money. Have you seen Black Klansman? It's based on a true story. If the Grand Wizard gets a big salary, we should get that job for one of our own coz money is sweet, sweet, like honey. 

 CRT thus seeks to explain the fact of persistent racial injustice

viz our not having certain jobs and the money those jobs pay

 by analysing the practices of American institutions.

except ones where us guys have already got all the jobs and the money.

 Such practices are racist because they 

are being done by guys wot aren't our guys so us guys aint getting that money.

perpetuate racial inequality, not because people within them seek deliberately to oppress individual and specific black people. Mortgage lending, for instance, can function in a racist way, even if the lenders themselves harbour no personal bigotry against non-whites.

Expecting me to repay money I borrowed is not just bigotry, it is FASCISM. Anyone who can repay his debts very easily is constantly being courted by lenders. Yet they run a mile from me. 

CRT holds that such institutional practices are difficult to change and endemic to American institutions, and that they, rather than the malice of individual bigots or the supposed pathologies of black American behaviour, are primarily responsible for racial inequality. 

Which arises out of having less money.

CRT is thus not about people’s individual characters.

It is about money.

 It is rather a claim about the structures, practices, and habits that perpetuate racial inequality.

i.e. us guys having less money.

 Even the most avowed anti-racist can participate in an institution with racist practices.

Even the most avowed anti-racist may be merely virtue signaling. 

Martin Delany, a political philosopher and black abolitionist, writing in the year 1852, noted that even in “Anti-Slavery establishments”, by which he means institutions in Northern cities devoted to the abolition of slavery and “the elevation of the colored man, by facilitating his efforts in attaining to equality with the white man”, black citizens only occupy “a mere secondary, underling position.” 

Delany believed that the future of African Americans lay in Africa. He and two other African Americans had been admitted to Harvard Medical School after a vote by faculty members in 1850. However, the students rebelled saying though they' had "no objection to the education and elevation of blacks' they didn't want them studying with them (or competing with them after they left College!). So the African Americans were expelled. The other two spent time in Liberia as Doctors- one died there- while Delany served as a major in the Army and later played some role in Southern politics.

The truth of the matter is that Delany, at that time, thought Liberia would be a nice place to settle in. It was nothing of the sort. The White Abolitionists who funded the Liberia experiment didn't want Free Blacks even as underlings. They wanted them to fuck off to Africa. A few thousand Free Blacks did go to Liberia. Half died of various tropical diseases. Delany, writing in 1852, was advocating a very foolish policy. He wised up subsequently which is why he is not remembered as a 'political philosopher'- i.e. a cretin like Jason Stanley- but rather as a writer, a Doctor, and a soldier/politician.

Even whites most devoted to the cause of the advancement of racial equality hired black Americans for inferior jobs.

This is a crazy way at looking at things. The fact is, Whites were worried that Free Blacks would help liberate their enslaved brethren. They no more wanted to hire blacks for superior jobs than they wanted to marry off their daughters to them. 

Such whites might have argued for a distinction between political and professional inequality—they might have felt, in other words, that the law should treat everyone equally, but also that American citizens of African descent are best suited for menial work. 

Rather than eligible grooms for their daughters. However, it must be said that people like Emerson thought that Irish and Scandinavian immigrants were doomed to equally back breaking labor. Their graves might make a patch of prairie a tad greener but there was no question of non WASPs (of good families) not continuing to dominate the Republic from generation to generation till the end of Time. 

But this is explicit racism, which no avowed anti-racist could accept. 

In which case, by Stanley's lights, there were no White anti-racists in America at that time. This is why the First Nations were fucked over so thoroughly. 

The professions of anti-racism from these whites, whom Delany called “the truest friends,” might have been sincere, but they coexisted with obviously racist practices.

Like suggesting that Delany fuck off to Liberia and die of some disease there. 

 Delany denounces this faux liberal equality, declaring, “There is no equality of persons, where there is not an equality of attainments.”

Delany says free African Americans should work hard and study and set up enterprises so that their population has the same statistical distribution of attainment as Whites The alternative, which he later supported, was going to Liberia or some such place where there would be 'equality of attainment'- more especially in terms of attaining death through tropical disease- soon enough. 

Delany wrote- 

Society regulates itself, being governed by mind, which like water, finds its own level. “Like seeks like,” is a principle in the laws of matter, as well as of mind. There is such a thing as inferiority of things, and positions; at least society has made them so, and while we continue to live among men, we must agree to all just measures, all those we mean that do not necessarily infringe on the rights of others. By the regulations of society, there is no equality of persons, where there is not an equality of attainments. By this, we do not wish to be understood as advocating the actual equal attainments of every individual; but we mean to say that, if these attainments be necessary for the elevation of the white man, they are necessary for the elevation of the colored man. That some colored men and women, in a like proportion to the whites, should be qualified in all the attainments possessed by them. It is one of the regulations of society the world over, and we shall have to conform to it, or be discarded as unworthy of the association of our fellows...

 ...Until we are determined to change the condition of things, and raise ourselves above the position in which we are now prostrated, we must hang our heads in sorrow, and hide our faces in shame. It is enough to know that these things are so; the causes we care little about and moralising over all our life time. This we are weary of. What we desire to learn now is, how to effect a remedy; this we have endeavored to point out. Our elevation must be the results of self efforts, and work of our own hands. No other human power can accomplish it. If we but determine it shall be so, it will be so. Let each one make the case his own and endeavor to rival his neighbor in honorable competition.

...These are the proper and only means of elevating ourselves and attaining equality in this country or any other, and it is useless, utterly futile, to think about going anywhere, except we are determined to use these as the necessary means of developing our manhood. The means are at hand, within our reach. Are we willing to try them? Are we willing to raise ourselves superior to the condition of slaves, or continue the meanest underlings, subject to the beck and call of every creature, bearing a pale complexion? If we are, we had as well remained in the South, as to have to come to the North in search of more freedom. let us determine to equal the whites among whom we live, not by declarations and unexpressed self opinion, for we have always had enough of that, but by actual prof in acting, doing and carrying out practically the measures of equality. Here is our nativity and here have we the natural right to abide and be elevated through the measures of our own efforts.

Seven years after writing this, Delany sailed for Liberia. He was not a stupid man. He didn't stay there long. 

The fact of the matter is that White emigrants to the US already had higher attainments. Indeed, Whites gained hegemony in that Continent because of those higher attainments. Furthermore, they had higher 'transfer earnings'- i.e. they'd quit and move on if paid too badly. As Billie Holliday sang 'Them that’s got shall get/ Them that’s not shall lose / So the Bible said and it still is news

Almost 170 years later, how has the American polity done on Delany’s measure of equality? 

It put Obama in the White House. Liberia, on the other hand, didn't do so well though, it must be said indigenous Africans did get the vote- in 1904- though there was only one Party they could vote for. African American domination of Liberia ended in 1980 when President Tolbert was killed by Samuel Doe. Interestingly Tolbert spoke an African language- the second Liberian President to do so. He was accused of 'letting the peasants into the kitchen' by other members of the elite. His big mistake was establishing diplomatic ties with Communist powers while severing diplomatic relations with Israel. Worse yet, he started going after American corporations, like Firestone, who were doing well out of cheap Liberian rubber. His murderer, an indigenous African, was supported by the US during the Cold War but Bush pulled the plug on him once a deal had been reached with the Soviets.

George Weah- one of the finest footballers the world has seen- is now President of Liberia. He is of indigenous ancestry. Things are looking up for that part of the world. 

Consider the criminal-justice system, decried in W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 book “The Souls of Black Folk”

To be clear, Du Bois was writing about the US, not Liberia. 

 as a “a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination.”

Tolbert may not have fallen if he had erred more on the black side. 

 As of this writing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. 

Because there is a profitable prison-industrial complex financed by the Tax payer. As America falls in relative wealth this will change. Indeed, China might overtake the US on Xi's watch.

Black Americans are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at five times the rate of white Americans.

Which is why longevity improved for some African American cohorts. The sad truth is that it was perfectly rational for Blacks to vote for three strikes. The evidence is, having a family member in prison is better for the family than having the fellow hang around the house. 

It is true that rates of violent crime among black Americans are higher. But just as higher covid-19 death rates among black Americans are best explained by differences in environmental conditions,-

which involve having closer contact with those who might have had closer contact with carriers of the disease

 higher crime rates are also due to racial disparities,

which involve having closer contact with criminals

 such as harsher policing (a racial disparity not explained by differential crime rates),

Harsher policing may be a symptom of less effective policing which generally reflects lower willingness to fund the thing

 lack of decent job opportunities, 

Criminals should be hired by the State and get regular promotions. Lack of decent jobs in Crime is a Social failure. Research by Levitt & Venkatesh more than 20 years ago showed that most gang bangers are earning less than minimum wage. 

homelessness, and poverty. Thus the longstanding American practice of addressing crime spikes through increased policing rather than, say, more job-training programmes is an example of a practice that perpetuates racist outcomes.

Sadly, being a member of a gang may be necessary to avoid being its victim. Job-training can't really help- more particularly because it tends to be crap designed to create jobs for job-trainers who would otherwise be unemployed- though geographical mobility can dramatically change outcomes.

Inequalities in the justice system are mirrored, unsurprisingly, in inequalities in wealth. In 2016, the median black family had 10% of the wealth of the median white family.

While median Jewish wealth might be five times median Protestant wealth. 

 This is an improvement from 1963, when the median non-white family had only 5% of relative wealth. But it is a far cry from equality of attainment, 170 years after Martin Delany set that down as the standard for racial justice.

Before legging it for Liberia and promptly legging it back from there. 

From sharecropping in the South to predatory lending in the North, white Americans have been materially invested in creating and maintaining racial domination. 

Predatory lending- eh? Shylock...OMG, has Stanley been reading 'The Secret Relationship?'

In addition to these material benefits of racial hierarchy, documented in a justly famous essay of Ta-Nehisi Coates, there is the desire to preserve what Du Bois in 1935 called “the public and psychological wage of whiteness.”

Stanley is white. Shame on him.

Jennifer Richeson 

who did well out of African-American heritage

and Michael Kraus,

who may not be non-White in any way and who is thus stealing the bread out of our mouths

 both psychologists, 

i.e. cretins

along with their co-authors, have documented a delusion among white Americans about the racial-wealth gap. They show that Americans estimate that in 2016 the median black family had 90% of the wealth of the median white family—rather than the true figure of 10%. 

That means they think African Americans are thrifty and smart at investing their money. That's a good thing. Thinking a different ethnic group is perennially in debt no matter how much they earn is evidence of Racism. Why? Wealth is stuff smart peeps strive to acquire.

Suppose Delany were alive today. What would he say to his brethren? I think the gist of it would be

'Wealth building service providers target those who are seen as having a low 'nut'- i.e fixed costs- and high liquidity. This means live cheap and never marry, or have kids with, improvident peeps. First ensure you have sufficient fungible assets- i.e. T-Bills covering 3 months earnings. Then do portfolio choice. True, initially the broker treats you as small fry. But within a year or two, data mining identifies you as worthy of proper wealth-building services. That's when you get a couple of apps on your phone to keep track of markets. Five years in, think about real estate. Ten years in, think about growth stocks. By now you are in a low risk actuarial class and can afford to be over-insured jus' like upper crust white peeps. Then do the Estate planning stuff and so on. Also if you have joint inheritance of agricultural land in the South- don't spend a dime on that shite. You will be shafted.'

African American economists and lawyers know all about how 'self-help' is about changing the statistical description of the class you fall into. Talking bollocks is a waste of time. Everything is statistical, baby. Not click bait junk social science. That's just drive-by regression with invalid instruments. I'm talking about the sort of stuff Amazon uses to make money.

Their research shows a bias towards what Ms Richeson calls a “mythology of racial progress.” 

No. It shows Americans think African Americans are smart and thrifty rather than stupid and likely to blow their wad on bling. 

As Ms Richeson writes in a recent article, “People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially better—and are approaching parity.” 

No. They don't give a shit about 'racial disparities'. They assume that if Blacks are as good as Whites then they'd be like Whites in their saving habits. What is being tested for is bias against Blacks based on stereotypes re. drug use and addiction to bling. These stupid shitheads think ordinary folk care deeply about racial justice and equality of attainment and other such shite. 

This belief that the present has come close to parity is longstanding—in a Gallup poll from March 1963, 46% of white Americans agreed with the statement, “blacks have as good a chance as whites in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.”

What this meant is that white Americans had come to see that blacks were equally skilled and talented and able to manage money. In any case 'qualified', back then, meant something different to what it means now. Why? If your face didn't fit, you couldn't get the fucking qualification in the first place. 

Many Americans believe that we are nearing racial equality after a long progression of positive change.

No. Americans think that people are getting ahead by their own efforts. Sadly the pointy heads keep creating more hoops to jump through for Americans which is why the Chinese are eating their lunch. 

 That means that any attempt to push for structural change to address inequalities will be met by profound disbelief. 

No. It will be met by people telling you to fuck off because you have shit inside your brain. If you like structural change so much, why don't you get married to it and go live in Venezuela? 

Those who argue for such changes get painted as radicals with a devious and destructive hidden agenda.

No. Stupid peeps like Stanley shit the bed. People say 'fuck is this cunt a Professor of?' When they learn it is Philosophy, they shrug their shoulders and say 'well, at least he doesn't masturbate in public or shit into his hands and fling his feces around like most of the other Philosophy Professors I saw at the Zoo.

 This sort of moral panic helps maintain the status quo.

Very true. Moral panic about pedophiles helps maintain the status quo with respect to your teenaged daughter or 5 year old son not being incessantly sodomized by smelly hobos. 

But such panics might not happen if schools made more efforts to teach students

useful stuff- e.g. why studying Philosophy at Collidge is a waste of time and money.

 how American institutions fell short of their ideals. 

Fuck off! WASPs wanted to dominate their portion of the Continent. By 1945, they were dominating half the world while still lynching niggers and deporting wetbacks and keeping out the Hindooos and Chinkies and so forth. That was the fucking ideal which motivated these guys to go West and kill the natives and take their land. 

Hence, in few arenas does the battle over CRT rage as strongly as in education—which fits the historical pattern. 

But if American kids fall behind in STEM subjects then the future belongs to China. Private Schools will teach Mandarin. State Schools will get kids to rite ess-As on how American ideals are so nice that even the Chinese are buying up Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty and the Obama Memorial Library not to mention the 'Who-the-fuck-was-Biden?' souvenir shop outside.

The aim of Du Bois’ 1935 work “Black Reconstruction in America” was to tell the true story of the end of Reconstruction (the brief period of racial progress that followed the end of the civil war), which is one of violent white backlash against emerging black political power. He denounces the teaching of history “for inflating our national ego,” and for years his work was overlooked in favour of an interpretation arguing that Reconstruction failed because black Americans were corrupt and incapable of self-governance.

Reconstruction succeeded. It threw a scare into the Dixiecrats. If the thing could happen once, it could happen again. The South was corrupt but it was capable of self-governance by beating and killing people the way the North had done during the Civil War and the way the US had done to the Indians and the Mexicans and so forth. 

More recently, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project,

which would have been fine with us if she hadn't let in a couple of Whites.

 which seeks to illuminate how the legacy of slavery has shaped American institutions, was met by fury from the right, as well as demands for “patriotic education.” 

apparently the lady spent some time in Cuba. So she's exactly what the Doctor ordered as far as the Republicans are concerned. Just reclassify Hispanics as Whites already. The Asians will see an arbitrage opportunity in going Black. Look at Kamala Harris.

The same cycle again: illumination implying the need for structural change produces a moral panic seeking to reinforce a racist status quo.

Moral panic? This is Trumpian and tactical. Only a Stanley level cretin would believe any morality was involved.

The targets of the Republican attack on CRT reveal that the issue is not CRT, but something much broader. A recent education bill passed in Tennessee bans “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race”—subjective language that could easily bar teachers from discussing how race has shaped American institutions. 

Race shaped American institutions to a point where it became the richest and most powerful country in the world. Teachers discussing race aint going to help America face the Chinese challenge. Getting kids to learn category theory and molecular biology and other stuff which didn't exist when I was in skool is good for America and good for the world. 

In 1935, Du Bois explicitly argues that American history, properly taught, is divisive, as “war and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds.”

Who gives a toss what he argued? Stanley's parents emigrated to a country they knew to be racist. Indeed, Hitler was copying American racial policies. Had he concentrated on developing 'Jewish Sciences', there might be a united Europe whose flag would be the Swastika. Thanks to Hitler's stupidity, black folk everywhere started to rise up. The Soviet threat too played a positive role. Blacks be smart and good at fighting wars.  Suddenly the US Army became a vehicle for Black advancement. White soldiers would rather be led by a smart Bleck rather than get massacred under an incompetent Preppie. 

 White Americans enslaved black Americans, 

No. They bought Africans enslaved by Africans. 

and shortly after the latter achieved their freedom during the brief period of Reconstruction, excluded them by legislation and force from civic and political life until the 1960s. 

Because American ideals were about WASPs fucking over everybody else. Some pedagogues and priests may have pretended otherwise but they were also pretending they weren't fucking little boys or big breasted hookers or whatever. 

American democracy is young.

Biden is old.

 These facts are divisive. The Republican attack on CRT’s aims is thus a broadside against truth and history in education.

Fuck history and the donkey it rode in on. Teach kids STEM stuff while their brains are still growing. Keep 90 percent of them out of College. Apprenticeships and Vocational education is the way to go. Research Degrees should only be given in areas where there are increasing returns to such activity.

CRT urges America to reform practices in virtually all of its institutions, including criminal-justice, education, housing, banking, and hiring.

So it is a 'second order' good- i.e. it clamors for more of a first order good. But such clamoring is useless or counterproductive. Why not simply pay preachers to go around saying 'Sell all you have and give to the poor'? 

 The United States has attempted this before – most notably during Reconstruction, when the federal government poured large resources into empowering a newly free southern black population.

Fuck off! Reconstruction was about military occupation of the South. But it wasn't profitable and after the recession of 1873, there was little appetite for it in the North. 

That period saw formerly enslaved black legislators elected across the South, and free public education offered to children of all races. The response to these drastic changes was moral panic, widespread racist terrorism and rapid reversal of progress.

The military occupation needed Black support and got it but the game was not worth the candle. Still, the memory of that period was enough to quash all future talk of secession. The South rose again but gave up its pretensions to greater gentility. There's an O Henry story of an old slave who wants to meet his former master's heir. The guy shares an office with his Northern cousin. Will Uncle Tom be able to recognize the blue blood of his Masters'? Who gives a fuck? O Henry has another story about a bankrupt Southern Colonel who accepts charity believing it is 'restitution' from an old ex-slave. Actually it is his daughter's boy friend (what? you can't tell me a true Southern belle wouldn't have ridden the fellow ragged) in black face. O Henry is also suitably racist about the Jews and the Irish.

Decades later, in the 1960s, the civil-rights movement fought for major legal changes to end the era of legal segregation. 

Which the State Department was pushing for. The odd thing was this Republican platform was pushed through by a Texan Democrat. But this meant Nixon had a 'Southern Strategy'.  Rockefeller Republicans faded from prominence. 

During this fight, its leaders were denounced as anti-American communist sympathisers. 

Unless they were Jews in which case cruder language was used.

It should come as no surprise now that the same Republican legislators who want to ban CRT are also advancing voter-suppression laws that target black communities.

Who, they believe have been taught to hate white peeps. Anyway, Trump banned the thing for Federal job training while Biden brought it back so it looks as though Democrats have handed this to their rivals on a plate with plenty of trimmings.

Dramatic structural change is hard, and involves missteps. 

Sadly such 'missteps' hurt those at the bottom disproportionately. 

“Diversity” workshops that involve little more than people sharing feelings, or being told their race is the single most important and determinative thing about them, are no doubt examples. 

Stanley is against workshops. Cool. But if CRT can't be workshopped, what good is it? Why not simply say- dudes, teachers lied to you. America is a great country coz great racists came here and fucked over all lesser racists. But fucking over lesser racists involves being better at STEM subjects. So stop looking down on nerdy kids who do well in Math or guys with small hands who studied Accountancy and Finance at Wharton while the cool kids were smoking dope at Berkeley. Imitate Gates and Trump. Get rich. Make America Great Again.

But critics vastly inflate the importance of these missteps, to make such calls, and CRT more broadly, seem outlandish. When such complaints dominate the discussion, they fuel moral panic that is cynically used to halt and reverse progress towards equality.

CRT is a complaint. It is good to stockpile grievances which you can bring up at a later date as needs be. It is bad to cause a nuisance save as a means of asserting countervailing power. What smart African-Americans did was not invent a grievance but find ways of improving mechanism design- through things like consent decrees- in a manner which helps everybody but African-Americans most. Obama warned about toxic wokeness. Stanley didn't get that Obama meant nutters like him. 

Daisy Dixon & the Colston statue

 Daisy Dixon is an artist and philosopher. I am neither. On the other hand, Daisy does look a lot like me- indeed, for a moment, I thought I was looking at my own profile pic. She is a lot whiter and, well, girly- but fundamentally, it wouldn't be racist at all for anyone to mistake her for me. To be clear, I am not accusing this estimable savant of cultural or aesthetic appropriation. It may be that both her parents glimpsed the splendor of my visage and, willy nilly- being blindly possessed by the Schopenhauerian Will- stochastically sought each other out to but mindlessly rut till they had incarnated something approaching the perfection of my physiognomy in the miroir sans tain of their carnal concupiscence. Obviously, when I speak of mirrors, I don't mean the tawdry and meretricious stuff they sell at John Lewis or Ikea but the classy and expensive sort of looking glass for which I am saving up and in which more than Emmy Noether symmetries will be conserved in the phantom curves of my flabby phiz. 

Daisy's expensive education, quite criminally, didn't tell her that Art is distinguishable only by an uncorrelated asymmetry. She assumes it is something which can be conserved. But Noether's theorem only applies to non-dissipative systems. Certain types of entropy, negentropy and Parrando games can't exist in her ontology. 

Suppose this were not the case. Then, Daisy is the face I look at in the mirror. It is the darts of my eyes she adorns futilely burnishing her own gaze of bronze. 

In mathematical terms, we might say that 'precomposition' is the source of Daisy being my 'pullback' in this respect. However such an assertion is a trifle ad captum vulgi. I urge Daisy to turn her back on the rubbish she has been taught at Cambridge and investigate the more arcane cohomological groups in which such may be the case. I say this entirely for her benefit. She has disgraced herself by getting a PhD from Cambridge. I got a 2.2 from the LSE and followed it up with a NVQ (level 3) in Hospitality Technology. Well, I didn't actually get that NVQ because my experiments in carrying dishes on both sides of the tray were sabotaged by the other waiters at the Tandoori Restaurant where I had managed to secure employment. The other employees were Sylhetis- i.e. Aryans- and it is an indisputable fact that Aryans have oppressed and ethnically cleansed Dravidians like myself for thousands of years.  

I see that Daisy has a paper on 'lies in Art' which

aims to show that any account of how artworks lie must acknowledge (I) that artworks can lie at different levels of their content—what I call ‘surface’ and ‘deep’—and (II) that, for an artwork to lie at a given level, a norm of truthful communication such as Grice’s Maxim of Quality must apply to it.

The problem here is that works of art are likely to be high in implicature or what us Hindus call 'dhvani'. But, if reverberation is semantic, Dialethia is ontic. Thus Grice's maxims can't apply.  In particular, the comic mode (hasya) using rasabhasa (inappropriate affect) has been shown to be the root of all other modes in Sanskrit poetics. The accumulation of 'suggestio falsi' is a truthful if self-puncturing afflatus of Maya's epistemic bubble.  

If 'surface' vs 'deep' distinctions exist then Daisy's profile pic could really be my profile pic's mathematical 'pullback'. 

Obviously, since I'm much older than her and we descend from the same ancestral Eve, there is bound to be some biological 'homology'. But, ask yourself, is a theory which might incline you to kiss me rather than Daisy really a useful theory? It throws away too much information. Grice died before it became obvious that wherever there is a coordination game, then- so income and hedging effects can arise- there will also be a discoordination game. Otherwise, there will be no game. The thing isn't worth its candle. There won't be any 'channelization' or 'capacitance diversity'. There won't be enough volatility to drive liquidity. The Chichilnisky 'Goldilocks' conditions for language or trade (local arbitrage) won't be met. 

From the time of King Rituparna, the Saivite artist who must celebrate Smarahara- the Lord as the destroyer of Memory, of Love- knows that there is a skill similar to that of the Vedic poet or expert charioteer which permits us to be the baby who longs to sleep between Mummy and Daddy but can't because Vatsalya is 'Ardhnarishvara'.  Parental affection involves an utter fusion of gender and reversal of the very gender dimorphism required for reproduction. Elder bro, Ganesa, says sleep between Everyman, Everywoman. Hence, Muruga is the God of even the Tamil Atheist. 

Art lies in the very real places where kiddies lie happily between their Mum & Dad or where elderly losers, cowering 'fore COVID, cuddle their duvet for lying so ineffectually 'twixt Life and Death. 

There is only surface- no depth. Samsara is Nirvana. 

For Mathematical logic, we know 'univalent foundations'- i.e. computer proof checking- is always possible for any given partition of intensional from extensional. But for any given mathematician's proof of a conjecture- e.g Mochizuki- there are more such logics than there are mathematicians. This is equally true of poetry or other self-consciously artistic work. There is a choice sequence which maximises amphiboly with respect to embedding in 'absolute metaphors'. It is this we are attentive to. It is here that we have 'dhvani' reverberations of allusion and inchoate emotion. Of such is the Schopenhaurian Music which outlasts Time. This is the silence of the nightingale in which the rose shreds its cloak. 

A corollary is that it’s harder than you might think for artworks to lie: Quality is not automatically ‘switched on’ during our engagement with art. However, I show how a work’s curation and genre-membership can ‘switch on’ Quality, allowing artworks to lie at different levels.

So, Daisy is putting in a type theory. Nothing wrong with that. But why not look at recent developments in Martin Lof? 

One answer may be that Daisy, as a relatively elderly philosopher (my reading age is at least half hers), has succumbed to the temptation to more categorically repeat what Nietzsche called Kant's joke — Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people” Replace 'scholars' with 'epistemically privileged Whites' and 'people' with fat, old, black cunts like wot I iz and you can begin to understand my animus. 

Daisy has an essay in Aeon on which I left a typically rebarbative comment. Foolishly, she responded. Was it coz I iz bleck? No. It was just a generalized sort of noblesse oblige. Yet such genuine oikeiosis as grounds Grievance Studies responds only to the Socratic 'palinode' of the 'Directed Graph' which alone can provide deontic logic a method of incorporating information re. uncorrelated asymmetries and thus makes it immune to 'Jorgensen's dilemma' by reason of not being utterly useless and a waste of fucking time.

Daisy is an artist as well as a philosopher. I know a lot of people wot weren't either and had it rough growing up down this neck of the woods. Galley slaves, tied to no mast, they heard the Sirens' song and yet, mere flotsam and jetsam, they survived. An antidosis between Daisy and such like is possible. Why do I say this? She is young. I am old. I am a Gerontion who, after getting broadband and Wikipedia and thus getting up to speed on stuff I wasn't smart enough to pursue at Uni, saw that the face of the Universal Constructor of Mathesis, if not revealed, had already been conceived.  I am ready to depart. But, if I am right, this also means there is an infinite 'pullback' to the haecceity of our every gratuitous- id est 'artistic'- truth as lie.

Sin as individuation. Metanoia as doing what the God of Agathon could not- viz. abolish the Past- Wilde was ahead of Frege. The fact is Time's arrow can be reversed if a computable function can grow exponentially faster than the domain it maps from. 

Granted this aint the sort of guff they should teach at Cambridge. We trust that place to provide us with bureaucrats and lawyers- not exponents of Henry More's 'fourth dimension'. 

Daisy's very polite reply to my comment is as follows-

I think that while different approaches to the art-censorship problem will offer varying insights and practical guidance, philosophy is an indispensable tool to gain a clearer and deeper understanding of the subject, and in this case, understand *why* and *how* an artwork can be dangerous in the first place.

The problem here is that philosophy does not now, nor has it ever, supplied 'bright-line' criteria in this regard. Law & Econ has. Those conjoined disciplines have found Applied Math an indispensable tool. But philosophy has fallen by the wayside. It gave up on Math. Then everybody else gave up on Philosophy. I suppose you could say, Regina v Shivpuri had a 'philosophical' ratio. But it was bad law. Or was it?  Occam's razor, like Rudy Narayan, suggests that it wasn't Utilitarian philosophy but Shivpuri's dark skin which got him sent to jail. 

As an elderly black man who had to quit Education at 19- and who WAS THE VICTIM OF RACIST AND SEXIST abuse in this country by, firstly, Mum & Dad, and then my ex-wife and so forth- I resent being told that 'philosophy is an indispensable tool' to understand why Rushdie's shite harmed India by telling stupid lies about the founder of his own Religion. 

Daisy won't condemn 'Satanic Verses' . I will. A Hindu bureaucrat banned the import of that noisome filth into India. But India did not try to harm Rushdie in any way. He crossed a line, but the moment he said 'I'm an atheist', Indian Law gave him perfect equality and immunity from prosecution for any atheistical statement he might make.

Why is the law superior to philosophy? The answer, obviously, is that it isn't just protocol bound, it is buckstopped in a manner Kripke could not conceive. Not permanently so, obviously, but there is a clear 'directed Graph' which corresponds to the Socratic palinode. This is the essence of Art. 

Acquiring this sharper grasp of the problem illuminates new and existing solutions.

Daisy offers no new solutions. She merely observes that 'bystander supported' denunciation of trespass is effective in establishing Sociological 'thresholds'. But that bystander support must be of a non-philosophical, 'overlapping consensus', wholly pragmatic type. The thing is entirely extensional, not intensional at all. There is a 'reverse mathematics' project here which we could say is philosophical, but Daisy has been brainwashed by her, no doubt, very expensive paideia into positing the opposite. 

That is, philosophical analysis can reveal new strategies to manage hateful art, but it can also explain why existing approaches are so effective.

No. Game theory can do so because it looks at strategy at its most abstract. A parsimonious Philosophy would simply be the reverse mathematics of the folk theorem of repeated games. But we already have that through a notion of directed graphs which capture all the information pertaining to oikeiosis. In other words, all uncorrelated asymmetries are available for Muth Rationality's 'bourgeois strategy'. That ensures 'buckstopping'. Law & Econ has better Math behind it than Cambridge's daisy chain of decline and fall from Russell.  

E.g. even the somewhat haphazard rolling of Colston through Bristol streets shouldn’t be overlooked in its significance, in its sonic aspects of re-curation - it was scraped and banged all the way to the harbour and then plunged into murky water.

The thing was a disaster for black peeps- just like the British suppression of the Slave Trade was a disaster for the great people of the Congo. They lost the ability to buy guns to protect themselves. King Leopold's statue deserves all it gets. Colston was a local philanthropist who never touched a hair on the head of any person of my colour. By contrast, Grotius justified the practice of kidnapping Tamils like me to labor in Ceylonese plantations till they died within six months. It was cheaper to kidnap more from across the Palk Straits.  Some of our women were raped by Dutchmen whose fat and jealous wives then took pleasure in whipping these 'Kanagis' to death. Yet a lot of Indian Diplomats and Academics drone on about Grotius as the founder of 'International Law'.  

Every black person currently in the UK has ancestors who came here in the full knowledge of its history but also a faith in the 'palinode' embedded in English's being wholly embedded in the Gospel of Lord Jesus Christ- foreshadowed, it may be, by the 'Greek speaking Druids' who, Sir Edward Coke said, laid the foundations of our Common Law. William Blake, not bleck, it is true, but like me a Sarf Lunnon nudist- what?- Baby used to piss and shit on me so I was unclothed, save for swimming trunks to keep my nut-sacs safe, during that long, hot, Stockwell summer when I was happiest.

 Blake said, and us elderly, ill educated, blecks say, 

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

Daisy is an artist. Her music features 'minutely organized Particulars'. By contrast, my Tik Tok videos feature me lip-synching and twerking to Beyonce. Whom would you rather have at your hen do? Not me. I gotta tiny package.

This kind of re-curation or even dramatic/artistic performance can be seen as a distinctively aesthetic way to disable the harmful speech acts performed by the statue in its original location.

This was a piece of metal which birds shat upon. It wasn't a speech act at all till some bureaucrat decided Bristol should have a 'History month'. But, Bristol has a fucking horrible history. Also, those cunts tend to look down on peeps without posh accents and yachts and shit. They got their comeuppance- right? Wrong. They got to look like Southern Cavaliers rather than Cits whose sole representation within Anglo-Celtic paideia was the vast vacuity of Clifton College. Them guys had good commercial and tech ed. But they resisted Civilization till 1862. They could have had a University at any time from the Seventeenth Century. They were too smart, or too successful, to do anything so stupid.  

By disabling the illocutionary force of an artwork like this we can, as active viewers,

How is Daisy the same sort of 'active viewer' as me? The answer, obviously, is that this homotopy arises from the fact that she looks just like me- except maybe a trifle more macho. I tend to exhibit a disarming and obviously denture supported grin.  She gazes unsmilingly at the camera like a coiled serpent ready to strike with krav fucking maga. 

disarm its power whilst revealing the harm it was causing/constituting in the first place - something which in itself has often been overlooked for decades, even centuries.

Wow! Us black peeps overlooked for centuries the fact that we were being fucked over. But, we- or our parents or grandparents- came here coz we knew that the British and Irish working class, too, had been fucked over. We were productive. They were productive. Would they like us or tell us to fuck off? For men of African heritage- there was one answer. Women wanted to have their babies. For men of Indic heritage- there was another answer. Employers wanted us to keep our heads down and work and thus were delighted to give us a couple of weeks off to go back to the old country and get married. 

It was the women and kids who bore the burden. But this was equally true of Catholic Irish or, even now, 'pikeys' and so forth. 

There is scope here for Art. But, as if obedient to the dhvani theory of Abhinvavagupta, that Art is comedic. It involves 'rasabhasa'- inappropriate affect or scholasticsm- but the thing is only funny if done by a guy who looks to you like me- not Daisy. 

You now understand why I began this post in the way I did. The fact is wage and service provision discrimination, to be a cheap way to extract surplus, must work upon costly to change 'uncorrelated asymmetries'. Econ ran with this discovery- because, at the margin, it has to pay for itself. Philosophy didn't. African American economists, jurists and political scientists did the donkey work. By the end of the Nineties they had won the intellectual argument. Pigford v Glickman was a game changer. Obama saw that 'consent decrees'- i.e. ideographic mechanism design under a juristic mandate- was the way forward. That's what made him electable and re-electable. Now his Veep is Prez. 

So, I think I respectfully disagree that philosophy can only weigh in after the event with merely anodyne reflections.

Daisy's art may be a little cerebral and avant garde for the likes of me. What she says may be true of her project in toto. Sadly, it can't be said of her Aeon essay. So what? She is young. She will do better.  

I think, rather, philosophy can offer us a valuable and deeper understanding of the moral/aesthetic issue,

this valuable and deeper understanding is what is severely lacking not just in Daisy's essay but her instructors' entire oeuvre.  

which, as well as being intrinsically valuable knowledge, will also serve as justification for practical decisions and policymaking by government and councils, as well as inform and guide the law.

Economic and Legal and Strategic arguments justify stuff. Philosophical arguments have never done so in this country. Why pretend otherwise? 

There is no philosopher alive today who is not considered an ignorant, ultracrepidarian, fool. The Math moved on too quickly. David Lewis ended up babbling about 'megethology'. Kripke is alive. Voevodsky is dead. But, from the point of view of conceptual evolvability, or backward  induction based begriffsgeschichte, the reverse is the case.  

As for the difference between public and private space - there do appear to be significant differences.

Very good of you to say so, Daisyji, I'm sure. I was worried you were doing potty in the street. I'm not saying I don't do the same- when of strong drink taken- but, honestly, young peeps should be discouraged from a practice which causes many of us older blokes to slip on a turd and fracture our stink bone. 

In the case of art, a racist work that sits in the home of its maker will still possess those immoral properties, but it may not incite violence (for it isn’t being viewed by anyone else).

Sadly, this is not the case. Violence will occur if it pays to posit some objectionable work of art or instrument of heretical science to exist within a private space. The great Gandhian Vinobha Bhave's followers would raid the huts of their equally abject victims in the hope of finding porn. To be clear- I'm not a refugee from India because my family had porn, but rather a porn seeking immigrant of the best and most philosophically accomplished type- e.g Amartya Sen whose Capabilities approach is its own masturbatory Mathesis Universalis. 

My focus on public art displays was, I suppose, because the problem of harmful art and censorship seems to arise most pertinently in public contexts, for the groups targeted by the artwork are being directly harmed by the public pronouncements of harmful content.

Daisy, Daisy, Daisy- this is a terrible sentence. You are an artist. Why did you perpetrate it? The truth is you didn't focus on shit save getting some shite published because you are pushing Thirty and are stuck in a shite discipline. 

Do your Art and then find justifications for it, not in obsolete shite, but contemporary advances in Math. Logic is just the crutch Maths kicks away as it burgeons in utility. 

Wagner was an artist. His foray into Philosophy was by no means contemptible by the standards of the day. But, we remember him as an artist.  

There is of course much more to be said, but I do hope my response was still helpful.

It wasn't at all. It was polite. It was considerate. But its content was bureaucratic. 

I 'do' Philosophy because that's a discipline which keeps Poetry honest. True, my poetry is as ugly as shit. Still, shit is a fertilizer- or so I tell those who complain about the gifts I send them on their birthdays. 

I shouldn't have mentioned that last. Sometimes I embarrass myself. 

Cancel Priya Satia!

The British have a great sense of their own history. But that history is local and genealogical. It is partly driven by popular historical novels and TV series and partly by archaeology- which has long been an amateur passion and which has become the basis of successful TV series- for example those fronted by, Blackadder star, Tony Robinson.

An oddity of post-War British historiography was the extent to which the new 'State trained' History majors immersed themselves in Medieval History. This percolated down to the 'Monty Python' generation- school boys who could discourse learnedly on the relative merits of trebuchets and ballistas. It was only after the age of 14, by which time most kids had dropped History, that political and socio-economic and diplomatic history appeared on the syllabus. 

On the other hand, there has also always existed in this country a well written but highly partisan type of historiography aimed at the intelligent layman which, however, is wholly unrelated to any sort of alethic research. For this reason, it is dismissed as mere bloody mindedness.

The New Yorker has an article of the latter sort.

 How did the British get to be so blinkered about their own history? In “Time’s Monster: How History Makes History” (Harvard), a probing new book, the Stanford professor Priya Satia

An American of Indian origin whose view of British history is not merely blinkered, but based on blind hatred

argues that British views of empire remain “hostage to myth” partly because historians made them so.

The British don't give a toss for historians. Dons of that description are expected to be absurdly partisan, to have colorful personal lives, and to hold crazy political views. Priya thinks Bennett's 'History boys' were proto-Bojos! She clearly knows nothing about this country. I went to the sort of Grammar School depicted in that play- but a few years earlier. Had I stayed on for the 'seventh term' and gone onto Oxford, I'd have been indoctrinated in Marxist nonsense. BoJo and Rees-Mogg were Etonians. Churchill wasn't. BoJo thinks he is striking a populist note by championing a dim Harrovian who didn't go to Uni and knew little Latin and less Greek. Rees-Mogg did study History but his carefully cultivated mental density kept him from harm. Say what you like, Catholicism has its uses.

In 1817, the utilitarian philosopher James Mill provided a template when he published his three-volume “History of British India,” which became a textbook for colonial administrators.

Nonsense! Colonial administrators actually lived in the Colonies. Their 'textbooks' were to be found in their own files. They didn't read Mill or Macaulay or Maine save to laugh at them. 

Germany had no colonies. But it had State salaried pedagogues- not 'philosophers'- who wrote nonsense about a world of which they were wholly ignorant. Some British Historians, or popular writers of that description, being a deeply provincial, declasse, and low IQ breed, may have been influenced by such 'theories of history'. But historians have and had no influence. Pedagogues and polemicists seldom do. In Britain's case, its Colonies' administration was initiated and put on a solid foundation mainly by people without a University education. These were not bookish men.  To succeed they needed to understand commerce and the elements of military science. Their successors in covenanted Colonial Services did have degrees but their scholastic accomplishments were in Classical subjects and, more often than not, they were chosen for their sporting achievements. The Sudanese Civil Service represented that ideal of 'Blacks ruled by (Oxford) Blues'. 

Civilization evolves in stages, the logic ran; Britain had reached a higher stage than its colonies; therefore Britain had a moral duty to lift them up.

Nonsense! Administrators had a fiduciary responsibility to turn a profit, or at least cover costs, on Britain's colonial possessions. A Game-keeper may have a moral duty to ensure that shooting fees more than cover the cost of preserving game. He ha no obligation to raise up pheasants to a level of moral equality with those who shoot them.

One or two scribblers in London might supply Ministers with guff about 'moral duty' while other Grub Street hacks supplied the Opposition with guff about 'moral delinquency'. 

Mill soon got a job drafting dispatches in the East India Company’s London headquarters. (Mill’s eldest son, John Stuart, who at the age of eleven had helped correct the book’s page proofs, joined him at India House as a junior clerk in 1823 and stayed until the East India Company was dismantled, in 1858.)

Thus, it was bleeding obvious that the Mills and Macaulay (who did, by reason of pecuniary embarrassment,  briefly serve in India- which is how come he had the leisure to compose his great 'lays of Ancient Rome' which, sadly, isn't pornographic at all)  and so forth were paid for mere puffery on behalf of a Commercial Enterprise.  

Satia, whose earlier books described British surveillance of the interwar Middle East

Surveillance? Them guys ruled, or had paramountcy, over a good chunk of it! 

and the eighteenth-century origins of a British military-industrial complex,

which itself had seventeenth century origins which in turn had sixteenth century origins and so forth. The Royal Dockyards at Portsmouth date back to Henry VII at the end of the fifteenth century. 

is well attuned to the echoes of historical scripts. Mill’s basic premise that imperialism brings progress reverberated in a series of moral claims.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore set up newspapers in India at exactly this time with the aim of backing up such claims. Roy came to England to lobby for unrestricted European settlement in India. Roy wasn't just interested in economic and moral progress (an example of the latter would be the abolition of suttee), he also wanted Whitey to protect Hindus from the rapacious Muslim.

There was nothing novel about this. Most Colonies had a comprador class from before they became Colonies. Progress did occur because Oceanic Commerce stimulated Socio-economic change. Missionaries contributed to 'moral' progress. 

The parliamentary act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, in 1807, was held up as proof of the British Empire’s commitment to freedom, effacing its shameful past as the largest slave trader in the eighteenth-century world.

No it wasn't. Nobody greatly cared. The fact is everybody, around this time, was restricting importation of slaves. Why? If blacks outnumber whites then, as was happening in Haiti, they would get the upper hand. There was also the 'distributional question'. A rich guy importing a lot of slaves gains a high marginal product while getting a free-ride on existing infrastructure- including an enforcement system against runaway slaves. 

Some stupid historians advised the British Government a couple of decades ago that it would be a good idea to commemorate the 1807 act by issuing a coin or something of that sort. Other stupid historians have worked themselves up about this. Bristol was foolish enough to listen to some cretinous historians and institute a 'Black History Month' in the belief that it would drum up tourism. After all, the Carnival has been good for Notting Hill- right? Then came the COVID lockdown and BLM mobs decapitating statues all over the place.  

Colonial independence, in the twentieth century, was depicted as the culmination of a selfless mission to spread democracy, something “given” or “granted” to colonies, rather than something long denied by force.

Who was it doing this 'depicting'? Name and shame the fuckers. Where was this 'depicting' going on? How come I didn't notice? I've been here in London reading virtually everything that comes out on Imperial History for the last 40 years. 

The reason the Brits don't say 'we spread democracy' is because, apart from India and Ceylon, democracy hadn't spread. But India was also an example of the Congress Party begging the Viceroy to stay on. If it had democracy it was for the same reason that it couldn't have the Brits. The game of autocracy was not worth the candle of assassination. The place was too poor and its poor too proletarian- i.e. productive only in child bearing- for either Capitalism or Communism to take root- save in a Casteist manner.

The Second World War became the British Empire’s triumphant last stand as the bulwark of global liberty in the face of fascism, eliding Britain’s violent suppression of anticolonial resistance.

Fuck is this cunt talking about? What 'anti-colonial resistance' did Britain 'violently suppress'? The Mau Mau? The thing was a joke. Idi Amin, it is true, owed his elevation to the jolly time he had dealing with that problem.

The truth is 'anti-colonial resistance' was the sort of thing the Natives wanted no part of.  Mau Mau killed far more Blacks than Whites.

Britain has never wanted to be a 'bulwark of global liberty'. Why? It knows that preserving British liberty is costly and depends on playing nice with all sorts. That's why Churchill got cuddly with Stalin. But, this didn't mean he'd ban Orwell's Trotskyite shite. 

“In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs,” Niall Ferguson wrote in 2002. “Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?”

Niall Ferguson is a Scottish-American on the make. He has done well for himself. But fuck has he to do with England?  

“Time’s Monster” joins a dense body of scholarship

by scholars who are very dense indeed 

analyzing liberal justifications for empire.

which never mattered a tinker's fart. Either the thing paid for itself, or it was kicked to the curb. 

By the early twentieth century, critics were growing skeptical of British claims about progress. Consider Edward John Thompson, who travelled to Bengal in 1910 as a Methodist missionary and befriended the anticolonial poets Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal.

Fuck Thompson. Nobody gave a shit about a lower middle class Cockney with an 'external' degree. He did not 'befriend' his social superiors. He ingratiated himself with them. Dr. Muhammad Iqbal gladly accepted a Knighthood because he wasn't against the Brits at all. His beef was with Hindus and Sikhs. Tagore renounced his Knighthood but he had already warned his people that they'd get ethnically cleansed from East Bengal if the Brits left.  

The Great War, in which Thompson served as an Army chaplain in Mesopotamia, soured him on the much touted promises of British civilization.

What about the Turkish habit of sodomizing starving British prisoners of war who were also suffering from dysentery? Did that sour him on the much touted promises of Islamic civilization?  

He started writing history to expose the unsavory truths that propagandists had left out. In “The Other Side of the Medal” (1925), a revisionist history of the Indian rebellion of 1857, Thompson described British atrocities passed over in earlier accounts. It was time, he said, to “face the things that happened, and change our way of writing about them.

Nobody gave a toss about that cretin.  He was remembered by Bongs- like Spivak- mainly as a shithead who'd had the temerity to damn with faint praise some particularly tedious shite by the always tedious shithead Tagore. 

In an incisive recent study of anticolonial dissent, “Insurgent Empire” (Verso), Priyamvada Gopal,

a cunt so declasse she picked a fight with College Porters- i.e. actual working class people- because they called her Ma'am not 'Doctor'!  JNU must be so proud. The fact is the NYT accords the title 'Doctor' only to actual Medical Doctors. Everybody else is plain Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. 

a professor of English at Cambridge, places Thompson in a long line of critics of imperialism.

Whom nobody bothered with. You can place me in a long line of critics of stupid academics but that line is so broad it includes everybody in every era. 

She and Satia agree that public outcries against injustice—such as the brutal suppression of the 1865 uprising at Morant Bay, Jamaica, and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, in which soldiers under British command fired into a crowd of nonviolent Indian protesters—often amounted to a scapegoating of individuals and the laundering of the nation’s conscience.

WTF? Where was the 'scapegoating of individuals'? Governor Eyre, an Ozzie, and Brigadier Dyer, who was India born, did well out of their respective roles. The fact is, in Punjab, elected Premiers would keep whimpering for 'the smack of firm Government'- i.e. another Dyer to strike fear into the hearts of the rabble. 

Still, Eyre was on the right side of History- which was moving to 'Scientific Racism' and the doing away of 'Colonial Legislatures'- whereas Dyer was on the wrong side of History. Still, a short while after Jallianwallah Bagh, he had a chance to show valour against the Afghans leading mainly Indian troops. Dyer was important because he showed that the British Indian Army would not do 'Nation Building' and would never bend the knee to 'the frocks'. This was helpful for India because Gandhi, nutter that he was, demanded that the Army be put under his control! This sufficed to unite the minorities against the INC and prevent Gandhi gaining the powers of an Il Duce or Fuhrer. Thus, that toothless old hypocrite had to stick to the straight and narrow path of being a nuisance merely, as opposed to a fucking National catastrophe. 

Yet, through a process of what Gopal calls “reverse tutelage,”

as opposed to having a fucking JNU retard as your tutor though your Daddy and Mummy are paying big bucks to send you to Oxbridge 

colonial subjects consistently pressed their British interlocutors to adopt more radical stances against empire.

by getting down on all fours and barking like a dog. 

One might see Thompson as a sort of real-life Fielding,

no we mightn't. Fielding was an Oxbridge graduate paid on a much higher scale as part of the 'Covenanted' Indian Education Service. Thompson was poor.  

the British teacher at the center of E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” who learns from the Indian doctor Aziz that, in Gopal’s words, they “would have to be allies in the project of driving the English out of India before they could be friends.”

This is silly. Forster had been Ross Masud's tutor. He understood that, once Gandhi surrendered unilaterally, Aziz & Co would be at loggerheads with Godbole and his ilk. 

“Insurgent Empire” demonstrates how often critics have hacked at the pedestals of imperial pieties, and how consistently voices outside Britain have inspired them.

Imperialists, like Kipling, Meredith Townsend, Candler & so forth, had dynamited any lingering Imperial pieties. But 'voices outside Britain'- like Bhownagree & Gandhi- kept the Brits in business. Then, quite unexpectedly, it turned out troops from the Empire could alter the balance of power on the Continent. At the same time, the Colonies realized that with the Royal Navy's power waning, they too were vulnerable. Ultimately, 'critics hacking at pedestals' discovered that they had been barking up the wrong tree. Racism was on its way out anyway. But collective security and stable exchange rates required cooperation not confrontation. In the end, the New Commonwealth gave Westminster what it wanted more cheaply than ever before. 

Nine decades ago, the Scottsboro case prompted anticolonial activists to confront racism;

That was in the US which had stopped being a colony a hundred and fifty years before that date. Indians were more concerned with Hindu Muslim riots. The Burmese were more concerned about killing Hindus and Muslims and so on and so forth. 

five years before Colston tumbled down, Rhodes Must Fall, a student movement at the University of Cape Town, inspired an affiliated campaign at Oxford to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes and “decolonize” the curriculum.

Which curriculums? STEM subjects ones? No? Then who gives a flying fuck? On the other hand, it is true that Jeremy Corbyn's election manifesto pandered to this type of stupidity. That was one reason the Red Wall collapsed. Now Corbyn has been suspended from the Labour Party for anti-semitism.  

What happened to this critical strand in the history of the British Empire?

It was ignored because it was the province of impotent cretins. 

Satia finds an unexpected answer in Thompson’s son, Edward Palmer Thompson.

A former Communist and CND type nutter whose political influence peaked before I was born and who had no role whatsoever in subsequent Labor governments.  

As a boy, he saw the stream of writers and activists who passed through the family’s home, outside Oxford—Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, T. E. Lawrence—as a source of exotic stamps for his collection. When he was a young man, returning from service in the Second World War to complete a degree in history, he rebelled against his father’s Byronic ideals and engagement with Indian affairs. He joined the Communist Party, took a teaching job in Leeds, resigned from the Communist Party, co-founded The New Left Review, and wrote about the lives of working-class radicals—to rescue them, he said, from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”

Sadly for Thompson, the British working class refused to let tossers like him condescend to them. Their idols were pop-stars and football players, even celebrity hairdressers, whose glitzy life-style made the horse faced aristocracy green with envy.  

E. P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class” (1963) is one of the most influential works of modern history.

No it isn't. It was obsolete before it came out. By the mid Seventies, when I was doing my History A level, the thing was a joke. Why? Because actual Labour Governments, concerned to rationalize industry and get rid of craft unions, where 'Dad's lads' entrenched religious discrimination- and 'feather-bedding' and 'pay differentials' and wild-cat strikes and 'work to rule'- realized that the working class needed to be de-historicized just as much as ex-Colonies needed to be de-tribalized. Ergodicity, to use Samuelson's term, had to replace hysteresis otherwise Britain would descend to the level of Uganda. 

Its method, “history from below,” has had an incalculable international impact,

We can easily calculate its international impact. It is zero. Thatcher and Reagan won. Mitterrand did a U turn. Labour, as a factor of production, was dehistoricized and rendered increasingly gender and race blind. 

The fact is 'history from below' is backward shite studied by retarded people.  

not least in recuperating the histories of colonized people.

Yes, yes. Subaltern Studies really helped poor Indian tribals- NOT! 

Yet, in Satia’s view, Thompson himself personified an insular turn taken by historians of his generation, who, as Britain’s global power waned, focussed intently on the local. Histories that ignored British imperialism, she suggests, contributed to historical illiteracy as much as histories that defended it did.

 Cancel E.P Thompson! The fucker was sooooo Racist. 

Insularity, though, hardly describes postwar Britain’s other preëminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm.

AJP Taylor was the only celebrity historian when I was a kid. Then it was Simon Schama. Now it is Lucy Worsley. Working class people don't want to be bored shitless by stories about their ancestor's abjectness. 

A secular Jew born in Alexandria and raised in Vienna and Berlin, Hobsbawm, a lifelong Communist, wrote panoramic histories that unfurled the international ramifications of British industrialization.

Which were the same as the international ramifications of American, Japanese, and now Chinese industrialization. 

And empire was an ever-present frame for the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, another co-founder of The New Left Review, who came to England from Jamaica as a Rhodes Scholar, and argued that “the very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up with empire.”

Like American greatness was bound up with not having an Empire coz the thing is a waste of time.

In the nineteen-nineties, practitioners of a “new imperial history” (including Hall’s wife, Catherine, a distinguished feminist historian) picked up this thread and stitched the stories of the British Empire and the British Isles together again.

And nobody noticed or if they did they said rude things. To call someone a 'distinguished feminist historian' is a step above calling her an 'Eminent cat lady'- but only a step.

Historians, whether mythmaking or record-righting, draw on sources that are themselves shaped by historical pressures—

and therefore misleading 

and these, too, played a role in distorting the picture of the imperial past. For while Thompson and his contemporaries were performing their acts of archival recovery, the imperial officers of the British government were doing their best to leave little for posterity to find.

Only secret files were shredded though some were shipped back. This was a good thing. Everybody who was anybody had a file full of false, but also true, reports from informers regarding sexual and financial and all sorts of other crimes. 

On a showery Friday in August, 1947, citizens of the new nation of India crammed into the ceremonial avenues of New Delhi to celebrate their first day of independence. “Jai Hind! Jai Hind! ” they cheered as the new tricolor was run up the flagpole, and a rainbow broke over the clearing sky. But for days beforehand, it was said, a haze of smoke had blanketed the city: the British were burning government documents en masse, lest anything that might compromise His Majesty’s government get into the wrong hands.

'It was said' says it all. The fact is Sardar Patel had already been Home Minister for a year.  

At the empire’s late-Victorian apogee, Rudyard Kipling had enjoined his compatriots to contemplate the ruins of fallen powers with humility: “Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, / Lest we forget—lest we forget!” In the event, an apter motto for Britain’s imperial retreat was “Best we forget.” In one colony after another, as the former Guardian journalist Ian Cobain details in his 2016 book, “The History Thieves,” the British went down in a blaze of documents. A reporter in Cairo during the Suez Crisis recalled standing on the lawn of the British Embassy “ankle deep in the ashes of burning files.” Twelve days before Malaya’s independence, in 1957, British soldiers in Kuala Lumpur loaded trucks with boxes of records to be driven down to Singapore and, a colonial official reported, “destroyed in the Navy’s splendid incinerator.” In 1961, recognizing that “it would perhaps be a little unfortunate to celebrate Independence Day with smoke,” the Colonial Office advised the governor of Trinidad and Tobago to get an early start, and told him that he could also pack files into weighted crates and drop them into the sea. In British Guiana, in 1965, two women hovered over a forty-four-gallon drum on the Government House grounds carrying out what their boss described as “the hot and wearing work” of cremating files. What colonial officials didn’t destroy, they hid. In Nairobi, nine days before Kenya became independent, four packing crates of sensitive papers were hustled into a plane and flown to London Gatwick, where a government official supervised their transfer into storage. These, along with thousands of other colonial files, ended up stashed behind the razor wire of Hanslope Park, in Buckinghamshire, an intelligence facility dedicated to communications security—that is, to keeping secrets.

How very sinister! Secrets should not be kept. I hope responsible historians will make a practice of publishing their Bank passwords and security codes.

“Erasing history” is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures. But taking down a statue isn’t erasing history; it’s revising cultural priorities. Those who pulled down the Colston statue were, in a way, making history—by insisting that public space reflect the values of postcolonial Britain, just as citizens of former colonies have renamed, removed, and reframed imperial symbols. (In the nineteen-fifties, a British diplomat in India discouraged the idea of sending dismantled monuments to England, wondering “what use a series of somewhat weather-beaten and not uniformly first-class statues could be put to in the United Kingdom. I thought we had too many already!”)

The problem here is that Britain is still 86 % White. Corbyn lost for many reasons but one reason was his wokeness. If we say British Greatness derived from Racist rapacity then BAME immigrants voted with their feet in favor of Racist Rapacity. Their descendants are welcome to move somewhere with a nicer History. 

Burning documents: now, that’s erasing history.

No. It is burning documents. It is costly to preserve them. Furthermore, Historians are bound to be mislead by them. The kindest thing would be to give them PhDs for watching the History Channel while playing with their own poo.

By eliminating written evidence of their actions from the archival record, British officials

obeyed orders. They didn't give a toss about future historians because past historians had been useless tossers and it was a safe bet that trend would continue. 

sought to manipulate the kinds of histories that future generations would be able to produce.

But stupid lies work even better than paranoid misreadings of archival material.  

E. P. Thompson, who struggled for years with the “secret state” to get details about his brother’s death during a covert wartime operation, would not have been surprised by the extent of government duplicity. “Reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge,” he said.

Whereas historians are eternally at war with Reason 

The secret stash at Hanslope Park was revealed only in 2011, during a lawsuit brought against the British government by victims of torture in colonial Kenya. (The case was based in part on oral testimony gathered by my Harvard colleague Caroline Elkins.) What came pouring out from the so-called “migrated archives” were records of systematic, wide-ranging, stomach-churning abuse. These accounts flew in the face of the popular British myth that—as a Home Office guide for the U.K. citizenship test currently assures us—“there was, for the most part, an orderly transition from Empire to Commonwealth, with countries being granted their independence.”

This was certainly true of Kenya which is why Europeans and Asians are still quite thick on the ground there. On the other hand, with hindsight, making Idi Amin a serjeant probably wasn't a very good idea. Stomach churning activities have taken off greatly since then. More than secrets, it is what States are initially built upon. 

“The problem with weighing pros and cons is that it presumes there is a point at which the story is over, the accounts are closed, and we can actually tot up the balance,” Satia writes. But the reckoning continues. In 2018, it emerged that dozens of immigrants of the “Windrush generation” (named for a ship, the Empire Windrush, which brought Caribbean migrants to the U.K. in 1948), who had legally settled in Britain between 1948 and 1973, had recently been deported by the Home Office because they couldn’t prove their status. Their landing cards—often the only record of their legal arrival—had been destroyed in a procedural culling of the archives in 2010.

There was no 'procedural culling'. Rather, it was a legal requirement under under the Data Protection Act of 1998. 

In 2002, the privately funded British Empire and Commonwealth Museum,

It got money from the National Lottery 

which aimed to present the imperial age from multiple perspectives, opened in Bristol after more than a decade of planning. In a slant rhyme to the end of empire, it closed its doors six years later and went into liquidation amid sordid reports about the unauthorized sale of loaned objects. The chairman of the museum’s board of trustees said, “I think the time has not yet arrived for the proper story of Empire and Commonwealth to be told.”

Because Historians are shit. 

Satia joins Gopal, Hirsch, and a growing number of historians

Gopal teaches English 

—many of them scholars of color—in trying to change that storyline. A fuller history of empire and its legacies requires, in part, what Gopal calls “a sustained unlearning.”

and telling stupid paranoid lies 

This approach is gaining momentum, at least symbolically. Two days after Colston fell, a crane in London’s Docklands hoisted the effigy of another slave trader off its plinth, as Mayor Sadiq Khan launched a review of all public landmarks. The University of Liverpool announced the renaming of a dormitory commemorating Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was the son of a slaveowner and, in his maiden speech in Parliament, in 1833, had argued in favor of compensating slaveowners for emancipated slaves.

The backlash is gaining greater momentum. At one time voters were prepared to do something about tuition fees. Then, it turned out, the major beef students had was with statues of Dead White Men and Halls of Residence named after great Prime Ministers.  

The governing body of Oriel College, Oxford, voted to remove the controversial statue of Rhodes that, four years earlier, it had affirmed keeping in place, while Imperial College London, endowed by Rhodes’s South African mining cronies, removed its motto, Scientia imperii decus et tutamen: “Scientific knowledge, the crowning glory and safeguard of the empire.”

Ok, that last is funny. 

What shall be learned instead? Satia, taking inspiration from the work of Urdu poets, calls on historians to step away from narratives of moral progress and seek fresh ways to connect the present and the past.

Sir Sayyid Ahmad, Ghalib's good buddy, said that teaching the Liberal Arts in Urdu, rather than English, rots the brain.  

A good example of what that might look like in practice is University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. The center (which Catherine Hall chairs) has compiled a database of every slaveowner in the British colonies at the time of emancipation, in 1833, and has wrinkled the sanctimonious tale of British abolitionism. Its researchers have shown that government payouts to slaveowners following emancipation seeded fortunes inherited by generations of prominent bankers, writers, engineers, and politicians—sustaining slaveowners’ privilege right down to the present. Last year, the University of Glasgow, scrutinizing its own imperial gains, announced a twenty-million-pound project to explore the history of slavery and its consequences, in partnership with the University of the West Indies, whose vice-chancellor, Sir Hilary Beckles, has been at the forefront of the Caribbean reparations movement. A myth countered, a history deepened, and a gesture of recompense. There may never be an end to reckoning, but such beginnings might help historians imagine broader forms of recovery and repair. That, too, could be a kind of progress. 

The kind of progress which causes 'Red Wall' voters to plump for BoJo. Historians are stupid- unless they aren't in which case they are either belles lettrists or econometricians- and stupid pedagogues have 'never imagined broader forms of recovery and repair'. They have merely made fools of themselves. Canceling stuff is by no means a bad thing. We do it all the time. Cancel Grievance Studies by all means. The thing is a nuisance.

Why Historians should be stripped of Citizenship

Some 15 odd years ago, the Home Office issued a handbook for the Citizenship test which contained glaring errors- perhaps because it was written by a Professor of Political Theory. Historians protested and were heeded. The handbook was rewritten.

Now, it appears, the Historical Association has penned another open letter to the Home Office which supplies a novel argument for why they themselves, as Historians, should be stripped of Citizenship of any country under the Sun.

Oddly, this was not their intention. They were simply virtue signalling on the BLM issue. But 'woke' stupidity of this sort creates a disproportionate backlash. Thus, we should get angry with these cretins, not laugh at them simply.

We are historians of Britain and the British Empire and writing in protest at the on-going misrepresentation of slavery and Empire in the “Life in the UK Test”, which is a requirement for applicants for citizenship or settlement (“indefinite leave to remain”) in the United Kingdom.

This is misleading. There are significant exemptions to this requirement. 

The official handbook published by the Home Office is fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false. For example, it states that ‘While slavery was illegal within Britain itself, by the 18th century it was a fully established overseas industry’ (p.42). In fact, whether slavery was legal or illegal within Britain was a matter of debate in the eighteenth century, and many people were held as slaves.

This is misleading. In the United Kingdom, only the Judiciary can decide whether something was or is illegal. English law is based on 'artificial reason'. The stare decisis view is that Slavery was indeed illegal by the Eighteenth Century because, at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, Lord Holt had decided there could be no action of trover re. a black slave because the Common Law did not recognize any difference between blacks and whites. This is not to say that any cognizable offence was committed by holding or coercing slaves. Some types of sexual intercourse, not always considered Rape previously, are known to be wholly abhorrent and illegal now. Yet such rapes occur. Similarly, the existence of slaves did not mean slavery was legal at that time. By contrast, it was indeed a flourishing and wholly legal industry overseas by reason of positive law.  Somerset's case decided that no positive law had established slavery on this soil in the manner that it existed overseas. Academics may dispute this but if they do, they will be forced to concede that, during the course of the Seventeenth Century, slavery of the overseas type could have been legal for White English people as well. In other words, ambiguity in the Law cuts both ways.

Some people from Africa enslaved some people from Britain during the Seventeenth Century. Such cases declined as the power of the Royal Navy outmatched that of the Corsairs. Still, the fact remains, if some Historians want to dwell on one aspect of that repugnant trade for a gesture political purpose, others will want to air the other side's grievance. That way madness lies.

The handbook is full of dates and numbers but does not give the number of people transported as slaves on British ships (over 3 million);

It also does not tell us the percentage of members of the Historical Association who are stupid liars. The figure may be less than 100 per cent because some of them may be in a coma.

nor does it mention that any of them died. It also states that ‘by the second part of the 20th century, there was, for the most part, an orderly transition from Empire to Commonwealth, with countries being granted their independence’ (p.51).

This is true. France, Holland and Portugal's transitions were far more violent. In Vietnam, Indonesia, Angola etc, bloody wars were fought before the Imperial power agreed to hand over power. Britain's one major 'colonial war' was against the Boers. But they were White, not Black. Subsequently, the Boers were friends of the British though they left the Commonwealth in 1960 because India and other 'New Commonwealth' objected to admitting the Apartheid Republic. Only one ex-colony refused to join the Commonwealth- Burma, now known as Myanmar. But its subsequent trajectory was far from salutary.

In fact, decolonisation was not an ‘orderly’ but an often violent process, not only in India

But the Indian view is that the transfer of Power, as opposed to what the Muslim League did with that power, was orderly and non-violent. India still has violent confrontations with its Muslim neighbor. It may once have been fashionable to blame everything on the Brits, but the fact is Britain too feels it has to lock up some Muslims from that region because they keep stabbing innocent people for some obscure reason.

 Had the transfer of power not been so amicable, India would scarcely have remained in the Commonwealth.  Furthermore, Indians consider Mahatma Gandhi to be the leader of the Independence Movement. Are these stupid, lying, Historians suggesting the man was a terrorist or a guerilla leader?

but also in the many so-called “emergencies” such as the Mau-Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960).

Where else in British Africa was there anything similar? Anyway, the UK remained good friends with Kenya. Thus the actual hand over of power was amicable and orderly. Why not mention the Malaysian or Cypriot Emergencies? The fact is Malaysia welcomed Britain's role in putting down the Reds. Cypriots now understand that 'Enosis' was not possible.

We call for an immediate official review of the history chapter.

I call for the immediate disbandment of the Historical Association. They are a bunch of stupid liars.

People in the colonies and people of colour in the UK are nowhere actors in this official history.

This is not an official history. It is a handbook for a purpose which is not historiographical. These fools are telling a blatant lie.

The handbook promotes the misleading view that the Empire came to an end simply because the British decided it was the right thing to do.

Independence was granted to colonies by elected British Governments which considered this was the right thing to do. It is false to say that any country was granted independence, as opposed to unilaterally declaring independence, because the British people, at the time, felt it was the wrong thing to do. On the contrary, the sentiment was that the thing should have been done sooner.

Similarly, the abolition of slavery is treated as a British achievement, in which enslaved people themselves played no part.

 Since British parliament passed laws in this regard without any outside pressure, these laws are indeed a British achievement. It is not the case that enslaved people had any influence over legislative deliberations or the outcome of Parliamentary voting procedures.

The book is equally silent about colonial protests, uprisings and independence movements.

Just as it is silent about the degree of cretinism of the Historical Association.

Applicants are expected to learn about more than two hundred individuals.

But do so after about 10 hours of preparation.

The only individual of colonial origin named in the book is Sake Dean Mohamet who co-founded England’s first curry house in 1810.

I found the name of Mary Seacole when I took the test.

The pages on the British Empire end with a celebration of Rudyard Kipling.

He is mentioned after Sake Dean & Isambard Brunel. Why? Because he won the Nobel Prize and a poem of his, which is reproduced, has often been voted the Nation's favorite.
This is perfectly reasonable. Many British people genuinely like and can recite portions of Kipling's poetry. But so can many Indians and Pakistanis.

The “Life in the UK Test” is neither a trivial quiz

It is a multiple choice test which is easy to pass if you have basic comprehension and memory retention skills. The content is not challenging or controversial.

nor an optional discussion point. It is an official requirement

to which there are exceptions

in the application for settlement or citizenship and provides essential information about the United Kingdom.

Some of the information may be 'essential' but some isn't. No claim is made that information provided is exhaustive. 

The handbook ‘has been approved by ministers and has official status.’

As what? The answer is it is a text which has been approved for the purpose of helping people demonstrate that they meet a requirement, unless they are entitled to an exemption, such that they may gain Citizenship or Indefinite Leave to Remain.

It is not the case that the handbook has 'official status' for any other purpose- e.g. giving comprehensive information of a type essential to live in the UK. If such were the case, why are British people not being supplied with it? How on earth have they been managing to exist for thousands of years without its invaluable guidance? 

It requires applicants to remember and repeat the information it contains, which is, then, tested in an official multiple choice test.

So, it makes it easy for anyone of average intelligence who can comprehend English to pass the text with a minimum of time consuming preparation. Surely, that's a good thing- if you think immigration is a good thing? The alternative to having a jejune handbook is to have something scholarly or purely polemical. If the thing is scholarly, it discriminates against people who aren't scholars. If it is polemical, it would be a tool of the party in power to push forward its ideology and to score off against its rivals. Thus the correct answer to 'Winston Churchill is famous because'
1) He was a war monger who ground down the faces of the poor
2) He perfected a technique of Gramscian hegemony involving, as Deleuze & Guatarri, might put it a Molar deterritorialization of the Hegelian 'beautiful soul' within a context of Marcusian repressive desublimation as Keynesian chrematistics.

The examination is ‘based on ALL parts of the handbook’, which includes the parts mentioned above.

Though if you skip the history part, because of a conscientious objection, you can still pass.

This publication and its official view of British history is not a left over from the distant past.

The Historians Association claim that there is an official view of British History. This is a stupid lie.

It is a recent innovation, and some of its most misleading passages date only from the third edition published by the Home Office in 2013 which, with minor updates, remains the official text to this day.

There are no misleading passages. It is the Association's letter which is based on stupid lies.

This official, mandatory version of history is a step backwards in historical knowledge and understanding.

Are these cretins saying that people like myself, who took the test, were  indoctrinated in an 'official' and 'mandatory' version of history? How come none of us noticed? The fact is, you read the handbook and then take a few sample tests. If your English comprehension is good, you start passing the test within a few hours. But you are no more indoctrinated in British history than you are in British Law or Geography or anything else.

Historical knowledge is and should be an essential part of citizenship.

No. People with mental impairments must not lose their 'right to have rights'. The Historical Association may have a vested interest in getting 'jobs for the boys' but their members are, on the evidence of this letter, comparable to the Nazis in their contempt for mentally disabled people.

The fact is, Historical knowledge is often inversely related to Civic Sense. Often,  such knowledge is worthless. It makes people stupider than they need be.

Historical falsehood and misrepresentation, however, should not.

Should these stupid liars be stripped of their citizenship for this utterly Fascist suggestion? No. They teach, or were taught, a shite subject. All we ask of them they is not to masturbate in public.

In 2019, 125,346 individuals applied for naturalisation; almost all will have had to pass the test before applying. Many thousands more took the test in order to settle here. For many, it will have been their introduction to British history.

No. Their decision to seek British citizenship is likely to have arisen from prior knowledge of Britain's long history as a place where people like themselves had done well.

For applicants from former colonies with knowledge of imperial violence, this account is offensive.

I know many who took the test, as I did myself. None reported any such reaction. On the other hand, people with a genuine grudge against this country, because of things which happened long ago, are likely to consider the suggestion that they want to visit, or settle in, this country highly offensive.  If your ancestors were insulted and injured by the British, why would you want to go there and pay taxes and contribute to the prosperity and security of the descendants of those evil people?

For those from outside the former Empire without prior education in history, the official handbook creates a distorted view of the British past.

Whereas, if the Handbook said 'Britain tortured and killed and robbed and enslaved Brown and Black people. The British have, historically, shown repugnance and disdain for those of darker skin'- would these Historians be happy? Perhaps. But the White Supremacists would be happier still. If they wish to insult a new citizen on the grounds of color, they can say 'you knew what you were signing up for. You read the handbook. +Historically this is a Racist country. Deal with it.'

For those with a basic knowledge of history, whatever their background, it puts them in the invidious position of being obliged to read, remember and repeat a version of the past which is false.

But if colored people accept the Historians' view of what is true, they should feel ashamed of themselves for betraying their own insulted and injured ancestors simply so as to get a better material standard of life in a historically Racist country.

For British citizens in general, the official history perpetuates a misleading view of how we came to be who we are.

But British citizens are not obliged to read that handbook.

The aim of the official handbook is to promote tolerance and fairness and facilitate integration.

Indeed. The fear was that some immigrants were intolerant, unfair in their behavior, and did not want to integrate. This handbook is meant to make applicants for citizenship or settlement more aware of what this country expects of them. Naturalization can be stripped. Indefinite leave can be cancelled. The cost of misbehavior falls upon the applicant.

In its current version, the historical pages do the opposite

There is no evidence of this. Many people like me, permanently domiciled in the UK, took Citizenship simply as a matter of convenience because we were frequent travellers to an EU state.  It is not the case that, after reading the 'historical pages', we became less tolerant or opposed to fairness or hostile to integration. Nor did, by some occult manner, the rest of the British population which did not read that Handbook at all.

As historians we believe in debate, but interpretations of the past have to be based on facts.

So do interpretations of the present. These Historians haven't just told stupid lies about the past, they are telling stupid lies about there being 'an official, mandatory' version of British History. They are lying about the effect this handbook has had on those, like me, who read it. They are trying to stir up trouble where no trouble exists. Shame on them!

The distortion of the past is a challenge to democratic culture and liberal values.

No it isn't. We don't give a toss about these stupid liars. Our culture and values can't be damaged by shitheads teaching a cretinous subject.

Historical misrepresentation should not be officially sponsored by the state.

No, indeed! Leave it to this bunch of cretins.

We, therefore, urge the Home Office to review the “Life in the UK Test” as a matter of urgency. Until the history chapter has been corrected and rewritten, it should be formally withdrawn from the test.

No doubt, there are people in the current administration who will welcome the chance to make this portion of the test much, much, harder. It seems the useless idiots of the Historical Association do have some use value after all- but only to bigots. What they may not realize is, if the test gets harder, then people who studied History will fail it while STEM subject mavens will breeze through just with a little cramming.