The great Australian poet Les Murray once asked, Where will we hold Australia, we who have no other country? Not indigenous, merely born here. As Murray further lamented, the elite that rules unsullied by elections has no use for us. Of all people the British are fast having to ask themselves the same question.
You’d think that what it is to be British would be clear to the British, at least, which is indeed the whole theme of Tom Sharpe’s 1975 satire, Blott on the Landscape. The titular Blott, a former German soldier who adopted Britain as his new home, struggles with understanding the essence of Englishness.
Increasingly, thanks to the elite who rule unsullied by elections, the English are likewise being alienated from their own indigenous lands.
Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, 83 per cent of schools have made changes to ‘diversify’ or ‘decolonise’ their curriculums in recent years. In many cases, this shake-up has brought politicised and one-sided narratives into schools. Inaccurate and poor-quality teaching resources are being used to give students a mistaken impression of the past.
During research for Policy Exchange’s report, Lessons from the Past, we found children being taught the ahistorical claim that Stonehenge was built by black people. Elsewhere, pupils learn radical and contested interpretations of the past: such as that the West African kingdoms, which sold other Africans to European slavers, were unaware of their role in the global slave trade. In one case, a membership organisation for subject experts has produced teaching resources describing the genital mutilation of slaves in ancient Rome as an early form of ‘gender transition’.
This is foisted on schools by radical Marxist bureaucrats and activists under the rubric of ‘decolonisation’. Which is not only arrant bullshit, it’s also a vicious first step on the road to racist perdition. If you haven’t stopped to wonder what the end-goal of ‘decolonisation’ actually is, simply look back to October 7, 2023. The mediaeval brutalities of Hamas were celebrated, literally, as the apotheosis of ‘decolonisation’.
‘Decolonisation’, then, far from a benign process, is in reality the violent expunging of all things ‘white’. It’s as clear a call to genocide as Hamas’ charter, which might explain for you the left’s fondness for the mediaeval racism, homophobia and misogyny of Islam.
So it is that British schoolchildren are bombarded with such nonsensical propaganda as Brilliant Black British History. Written, not by an indigenous Briton, nor even a British-born non-indigene, but a Nigerian immigrant. This lying garbage, as risible as Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (likewise foisted on Australian schoolchildren), claims among other things that ‘the first Britons were Black’. This is arrant nonsense. That the earliest Britons were ‘dark-skinned’ is hardly a matter of dispute, but what does ‘dark-skinned’ actually mean? It means that the earliest Britons were likely olive-tan skinned, much like Mediterranean peoples today. They certainly weren’t ‘Black’, which, note capitalisation, means negroid, sub-Saharan Africans.
Curioser is the claim that “some of the Roman soldiers who invaded and ruled Britain were Black, too”. Again, this bends and distorts history ridiculously. Certainly, some of the Roman soldiery were African, but those would mostly have been Semitic North Africans, where Rome had extensive colonies. Negroid, sub-Saharan Blacks would have been much rarer. Especially in the ruling class of Rome: none of the Roman governors of Britain were black (a handful were from Roman North Africa, but were Berber or Punic in origin: which is to say, not ‘Black’).
In any case, it’s rather an own goal to posit ‘Blacks’ as ‘invaders’ of Britain.
Another own goal was ‘comedian’ Nish Kumar’s TV special that purported to list things that aren’t really British. Tea, for instance. Because, Kumar claimed, tea comes from India. Leaving aside that tea actually comes from China, it raises the curious question: if tea isn’t British because it originated from India, what does that say about someone living in Britain called ‘Nish Kumar’?
Would Kumar argue that anime isn’t really Japanese, because the style originated when Osamu Tezuka created the manga adaptation of Disney’s Bambi, in 1951 (itself adapted from a German novel)?
We all know the answer: all this ‘decolonisation’ garbage only ever works one way – against white people. The gambit behind claiming Britain as ‘Black’ is to erase whites from their own history: to make whites fully nothing, as Les Murray wrote.
