Congratulations to President Assad and all the people of Syria who voted for him in 2021

5/27/21, “Syrian President Bashar Assad wins re-election with 95.1% of votes,” rt.com

“President Bashar Assad has been reelected to a fourth term with over 95% of the votes cast, defeating two challengers – including a former senior official of a rebel coalition, Syrian authorities have announced.

Turnout in Wednesday’s election was 78%, with Assad winning over 13 million votes, according to Hammouda Sabbagh, speaker of the Syrian legislature.

Mahmoud Ahmad Marei, who previously served as secretary-general of the rebel coalition National Front for the Liberation of Syria, received some 470,276 votes, or 3.1%, while Abdullah Sallum Abdullah of the Socialist Unionist Party came in third with about 213,968 votes, or 1.5%….

Syria had invited international election observers from Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and Armenia.”

Images from Reuters, 5/27/21, “Syria’s Assad wins 4th term with 95% of vote, in election the West calls fraudulent,” Reuters

 

 

 

 

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Caribbean slave colonies were so profitable they became hub of the British Empire. 70% of the Empire’s total income from 1750-1780 came from taxes on goods from its slave colonies

“Slave Trade was the richest part of Britain’s trade in the 18th century….The sugar colonies were Britain’s most valuable colonies….Between 1750 and 1780, about 70% of the [UK] government’s total income came from taxes on goods from its colonies.…The Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire.…Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves” over a period 245 years beginning in 1562 during the reign of Elizabeth 1.”…

“British Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade," The Abolition Project

[Image: Slate map shows heavy flow of slaves from Africa to Caribbean in 1700s, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” Slate, posted on You Tube, 8/12/2019]

“For well over 300 years, European countries forced Africans onto slave ships and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean….

Captain John Hawkins made the first known English slaving voyage to Africa, in 1562, in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Hawkins made three such journeys over a period of six years. He captured over 1200 Africans and sold them as goods in the Spanish colonies in the [North and South] Americas….

Historian, Professor David Richardson, has calculated that British ships carried 3.4 million or more enslaved Africans to the [North and South] Americas….

Estimates, based on records of voyages in the archives of port customs and maritime insurance records, put the total number of African slaves  transported by European traders, to at least 12 million people….

Barbados became the first British settlement in the Caribbean in 1625 and the British took control of Jamaica in 1655.

The establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672 formalised the Slave Trade under a royal charter and gave a monopoly to the port of London. The ports of Bristol and Liverpool, in particular, lobbied to have the charter changed and, in 1698, the monopoly was taken away.

British involvement expanded rapidly in response to the demand for labour to cultivate sugar in Barbados and other British West Indian islands. In the 1660s, the number of slaves taken from Africa in British ships averaged 6,700 per year. By the 1760s, Britain was the foremost European country engaged in the Slave Trade.”…

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Added: On a British slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1791, an African slave girl was hung by one ankle and whipped to death as depicted in copyrighted image.

British slave ship Recovery was owned by Bristol merchants. In 1791 an enslaved African girl was whipped to death for refusing to dance naked on the deck of the ship. At right, a sailor is seen suspending the African girl by her ankle from a rope over a pulley. The ship’s captain, John Kimber, left, holds a whip. Back in England, Captain Timber was tried for murder but acquitted. He was merely denounced before the House of Commons over the alleged incident….Image attributed to Isaac Cruikshank.…”Cruikshank’s depiction of the alleged murder of a slave girl by John Kimber, published April 10, 1792.“…”This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3g06204.”…Image is “Copyright The British Museum.”

“Description: The Abolition of the Slave Trade, showing Captain John Kimber of Bristol flogging a slave girl because she was unwell and could not eat, by Isaac Cruikshank, 1792.

Copyright The British Museum

Creator: Isaac Cruikshank

Date: 1792, Copyright: Copyright British Museum”

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Added: “On the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the island of Grenada in the Caribbean, Kimber had punished a female slave.” In 1792 Kimber was tried as tried and found not guilty of murdering the slave girl.

 

 

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Author of 4/13/21 letter to fellow Brearley parents about teaching of pro-racism “critical race theory” has received thousands of supportive emails from parents, teachers, and concerned citizens across the country, but he was shocked to learn how entrenched it is in all kinds of schools

May 25, 2021, “Parent tells Tucker he was ‘excommunicated’ from school after viral letter," You tube, Fox News

“Andrew Gutmann tells ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ since pushing back on critical race theory [taught at NY City’s Brearley School] he has received [thousands of] notes from parents and teachers.” [Text of Mr. Gutmann’s 4/13/21 letter is posted below].

At 2:05: Mr. Gutmann: “Thousands of emails from parents, and teachers, and grandparents, and concerned citizens from all over the country. Overwhelmingly supportive which is great, but the flip side of that is I had no idea how entrenched and widespread this issue of critical race theory was across the country, all over. I knew it was in New York City schools, I knew it was in some California schools, but I had no idea how quickly this had spread to schools-public, private, even religious schools, all over. This is an enormous problem, and I think we have to fight this much harder.”…

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Added: Entire text of Mr. Gutmann’s April 13, 2021, letter to Brearley parents:

Four sentences about Brearley, by Bari Weiss:

“If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school [for 7 years] since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week.”…

Following is Mr. Gutmann’s 15 paragraph letter: (From parag. 12): “We have today in our country, from both political parties, and at all levels of government, the most unwise and unvirtuous leaders in our nation’s history.“…

“April 13, 2021

Dear Fellow Brearley Parents, 

Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child’s education is irreparable.

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley’s antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.

I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died. 

I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country’s history and adds no understanding to any of today’s societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.

I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley’s oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.

I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism. 

I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley’s caliber. 

I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors. 

l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests. 

I object to, as we have been told time and time again over the past year, that the school’s first priority is the safety of our children. For goodness sake, Brearley is a school, not a hospital! The number one priority of a school has always been, and always will be, education. Brearley’s misguided priorities exemplify both the safety culture and “cover-your-ass” culture that together have proved so toxic to our society and have so damaged the mental health and resiliency of two generations of children, and counting.

I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive (something that has already happened in my daughter’s 4th grade class). I object to the lowering of standards for the admission of students and for the hiring of teachers. I object to the erosion of rigor in classwork and the escalation of grade inflation. Any parent with eyes open can foresee these inevitabilities should antiracism initiatives be allowed to persist.

We have today in our country, from both political parties, and at all levels of government, the most unwise and unvirtuous leaders in our nation’s history. Schools like Brearley are supposed to be the training grounds for those leaders. Our nation will not survive a generation of leadership even more poorly educated than we have now, nor will we survive a generation of students taught to hate its own country and despise its history. 

Lastly, I object, with as strong a sentiment as possible, that Brearley has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think. I object that the school is now fostering an environment where our daughters, and our daughters’ teachers, are afraid to speak their minds in class for fear of “consequences.” I object that Brearley is trying to usurp the role of parents in teaching morality, and bullying parents to adopt that false morality at home. I object that Brearley is fostering a divisive community where families of different races, which until recently were part of the same community, are now segregated into two. These are the reasons why we can no longer send our daughter to Brearley.

Over the past several months, I have personally spoken to many Brearley parents as well as parents of children at peer institutions. It is abundantly clear that the majority of parents believe that Brearley’s antiracism policies are misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous. Many believe, as I do, that these policies will ultimately destroy what was until recently, a wonderful educational institution. But as I am sure will come as no surprise to you, given the insidious cancel culture that has of late permeated our society, most parents are too fearful to speak up. 

But speak up you must. There is strength in numbers and I assure you, the numbers are there. Contact the administration and the Board of Trustees and demand an end to the destructive and anti-intellectual claptrap known as antiracism. And if changes are not forthcoming then demand new leadership. For the sake of our community, our city, our country and most of all, our children, silence is no longer an option. 

Respectfully,

Andrew Gutmann”

 

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The Constitution did nothing to protect us from monarchs after all. Entire US political class simply assumed privileges of a monarchy and installed a two tier justice system-Angelo Codevilla, American Greatness

“I would like to see January 6th burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11 because it was that scale of a shock to the system.” 5/23/21, George Will….“Trials for the events of January 6 are not to begin until at least some nine months after the fact, on no particular schedule. During this lengthy and indeterminate time, the accused are held in solitary confinement under conditions harsher than most murderers ever experience….The oligarchy itself committed the only unlawful acts of interference during the 2020 election.”

May 20, 2021, “Regime vs. Regime," Angelo Codevilla

[Image, 5/31/2020, In Pittsburgh, Pa., dozens of businesses and shops are left cleaning up after rioting and looting, wpxi.com, Pittsburgh, Pa.]

“We who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country.”

…….

“The attempt of America’s ruling class to convict 455 persons of “armed insurrection”—i.e. of waging war against the United States, a species of treason—for protesting insufficient scrutiny of the 2020 election on January 6 in the Capitol, while at the same time it excuses and even cheers the burning and looting of courthouses, police stations, and downtowns all over America, is not the exercise of a “double standard.”

The people in and out of government who do this are not corrupt. Instead, acting as part of the regime–the oligarchy–they are replacing the American republic and waging war to crush its remains.

The sooner Americans realize that we are being governed by people at war with our Constitution and contemptuous of ourselves, the sooner those people may be treated as the enemies they are.

In the Washington Post, the Justice Department explained why the words of its indictments of those it claims trespassed on the Capitol will not result in the severe prison sentences they imply. Those words try to fit acts prima facie of mostly peaceful protest into the [at least 75 Republican and] Democratic Party’s and associated oligarchy’s narrative of

“armed insurrection

against our democracy.”

But in the Post story these “legal experts” mention regretfully that, their best efforts notwithstanding, what remains of the U.S. legal system cannot wholly erase the fact that “trespassing is still only trespassing, even in the U.S. Capitol,” and that “a misdemeanor is still only a misdemeanor.” Drat, still!

Nevertheless, these prosecutors and friendly experts fill most of the article with how they

combine unlimited pretrial detention under harsh circumstances and limitation of legal assistance to press the accused

to accept maximum penalties and

to forgo bringing cases to juries.

The Narrative vs. Reality 

Keeping evaluation of cases within the administrative-judicial system—

out of the hands of the accused’s peers—

is an essential part of suppressing the reality of what happened and did not happen on January 6. Forcing the accused to plead guilty to charges formulated according to the narrative

that white supremacist Americans unlawfully obstructed the 2020 election

is essential to establishing the validity of that fraudulent political claim. 

That, in turn, is an essential weapon in the oligarchy’s attack on the American republic and its supporters. Reality is the opposite: the oligarchy itself committed the only unlawful acts of interference during the 2020 election. Anyone looking for evidence of oligarchic interference may begin with Time magazine’s February 4 story, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” and continue to the ongoing campaigns to thwart audits of vote counts.

Today’s Justice Department, acting as part and parcel of the oligarchy that calls itself

“our democracy”

has pushed partisanship to the point of war by one regime in favor of another. Inevitably, this has created the horrid reality of political prisoners among us—people who are being punished for supporting the republic against the oligarchy. When regimes war on each other, whose side you are on becomes the practical definition of justice.

The following shows that the oligarchy’s system of justice consists precisely of negating what the U.S. Constitution defines as right. The founders passed the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, precisely to place the judicial power’s capacity to hurt individuals ultimately and firmly in the hands of the people. They did it to prevent those in power from using that power to cow opposition and force support.

But that is exactly what the regime that calls itself

“our democracy”

is doing.

Consider: The Fourth Amendment prohibits officials from searching a person or his home and papers without prior consent or a legal order. A warrant must be based on probable cause, or reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior. It must also be very specific in describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The Fourth Amendment is intended not just to prevent bothersome “fishing expeditions” into innocent matters. It also means to outlaw using investigations themselves as a form of punishment and intimidation.

And yet first the Justice Department, and now regime-friendly judges, have used and are using investigations to draw

a dragnet through American society

to embarrass, punish, and chill countless persons

who are or may be opposed to the oligarchy’s desires. Having been at the Capitol on January 6, or merely in Washington, D.C., has been enough to earn a SWAT team’s intrusion and trashing of one’s home. Other departments of government including the armed forces, plus any number of corporations, examine social media posts for heterodox views. Though punishment does not always result, spreading fear always does. Which is the main point.

Political Power vs. Constitutional Rights

The Fifth Amendment’s prohibition of compulsory self-incrimination was meant to prevent officials from pressuring suspects into admitting guilt for crimes they did not commit. Guilt and innocence were supposed to be determined at trial. But the modern American justice system relies almost entirely on over-charging offenses and then discounting them to obtain a guilty plea—the truth of what really happened be damned. This has placed dictatorial discretion in officials’ hands, resulting in laxity for socio-political favorites and oppression for those out of favor. 

Misuse of the plea bargain system is playing a major role in the oligarchy’s attack on the republic because the oligarchs are combining it with neglect of the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, to hear and question witnesses, and to be defended by a lawyer.

Trials for the events of January 6 are not to begin until at least some nine months after the fact, on no particular schedule. During this lengthy and indeterminate time, the accused are held in solitary confinement under conditions harsher than most murderers ever experience. Their lives have already been ruined. And for what? The pressure on them is enormous to sign anything and at least set a date by which their nightmare will end.

This is possible because the Justice Department also acts in defiance of the Eighth Amendment, which protects against excessive bail or fines. The Constitution’s framers assumed that all but a few dangerous defendants would be granted bail—money pledged in exchange for the promise to appear for trial. Overheated rhetoric aside, none of the persons arrested in connection with January 6 actually injured anyone, or have a history of injuring anyone. The allegation that they are dangerous is purely a political one, and the purpose of denying them bail is all too obviously to pressure them to support a political narrative and to warn the oligarchy’s potential opponents of what the administrative system has in store for them. 

Deny Their Legitimacy

The Eighth Amendment also forbids cruel or unusual punishment. What might that be for trespassing? What is cruel or unusual punishment for disagreeing with the socio-political agenda of powerful people?

The Bill of Rights has long since applied to the states. Erasing the distinction between what had been public and private, between the powers of those in political office and those of corporations, institutions, etc., is oligarchy’s essence. 

Arguably, the imposition of very cruel penalties on persons out of step with people and institutions that are part of the ruling oligarchy is contemporary America’s most prominent feature. These include deletion of careers and livelihoods, public imputations of racism, etc. They amount to something like outlawry.

And for what, specifically? Loud and clear is the ruling narrative:

“our democracy”

is under armed assault by hordes of white supremacists who lurk throughout society, ready to unleash another, deadlier version of January 6. But the reality is that “trespassing is still only trespassing.”…

The oligarchs are not fooling around. Appealing to the Constitution can only increase their determination to bury its remnants under the administrative powers it creates or enhances. This is a regime alien and inimical to ours.

That is good as well as bad news. The good aspect of it is that we who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country. Nor can we persuade them about right and wrong. If we are to avoid becoming the oligarchy’s mere subjects we can and must treat them as the enemies they are: deny their legitimacy, and rebuild the republic amongst those of us who love it.”

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“Angelo M. Codevilla is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace (Hoover Institution Press, 2014).”

 

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British Empire was single biggest buyer of African slaves in late 18th-early 19th century, bought new African slaves to make them soldiers in West Indies regiments to protect its Caribbean sugar plantation profits

"By the end of the 18th century, the British army was the single biggest purchaser of slaves." (at 1:50 on video, Forces News). Added: “In the 1790s the British Government was the largest purchaser of captured Africans. Between 1795-1808 (the very eve of abolition) they paid for 13,400 Africans for West India regiments."

"To protect Britain's lucrative sugar plantations on the islands, 13,400 African slaves were purchased for its West India Regiments between 1795 and 1807. "White soldiers, unused to the region's climate, regularly fell ill, leaving garrisons dangerously undermanned. This led to the decision to buy African slaves to fill those gaps."

10/29/2020, "West India Regiments: The Story Of Slavery In The Army" forces.net, R. Laydon

"Estimates suggest around 13,400 slaves were purchased for the West India Regiments between the years 1795 and 1807.

Towards the end of the 18th century, the British Army was charged with protecting new and lucrative interests in the Caribbean.

The islands of Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago became known as the British West Indies, known for their sugar plantations....

White soldiers, unused to the region's climate, regularly fell ill, leaving garrisons dangerously undermanned.

This led to the decision to buy African slaves to fill those gaps.

When the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 was passed, as many as 50% of Army regiments in the Caribbean included slaves.

The National Army Museum's archive in London holds official documents containing details about the formation of the West India Regiments.

"The records available tell us that the [British] Army purchased about 13,400 slaves for these regiments [between 1795 and 1807] at the cost around £1 million," says Jasdeep Singh, the Research Curator at the National Army Museum.

"Looking at various years, it averages around £70 for the cost of one single slave.

"What the British soldiers didn't realise is that there were mosquitos carrying around Yellow Fever and a variety of tropical diseases.

"From Britain, there were policies sent,...'Here are some supplies, here are some funds, go and purchase new Africans'--so purchase Africans from Africa, as slaves, and then recruit them into the West India Regiments."...

In the years after the slave trade was abolished, the role of those soldiers changed from having to protect colonial assets, to serving overseas....

After first being raised in 1795 to support Britain's presence in the Caribbean, the West India Regiments remained a part of the Army until 1927, and at one point was comprised of 12 different regiments.

The unit was briefly re-formed in 1958, before being permanently disbanded four years later."...images above from forces.net

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Second source:

2016, “A Voyage around the Slave Ports of Britain,” Nigel Pocock

[Image: West Indies]

“In the 1790s the British Government was the largest purchaser of captured Africans. Between 1795-1808 (the very eve of abolition) they paid for 13,400 Africans for West India regiments, at the then enormous cost of £925,000. These deals were concealed in an unaudited account called ‘Army Extraordinaries’. In 1806 the Government negotiated (with Dawson of Liverpool) for between 2,000--4,000 captured Africans ‘...of the tribes of the [African] Gold Coast...before the act [sic] takes effect.’ In the 12 months before the Abolition Act took effect (ending 1st March, 1808), the British Government purchased 1,000 Africans for the military....

Around 50-60 MPs had holdings in the West Indies, or commercial interests there in the 1820s. The West India lobby was the most powerful single interest group in the [House of] commons. Sir Thomas Johnson, MP, mayor of Liverpool, was partly responsible for one of the first slave ships, the ironically named Blessing, to leave his city.

[Image: African slaves on British ship, schoolhistory.org.uk]

In 1788, there were more than 60 West India merchants in the [House of]  Commons, mostly merchants in London.

[The term “West India merchants” is a UK euphemism for "slave traders."]

“Britain was unique among the slaving nations, in that policy was the direct result of Parliament, and especially the Board of Trade.

“Parliament authorised the West India Dock Company. The chairman was George Hibbert, a slave merchant, who was also the driving force behind the West India Docks."...

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Third source: Britain bought African slaves to fight in Caribbean wars against France, 1795-1807:

"Slave or Freedman: The Question of the Legal Status of the British West India Soldier, 1795-1807" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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800,000 African slaves on British owned Caribbean sugar plantations were legal property of 46,000 British citizens as of 1833-UK Guardian, 7/13/2015

UK’s “Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners.…The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.”

7/13/2015, “The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed," UK Guardian, David Olusoga

“A new BBC documentary tells how a trove of documents lays bare the names of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell

"Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean....

That geographic distance made it possible for slavery to be largely airbrushed out of British history, following the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Many of us today have a more vivid image of American slavery than we have of life as it was for British-owned slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean. The word slavery is more likely to conjure up images of Alabama cotton fields and whitewashed plantation houses, of Roots, Gone With The Wind and 12 Years A Slave, than images of Jamaica or Barbados in the 18th century. This is not an accident….

Image: Bodies of African slaves stowed in the holds of UK African slave ships were packed like sardines. Photograph: Christopher Jones/Bristol Museum

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property.” The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20m the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn.

The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission….

The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”,

while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term

“West India planter.”

Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether.

(“A print shows African captives being taken on board a slave ship. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty”)

The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story.” If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story. William Wilberforce and the abolitionist crusade, first against the slave trade and then slavery itself, has become

a figleaf behind which the larger, longer and darker history of

slavery has been concealed.

It is still the case that Wilberforce remains the only household name of a history that begins during the reign of Elizabeth I and ends in the 1830s. There is

no slave trader or slave owner, and certainly no enslaved person, who can compete with Wilberforce when it comes to name recognition.

Little surprise then that when, in 2007, we marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was Amazing Grace, a Wilberforce biopic.

George Orwell once likened Britain to a wealthy family that maintains a guilty silence about the sources of its wealth. Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, had seen that conspiracy of silence at close quarters. His father, Richard W Blair, was a civil servant who oversaw the production of opium on plantations near the Indian-Nepalese border and supervised the export of that lethal crop to China.The department for which the elder Blair worked was called, unashamedly, the opium department. However, the Blair family fortune – which had been largely squandered by the time Eric was born – stemmed from their investments in plantations far from India.

The Blair name is one of thousands that appear in a collection of documents held at the National Archives in Kew that have the potential to do to Britain what the hackers of WikiLeaks and the researchers of PBS did to Affleck. The T71 files consist of 1,631 volumes of leather-bound ledgers and neatly tied bundles of letters that have lain in the archives for 180 years, for the most part unexamined. They are the records and the correspondence of the Slave Compensation Commission….

The records of the Slave Compensation Commission are an unintended byproduct of the scheme. They represent a near complete census of British slavery as it was on 1 August, 1834, the day the system ended. For that one day we have a full list of Britain’s slave owners. All of them. The T71s tell us how many slaves each of them owned, where those slaves lived and toiled, and how much compensation the owners received for them. Although the existence of the T71s was never a secret, it was not until 2010 that a team from University College London began to systematically analyse them. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, which is still continuing, is led by Professor Catherine Hall and Dr Nick Draper, and the picture of slave ownership that has emerged from their work is not what anyone was expecting.

The large slave owners, the men of the “West India interest”, who owned huge estates from which they drew vast fortunes, appear in the files of the commission. The man who received the most money from the state was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. He was paid £106,769 in compensation for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations, the modern equivalent of about £80m. Given such an investment, it is perhaps not surprising that William Gladstone’s maiden speech in parliament was in defence of slavery.

The records show that for the 218 men and women he regarded as his property, Charles Blair, the great-grandfather of George Orwell,was paid the more modest sum of £4,442 – the modern equivalent of about £3m. There are other famous names hidden within the records. Ancestors of the

novelist Graham Greene,

the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and

the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott

all received compensation for slaves. As did a distant ancestor of David Cameron.

But what is most significant is the revelation of the smaller-scale slave owners.

Slave ownership, it appears, was far more common than has previously been presumed. Many of these middle-class slave owners had just a few slaves, possessed no land in the Caribbean and rented their slaves out to landowners, in work gangs. These bit-players were home county vicars, iron manufacturers from the Midlands and lots and lots of widows. About 40% of the slave owners living in the colonies were women. Then, as now, women tended to outlive their husbands and simply inherited human property through their partner’s wills.

The geographic spread of the slave owners who were resident in Britain in 1834 was almost as unexpected as the gender breakdown. Slavery was once thought of as an activity largely limited to the ports from which the ships of the triangular trade set sail; Bristol, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. Yet there were slave owners across the country, from Cornwall to the Orkneys. In proportion to population, the highest rates of slave ownership are found in Scotland.

The T71 files have been converted into an online database; a free, publicly available resource.

During the production of a documentary series about Britain’s slave owners for the BBC, made in partnership with UCL, all of my colleagues who learned of the existence of the database found themselves compelled to enter their own family names. Those whose surnames flashed up on screen experienced, like Ben Affleck, a strange sense of embarrassment, irrespective of whether the slave owners in question were potentially ancestors.

There are, however, millions of people, in the Caribbean and the UK, who do not need a database to tell them that they are linked to Britain’s hidden slave-owning past. The descendants of the enslaved carry the same English surnames that appear in the ledgers of the Slave Compensation Commission – Gladstone, Beckford, Hibbert, Blair, etc – names that were imposed on their ancestors, initials that were sometimes branded on their skin, in order to mark them as items of property.”

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“Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, the first of two episodes, presented by David Olusoga, will be broadcast on Wednesday on BBC2. Click here for the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database.”

■ “In 1807, parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, effective throughout the British Empire.

■ It wasn’t until 1838 that slavery was abolished in British colonies through the Slavery Abolition Act, giving all slaves in the British empire their freedom….

■ When the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, there were 46,000 slave owners in Britain, according to the Slave Compensation Commission, the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners

■ British slave owners received a total of £20m (£16bn in today’s money) in compensation when slavery was abolished. Among those who received payouts were the ancestors of novelists George Orwell and Graham Greene.”

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