Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wolf" data-source="post: 115396" data-attributes="member: 199">Since then, be assured, there has been much head scratching, perhaps especially in that Global South that Lammy tried so desperately to impress with his rhetorical kamikaze attack. Was not the British – cough, cough – Empire (as in imperialism) one of the worst participants in the Atlantic slave trade that produced 10 to 12 million Black victims? <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/603986-ukraine-russia-missiles-nato/" target="_blank"><img src="https://mf.b37mrtl.ru/files/2024.09/xxs/66e4526e20302774ea759bd9.jpg" alt="The West is ensuring Kiev’s demise on purpose" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/603986-ukraine-russia-missiles-nato/" target="_blank">Read more</a> <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/603986-ukraine-russia-missiles-nato/" target="_blank">The West is ensuring Kiev’s demise on purpose</a>During the process of hunting and enslaving human beings, “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade/The-Middle-Passage" target="_blank">an estimated 10 to 15</a> percent of the captives died on their way” from the African interior to the coast. Then the so-called Middle Passage, the nightmarish deportation across the Atlantic killed another 10 to 25% of the victims. Apart from the effects of brutal overcrowding below deck, malnutrition, and psychological trauma, slave traders had a habit of “disposing” of those they considered worthless by dropping them into the sea, alive and chained to each other, sometimes to make an insurance profit. William Turner depicted such a massacre by drowning on, as it happened, a British slave ship, <a href="https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31102" target="_blank">in one of his most famous paintings</a>.And for those who survived both capture in Africa and the Middle Passage: Was it not the US – Britain’s current boss and the site of Lammy’s rant – that literally built its economic take-off on slave labor so brutal the ancient Romans would have been either impressed or shocked? And what about that famous “value” West that Lammy also seeks to speak for? Comprehensively represented in the same great crime: the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, you name it…The result was not only death and brutality on a staggering scale. Parts of the African continent were also massively damaged demographically, economically, and politically. As summarized in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade/The-Middle-Passage" target="_blank">Encyclopedia Britannica</a> (as it happens), the transatlantic slave trade “had devastating effects in Africa. Economic incentives for warlords and tribes to engage in the trade of enslaved people promoted an atmosphere of lawlessness and violence. Depopulation and a continuing fear of captivity made economic and agricultural development almost impossible throughout much of western Africa. A large percentage of the people taken captive were women in their childbearing years and young men who normally would have been starting families. The European enslavers usually left behind persons who were elderly, disabled, or otherwise dependent groups who were least able to contribute to the economic health of their societies.” This was a holocaust for Africa. Historically, it is not long ago. Its scars are still there. And it was the West’s doing. The point is not to pretend that Russia, at the same time, had no imperial history, including great violence and injustice. Empires do. Only the naive are in denial about that fact. Rather what is so striking is that, to go after Russia, Lammy could not think of anything better than to bring up one of the British Empire’s greatest crimes. At first sight, this is “merely” yet another example of Westerners losing all inhibitions when demonizing their geopolitical opponent. They are not even ashamed to openly cite their own worst crimes to do so. Orwellian indeed.<a href="https://www.rt.com/news/603910-germany-olaf-scholz-ukraine-war/" target="_blank"><img src="https://mf.b37mrtl.ru/files/2024.09/xxs/66e2c0fd2030270a9836d46e.jpg" alt="Olaf Scholz has a sudden moment of clarity about Russia" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/603910-germany-olaf-scholz-ukraine-war/" target="_blank">Read more</a> <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/603910-germany-olaf-scholz-ukraine-war/" target="_blank">Olaf Scholz has a sudden moment of clarity about Russia</a>Yet there is something else here as well that is, if anything, even more insidious. Since the Ukraine War, we have seen a relentless and widespread effort to mis-appropriate the experience, the suffering, and the resistance of the Global South as a cheap rhetorical device to provide heroic spin for Zelensky’s regime and the West’s proxy war as well as cheap shots at Russia.There is, of course, a politics of Left and Right here. Traditionally, and for good reasons, criticizing imperialism and colonialism has been a ‘left’ thing. By hijacking ostentatiously ‘anti-colonial’ terms for the proxy war in Ukraine, this potential on the Western Left was supposed to be channeled into serving the US-NATO-EU complex. With some, that rather perverse trick, transparent as it is, has even worked. Think of it as wearing a Che Guevara-print shirt and venerating Ukrainian Azov Neo-Nazis as ‘freedom fighters’. Politically, this is just another way in which semi-smart people fool semi-simple people. But there is a more serious, moral dimension as well. It is a truly and abjectly colonial and imperialist move to exploit the massive suffering – almost exclusively at the hands of the West – as well as the hard-won insights and hard-fought resistance of what we now call the Global South so as to feed them into the cheap propaganda that the West now uses to sell its geopolitics-101 proxy war in Ukraine as an issue of ‘rules’ and ‘values’. And yet that is precisely what David Lammy has done. What a disgrace.</blockquote>

Name

Verification: Does Doxxie know his real father.

Latest Threads

The Occult War
- Started by céline
- Yesterday at 12:37 PM
- Replies: 3
Public Chat and Announcements
S
Mystery surrounding the first performance of Shakespeare in Ireland, Coleraine 1628
- Started by scolairebocht
- Friday at 1:55 PM
- Replies: 6
Scholairebochts Blog.
Pentagon orders rare, urgent meeting of hundreds of generals, admiral
- Started by Anderson
- Thursday at 10:47 AM
- Replies: 49
USA
Retailers and communities on the 'chaos' of anti-social behaviour
- Started by Anderson
- Thursday at 4:36 AM
- Replies: 5
Ireland
Is Irish Literature inherently Left-Wing?
- Started by céline
- Sep 21, 2025
- Replies: 2
Ireland

Popular Threads

Ukraine.
- Started by Declan
- Feb 21, 2022
- Replies: 15K
World at War
US Politics.
- Started by jpc
- Nov 7, 2022
- Replies: 6K
USA
Mass Migration to Ireland & Europe
- Started by Anderson
- Feb 26, 2023
- Replies: 5K
Nationalist Politics
C
🦠 Covid 19 Vaccine Thread 💉
- Started by Charlene
- Sep 14, 2021
- Replies: 3K
Health
General Chat in The Marcus Lounge.
- Started by Declan
- Dec 30, 2024
- Replies: 3K
Public Chat and Announcements
The Climate Change scam
- Started by Anderson
- Jul 29, 2022
- Replies: 2K
Climate Change