Oh thank God, we can go back to hating ourselves again. For a time I thought there might be something we could take pride in, but no, not even the abolition of slavery. Gavin’s next article: “Some people in Britain supported HITLER”, so take that!

For all the heat and hot air of the BLM movement, the only thing I have learned about slavery that I never knew before, is: 1. Britain paid Portugal to end slavery’ 2. Ethiopia only abolished slavery in 1936. Yes, that is 1936.
History is not easily and neatly appropriated to fit one particular perspective of the past – as this excellent article demonstrates. This is particularly so when history is imbued with an instrumentality for moral or self-righteous uplift of a particular segment of our body politic (the ‘woke’). To our shame, there are many intelligent people out there who really ought to know better but are abetting this intellectual lobotomization of our history because it doesn’t pay to speak up (substantive critique in the US 1619 Project only being done my small number of historians, most are silent).
And the lack of self-awareness in the smug moralising of the woke is almost comic: who believes that our 23rd Century descendants will look with anything other than unmitigated horror at the contemporary practice of abortion as birth control? And it was the Evangelicals that protested slavery the most in the 18th C, just as they are with abortion in the 21st…

“Because they view history in a context-free, partisan, balkanised way, where a simple story of good and evil holds.”

That pretty much sums up the agenda of the current crop of partisan historical revisionists.
They aren’t interested in learning from history – they want to use history to validate their Injustice IOUs.
It is social justice alchemy: turn Guilt into Gold.

In many ways it’s a laughable pile of crap but IMO it is causing mental atrophy in our unwitting young folk by depriving them of the critical mental exercise they would otherwise get by examining and attempting to understand about who we were then, who we think we are now and how we draw a line between the two.

This issue has nothing to do with slavery. BLM and similar organizations are full of Marxists who are excited at the opportunity of finding a vehicle to tear down the Institutions and the History it so despises in our Country, Britain. And they must be so surprised that they are meeting so little resistance from a pathetically weak and wet establishment whilst understanding that their agenda would be promoted by the BBC, Channel 4 and the intelligentsia.
If you wanted a balanced argument about slavery you would mention that it has been around since the beginning of time, before the Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians and before the English were discovered in the Roman slave markets by Pope Gregory the Great in around 580. (After which he Augustine and 40 Monks to convert the Angels with dirty faces from their Germanic Heathenism.)
And you would then go onto say that just about every group of people have at one time in History felt the brutality of slavery. But interestingly everyone else just gets on with life, doesn’t cling to victimhood and doesn’t go around pulling down statues and demanding the re-writing of History!
And when talking about Africa you would start by saying, traditional forms of servitude were endemic in Africa and Asia at that time and in places today still remain.
You would say that the British lead the abolition of slavery and could do so due to the might of the British Empire and particularly its Royal Navy and so the British Empire served a very good purpose. But even then there was trafficking so the Royal Navy placed a permanent squadron from 1808 to 1870 to try to intercept slave traders off West Africa-sometimes as much as 1/6th of their ships. Many of the sailors died of tropical diseases whilst on duty.
The British had to pay off the Spanish, Portuguese and most of all the African tribes. They signed 45 treaties with African rulers to stop the traffic at source. However the African Rulers were very reluctant to give it up, threatening to kill all their slaves so Britain was forced to pay compensation and then help them with other trades like palm oil to ween them off the slave trade.
You would note that before slavery, in Africa the Dahomey used to kill large numbers of their own people every year,until they realized it was more profitable to sell them. African tribes and Kingdoms were heavily involved in providing slaves including the Oyo,Igala, Kaabu, Asanteman, the Aro Confederacy and Imbangala war bands.
Stanley(and no doubt Livingstone) discovered the slave markets where women slaves were provided by Dugumbe & Tagamoio and Swahili traders who sold them to the Sultan of Zanzibar off the coast of modern day Tanzania .
Ashanti on the Gold Coast were particularly brutal with many Humans being sacrificed annually until they too discovered they could earn some money selling them.

You would also say that that Arabs dragged millions of slaves across the Sahara where it is believed at least 1 million died.

You would say that in 1843 British subjects were forbidden to own slaves anywhere in the World.
You would also mention, just to be balanced, that in America, as well as white people, the Native Indian tribes of Cherokee, Chikasaw, Choctaw,Seminole and Creek had black slaves.

So in conclusion, you would realise, that probably all people in History have been at one time or another slaves. You would realise that the profits of the African Slave Trade were divided by people of all colours and Nations and so if you want to go after the British then don’t be hypocritical, just go the Hague and issue a class action suit against the Whole World!!

But it’s not about slaves is it, it is about Marxists trying to destroy our institutions and our very proud History! If we had tougher leaders they would have been stopped at the first march “¦”¦”¦

Gavin might have mentioned that Abraham Lincoln drew inspiration from the work of English abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. There is a fragment of speech one can find by googling “Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States” where he mentions both men by name. It was written for his 1858 Senate race against Stephen Douglas, and may have been part of one of his speeches in the campaign, but was not part of a speech he gave in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It seems that Lincoln saw abolition in America on very much the same lines as in the British Empire, but events unfolded otherwise. The work of the English abolitionists certainly hasted American abolition along.