Society of Classical Poets outdoes itself... with nuked-brain racism
 

HAHAHAHAHA!!! What the actual fuck? The Society of Classical Poets is a go-to for hate-reading, but this takes it to a whole other level of knuckle-dragging fuckbaggery.

“The British Empire is generally recognized as having been a force for good in India through the 19th century and arguably beyond.” This owns. Maybe it’s “generally acknowledged” among the Epoch Times B-List running the show at SCP, but for the rest of us... not so much.

Get a load of this: “‘The White Man’s Burden’ was written in 1899, at a time when imperialism was still a perfectly normal and healthy way of ensuring the survival and prosperity of one’s nation or empire. Particularly, this was before World War II and the Holocaust, which was enabled by the rise of Nazi German imperialism. (It is important to note here that Nazi German imperialism was ideologically driven by social Darwinism, part of the underpinnings of communism.)”—Imperialism was fantastic until the Nazis came along and did Communism with Social Darwinism. Every element of this is wrong.

And it goes on. These people aren’t Bozos. They’re what Bozos become if you hit them on the head with a shovel every day and then induct them into a malign right-wing religious cult.

https://classicalpoets.org/2021/03/0...tj4mR4E-WYaVtk

Neither their name nor the list in which they ranked a work by Longfellow (ha ha!) as one of the greatest poems in the world (ha ha!) lead me into strongly believing in their strength of judgement, but that was aesthetic.
This isn't a tenable political commentary, it's an embarrassment. The only truly accurate response is to laugh.

I genuinely thought this was a mirage, or bad dream when I followed the link. It also sparked a hailstorm (no kidding) amid a feeling of violent fatigue.

What to do? Shout, swear, cry. Go to bed with a cup of hot chocolate and hide. I am not sure that obsessively making small imaginary creatures from paper is helpful, though that's my default.

Sarah-Jane

After reading this lesson plan, I eagerly await a hearty defense of the advantages that slavery in the New World brought to the heathen savages of Africa, and an appreciation of all that the altruistic White Man suffered by going to all the trouble to rescue them from such a barbaric continent, and then striving ceaselessly to establish and maintain a harmonious social order in which everyone knew his or her place.

Oh, and please let's hear some more about how prejudicial--dare we say racist?--it is for critics to say categorically that ALL the white colonists and plantation owners were cruel and exploitative. If SOME of them were a bit excessive in their means, surely the glorious mission of bringing superior Western civilization to such benighted people justifies those excesses, on the whole.

And look what a difficult, thankless task the White Man had set for himself! Look at the weighty responsibilities that he was shouldering, day and night, since he had to look after the health and welfare of so many people, and decide what was in the best interests of society as a whole! Under so much stress, surely he can be forgiven if he lost his temper now and then.

Alas, this is the new burden of the White Man: having his past achievements for the betterment of humankind universally maligned and misunderstood, not only by the ungrateful descendants of his beneficiaries, but also by his own unworthy descendants. He's the real victim here.

I had never really looked at that site before but I spent a few minutes there just now and this latest outrage seems like par for the course. Everywhere I look there are articles and comments saying highly offensive and stupid things, almost at a Qanon level of evil idiocy. Why this comment should attract special notice is beyond me. It's all horrible crap.

It's a mutual admiration society. A haven for the sort people who applaud each others' complaints about "cancel culture" while simultaneously censoring any sort of criticism of their own views.

Last year I left a comment politely mentioning some glaring factual inaccuracies in a poem. Unsurprisingly, my comment stayed up for about ten minutes before it was deleted, thanks to this policy:

I came across the metrical tribute to Rush Limbaugh. lol. It’s a kinda
weird sub-genre, of right wing masonic/golf club poetry that we also
have in the UK. These guys write poems for family weddings and golf
club dinners.

Old white dudes who basically think that really bad, metrical,beat-heavy,
cliche-laden bollocks about golf is totally hilarious. I never knew until
now that they had their own site...

...and blimey. they have a metrical tribute to Tommy Robinson. feck.
He’s a kinda modern English blackshirt, if anyone knows what that is.
Not good.

It’s a full on fascist poem...

[please delete]

.

Oh my god, a different worldview than the allperfect, allholy one that I confirm to! I can't believe they are still allowing such crimes against humanity to exist. All I can do is keep myself civilized by being full of myself, spitting, vomiting and raging against nonconformity.


.

It's The Pennsylvania Review with a different hat on.

Kevin, I know that you intended to use the phrase "crimes against humanity" sarcastically, but you were actually right on target there.

White supremacist views like those habitually expressed by members of the Society of Classical Poets in their poems and essays trivialize and encourage LITERAL "crimes against humanity."

I am not going to apologize for getting agitated about worldviews that encourage whites to regard themselves as superior to my non-white husband, daughters, nieces, nephews and in-laws.

Interesting that you mentioned spitting. The xenophobes are the ones doing it, though. Spitting and coughing on people who are exactly like my husband and children and other family members, and using EXACTLY the same anti-Asian slurs for coronavirus that are encouraged by the Society of Classical Poets.

Watch even a few minutes of last night's town hall on this year's attacks on Asian Americans, and I hope you'll understand why I have so little sense of humor about this.

--Mrs. Sih

*conform

As it happens, I know a thing or two about this, and know that it’s both wrong and bigoted. That this view is widespread is good. Pointing out that it is widespread and differs from others doesn’t really do much. Do you have anything to add in regards to the supposition that European conquest and spoliation of the world at large was actually good?

Now run-of-the-mill white racism is really brave nonconformity.

How do you think of the British Empire's approach to slavery?

The White Man's Burden
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

Problematic.

I say this as someone who lives in a U.S. state that technically never allowed slavery, yet which at this very moment has a thriving for-profit prison industry, and also a wilderness firefighting system partially dependent on prison labor that is so low-paid (as little as $2.90 per day--i.e., less than a dollar per hour) that it might as well be slavery.

(Julie)

Blimey, I just spent half an hour on it. Yep, it's a website full of objectionable, bigoted, conspiracy-addled clowns. For someone like me, who does have issues with certain aspects of "cancel culture", the idea of having any affiliation with this bunch is utterly depressing. It would be like using Hitler to strengthen the case for my vegetarianism.

Yep. All of the above. Metrical praise for Tommy Robinson...(?!)
Jesus. Thank God the poems are so bad.

I assume you’re referring to the 1833 Emancipation Act (after more or less two centuries of actively building an empire on slave labor, especially in the Caribbean). Well, it’s good that it happened, but between the massive compensation to former slaveowners, unpaid “apprenticeships” to, well, “learn” the jobs they had done under slavery, deliberately and gratuitously regressive taxes to prevent social mobility (see the Salt Tax in India for another example), use of indentureship to flood the Caribbean labor market and deliberately create an ethnic division in the work force where none had existed before, not to mention property qualifications designed to keep the bulk of former slaves and their descendants out of politics, it’s clear whose side the British government was on.

What are your thoughts on the West Africa Squadron?

David, what are your views on the British Empire's approach to slavery?

I go along with most of the comments, although the Guardian article linked by Julie does seem an extreme example of judging the past by the ideas of the present.
The West Africa Squadron has been described as one of the few examples of pure altruism by any government, ever, and I'm interested to hear what people think of it.

altruism, i think not. A gesture maybe, but no more. the trade
in tobacco/sugar continued and everyone got rich. or even richer
than they were already. they knew where the money was
coming from. Glasgow/Edinburgh/Perth/Liverpool/ Manchester
etc. etc. beautiful buildings, stately homes all over the place.

money invested, and cleansed, in vast enterprise all over the
world. the original money was dirty, but as soon as it reached
the banks it disappeared into railways and ship building, and a
million other things.

also..the 1833 buy-back was like the 2007 bank bailout. equivalent
to £20 billion in todays money. all the money went to slave owners,
zero to the slaves themselves.

Yes. Quite.

I don't see how you can call the West Africa Squadron just a gesture, Conny.
To quote from Wikipedia:
"Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. It is considered the most costly international moral action in modern history."
At the height of its operations it employed a sixth of the Royal Navy fleet.
About 1,600 British sailors died in service.

The compensation paid to slaveowners was a huge financial commitment by the British Government. Without it, emancipation would not have been approved by Parliament.
It would never have been suggested or thought in those days that the slaves themselves should be compensated. President Lincoln is considered a hero for freeing American slaves 30 years later but did not compensate them.

If Lincoln is considered a hero it is more for saving the Union than emancipation of the slaves. Also, who knows what he may have done in a second term if he hadn’t been murdered.

i would have thought the most costly moral international
action in modern history is WW2, by a country mile.

basically we closed the stable door after the horse had left.
then we kept all the money. Also we kept the stable and
the big house attached to the stable. and also everything
made up until that point. Altruism? i think not.

then we continued to trade on the back of it, pretending the
problem was nothing to do with us because the money was
invested and we didn't like to talk about where the money had
come from in the first place.

oddly, then we spent most of the money digging trenches,
and blowing up farmland around the Somme river. but that's
another story. History is a strange thing.

the story in America is similar imo. Lies, moral vacuity and
death, for several generations. looking to the WA squadron for
some kind of redemption is really not going to cut it.

also,

as an ex gilt trader i 'd like to point out that the 1833 buy-back
was a watershed in government finance. some thought it was
going to be a total disaster: as it turned out it was the first, and most
spectacular, example of fiscal stimulus. the way it was done put
rocket fuel into Imperial expansion. it did nothing for the slaves
obviously, but if anyone needs an explanation of how we reached
the imperial zenith (of about 1880) the buy-back was how it was
achieved.

I don’t think you can call WW2 a moral action, Conny. It started because Britain and France were not willing to let Germany dominate continental Europe, which was a political not a moral motive.

David, one could as easily argue that political and economic factors kept the West Africa Squadron from being a purely moral and altruistic action. Much of the West Africa Squadron's activity targeted the slave ships of other countries, to prevent the economic advantage of an uninterrupted labor supply to their colonies' sugar plantations, while English sugar plantations had to do without. Also, enforcement varied depending on whether a particular country had a militarily useful treaty of alliance with the British at the time.

Given the enormous financial and political power of British sugar barons, a series of political and financial compromises were necessary in order for the British government to abolish slavery. Compromises, by definition, introduce moral impurities, but not much happens without such tradeoffs. As Otto von Bismarck said (though I do not endorse many of his views): “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best.”

I think we are in agreement that the mustering of the political will to outlaw slavery on British soil should be recognized and even celebrated. It might well have been otherwise. And I also salute the fact that the political will to enforce that law, by means of the West Africa Squadron, was eventually summoned. Without enforcement, the British government's outlawing of slavery would have been only a symbolic victory. And the high death rate (mainly due to disease) of the British servicemen who enforced it represents a significant sacrifice that should not be sneered at in any way.

Overall, these were strides in the right direction, despite some backward steps. Slow and imperfect progress is far better than none at all.

That said, it's not difficult for me to see why Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed (in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail") his loss of patience with incrementalism, and with being told he should be grateful for, and content with, slow and partial gains in the area of social justice, constrained by the limitations of what both Black and White moderate allies thought was politically viable in their own time, and with the fear of backlash always a realistic concern. Since the slowness of past progress was often used to justify these moderates' caution about demanding contemporary changes, I think it's fair to have a healthy impatience with the rate of progress, both past and present.

I don't say so with the objective of applying anachronistic standards to undercut or trivialize the hard-won achievements of past generations, for which Wilberforce and others worked so hard. But neither should we rest smugly on previous generations' achievements, or regard those through rose-colored glasses. They left a lot of work for others to do, including us today.

BTW, speaking of previous generations, my own family traditions say that at least one of my English ancestors made his fortune in the sugar trade. I haven't found independent confirmation of this, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit, since that's the side of my family with at least one violent convicted criminal in all but the last of the five most recent generations. I can easily imagine some of my family members doing very well in a slave-murdering industry like sugarcane production, in which functional consciences were surely a liability.

Unlike in the cotton and tobacco plantations in the United States, the sugar plantations in the West Indies did not tend to have breeding programs (a different set of atrocities) to assure a future labor supply. Instead, they tended to work people to death in the short term, and they didn't have time to wait for infants to grow up. They relied on a continuous influx of fresh captives from Africa who were already ready to be put to work.

Do I feel guilty that my family members committed atrocities--certainly recently, and possibly long ago, too? No. Should I? I don't think so. I share their DNA, but I had no knowledge or control over their actions. Did their sometimes-reprehensible actions benefit me personally? Yes, some of them must have, and I think I'm obliged to acknowledge that. If their crimes leveraged any advantages, however temporary, in nutrition, education, and social status for later generations of my family, those advantages positioned me for greater opportunity than otherwise, even though I grew up on food stamps due to the negative consequences of some of their more recent actions.

And nearly all White people in the U.S. have benefitted from systemic efforts to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from competing with them on a level playing field. Those privileges, for which I didn't ask, come with the responsibility to increase opportunity for those who did not enjoy similar benefits. (That's what the term "White privilege" means. It doesn't mean that all Whites have had it easy. It means that most non-Whites have had it much, much harder.)

i'd agree with that i think.

and David,
if moral means concerned with the principles of right and wrong,
which it does, then i'd say WW2 was totally a moral action. The third
reich wasn't normal politics: it was diabolical. not a word which i'd
use lightly.

but again, the biggest lie of the slave trade, for this country at least,
was the 1833 bail-out, and what came after it.

Very interesting and thoughtful comment, Julie.

But I am proud of my forebears.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...e_iOSApp_Other

Michael Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (Bodley Head, 2020)

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)

Yes, Julie posted this earlier in the thread. Talk about judging the past by the ideas of the present.

never mind

Alas...

Clive