David Bennett

The Black Atlantic exhibition is just ending at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge UK.

It’s a kind of a mea culpa for the slave trade because a slave owner gave Cambridge University the money to build the museum. He made his money from pineapples in the Caribbean, and used slave labour to run his business.

Twelve and a half million people were transported to the New World to make money for the European entrepreneurs, often with State backing and with scientific connivance concluding that Blacks were lower in brainpower, and less human.

Ten million seven hundred thousand arrived, so almost two million died on the way.

One exhibit that caught my eye was a punch bowl from the 1760s with a motif proclaiming ‘Success to the Africa Trade’, and celebrating the voyages of George Dickinson. He made five voyages on three ships, between 1763 and 1768, transporting a total of 725 captives across the Atlantic: 97 died.

I am going to assume the numbers are typical for all voyages. In that case 725 divided by five voyages is 145 slaves.

Twelve and a half million slaves at 145 per voyage equates to over 82,000 voyages.

After Seeing The Exhibition

I wanted to resist tutt-tutting at the terrible deeds. I had to work to keep my own feelings and not be swept along with the tide of feelings that are kind of expected in a mea culpa exhibition.

So many stories, so many strands.

How should we feel? How should dyed-in-the-wool white English people feel? Many of them will have great grandparents who lived miserable toil-filled lives. They too have their stories.

In a place like Cambridge there will be more than a sprinkling of people who come from privileged families. Perhaps they will feel uncomfortable? Should they feel more uncomfortable than the poor? People from poor backgrounds might feel they are off the hook. 

The truth is that if the profits were kept by the wealthy, they didn’t conduct the slave trade all by themselves. There would have been people from every class without whom the system would have ground to a halt.

How quickly did the racial stereotypes filter into the way everybody from the top to the bottom felt about Black people? 

And today should ‘we’ be making amends? And how? Even if exhibitions raise awareness, they don’t pay the bills of the descendants of those who were enslaved.

And if, as it was, that the whole system was driven by money, then should ‘we’ pay money back, aand if so then how much? Europe took off like a rocket on the back of the profits from the slave trade.

What about all the compounded benefits? Should there be a discount because the world would not be in the happy place it is without the initial capital that drove technological advances in which everyone can now share?

And who is ‘we’? Aren’t we all the same – give anyone any excuse and wouldn’t we do the same? Or would we? Not now, today of course, but under the influence of the environment prevailing then. Of course we would not be cruel, but that seems a poor excuse for turning human beings into energy sources against their will.

And what about those intermediaries, the North African traders, the tribe-on-tribe enslavement? How would we allocate responsibility?

Maybe we have moved on.

Of course, no one would think it right to own slaves today. But if the environment changed? If enough people thought it was OK? Would we be drawn along. Would you? Would I? Is it absolutely clear that we do not want to go backwards?

In the short term you couldn’t argue that the world is moving from bad to good. Maybe in the longer term you could say we are moving that way.

The big question is what moves us that way. A friend thinks that it’s the natural outcome of rubbing along together that we eventually see that being nice is a better way to be. It doesn’t answer every question because if life itself is just a chance outcome of bouncing molecules, then sooner or later some people are going to want a bigger answer.

There is a furore around Elon Musk’s tweet, with advertisers withdrawing their advertising.

Let me take you out into space a bit and look down on how the tweet came about. 

First came a tweet from Charles Weber who describes himself as a Jewish Conservative from S. Florida. His tweet contained a video advertisement of a father and son sitting in a car. The father has caught the son making antisemitic comments on social media and he tells the son how hateful it is and whether he wants to step out of the car to tell it directly to the group of Jews we can vaguely see through the windscreen.

The intent of the video advertisement was no doubt to suggest that some young people ought to think a little more before mouthing off.

I have seen the video before and when I saw it I thought it was taking a gamble. What is to say that those ‘young people’ at whom the video was directed wouldn’t imagine themselves in the shoes of the son and jumping out of the car and shouting antisemitic words?

Ah well.

So ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Eric’ responded. Before I paste in what he responded, you should know a bit more about The Artist Formerly Known as Eric

He is not antisemitic. He is more or a man who sees things from his point of view. For example, when a person who styles him or herself ‘being libertarian’ tweeted this about Osama bin Laden

You shouldn’t read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” & become a sympathizer. You should read it to understand the motive and plan. In no way was 9/11 justified, but there were reasons besides they hate our “freedom.” They hate us being over there. And we haven’t learned

The Artist Formerly Known as Eric’ responded this way. He tweeted

You couldn’t apprase Bin Laden any more than you could Ibram Kendi, or Angela Davis. As far as they’re concerned, there is an infinite well of pain that’s owed to you.

I take that to mean the former-Eric looks at things from the point of view of the protagonists. In other words, that you should not seek to impose your narrative but to understand that there are different narratives. And recognise that our ability to do so is limited because we are not in their shoes.

That’s bollocks because in the absence of certain narratives the world is chaos. 

That’s my point of view.

So against this background, what the former-Eric said in reponse to Mr Weber’s endorsement of the video advertisement was this:

Okay.

Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.

You want truth said to your face, there it is.

And in response to that, Elon Musk tweeted

You have said the actual truth

Oh, the Jews have been pushing dialectical hatred. They have the temerity to say this is right and this is wrong.

OK. So that’s a point of view. 

I’m not really concerned with it because the former-Eric is not the boss of X (Twitter) with the power to make the world reverberate in the way that Musk can.

So what do I think is so ‘wrong’ about what Musk said when he endorsed former-Eric’s tweet in reponse to Mr Weber?

The real poverty of thought in Musk’s comment lies not in whether he’s right, or whether he’s wrong, but the fact that he’s made an exception for one group and holds them to a different standard than other groups.

He’s in good company. The last high profile person to do so was General deGaulle, who when he was president of France said at press conference that the Jews were “at all times an elite people, sure of itself and dominating.”

The truth is that if Musk looked around with an unbiased eye he’d see that what he said is true of so many groups throughout the world.

The British class system is built on superiority and their narrative.

Colonialism is built on superiority and the narrative of the colonialists. There’s dialectical hatred in full flow.

Yes, probably some Jews and their narrative of world history and the transcendent are a little mixed up. You might do the same if your sense of worth was tested at the barbed wire of Auschwitz.

Certainly some Palestinians think they are superior and that their narrative and dialectical hatred is the right one. You only have to hear their description of Jews to know that.

Trump certainly thinks some people are superior and that his narrative is right, witness his comment at a rally recently when he talked about those who live like vermin.

Now tell me what group doesn’t have a strong element of thinking they’re superior and that their narrative is right? And by extension that the opposing narrative is wrong? There’s dialectical hatred. 

The problem with the whole world is in thinking about the issues and not about the people.

Perhaps just the poor downtrodden colonised masses who bow their heads; they might not think they’re superior.

Of course not all people think they are superior and not everyone by a long chalk spews dialectical hatred. And maybe we are learning. But there’s a definite strain of group superiority everywhere.

That’s what the human race is trying to get past and bring us all together. And in order to do so we have to join in a single narrative that join us above the supposed rightness of the issues that divide us..

Bottom line – not all narratives were created equal.

The thing is that Musk didn’t make a general point about all humans having different narratives and that maybe some people have better narratives. No, he singled out Jews.

We see it a lot; people who have made Jews and Israel their hobby horse. It doesn’t need me to say again how little attention those same people give to other events and other situations that would deserve their attention if ‘Jews and Israel’ merits their attention.

But the reason for antisemitism is not to be understood at the level of world events.

And Musk did it, because he did not make similar comments about other groups and other situations. And here’s the greater point. It’s not just that Musk made his comment at some point in time. He made it now – now when feelings are at fever pitch.

I ask myself whether Musk thinks all narratives are equal or whether maybe he really has bad intent.

Another Narrative

Another narrative has to take into account the possibility that Musk did not make his tweet at three in the morning when his ‘off-switch’ wasn’t functioning properly.

I listened to his biographer and I am not sure he is qualified to describe Musk. I did learn though that Musk is training his AI model on the contents of Twitter. And perhaps therefore Musk’s tweet was designed to give food and fuel to his AI-in-training.