POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

The End of Progressive Intellectual Life in America

Replaced by discourse very reminscent of the strait-jacketed Intellectual Life of the Soviet Union. The changing and repressive Intellectual Life of the French revolution is another, earlier, precedent. Except for Elon Musk wrecking the Leftist censorship plans, America might by now be well on the way to a similar tyranny

BY MICHAEL LIND

I have never liked the term “public intellectual,” but like its
19th-century predecessor, “publicist,” it describes a social type that plays a useful role in liberal democracies in which at least some government decision-making is influenced by open debate rather than secret discussions behind closed doors. To influence voters, public intellectuals write for a general educated public (not necessarily the less-educated majority) in ordinary language, not jargon. Like the policymakers whom they also seek to influence, they are necessarily generalists. In the service of what the Brazilian-American public intellectual Roberto Unger calls a strategic “program,” public intellectuals ponder connections among different policy realms—economic, foreign, and cultural—if only to ensure that one policy does not contradict another. Public intellectuals tend to annoy their own side by probing its internal weaknesses, while trying to convert members of the other team rather than simply denounce them.

The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center-left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual.

If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st-century, intellectual life on the American center-left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism, Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions

Consider center-left journals of opinion. In the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center-left, from the technocratic neoliberalism of Washington Monthly to the New Left countercultural ethos of The Nation and the snobbish gentry liberalism of The New Yorker. Today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.

You cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star.

It is not surprising that the output of this billionaire-funded bureaucratic apparatus does not make for very interesting or original reading. Open any center-left journal at random and you will find the likes of this, from a recent interview of an academic named Wendy Brown in Dissent: “It is also important not to stay inside our tiny circles because most of our inherited traditions of political theory, including critical theory, have in them the masculinism, the whiteness, the colonialism, and, above all, the anthropocentrism that have brought us to our current predicaments with racism, with the planetary crisis, with democracy, with gender, which is still always a secondary consideration.” The only ingredient lacking from this NGO word salad is crunchy croutons, in the form of the acronyms that stud post-intellectual progressive discourse: DEI, CRT, AAPI, BIPOC, LGBTQ+. Wokespeak is Grantspeak.

Meanwhile, in one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism, Inc. has shut down debate on the center-left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and center-left editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGOsphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.

In the 1990s, you could be a progressive in good standing and argue against race-based affirmative action, in favor of race-neutral, universal social programs that would help African-Americans disproportionately but not exclusively. Around 2000, however, multiple progressive outlets at the same time announced that “the debate about affirmative action is over.” Today race-neutral economic reform, of the kind championed by the democratic socialist and Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the Marxist Adolph Reed, is stigmatized on the center-left as “color-blind racism,” and progressives in the name of “equity” are required to support blatant and arguably illegal racial discrimination against non-Hispanic white Americans and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, for fear of being purged as heretics.

Immigration policy provides an even more striking example of the power of Progressivism, Inc. to crush debate among actual progressives. Up until around 2000, libertarians and employer-class Republicans wanted to weaken laws against illegal immigration and expand low-wage legal immigration, against the opposition of organized labor and many African-Americans—who for generations have tended to view immigrants as competitors. The Hesburgh Commission on immigration reform, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and the Jordan Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton and led by Texas Representative Barbara Jordan, the pioneering civil rights leader who was left-liberal, Black, and lesbian, both proposed cracking down on illegal immigration—by requiring a national ID card, punishing employers of illegal immigrants, and cutting back on low-skilled, low-wage legal immigrants. As late as 2006, then-Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both voted for 200 miles of border fencing in the Southwest.

Then, virtually overnight, the progressive movement flipped and adopted the former talking points of the Chamber of Commerce cheap-labor lobby. While Democratic politicians deny that they oppose enforcing immigration laws, center-left journals and journalists keep pushing the idea of open borders, in alliance with crackpot free market fundamentalists. On April 12, 2022, David Dayen in the American Prospect wrote that “declining immigration rates since the pandemic have contributed to labor shortages in key industries and harmed Americans who rely on those services.” Dayen linked to an article in the libertarian Wall Street Journal bemoaning rising wages as a result of lower immigration. On February 20 of this year, The New Yorker published a long essay by Zoey Poll, “The Case for Open Borders,” a fawning profile of the libertarian ideologue Bryan Caplan, author of Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, which, appropriately, takes the form of a graphic novel—that is to say, a comic book.

Back in 2015, Ezra Klein, then editor of the “progressive” outlet Vox, asked Senator Bernie Sanders about the idea of “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders replied in alarm: “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.” The lobby FWD.us, funded by Facebook and other large tech corporations that prefer hiring indentured servants (H-1bs) bound to their employers instead of free American citizen-workers and legal immigrants, denounced Sanders for holding “the totally-debunked notion that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting Americans.” Vox then published an article by Dylan Matthews entitled “Bernie Sanders’s fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrong-headed.” “If I could add one amendment to the Constitution,” Matthews declared, “it would be the one Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley once proposed: ‘There shall be open borders.’” In 2018, the progressive author Angela Nagle was canceled by Progressivism, Inc. when she published an essay in American Affairs, “The Left Case Against Open Borders.” By 2020, when Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, published One Billion Americans, the purging of dissidents and the fusion of the Progressivism, Inc. party line on immigration with the anti-union, cheap labor policies favored by the Wall Street Journal and Silicon Valley was complete.

The energy debate provides another example of the closing of the progressive mind. As recently as the early 2000s, some environmentalists favored reducing atmosphere-heating carbon emissions by expanding nuclear power, replacing coal with lower-carbon natural gas, or both. By 2010 these positions had been thoroughly anathematized by Progressivism, Inc. Not only all fossil fuels but all nuclear energy—which provides 20% of utility electric generation in the United States, roughly the same as all renewable energy sources put together—must be completely eliminated from the energy mix, according to the Green commissars. Insofar as only around 11% of global primary energy, and only around a quarter of global electricity, comes from renewable energy (chiefly hydropower, which has limited potential for expansion), the Green fatwah against nuclear energy seems self-defeating—as well as certain to shovel American money to China, which holds near-monopolies on the rare earth metals and production facilities used to make things like solar panels and lithium batteries. China also happens to be a major source of the fortunes of some of the billionaires who fund progressive media and NGOs.

At this point in history, the foundations and advocacy nonprofits of Progressivism, Inc. do not even bother to go through the charade of public debate and discussion before imposing a new party line. Half a century of debate, discussion, and activism gradually led to a majority consensus among American voters in favor of “negative liberty” for gay men and lesbian women, whose right to be free as individuals from discrimination in employment, housing, and military service does not require other Americans to undertake any actions, and leaves people perfectly free to oppose homosexuality on religious or other grounds.

In striking contrast, in a few years the ideology of gender fluidity went from being an obscure strain of thinking on the academic left to becoming the centerpiece of a radical program of social engineering from above carried out simultaneously by progressive, corporate, and academic bureaucracies. During President Obama’s second term, Americans were startled to be told by the federal government that Title IX, a civil rights law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, actually required gender dysphoric teenage boys to join girls’ sports teams and shower with girls, and that all public school bathrooms had to be rebuilt to be unisex. States that resisted this bizarre misreading of Title IX, which eliminated legal distinctions grounded in biological sex that the statute was written to protect, found themselves boycotted by multinational corporations and sports leagues. Corporate employees and university personnel who questioned the New Party Line now did so at risk of being fired or punished. All of this happened just between 2012 and 2016, with no public debate or discussion within the progressive camp, and no attempts to persuade conservatives, libertarians, liberals, or even pre-2012 progressives—only a sudden diktat from above, accompanied by contemptuous threats of punishment. In 2012, progressives were allowed to agree with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the time that marriage should be between a biological man and a biological woman. By 2020, you were a hateful reactionary conservative bigot if you did not agree that some men can be pregnant and some women have penises.

Who decides what is and is not permissible for American progressives to think or discuss or support? The answer is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.

The center-left donor network uses its financial clout, exercised through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats, to impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees. The methods by which they enforce this discipline can be described as chain-ganging and shoe-horning.

Chain-ganging (a term I have borrowed from international relations theory) in this context means implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee. At a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation that I attended more than a decade ago, an African-American community activist complained to me privately: “Immigration is hurting the people in the neighborhoods we work in. The employers prefer illegal immigrants to young black workers. But if we say anything about it, Ford will cut off our money.”

Shoe-horning is what I call the progressive donor practice of requiring all grantees to assert their fealty to environmentalist orthodoxy and support for race and gender quotas, even if those topics have nothing to do with the subject of the grant. It is not necessary for the donors to make this explicit; their grantees understand without being told, like the favor-seeking knights of Henry II: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” In the last few years, even the most technocratic center-left policy programs—advocating slightly higher earned income tax credits or whatever—have often rewritten their mission statements to refer to “climate justice” and “diversity” and routinely sprinkle Grantspeak like “the racial reckoning” and “the climate emergency” throughout their policy briefs in the hope of pleasing program officers at big progressive foundations.

Thanks to the takeover of the American center-left by Progressivism, Inc., there is literally nothing for a progressive public intellectual to do. To be sure, there are plenty of other kinds of mental work that you can perform as a member of the rising generation of young progressives even in the absence of a functioning public intellectual sphere. You can keep your head down and doubts to yourself, as you work on the technocratic policy that appeals to you the most: raising the minimum wage or free school lunches, perhaps. Or you can write endless variants of the same screed denouncing Republicans and conservatives as rabid white nationalists threatening to create a fascist dictatorship right here in America. Or you can join mobs on Twitter and social media to take part in Two-Minute Hate campaigns against individuals or groups singled out for denunciation that day by Progressivism, Inc. Or you can try to obtain fame and bestseller-status and wealth and tenure by getting the attention of the MacArthur Prize committee and editors at The Atlantic by auditioning for the role of Designated Spokesperson for this or that “protected class” or minority identity group (non-binary Middle East or North African (MENA), for example, not low-income Scots-Irish Appalachian heterosexual Pentecostalist).

You can even be a professor. High-profile American progressive academics like Paul Krugman and Jill Lepore and Adam Tooze who moonlight as public affairs commentators are not public intellectuals—they have the pre-approved left-liberal opinions on all topics that are shared by nine-tenths of the U.S. academic bureaucracy, from the richest Ivy League superstars to the lowliest adjunct at a commuter college. Back in the early 1990s, when as a young neoconservative Democrat I worked for The National Interest, our publisher Irving Kristol exploded in comic exasperation one day: “People are calling professors intellectuals! Professors aren’t intellectuals. Intellectuals argue with each other in cafes and write for little magazines. Professors are boring people who take out their dusty 20-year-old notes and give the same lecture over and over again.”

Unlike academics who recite the approved current center-left positions on all issues, genuine intellectuals, even if they happen to be employed by universities, are unpredictable and aggravating. They criticize their own allies and appreciate what other schools of thought get right. They do not indulge in contrarianism for its own sake but tend to be controversial, because they put loyalty to what they consider to be truth above party or faction. Needless to say, such people tend to perform quite poorly when it comes to the boot-licking, rote repetition of political slogans, acronym-juggling, groupthink, and “donor servicing” that constitute the forms of intellectual activity favored by big foundations and NGOs.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-end-of-progressive-intellectual-life

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Unwillingness to listen is now the hallmark of the Left

The great American debate about free speech is flaring again, this time around Elon Musk’s curating of Twitter. He is restoring speech rights or denying them, depending on your view. The predictable parties are declaring their positions and luxuriating in righteousness. They will change few minds, also predictably, because they are tussling over the wrong end of the stick. America has no problem with speech. It has a problem with listening.

Does the distinction seem specious? Speaking and listening do not mean much without each other. But emphasis matters. Focusing on the right to speak rather than the obligation to listen substitutes the easy question for the hard one, and a freedom secured by law for a discipline that must be instilled by culture. It also ensures that the debate—too grand a word, really—remains futile.

In a selfsatirising proof of how emphasising speechrights leads people to talk past each other, Yale Law students said they were exercising speechrights last spring when they shouted down a freespeech event because they disapproved of one panellist, a conservative Christian. “You’re disrupting us!” a protester shouted at Kate Stith, the professor moderating the event.

Newspapers continue to tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile the politics of their staff with covering a fractious democracy. They tend to default to framing their purpose in terms of protecting the right to speak—as though a publication is meant to serve its interview subjects and oped writers—rather than of protecting readers’ opportunity to understand the world.

This tripped up the editorial board of the New York Times a few days after the incident at Yale. In an attempt to defend free speech, the Times wound up coming out against it. “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” the newspaper declared. There is no right in America, of course, to silence one’s critics. The Times itself is in the business of shaming and shunning (Lexington has some experience of this), and that work is safeguarded, thank goodness, by the First Amendment.

What the paper failed to articulate was why readers (and reporters) needed to listen to views they might find repugnant. The moral logic that once inspired newsrooms—to resist dangerous movements like white nationalism, readers needed to understand them—has been stood on its head. Now, to report empathetically about people and ideas deemed dangerous is to “platform” or “normalise” them. Readers are too dim to be trusted with such information. Journalists are excoriated just for interviewing supporters of Donald Trump. “There’s nothing more to learn from them,” sneered a Vanity Fair columnist, more than a year before some of them attacked the Capitol.

More speech alone will fix none of this. Besides, insisting that someone must be allowed to speak can violate freespeech rights, as the dean of Berkeley Law School recently told the Wall Street Journal. He was explaining why nine student groups at the school were justified in banning Zionists from speaking at their events, even though he considered the rule antiSemitic.

Like those law students, all Americans can now relax in homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the congenial viewpoint of their chosen cablenews channel, socialmedia group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas or even adjusting them—the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous weakness.

In 1953, after he finished “Mariners, Renegades & Castaways”, his magnificent study of “Moby Dick”, the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James appended an essay about the circumstances in which he wrote it: he was imprisoned on Ellis Island, awaiting a decision about whether he would be deported. He was disappointed that fellow exradicals chose not to help him. Instead, he found, “oldfashioned American liberals” spoke up.

James brooded upon a quotation from Voltaire above the letters column in the New York Herald Tribune, a newspaper now extinct: “I wholly disapprove of what you say and I shall defend to the death your right to say it.” In the past, he wrote, “I have smiled indulgently at the grandiloquent statements and illusions of these old liberals.” But he began thinking about the conditions in which they struggled to establish the principles he had relied upon. “Today it is not their limitations I am conscious of,” he concluded, “but rather the enormous service they did to civilisation.”

So many Starbucks

To James, who was deported, one of the most vile characters in “Moby Dick” is Starbuck, the first mate. Starbuck knows Ahab is dooming the ship but lacks the courage to stand up to him. “His story”, James wrote from the depths of disillusion with the Soviet Union and horror at Nazi Germany, “is the story of the liberals and democrats who during the last quarter of a century have led the capitulation to the totalitarians in country after country.”

There is good reason to feel optimistic about America. Democrats heard voters’ concerns about crime and inflation and tempered their more extreme impulses. Voters heard the lunacy of the electiondeniers and rejected them. Jurors heard cases against the insurrectionists of January 6th and delivered justice.

But just as Republican politicians tremble before Mr Trump, some leaders of American institutions, afraid of their students or staff, are still treading Starbuck’s path rather than defending the principles that once made their institutions integral to the American project. They might instead consider the example of Ms Stith as she faced the Yale students. “Grow up,” she urged them.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/12/20/free-speech-is-not-in-peril-in-america

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A Leftist Pope in action

Has he been seized by the Devil?

The shocking and unprecedented move by Vatican officials, allegedly at the instigation of Bishop Patrick James Zurek, Bishop of Amarillo, Texas, to dismiss Fr. Frank Pavone from the priesthood has left Catholic pro-life activists stunned.

We call Fr. Pavone’s dismissal unprecedented because we could find no other example of a priest being expelled from the priesthood for a social media post – particularly one that appeared to reenforce church teachings on the sanctity of life and the sinfulness of abortion.

And it was stunning in its hypocrisy, as our friends at NewsMax pointed-out in a recent article:

…many priests have crossed the line on both politics and defying Church teachings, with little or no pushback from the Vatican.

For example, Father James Martin, editor of the Jesuit magazine America, embraces same-sex unions and consistently advocates against Church teachings on homosexuality and traditional marriage.

Martin’s advocacy has been met by alarm from some in the Church hierarchy, but not the Pope.

“I find it necessary to emphasize that Father Martin does not speak with authority on behalf of the Church, and to caution the faithful about some of his claims,” Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia wrote in 2019.

But Martin has been embraced by Pope Francis, who met with the controversial cleric last month and previously praised his work against traditional Church teachings, encouraging his ministry and urging him to “continue this way.“

Martin has also been active politically and had been a harsh critic of President Trump, calling his administration’s immigration policies "insane," "sinful" and "close to obscene."

Pope Francis decision to laicize Pavone appears to be part of a wider effort to undermine the Church’s traditional stand to protect the unborn.

Earlier this year, Francis welcomed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the Vatican, after her local San Francisco Archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, had banned her from receiving communion for supporting abortion.

Shortly after, Francis not only allowed Pelosi and her husband to receive communion at his mass, but bestowed a blessing on the couple.

While Cordileone was not publicly criticized by the Pope, Francis took the unusual step of passing over the Archbishop to the College of Cardinals, awarding the position to the Archbishop of San Diego.

And, in October, Francis again shocked Church supporters when he appointed a radical pro-abortion advocate to the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Church’s institute that had long advanced pro-life teachings.

CNA reported Francis had selected “Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato, known for her work promoting the public sector’s role in encouraging innovation,” to the influential academy.

Mazzucato has also been an activist for abortion rights and fierce critic of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Why is it that the burden of obedience to ecclesiastical authority always seems to fall most heavily on conservatives who wish to maintain the Church’s traditional teachings and rituals, while those who outspokenly traduce Church teachings receive no sanction?

While the obvious hypocrisy in Fr. Pavone’s dismissal will not surprise close observers of the reign of Pope Francis, many faithful Catholics were shocked by the NewsMax report detailing how the Pope – charged with being the ultimate steward of Church teachings on life and marriage – has embraced those who openly deviate from the teachings of the Church on such fundamental issues.

For his part, Fr. Pavone said he remained committed to following his vocation in the priesthood. "This idea that any of this is permanent in terms of dismissal from the priesthood is simply incorrect, because we're going to continue," Pavone told the Christian Broadcasting Network on Monday. "Then there will be a next Pope, and the next Pope can reinstate me."

"We're not going anywhere," he told CBN. "I'm not going to be one of those people that walks away, rebels against the church. I'm called to be a priest. I'm going to stick with that. I'm called to being a pro-life leader. I'm going to stick with that."

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/the-hypocrisy-of-fr-frank-pavone-s-dismissal-from-the-priesthood

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Biased history from the BBC

‘The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan’ is a BBC Two travel documentary series which won a British Academy Television Award for Best Features in 2020.

In the first episode of the third season, Ranganathan visits Sierra Leone and looks at the history of slavery there. However, by omitting important facts about the role of Britain in the country’s history and presenting a biased narrative of British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, he distorts the viewers’ understanding of the country’s history.

In the documentary, Ranganathan visits a fort established on Bunce Island in 1670 by a British company as a holding point for slaves to be shipped to the Americas. He tells us it was held by four British companies over 138 years, leaving the impression that enslavement was a purely British enterprise. Yet he omits to mention the fact that the fort was sacked in 1728 by a local African slave trader, José Lopez da Moura, who resented the loss of business caused by the British presence.

Ranganathan describes how “raiders” captured the slaves and brought them to the fort. Yet he does not mention that the said raiders were Africans, or that when Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, many local Africans continued to trade slaves with other countries, including the United States, as well as the colonies of France, Spain and Portugal.

Ranganathan states that 30,000 slaves were shipped from Bunce Island. He does not, however, mention that it was Britain’s Royal Navy which was later sent to suppress the slave trade, or that in doing so between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed over 150,000 African slaves.

Ranganathan describes Freetown, the freed slaves’ destination, but does not mention that the town had been set up specifically for freed slaves by Britain in an area negotiated by Britain with local chiefs.

While he does mention a freedom tree in the centre of Freetown, he does not mention the “Freedom Arch” leading to The Old King’s Yard. Freed slaves were taken to Freetown, walked through the arch to hospital and given treatment and food. Sierra Leone declared it a National Monument in 1949 and applied to UNESCO to make it a World Heritage site in 2012. The application on the UNESCO website notes that:

The Gateway to the Old King’s Yard compares with the Statue of Liberty in the United States in enduring as a highly potent symbol, inspiring contemplation of ideals such as freedom, human rights, democracy and opportunity… [It]…. is a symbol telling the end of a particular epoch of man’s cruelty to man.

Seeing such a monument would have enabled the viewer to get the full context. It is difficult to understand why such an important site was not mentioned in a travel programme.

Ranganathan remarks that what he calls “creoles” cannot, even today, buy land outside Freetown and concludes from this that “discrimination lasts today as a legacy of colonialism”. Yet the area concerned was controlled historically by African chiefs.

Inside Freetown, where the British had control, “creoles” have equality. So the legacy of colonialism is in fact the reverse of that suggested by Ranganathan.

Ranganathan also asserts that “the standard of living [in the UK] was built on the benefits of slavery”. This idea that Britain’s prosperity was created by the slave trade echoes the thesis of the historian and politician Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, written during the 1930s. 4 It has been long been rejected by most economic historians. David Eltis, in his Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1997), argues that Britain spent as much money suppressing the slave trade as it ever gained from it. While it is not easy to draw up an economic balance sheet, and while slaving undoubtedly enriched some individual seaports, shipowners, plantation owners and African chiefs, the theory that it financed the Industrial Revolution is not generally accepted by economic historians, and to repeat it as if it were a matter of undisputed fact suggests a lack of impartiality.

Drawing on his own defective analysis of the history in Sierra Leone, Ranganathan’s picture of slave trading as something “that the white British did” completely ignores African involvement. British involvement was, of course, morally reprehensible. But it could not have taken place without the active involvement of Africans, who were owners and traders of slaves long before the British arrived. It is a gross distortion to talk of black slaves and white slavers; many peoples were involved. If we limit ourselves to Africa, there is no doubt that black Africans were the main actors in the slave trade south of the Sahara, both as slavers and victims.

Among the European participants in the African slaving, the Danes were the first to renounce it in 1792 and the British were the first to try to suppress it after 1807.5 The British anti-slavery effort was costly, in money and lives, and it was vigorously resisted by other powers, especially the Americans and the French. Eventually the British used both bribery and force against some African rulers with whom they had previously had peaceful relations but who persisted in slave trading. Suppressing slaving became a major motive for British military intervention in West Africa in the 19th century, some of which was made following requests for protection by African victims of the slave traders.

In short, the programme makes no mention of Britain’s efforts to end slaving, which is central to the history of Freetown; it presents an inaccurate picture by making no reference to native African involvement in slavery; and it leaves the viewer with the inaccurate impression that slaving was a largely British activity.

In response to a viewer complaint, the BBC made a series of comments which evade the points raised.6 The original response said that “a single programme or report wouldn’t always be able to break down extensive historical information as much as we’d like due to time constraints”; this does not answer the point about which information was included and which excluded, and why. Indeed, the final rejection of the viewer’s complaint by the BBC’s Complaints Director, Mr Jeremy Hayes, merely elaborated on the earlier response: “The programme, as the Complaints team explained, took in many other aspects of life in Sierra Leone, past and present, and given the varied and impressionistic nature of the programme, it was perhaps not surprising that more detail was not supplied about the history and legacy of slave trading in the country.” In admitting that the programme had time to cover many aspects of life in Sierra Leone, Mr Hayes did not try to explain why “detail” could be given on aspects of history that were discreditable to Britain, but not on those that were creditable.

Given the number of mistakes and omissions in this programme, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was a case of poor journalism (unless the BBC considers that travel programmes are in a lower category for accuracy) and/or of conscious or unconscious bias.

https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/can-we-trust-the-bbc-with-our-history/