Wales tells National Coal Museum to find 'historical injustices' to teach - "A coal mining museum must teach a “decolonised” version of history under Welsh government plans to make diversity mandatory. The Big Pit National Coal Museum was founded to tell the story of one of Wales’s historic industries. But the former pit must now play a part in making the nation “anti-racist”. The devolved Labour Government has mandated that heritage sites, including the mining museum, must offer a “decolonised” view of the past that recognises “historical injustices”. Teaching material at the former mine must “tell stories through the lens of black, Asian and minority ethnic people’s experiences”, in line with government education plans. Slavery, empire, and colonialism could be taught to visiting children as a way to include more diverse stories, official guidance has suggested. The Big Pit museum is a 140-year-old former coal mine in Blaenavon, in south Wales and part of Museum Wales, a government-backed body which is bound to follow a Labour directive to set “the right historic narrative”. Under these plans, museums must provide an “authentic and decolonised account of the past, one that recognises both historical injustices and the positive impact of ethnic minority communities”. Other Museum Wales sites must also decolonise, including heritage attractions dedicated to slate mining, and the National Wool Museum, which informs visitors about the Welsh woollen industry. They have been provided with guidance on how to go about this, including auditing collections to find material with links to ethnic minority history... Museums have been offered guidance by the Group for Education in Museums on how to provide children with educational material to meet the aims of the new curriculum, and to meet their duties to the Anti-Racist Action Plan for Wales. This states that the new curriculum is “not based solely on facts”, but aims to provide the “skills and experiences young people need for living ethical, informed lives”."
When the demand for oppression exceeds its supply
"Authenticity" is whatever plays to left wing prejudices
Michiel on X - "In 1997 Robin Cook (Foreign Secretary) removed the portrait of General Sir Jang Bahadur Kunwar Rana, PM of Nepal (1817-1877) from his office because it was “backward looking and ideologically unsound”. His great granddaughter wrote a “carefully worded letter” to the FCO and now the portrait is in the British Library."
Meme - Jonathan Kay @jonkay: "what makes this garbage worse is that you know it went through five drafts and required three different committees and four sensitivity readers"
"In order to re-imagine archives as material fragments that narrate presences, proximities, and solidarities which persist as fissures in colonial ordering, this exhibition gathers artists' works that represent movements against empire, or movements along routes established in the wake of empire, in terms of their text and image archives, and how such archives are configured into sedimentary bases upon which new identities, nations or diasporas may build and image themselves.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE. HartHouse"
Meme - Misheru Katorin @MKatorin: "Third worlders as soon as the British give them back any artefact.*toppling statue to destroy it*"
Roy @royllovians on X - "It is an absolute shame that the British did not "steal" more artifacts from the Maldives, whose people so dearly loved their ancient culture that they destroyed nearly all of the country's "idolatrous" pre-Islamic Hindu and Buddhist artifacts in 2012."
Thread by @kunley_drukpa on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "MUSEUMS IN THE THIRD WORLD
How are historical artefacts looked after in the Third World? It’s true that they don’t get destroyed but very often they’re left to rot in sparse, run-down museums with flickering lights that nobody visits. On what many Third World Museums are like
Moving past the question of ‘should they be returned?’, many Westerners and Diaspora Groups agitating for returns have an skewed idea of what the Third World museums these artefacts would be returned to are actually like. They are not the same kind of museum you find in the west For one, the general condition of the museums; these are often in small or underutilised buildings and are empty, sparsely decorated and badly labelled. The displays are frequently poor and uninformative. The museums are often grimy and not well-maintained, have flickering lights. Having had the opportunity to visit lots of these places, the other thing you notice is the lack of local visitors. You will be in a national museum and there will be nobody there, locals seemingly uninterested. It would be fair to say a museum-going culture doesn’t really exist I don’t think this is just a product of the British stealing their artefacts or being poor. My experience is a culture of ‘inquisitiveness’ doesn’t really exist in many of these places. I remember actively trying to find a bookshop in Addis Ababa and only being able to find one. The general disrepair and emptiness, the lack of locals - it’s not obvious that many people in these countries actually care that much. Their diasporas might for identity-forming reasons but my impression is that artefacts returned to the Third World would be infrequently visited. It’s true that museums in Asia are generally better than in Africa and that there is a lot of variation in quality depending on where you are. But these same rules generally apply, just to a lesser extent. Eg. The National Museum in Delhi, India I remember being disappointed with. To stress again, there are lots of good Third World Museums - A lot of S. America’s pre-Columbian museums are very good, MENA museums like Tunisia’s Bardo, Qatar’s Islamic, Cairo’s Egyptian Museum (organisationally a mess inside but a lot to see). But IMO general rule still holds. Though - even in places that do preserve heritage, you see a lot of botched restoration work. China is infamous for this, in the Silk Road countries for instance there are lots of slap-dash cement job restorations. Some restoration work is well done but a lot of it is very shoddy. In all, a British-Nigerian or African-American living in the west might suddenly become passionate about getting an Ife Head returned to Nigeria but if it does get returned it’s unlikely to be visited or looked after as well. Maybe beside the point for activists, but the reality. To add, my other impression is that the diaspora groups care more about pushing for these kinds of returns than the people in the actual countries themselves - but YMMV... South Africa's richest family had to remove African art on permanent loan from a Johannesburg gallery because it was not being take care of"
Oppenheimers save African art from crumbling Johannesburg Art Gallery - "The collection was brought from the UK in the mid-1980s and entrusted to the Joburg gallery on permanent loan. Brenthurst Library director Sally MacRoberts says the collection was withdrawn because of the condition and location of the gallery in Joubert"
Meme - Ewan C. Forbes @Ewan_C_Forbes: "People have been building wells in Africa my whole life. During that period, China went from a nation of mostly peasant people to a world superpower. But even when they were peasants, they didn't need foreigners to build them wells. More people should question why this might be."
Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the: "We sacrificed the stars for this."
Battle Beagle @HarmlessYardDog:: "The total aid to Africa from 1960-2013 comes up to over $5 trillion or the equivalent of about 50 Marshall Plans."
MrBeast: "I built 100 wells in Africa to provide clean drinking water for up to 500,000 people! This is one of my favorite videos I've ever made (all ad rev will go towards getting people in need water)"
Obviously, not enough money was spent and colonialism was uniquely damaging to Africa
Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "We are all colonizers. Not a lot of Khoi Khoi, pygmies, Neanderthals and Denisovians, etc still standing these days. I mean, it's a cliche on the right, but: how do you think the Aztecs got THEIR land?"
Dr. Maalouf @realMaalouf: "Imagine being an Arab Muslim and having the audacity to call anyone else a colonizer."
"Islamic Conquest between 7th and 9th century"
Thread by @royllovians on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " Wrt "British Museum" discourse, it cannot be emphasized enough that, with few exceptions, the ancient civilizations of the Near East played no role at all in the culture or identity of the Arab and/or Islamic peoples of the region before European archaeologists rediscovered them It is not even that Muslims, in principle, often regarded pre-Islamic cultures with contempt—in fact, neither they nor anyone else had any knowledge or memory of ancient Near Eastern cultures beyond that preserved in Greek tradition until the work of 19thC European archaeologists The main exception being Iran, which did place significant value on its pre-Islamic history—even so, Muslims still regarded it with ambivalence. The Zoroastrian tradition through which this knowledge was preserved also did not preserve a coherent pre-Sassanid historical timeline. It is arguable that the ancient Egyptian heritage played a role in Egyptian culture via the prominent presence of ruins in the built landscape—but no Egyptian, whether scholar or peasant, knew the names of Narmer, Hatshepsut, or Nefertiti before Frenchmen discovered them Some might bring up non-Muslim minorities such as the Copts, but while they carried over certain practices (e.g. the use of a few glyphs from the Egyptian Demotic script), they did not preserve any real historical knowledge from the pre-Christian written traditions As for why this even needs to be said: Starting in the Tumblr era, Anglosphere MENA diasporoids invented a notion that their cultures had a deep and sentimental attachment to cuneiform/hieroglyphic civilization—that Western archaeologists had cruelly stolen their beloved heritage I recall a bunch of discourse back in 2013/2014 after Katy Perry released a music video with ancient Egyptian imagery, with Tumblr activists accusing her of committing "cultural appropriation" against the Egyptian people, since ancient Egypt is allegedly "sacred" to them (lol) Not to place it all on Tumblr; in the 20th century a number of political movements in MENA sought to connect modern-day nationalism with the pre-Islamic Near East. Let us be clear: Absolutely none of this would have been possible without Western archaeologists and scholarship. Not a single human being on the planet Earth, let alone anyone in Iraq standing 20 feet above the buried Sumerian ruins themselves, knew what "Sumer" was or who Hammurabi or Gilgamesh were, until British and French archaeologists dug up and translated the artifacts and tablets. Like, absolutely nobody knew how far back the history went: The Greek tradition and the Bible recorded information about the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the preceding Neo-Assyrian Empire, but there was no surviving information about anything in Mesopotamia further back than that. Again, the Greeks knew about the later pharaohs—what we call the "Late Period"—and knew some names of much earlier pharaohs via an extremely garbled and inaccurate history by Manetho, but *nobody* knew about the actual history of the Ramesside dynasty or Akhenten or any of that. Back to "the British Museum": These artifacts ended up in the West through various means, some licit and some illicit, but on the whole the Ottomans gave the green light to Western archaeologists because they did not give a fuck about any of this and it had no meaning to them. So, the Ancient Near East is just as foreign to the current inhabitants of MENA as it is to Westerners and all other humans. The legacy of these cultures was transmitted to much of humanity through fragments that survived in the Classical tradition and Abrahamic monotheism. So no, I definitely don't agree that the people of Iraq or Egypt have an exclusive *moral* or *cultural* right to house these artifacts. As for political rights, I'm no expert on that, but it's undoubtable that many of the artifacts were not "stolen" in any sense of the word. And ultimately, pragmatically speaking, it's a good thing that these artifacts were evacuated to the West: MENA and Muslim countries harbor large elements who remain hostile toward ancient heritage and have on numerous occasions sought to destroy what they can get their hands on. We can only hope for a day when large portions of the Middle East and other Muslim regions no longer subscribe to a belief system that views pre-Islamic heritage as a threat that needs to be destroyed. A final disclaimer is that this thread is specifically about *archaeological* findings—objects that were long forgotten, neglected, or ruined by a society—Europeans certainly did "acquire" or "steal" objects that were still "in use", and that involves a different set of questions For those who need to hear it: This thread is *particularly* about the misapprehension that people in MENA societies had some preexisting cultural closeness to those ancient cultures known only through archaeology, beyond that of the archaeologists who actually discovered them!... if you REALLY want to go there, insofar as some pre-Islamic civilizations *were* remembered and perhaps appreciated in Muslim MENA societies, it was almost always only as inferior shadows of Islam that merely anticipated the glory of the final revelation. Again—*before* Western scholarship! Your Pharaonist flights of fancy and neo-Babylonian raptures are the products of scholarly disciplines initiated and disseminated by Westerners! Before them, those ruins were only valued insofar as they fit into the story of Islam."
Clearly, this shows that pre-Islamic artefacts in the West need to be returned to the country where they happened to be found
Klaus Arminius on X - "“Africa is undeveloped because of colonialism.” Ethiopia literally exists. 60+ years of independence and you can’t even dig a water well? Despite its abundance of natural resources and billions of aid from the West, Africa remains poor and undeveloped due to tribalism, corruption & pure incompetence.
The average African would rather be poor and led by their tribe member than be rich and prosperous with a different tribe leading them."
The New Statesman on X - "“I argue that there is a catastrophic gap between what British people think its empire did to the world and what the world knows its empire did to the world.” 🖊️ @Sathnam"
Charles I the loyalist on X - "@NewStatesman @Sathnam You know what's funny these people will never complain about Persia basically going to India and just looting everything that wasn't nailed down or the Mughal empire"
Respectable Conservative on X - "Labour think they can construct a civic identity out of NHS worship. Ethnocentrism will win."
Klaus on X - "Another day another Indian complaining about the Empire"
Gordon of Khartoum on X - "What people think the empire did: build railways
What the empire actually did: build railways and restrain Indians from engaging in genocidal communal violence"
Zaid Jilani on X - ""Haiti is a perfect project of what happens when you decivilize or decolonize."
Charlie is cherry picking, almost the entire world was decolonized. Does anyone argue that India or Jordan is in the same status as Haiti or would be better off on British rule? How about America?"
Thread by @relevantmena on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "“Does anyone argue that India would be better off on British rule?”
Every Indian who emigrates to the West is implicitly admitting that they are better off under Western government, yes.
Liberal postcolonialists have a hard time squaring their nominal commitments to material wellbeing and democratic governance/rule of law with their support for nationalist movements that undermine both of these values in practice. Mostly, they just ignore the contradiction. The truth is that European colonial governance provided almost all the goods that liberals supposedly care about better than the natives ever have, and the basis for opposing it always amounts in fact to narcissistic racial grievance and ego injury. Indians value independence not because India is now governed well, but because they feel the humiliation of being ruled by White people was worse"
Tony Deyal | Only just big guns | Commentary | Jamaica Gleaner - "When the West Indies Federation failed, Guyana took a shot at being the first country to become independent, but this was shot down by the British. Of the two countries anxiously waiting in the wings, Jamaica was the first and quickly jumped the gun on Trinidad and Tobago (T and T) or, as the sports commentators would say, “bolted” into the lead. Jamaica became an independent country on August 6, 1962 while T and T had to wait until August 3. While Jamaica had Bustamante, bauxite and yellow gold, T and T had Eric Williams, natural gas and black gold. What they both had in common was crime. Worse, regardless of the country, it had only just Big Gun. When Jamaica gained independence in 1962, the murder rate was 3.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest in the world. In 2005, Jamaica had 1,674 murders, a rate of 58 per 100,000 people, the highest in the world. In T and T, during my schooldays, the police did not carry guns, and the majority of ‘bad johns’, or men ‘willing to use violence’, initially had sticks, knives, knuckledusters and cutlasses. By 1959, this was rapidly changing for the worse."
Clearly, this is the fault of colonialism!
Jacobin thinks Shōgun was about European colonization : r/GetNoted
Thread by @bad_histories on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Japan wasn't colonized in any meaningful sense by "Western" powers at any point in its history. European merchants were present in Japan during the period depicted and they even owned some land, but they were very much subject to the will of local daimyo and later the shogun. Eventually the Portuguese were expelled and only the Dutch were allowed to trade in Japan, and their movement was very limited. Now then, Japan did have to deal with American, British, French, and Dutch gunboat diplomacy in the 19th century, but Japan still wasn't colonized. And due to the Meiji restoration and rapid modernization, Japan was able to escape the worst parts of "Western" imperialism and became an imperial power in its own right. Which went... uh... not great for anyone involved to put it mildly.Speaking of which, the Meiji restoration and relations with the "West" before the restoration are a very interesting topic. I'd recommend checking out Joshua Provan's (@LandOfHistory) "Wild East" for more info on Japanese relations with the British."
Meme - Jacobin: "FX's series "Shogun" takes place at the time of first contact between European colonizers and indigenous Japanese people. In the process it shows something rarely seen on screen: the shocking hubris of the colonizer and dehumanization of the colonized."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Japan has never been colonized. However Japan has been a brutal colonizer."
Meme - "Shogun Exposes the Brutal Realities of Colonization"
Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof: "this is yet another in a long string of examples of how "colonialism" has become a buzzword used to sort out the sinful from the elect rather than lens for analyzing and understanding history"
JoeWrote @joemayall: "Hi, I wrote this. Would you describe the Treaty of Tordesillas as a colonial document?"
David Porter: "The Treaty of Tordesillas no more constitutes a Portuguese attempt to colonize Japan than the notion that the Chinese emperor was a universal ruler constitutes a Chinese attempt to colonize Europe."
JoeWrote @joemayall: "The Portuguese trained troops to fight in Japan to protect their financial interests. That's colonization."
David Porter @huwaliyasuniob: "I'm honestly unsure what you're trying to refer to with this. There were a few fairly minor military engagements between Portuguese and Japanese (often linked to competition among Japanese themselves), but the Portuguese were not training troops "to fight in Japan""
JoeWrote @joemayall: "Have you seen the show this article is about?"
David Porter @huwaliyasuntob: "The first couple episodes, but seems like that's less relevant than the fact that I'm a professional historian of East Asia who did a graduate field in early modern Japanese history"
JoeWrote @joemayall: "Then you know the Portuguese had imperial designs on Japan"
As David Porter @huwaliyasuntob: "I, like every other historian who has been criticizing your article over the past couple days, know that Portugal never made any meaningful attempt to colonize Japan under any reasonable definition of colonialism"
JoeWrote @joemayall: "Portuguese Nagasaki"
David Porter @huwaliyasuntob: "Yes, the Portuguese traded at Nagasaki because a succession of various Japanese authorities saw that as advantageous to themselves. Japanese daimyo actually competed to secure control over European trade. That's not colonialism."
JoeWrote @joemayall: "I disagree"
Trust the experts. Unless that threatens the left wing agenda
No, we do not need to decolonise imperial measurements - "What will they decolonise next? The decolonise movement, thriving on campuses across the country, has been busy in recent years renaming buildings, pulling down statues and redesigning university courses. Activists say this is all crucial to addressing the horrors of colonialism and empire. But their latest target suggests ‘decolonise’ is just another woke movement obsessed with finding offence. Now they’re going after imperial measurements. Yes, the mile, inch, yard, pound and ounce are, according to Oxford University, ‘tied deeply to the idea of the empire’ and may need to be decolonised... undergraduates have been recruited to work with scholars on an eight-week decolonisation project, aimed at making Oxford’s science and maths courses less ‘Eurocentric’. The project will make proposals to lecturers, which may include bringing in a new course on the history of measurements. This is the fruit of vice-chancellor Lousie Richardson’s promise last year to decolonise Oxford’s courses in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. What British colonialism has to do with policing in 21st-century America is anyone’s guess. But this rage against imperial measurements is even more confusing. Imperial measurements, like all measurements, are simply a way of assessing distance, weight and height. Just because they are called ‘imperial’ and were used in the British Empire doesn’t mean they are stained forever by racism. As one tweeter pointed out, the metric system is hardly without fault either in this regard, given it was spread around the world thanks to Napoleon’s imperial expansion. The decolonisation movement presents itself as a serious intellectual and political endeavour. It isn’t. It is a project of historical offence-taking that is apparently without end. As the goings on at Oxford demonstrate, if you give these activists an inch they will take a mile."
Champlain monuments under review to see if they're too 'colonial,' board says - "Historical tributes to Samuel de Champlain are being reviewed to determine if they are too “colonial,” according to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. Federal authorities up to 2015 praised the French explorer for promoting “friendly relations” with Indigenous people. The board said it was reviewing the 1929 designation of Champlain as a national historic person due to his “colonial assumptions.”... The Department of Canadian Heritage as late as 2015 praised Champlain for his 17th-century explorations. Champlain formed “friendly relations” with Indigenous people and “lay the groundwork for what would become, decades later, the first European settlement in Huronia,” which was comprised of what is now central Ontario, said a department guide Update to the Road to 2017 ... In 2019, the federal cabinet started a review of some 2,100 federal historic designations to address “colonialism, patriarchy and racism” in commemorations."
First, they came for the Confederate generals...
Stephanie D. Keene 🖤🖤🖤 on X - "everything can't be decolonized. some stuff gotta burn."
The left want to destroy society
Wilfred Reilly on X - "I'm just going to keep saying this: no one in the past followed modern moral rules. You can argue about whether the British Empire was good or bad for India, but an obvious next question is "vs what?" The alternative was the Mughal (?) Empire, not liberal democracy."
Lukewarm Takes on X - "Also the Mughal Empire wasn’t indigenous either. It was basically a Persian-speaking Central Asian Turkic empire who’s elites were overwhelmingly 1) Central Asian and 2) Iranian (at least initially). Crudely, one form of foreign rule was replaced with another."
Steve Smith on X - "As greater India moved towards independence from the UK after WWII, Muslims sought their own country (Pakistan, east and west … now Pakistan and Bangladesh) because they were afraid of what the Hindu majority would do in retaliation to centuries of oppression by Muslims."
Plus, the British built India up, as one reply pointed out
Wilfred Reilly on X - ""Settler colonialism" just means "nation building." You can't possibly think Italian Argentines, Peruvians named "Fujimori," Mexicans and Peruvians named "Cortez," Bantu Belizians and Brazillians, Irishmen...etc...are FROM the New World...can you?"
Thread by @WanjiruNjoya on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The Royal Navy lost 17,000 seamen off the coast of West Africa, trying to police the coastline so African slaver-kings wouldn't keep plying their trade. The Navy got no thanks for it. On the contrary, the descendants of the lost sailors are now being asked to pay REPARATIONS. By the way Britain tried to explain to the African slavers that slaving was banned and they needed to quit. Britain sent an unarmed mission to explain that, but the African slavers slaughtered them in cold blood. That's why Britain sent a punitive expedition in the first place. And now we're turning history on it's head, making the good people APOLOGISE and pay damages to the slavers. "We're sorry we busted your slave trade. Here, have some reparations" It's ridiculous."
Damn ethnocentrism!