Historian in hot water over history

How dare British historians actually know anything about British and world history!

Historian David Starkey could lose his University of Cambridge fellowship after he claimed ‘slavery was not genocide’ because ‘so many damn blacks live in Africa and Britain.’

Dr Starkey, 75, was accused of racism following an interview with BeLeave founder Darren Grimes, during which he argued the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is ‘wholly and entirely a product of white colonisation’.

Speaking via video link from his home, the historian said ‘the only reason that these young black protestors are here’ is ‘because of slavery’.

He added: ‘What has happened of course is that the only reason that these young black protestors are here – isn’t it slavery?

‘It’s only because of the great African diaspora, the compulsory diaspora, because of slavery. What of course that brings you up to confronting is of course slavery was not the equivalent of the Holocaust.

‘Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived.

‘And again, there’s no point in arguing against globalisation or Western civilisation: they are all products of it. We are all products of it.

Slavery obviously isn’t genocide. Economically inefficient as it is, it wouldn’t have worked as long as it did if it was. American Indians suffered genocide in part because they didn’t make good slaves. Africans, quite obviously, did not, with the exception of those living in the Belgian Congo.

If the British want to beat themselves up over the moral failings of the West – and I am not saying that it should – it should do so over the conquest, genocide, and near-total dispossession of the American Indian, not its treatment of Africans, or Arabs, or Jews.