Glasgow Border Force Raid Was London Show of Force

The abortive detention of two undocumented Indian men in Glasgow on 13 May has got me thinking. I am not by any means by a conspiracist but there are certain aspects of the attempted raid from which one can only draw disturbing conclusions.

The timing of the Home Office raid, supported by police Scotland, alone is questionable. Usually such raids are carried out early in the morning, when few people are about, and to catch the suspects by surprise. The Glasgow raid took place late morning, with plenty of people about, which is precisely why the people of Pollokshields were able to respond so quickly and so effectively.

Kenmure Street, Pollokshields, falls in the political ward of Glasgow Southside, which just happens to be the constituency of the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon MSP. It also took place while Members of the Scottish Parliament were being sworn in to form the new session of the parliament, just days after the SNP gained the highest number of votes ever cast in a Scottish Parliamentary Election.

Then there is the absolute crassness of attempting to detain two Muslim men on the day chosen, 13 May 2021. The end of the Muslim festival of Ramadan, and the day of Eid Al-Fitr; the holiest day in the Muslim calendar. Detaining the two men in a police van prevented them from joining in prayer on Eid Al-Fitr, which effectively contravened their human rights to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

All in all, this appears to have been a deliberately-contrived show of force by the UK government agency Border Contol, to prove to those "troublesome Jocks" who is in charge, to humiliate the First Minister, and one which was potentially racist and anti-Islamic.

And it was one which backfired spectacularly, but should not have deserved to do so, for the simple fact it should never have been attempted in that way, on that day of all days. I am an atheist, but I am an atheist who has an enormous respect for the right to freedom of religion for others. And I realise that if I want freedom from religion, then I must equally stand up for freedom of religion. This was one of such instances where I have no choice but to take a stand for the rights of Muslims.

I am not for one moment suggesting that Priti Patel, the UK Home Secretary, and a woman of Hindu Indian-Ugandan immigrant background, deliberately chose the day of Eid Al-Fitr to carry out this raid, but I would say that if she knew it was going to happen on that day, then she should have known better, and should have advised the Border Force officers not to act on that day. If she did not know it was going to take place on Eid Al-Fitr, then that equally calls her competence to hold the post she does into question. At the least, Border Force should have been a great deal more sensitive to the significance or the day, and that they were not does indeed suggest some degree of prejudice.

I do not blame the people of Glasgow for being outraged. They should be, just as all living in Scotland should be. In fact, as a Scot I could not be more proud of the way they rallied around their neighbours, just as Glasgow has always done. It won't, but this was an incident which should go down in the history books of Glasgow as a city, and Scotland as a whole. In it's own way it was every bit as big as the Red Clyde incidents of the early 20th century, and the way a proud city stood up to the brute force of a bullying London government to protect and support their own.

I have nothing but praise for Police Scotland, who were used as a tool by a government which Scotland never voted for, and ordered, possibly against their wishes, to go into Kenmure Street in force. But that the officer in charge ordered the men released and the police to stand down in the interests of public safety was the sensible thing to do. And I have absolutely no doubt that did not go down well with the Border Force agents, or their Westminster bosses.

But most of all the events of Thursday, 13 May 2021, was a supreme example of the power of nonviolent mass protest. By just sitting in the street, and getting under the van holding the two men, the people of Glasgow took a stance against force which required no violence, and which gave the authorities no choice but to buckle.

If Westminster thought that this would bolster unionist feeling in Scotland, they were absolutely mistaken. Their bully-boy tactics had exactly the opposite effect, and openly displayed to Scotland, the UK, Europe, and the world, just how far a London government is willing to go, how Scotland will not put up with it, and underlined just one more reason why Scotland needs to be independent.

There have been a few people commenting about "illegal immigrants" and accusing the Scottish Government of wanting to throw the doors open. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Firstly, the term "illegal immigrant" is a complete misnomer. It is not an offence to enter the UK undocumented, and if it were, then those detained would be treated as criminals. They would be arrested, charged, and tried by a jury of their peers. That simply does not happen. Instead, undocumented people in the UK are detained, processed and assessed by Border Force, and unless they can provide proof of refugee status, they are deported. At no point do charges or trials come into it. It is only where a deportee re-enters the UK undocumented that it becomes an offence. The important point here as many have stated, including the Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yusaf, "no person is illegal".

Secondly, the position of the Scottish Government in condemning the raid does not say that they want to "throw the doors open". Rather, it is that immigration into Scotland should be a matter for the Scottish Government. Not least because Scotland has a separate law system, and separate police, to England. No-one is saying for one moment that we cannot discuss immigration, nor prevent entry of those who may be undesirable. Rather that Scotland should be solely responsible for who comes into the country, and the only way to possibly achieve that is for Scotland to become fully independent.

Have We Entered the Realm of Thoughtcrime?

Baden-Powell Statue

The death in the USA of African American George Floyd at the hands of white police officer Derek Chauvin has seen a number of responses under the banner of “Black Lives Matter”.  Not least of these has been a renewed call to remove the statues of those involved in slavery, and/or the oppression of people of colour, and even other minorities.

Protests have spread worldwide, and one such event in Bristol, England, saw the statue of Edward Colston, an 18^th century slave owner, being torn from its plinth by protestors, dragged through the streets, and dumped in Bristol harbour.  The place where Colston’s statue was dispatched to the harbour was Pero’s Bridge; named after an 18^th century slave, Pero Jones, who was a well-known character in Bristol in his time.  Whether the protestors were aware of the significance of the bridge, or whether it was a complete coincidence remains unknown.

Since then protests in other parts of the UK have taken place, as have statues being sprayed with graffiti.  In one protest in London, a statue of Winston Churchill was so attacked.  However, bizarrely was the Cenotaph, which is the central war memorial for the entire UK.  One man also set light to a Union Flag atop the Cenotaph.  It is true that Winston Churchill was an odious character; a racist, misogynist, anti-Semite, and class elitist, who was responsible for a great number of deaths of unarmed and innocent people.  But the attack upon the statue of the man many see as the victor of the Second World War, allied with the attack upon the Cenotaph, and setting the Union Flag alight, certainly set a great many people against the BLM movement and protests.

Some cities, including London, have responded by stating that they will either remove statues, or where they cannot be removed, plaques explaining the unsavoury past of the characters they represent, which is to be applauded.  At the same time, the authorities claim to have a “hit list” or targeted statues, and one among those was the statue of Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, on Brownsea Island, Poole, where the first Boy Scout camp took place.

The reasons for Baden-Powell’s statue apparently being targeted were things he wrote during his lifetime.  He was blatantly homophobic in his lifetime, admired Adolf Hitler, once advised people to read Mein Kampf, and allegedly was seeking to ally the English Boy Scout movement with the Hitlerjugend in Germany.

Of course, the Scouts never were allied with the Hitler Youth, and had Baden-Powell, who died in 1941, known the enormity of the brainwashing and brutality of that organisation, or indeed the enormity of the horrors of the Nazi regime, which few knew until 1945, then he may well have thought very differently.  As to his homophobia, well it is a well-known phenomena that those who speak out loudest against gays are usually closet cases themselves, and that is almost certainly the case with Robert Baden-Powell, whom many online biographies say was a closeted gay man.

I am not a big fan of Scouting myself, but then, I am not a parent, and I am well aware that many children get a great deal from it, none less than my two dear little great-nephews.  Likewise a friend of mine not only has a son who is very active in the Scouts, but she is very active with the organisation herself.  And I think this is an important point here.  The Scouts of today are no longer the regimented, Empire loyalist organisation they were when I was a boy, and kicked out of the cubs for refusing to swear allegiance to God and Queen, but rather they are a modern, all-inclusive club, which helps to hone children’s social skills, encourages them to achieve, and where all are welcome, including LGBT+ children.

Therefore, to attack a statue of Robert Baden-Powell to me seems a bit silly.  The man himself was never personally responsible for the death or oppression of anyone, but merely wrote some highly questionable opinions.  And this makes me wonder if some protestors are going too far, and have we entered the realm of Thoughtcrime?

There are many people in history who wrote and said many questionable things, but that does not for one moment detract from the great many other things they said, wrote, or did.  During one protest in Edinburgh, a cardboard placard was put around the neck of a statue of David Hume, alleging he was a racist.  Hume, the foremost empiricist and sceptical philosophers of all time, probably did hold views which would be considered racist by modern standards, but given he lived mostly in his native Edinburgh from 1711 to 1776, his experience of anyone of any colour different to his own would have been extremely limited.  Even today, with a population of only 5 million, Scotland simply does not have a large number of ethnic minorities, and in Hume’s day, seeing a black face on the streets of Edinburgh would have been something of a sensation.  Can we then condemn Hume for holding views that could be construed as racist by holding a 21^st century candle up to them?  And do these views somehow suddenly invalidate all the great things one of the fathers of modern philosophy did say and write?

When we try to apply our modern mores to characters of the past, we open up a whole can of worms.  And those on the political left may find that some of their heroes are likewise hardly blameless.

Edinburgh was also the birthplace of Marie Stopes, pioneer of family planning, after whom there are now clinics across the UK, and around the world, which offer family planning information and resources, including abortion.  Therefore, many would see Marie Stopes as a champion of women’s rights, and of a woman’s right to autonomy over her own body, which she indeed was.  Yet Stopes was also a strong believer in and campaigner for Eugenics, and in her 1920 book Radiant Motherhood, she wrote, "inborn incapacity which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs. These populate most rapidly and tend proportionately to increase and these are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality"  Marie Stopes’ answer to this was "when Bills are passed to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased, and to provide for the education of the child-bearing woman so that she spaces her children healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream of the depraved, hopeless and wretched lives which are at present increasing in proportion in our midst"  So in other words, Marie Stopes believed in the enforced sterilisation, “by X-ray”, of women she deemed to be “degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced”. and referred to as a “prolific depravity”.

But let’s up the ante here.  Marie Stopes read Mein Kampf, and as a result started a correspondence with Adolf Hitler, sharing views on Eugenics and the “master race”, and even sent him poems.  This admittedly was however before the Nazis actually outlawed family planning, closed down clinics first in Germany and later across Europe, and even executed doctors who offered family planning, contraceptives, or abortions.

Do we then take down the blue plaque on Edinburgh’s High Street that marks the birthplace of Marie Stopes?  Do we rename all of the Marie Stopes International clinics?  Or do we recognise that she had some very mistaken ideas, but ultimately her 1918 work Married Love was a seminal moment, which recognised that women did indeed enjoy sex, that they could enjoy sex without the worry of falling pregnant, and that Marie Stopes International has helped and continues to help educating and empowering countless women about bodily autonomy?

Eugenics was a product of its time, and grew out of mistaken ideas from the findings of Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species.  People such as Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, and the economist Herbert Spencer, first man to coin the phrase, “Survival of the fittest”, misunderstood natural selection to mean that only the strongest survive; a belief that became known as Social Darwinism.  Galton particularly became the father of Eugenics, and it had many followers across the political spectrum.  Another firm adherent of Eugenics was George Bernard Shaw, who in 1910 at a lecture for the Eugenics Education Society stated, "A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them."  Likewise, Bertrand Russell in ICARUS, or the Future of Science, wrote "But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. The result will be to increase the average intelligence; in the long run, it may be greatly increased."  H.G. Wells, in the American Journal of Sociology (Vol 10, 1904), wrote, "It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."

Do we then take down the statues of George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and H.G. Wells?   Do we discount all the great things they did write?  Should we indeed topple the Martian Tripod sculpture in Woking, which represents one of the alien spacecraft from War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells?

These things are never easy, and it may surprise many on the left to discover that many of their heroes are just as guilty of questionable comments as those considered to be heroes of the political right.  Even Karl Marx is not immune.  A rabid anti-Semite who in his 1844 pamphlet On the Jewish Question, wrote, "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist."  Marx also thought little of Mexicans, whom he considered lazy and feckless; “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

In 1977 the band The Stranglers released one of their most successful songs, No More Heroes.  Songwriter Hugh Cornwell later said of the meaning in the song, “Don’t have heroes.  Be your own hero.”  The message of this is that whatever heroes we have will ultimately let you down.  This is a truth as much as it is for the left as it is for the right.  In recent years Mohandas Gandhi has been exposed as an abusive husband.  John Lennon likewise horribly mistreated firstly Cynthia Powell, and later Yoko Ono.  Both of these may mar forever the memory of these men, but it does not for one moment discredit their nonviolent philosophy.  And just how happy would the left be with someone pulling down a statue of John Lennon or Mohandas Gandhi?

Removing statues and plaques, and renaming streets is by no means a new idea.  Back to Edinburgh, there was once a statue of the 16^th century leader of the Protestant Reformation, John Knox, outside the New College of Divinity.  If you’ve seen the movie Chariots of Fire, you will have seen actor Ian Charleston, playing Eric Liddel, saluting it as he runs past on his way to his studies.  Today it is no longer there, but can still be seen inside St Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile.  The statue was removed due to the venomous anti-Catholic views and actions, and which still fuel the sectarianism that is the scourge and shame of Scotland to this day.  Yet ironically, Knox himself was once exiled from Scotland, which at one time saw him serve on a ship as a galley slave.

I am all for removing statues, plaques, and street names of those whose actions have directly led to the suffering and death of innocents, and I am not for one moment convinced that retaining them would make us forget history.  The absence of statues of Hitler in Germany does not mean we have forgotten the Nazis of World War II.  But where a statue cannot be removed, then there should be plaques put up to tell the whole truth about the individual involved.  But this must be the truth, thoroughly researched, and absolutely accurate.

But it needs more than this.  There needs to be a more holistic approach, whereby children in schools are taught the whole truth.   For the UK, this means teaching children the absolute truth about British imperialism, including its deficits, as well as its benefits.  Too long children have been taught that Britain built an empire upon which the sun never set, where the white man went out and educated and civilised the “ignorant savages”.  Likewise, it is way past time that schools in the USA started telling the truth about their slave-owning Founding Fathers, or indeed, the genocide and continuing mistreatment of Native American peoples, which no president, not even mixed-race Barack Obama, has ever properly addressed.

But the moment we start discounting the artistic works of people who have not personally hurt others, we go down a dangerous road indeed.  We need to recognise that some people were a product of their times, and shared the uninformed ideas of those times, which we cannot condemn in the 21^st century, and even where some views have been objectionable, that does not detract from their other works.

And as Hugh Cornwell said, perhaps we need to stop having heroes - and start being our own heroes.

No, You DON'T Get to Punch a Nazi First

Or anyone else for that matter.

On 20 January 2017, near to where Donald Trump was being inaugurated as 45^th president of the United States of America, Richard Spencer was being interviewed by an Australian television channel, when he was punched by an unknown assailant. Spencer was denying to the interviewer that he was a neo-Nazi, when members of the public asked him to explain his pin badge of 'Pepe the Frog' – a symbol often used by racists and antisemites – when a masked and hooded man ran up, punched Spencer, then ran off again.

Richard Spencer is the founder of the Alternative Right movement, often abbreviated to 'Alt-Right'. He has often espoused white supremacist, antisemetic, and homophobic views. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, Spencer advocates a homeland for a "dispossessed white race" and call for "peaceful ethnic cleansing". The Anti-Defamation League have quoted Spencer as rejecting conservatism because its adherents "can't or won't represent explicitly white interests." Although he purports to be an atheist, he rejects same-sex marriage, which he has described as "unnatural", stating "very few gay men will find the idea of monogamy to their liking" Spencer openly supported Trump for president and at the end of a speech after the Republican victory, Spencer shouted "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!", which was met by a large proportion of the audience giving Nazi-style salutes in return.

Richard Spencer is certainly therefore an odious individual, with extreme right wing, and yes, neo-Nazi views; he has repeatedly failed to condemn Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Since the punching incident, not only have there been hard left apologists applauding and attempting to justify the assault, there is now a whole “Punch a Nazi” movement which is claiming that it is perfectly justified to use violence first against the extreme right, to silence them, and shut them down. I would argue that it is never right to be the first to use violence, no matter the provocation, and those who do have already lost the argument. I would also state that many of those who are shouting loudest about punching 'Nazis' are guilty of the deepest hypocrisy and double standards.

First of all we have to identify just who these 'Nazis' are. Are they people holding views which can be construed to be not dissimilar to those of Hitler and the actual Nazis, or neo-Fascist ideas?

There are some on the hard left who maintain that all movements for national identity are by their very nature extreme right wing and racist. I seek an independent Scotland, because I firmly believe that self-determination (a right recognised by the United Nations) is the only way Scotland can ever progress. Despite the fact that many of we Scots Nats, including the Scottish National Party (SNP), have continually made the distinction of outward-looking “civic nationalism”, we have continually been lambasted as 'separatists', 'anti-English racists' and even portrayed as 'Nazis', by some on the left, up to and including some Labour Party members. Opponents openly refer to the SNP as the “Scottish Nazi Party” and I recently saw a Tweet from a member of the hard left stating “Forget this civic nationalism rubbish; nationalism is nationalism.”

So, should I and other Scots Nats, who embrace all, be attacked with violence, despite never using or supporting violence ourselves? Some would definitely think so. In the run-up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, there were many shops and cafés ran by the official Yes campaign were often daubed with swastikas and “Nazis”. As well as being subjected to a great deal of verbal abuse, Yes campaigners, myself included, were often spat upon by members of the hard left. At the more extreme end, a 5-year-old little boy was narrowly missed by a chair pushed out of a window, aimed at former SNP leader Jim Sillars by a left wing opponent, and an 80-year-old man campaigning for Yes, suffered a broken arm after being pushed to the ground by a woman who was a member of both the official Better Together campaign and the Labour Party.

And of course, one of the greatest hypocrisies is that many of those who decry and use violence against Scots Nats, quite happily support self-determination for the Palestine, and a united Ireland, but will tell you “It's not the same thing.” Yes, it seriously is.

I happen to take a centrist ground on immigration and refugees; I neither believe in pulling up the drawbridge, nor throwing open the doors to anyone. I do think that there are dangers of Islamist terrorists infiltrating immigrants and refugees, and every western country needs to be aware and cautious of that; as much as they should be more aware of the dangers of people-trafficking, which only harms those they claim to be helping. For being so cautious, as I honestly believe any sane, well-informed, politically-aware person should be, guess what I get called for that? A Nazi, that's what (while the right call me a bleeding heart – I can't win).

Where does it stop? Examine your own political views and then have a look at those espoused by the Nazi regime, or even Nazis of today – or things the hard left define as “Nazi - and you may very well find things similar to your own views. Should you then be punched?

I have had it suggested to me that the use of violence and shutting down should only be used on those who openly promote violence against minorities, or those who openly promote genocide. Oh really? Well, that is very interesting. I have in the past been on Irish Republican rallies in which I have heard sectarian Roman Catholics espousing hatred towards Protestants, even calling for the death of all of them. I even recently saw a post on Facebook saying “Scotland was Catholic – and will be once again”. Are those coming out with such comments not “Nazis”? Don't they deserve to be punched as such? Oh no, wait, they can't be; because obviously Irish (and Scottish) Roman Catholicism is a 'socialist' cause. Aye! Right! If anyone believes that, go have a look at just how very right wing a great degree of the Roman Catholic church is. Indeed, I invite any who think such to educate themselves upon the very close links the Vatican and Pope Pius XII had with the real Nazis.

Let us move on to the matter of Palestine, and those on the hard-left who show a strong support for an independent Palestinian state. Without a doubt, the behaviour of the state of Israel and their treatment of the Palestinian people has for much of their short history been utterly shameful. But there are too many who think this is all one way and that the Palestinians and many who support them, and lead them, in the Middle-East are somehow innocent little souls. HA! Palestinians are currently led by the Hamas and the Hamas Covenant completely refuses to recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist. While they have agreed to a two-state solution, based on 1967 ceasefire agreements, several Hamas leaders have stated that this can only be an interim measure, that all the land belongs to them as “Muslim land” - “from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean”. (Hamas leader Khaled Meshall). More disturbingly, the Hamas Covenant not only calls for the eradication of Israel, but for the killing of each and every Jew on the face of the planet. Quoting the prophet Muhammed, the Covenant states; “The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Hark tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”

So, there is the call for genocide of the Jews, and do we see the 'Punch a Nazi' brigade calling for violence to be used on pro-Palestinians, to silence them and shut them down? Not a bit of it. Quite the opposite in fact. In my experience there are those on the hard left who are all too ready to become apologists for Islamist violence against Jews. But then, there are many on the hard left who are very quick to bandy about the term “Nazi”, but who are themselves in fact deeply antisemitic. I have seen and heard it myself; people who call themselves 'socialists' and yet appear totally incapable of differentiating between Israeli and Jews, and who attack all Jews as a result. One need only look to the shameful levels of antisemitism in the Labour Party to see the truth of that one. And strangely enough, I don't see anyone in Labour, least of all Jeremy Corbyn, punching out any antisemites within the party.

There has actually been a disturbing increase in antisemitic attacks including acts of violence against synagogues and individual Jews in the UK in recent years, and some is coming from the left, who hold all Jews responsible for atrocities carried out by the state of Israel. Does this surprise me? Not in the least. I once put a meme up on Facebook commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, with the words “Never Again”, and the first comment on it was “It is happening again – in Gaza”. But then, when I put a meme up for Holocaust Memorial Day 2017, I asked others on Facebook to share it. Not one person did. Interesting then that Trump's inauguration fell on the same day (a coincidence I'm sure, but one which showed utterly crass judgement), and that of course was the very same day that Richard Spencer was punched, and the “Punch a Nazi” posts started appearing - from people who would not recognise Holocaust Memorial Day. Hang your heads in shame, you utter hypocrites.

It is equally true of the Hamas Covenant that it makes mention of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which it claims to be factual. The “Protocols” was in fact a fabricated Russian document, first published in 1901, which outlaid a secret Jewish plan for world domination by means of subverting morals, controlling the media, and taking over the economies of the world. It was responsible for much of the antisemitism which swept across the world in the early 20^th century, and was taught in German schools as factual after the Nazis came to power in 1933. One would have thought that the Protocols would have disappeared after 1945, but not a bit of it. It is very much available to this day, and this is never more true than in Islamic countries, where it is made available and distributed in Arabic, and taught as factual. Hamas claim on one hand to have moved away from their Covenant, but on the other hand say it cannot be changed “for historical reasons”. Given their insistence that a two-nation state can only ever be temporary solution, and the continued distribution of the Protocols, please do excuse my cynicism, but I do not and will not believe them for one moment.

Should the latter part of the above claims of the Protocols sound familiar, those of Jews subverting and controlling the media and economies, then it should do. Because the document is also available online and has been purported as genuine by some in the west, and this has filtered down to mainstream belief, where we now have people quite commonly bandying about ignorant views of the press and world economies being run by Jews; and the left have swallowed this bait hook, line and sinker. But they even go further and claim that Israel, and by expansion, Jews, are available for all the world's ills. Doubt that? How many times have you read or heard that Jewish workers were pulled from the World Trade Center before the attacks of 9/11, or indeed the bizarre claims that Islamist terrorist organisations, including Al Qedea and Islamic State were set up by or are even fronts for the Israeli secret service, Mossad? And again, all Jews get the blame for that. Yet if there is one group in society which is not calling for a campaign of violence against neo-Nazis, and never has done, it is Jewish communities. Seems to me that some on the hard left could learn quite a lot from them.

So where are the voices calling for Palestinians and other Muslims who believe the Protocols to be true, or their western supporters and apologists, to be punched? Where are those denying them a platform? Where are those shutting them down? Suddenly it has all gone silent.

But let me go back for a moment to this claim that it is only those who call for the genocide of others. Well, the major religions of the world – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – all contain commandments in them to kill non-believers, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, and many, many others; such was much of the basis of the real Nazis, just as it remains the basis of Islamist and fundamentalist Christians, and indeed some orthodox Jews, to this day. Whither then the calls to violence against Muslims? Who's forcibly silencing Baptists? Should we be punching Jews? WOAH! Did you see where that just went?

In discussing this with others there have been those who have stated that when faced with a bunch of neo-Nazis, they have the right to fight. I agree. I have never, not for one moment, ever said that no-one should not defend themselves. Indeed, I shall go even further.

It may come as no surprise to many reading this to learn I am a pacifist. I have read widely on many pacifist authors, not the least of which is Mohandas Gandhi. Now, Gandhi can be criticised on some things he wrote, and I personally think that he was naive at times, but in fairness he was a product of his time and culture. His faults however do not for one moment negate some of the extremely wise things he came out with. Gandhi believed that honour was more important than life itself, a view I happen to agree with, because a dishonourable life is a life not worth living. Under Gandhi's philosophy defending yourself by violent means is not only valid, it is necessary. “Nonviolence is superior to violence, but violence is superior to cowardice.” Gandhi stated, explaining that when one is left with only the choice of using violence in defence or cowardice, then violence is the only honourable stance that you can take, even if that means your death, but at least you will go down fighting, thereby retaining your honour.

So it is that when faced with violence, any one of us not only has the right to defend ourselves it is the only reasonable – and honourable – stance we can take. But note that this is in the face of violence. It does not for one moment give anyone the right to throw the first punch, no matter the provocation. Contrary to what many would have you believe today, words are not violence, and do not give you the right to be the first to use violence. For goodness sake, were I to punch everyone who offended me with their words, no matter how vile, I would have never been done fighting all my adult life.

And if you do use violence first, what will it achieve? Will it change your opponent's mind? Will it silence them? Will it stop others holding similar views and following them? Not for one moment. All it will do is make a martyr of them, put yourself in a poor light, and have the finger of condemnation pointed at you, while making the 'Nazis' appear squeaky clean. Sure, you can attempt to silence your opponent by the use or threat of violence. But if you do so, if you seek to use violence to frighten people into silence to achieve your own political ends, by do you know what that makes you, by definition? A terrorist, that's what.

Even should you manage in shutting certain people down or refuse them a platform because they hold odious views – or merely views you happen to disagree with (as Unionists v Scots Nats for example) - do you think that will silence them? Do you honestly believe that in the internet age they will not find a way of getting their message across or finding an audience? Of course they shall, even if they have to go underground to gain it. And in doing so, they will be able to spread their bile unchallenged to impressionable audiences, out of the public eye, instead of being where we all can keep an eye on them, and where their views can be challenged and showed up to be facile. I well recall the neo-Nazi British National Party (BNP) once fielded a candidate in a local election here in Edinburgh, and other candidates said they would not share a platform with him at hustings meetings. What did that achieve? It handed that candidate his very own 'Nuremberg Rally' on a plate where he was allowed to spread his venom without any counter-argument being put forward. And while he did not win the seat, it pushed his vote up considerably. Attempts to shut down and silence neo-Nazis can therefore be counter-productive.

Speaking on LBC Radio on 11 February 2017, Maajid Nawaz said “If freedom of speech is to mean anything, then it is the rights of others to say things you do not want to hear. If you only allow those you agree with to speak, that is not freedom of speech, it is mere sycophancy.” I can already hear people saying “Huh! Maajid Nawaz, a radio host, who is he?” Well, let me educate you in just who he is. Maajid Nawaz is a British-born Muslim who was once a member of the Sunni Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which seeks a global Islamic caliphate. For membership of this group he was jailed in Egypt in 2001, and spent the next five years in prison, during which he read widely on human rights, and was released with the help of Amnesty International. After release, he left Hizb ut-Tahrir and founded the Quillam Foundation, to help combat young people from becoming radicalised by Islamic extremists. So, there is a man who once took what could be described as a “Nazi” view, who has turned his life around. He has seen what silencing people leads to first hand, and that is why he takes a strong stance against it. If you think you are wiser than Maajid Nawaz, I strongly suggest you rethink your attitude.

Trust me, I am no different from any other human being. When I hear or read people coming out with bigoted bullshit, my first reaction is indeed to bitchslap the stupid out of them. But if we seek to truly silence those on the extreme right, then that can only ever be done through education, and the most important part of that is showing up their own ideas for just how very dangerous, and very facile, they are. Using their own words against them is the most effective, most powerful tool which we have. Turning to violence only makes it look like we do not have a counter-argument, and actually gives neo-Nazis a victory. Extreme right views are largely ill thought out appeals to peoples fears and imagined grievances. By using well-informed, educated counter-arguments, we can not only show up neo-Nazi and other right-wing rhetoric to be baseless, but also clearly show those espousing such views to be as foolish and as dangerous as they truly are. This is one battle where the pen truly is mightier than the sword.

But if we embark on a campaign of violence, then we merely hand the extreme right a victory on a plate. They will be first to exploit it, to claim they are 'persecuted' (some fundamentalist Christians already play this game), and make themselves out to martyrs. Using such tactics are also unhealthy for democracy, for as I have already said, just who is a 'Nazi' is very much open to interpretation, and one has to ask, just where does that stop? Violence will only lead to counter-violence, which will exacerbate into more violence, and before you know where you are, we will all be silenced. To paraphrase Gandhi, an eye for an eye does indeed leave the world blind.

And really, just what was Richard Spencer punched for? For wearing a Pepe Frog lapel pin? A character which started life as an internet meme? Is that what it comes down to? Punching people for wearing a fucking badge based on a meme? Really? Do please grow the fuck up. Or even if it was for his words, well if there are those who seek to silence and deny a platform to those whose words they disagree with through the threat of or the actual use of violence, just which regime does that sound like? Ermm, the Nazis, that's whom.

Using violence against the extreme right is merely playing their game and sinking to their level. And those who call for violence but who are nowhere to be seen when the fighting starts are the worst kind of coward.

Do not fall for either; you are better than that ~ and if you only look for it, you have infinitely more honour in you than both put together.

Some rights DO require greater emphasis - get over it

She could be.  Could you?

Check your privilege before claiming equality.
 

In the wake of heightened racial tensions in the USA, there have been demonstrations both there and in the UK under the banner of “Black Lives Matter”. As ever when that phrase comes up, it has been met with someone stating “All Lives Matter”, and even accusing those protesting of racism.

All lives do indeed matter, but Black Lives Matter throws into sharp relief where even a society which claims to be equal in reality affords privilege to some, and denies those same privileges to others, for which the establishment, the police, and the general public are responsible for.

I am a 'white' person (hate the term – my skin's not white; “Peach Flake” is nearer the mark) myself and I would ask other white people to ask themselves the following;

• How often have you been stopped under suspicion by the police, and subjected to a search?
• How often have you been pulled over by the police for driving a flashy car (or even a crap one) because you “fit the description” of some alleged crime?
• If you are reading this in a country with armed police, how often has an officer stopped you and drawn their gun on you?
• How many of your friends, family, and local community have been deliberately targeted, and in some places shot at and killed, purely because of their ethnicity?
• How many times have you been refused a job or other opportunity because of your ethnicity?
• Were you ever asked or expected to aim lower in the employment market because of your ethnicity?
• Have you ever had your car or other property vandalised by people who think that because of your ethnicity you should not have it?
• Have you ever been told to “go home” or “get back to your own country” by someone of another ethnicity to you?
• Have you ever been threatened, spat at, or physically attacked because of your ethnicity?
• Have you ever received abusive and/or threatening letters because of your ethnicity?
• Have you ever had excrement pushed through your letterbox?
• If you are a business owner, have you ever had your business smashed up, or the windows smashed, because of your ethnicity?
• Have you ever had your house or business set on fire, or such an attempt made, because of your ethnicity?
• Have you ever attended the funeral of someone who was killed purely due to their ethnicity?

I am guessing that most if not all white people reading the above will have answered in the negative to all of these. Yet these are things which people of colour (another term I dislike, but it is useful for this article) face or have faced on a daily basis, in the USA, the UK, and many other white-dominated countries. I frankly take my hat off to people of colour, as if it were me, I'd be a nervous wreck, wondering what's coming next.

And of course, these things do not only pertain to people of colour, but to other people within our society, who are targeted by bigots purely because they differ from the “accepted norm”. Following the EU Referendum in the UK returned a vote in favour of leaving, Polish and other eastern European people have faced an upsurge in anti-European, xenophobic verbal and even physical attacks. Indeed, while not all Leave voters were xenophobic or racist, every such bigot probably voted Leave. Now some of these bigots, fuelled with bravado with the vote, seem to think that gives them the right to verbally or even physically abuse eastern Europeans – and people of colour. And the sad fact is that the majority of the British public look the other way, because a, it's not affecting them personally, and/or b, they more than likely share the views of the bigots.

And there are even white people, native to their country, who are still targeted because of other “differences”. Not least among these are the LGBT+. A bunch of racist thugs in London within days of the EU leave vote were heard chanting “First the immigrants, next the queers.”, and there are now some anti-LGBT+ groups, such as Christian Concern, who are calling for equal marriage legislation to be reversed. Meanwhile, as I write this the UK is facing having a new Prime Minister, the choice being between Home Secretary Theresa May, or Energy Secretary Andrea Leasom; both of whom claim to be deeply devout Christians, and both of whom have a track record of opposing pro-LGBT+ measures.

Not that it needed an EU Referendum to spark any anti-LGBT+ feeling; it has always been there, in the UK, in the USA, and in a great many other countries in the world. Cisgender and heterosexual people reading the above add the following questions;

• Have you ever been afraid to kiss, embrace, or hold hands with your partner?
• Have you ever been arrested for doing so?
• Have you ever been stopped by the police and / or arrested for the clothes you are wearing?
• Have you ever been verbally abused, threatened, or physically attacked for your sexuality or gender?
• Have you ever been convicted of a crime and put in a prison full of those opposite to the gender you identify with?
• Have you ever attended the funeral of someone who has been killed, or has committed suicide, due to their sexuality or gender?

Again, the overwhelming majority of cishet people will answer no to most if not all of the above. Yet many, if not all, are the harsh reality for many LGBT+ people.

As I made mention of before, the problem lies with privilege. As a white cishet male UK national from a culturally Christian background, my life is full of privilege – and I am painfully aware of that. The only prejudice I face are a, for being a short man, and b, for being a Scot. But even then, I can't say either have ever been a real problem, and neither have denied me of many opportunities, or seen me fearing for my safety (apart from the very occasional 'big man' who thought he could bully me) or my life itself.

But those who upon hearing “Black lives matter” immediately reply “All lives matter” are ignoring their own privilege. For it is generally those who have not lived the experience of those affected, who have not been denied privilege who shout that the loudest.

A few years ago, my partner was on an online forum speaking about the importance of feminism. She came under attack from a 'man' (well, a silly wee laddie, really) who described himself as a “Humanist” and tried to argue that we should not fight for women's rights, but for the human rights of all human beings. My partner, myself, and a few others tried to reason with him, that yes human rights are an issue for us all, which all should be involved in, but within human rights – and within humanism – there are certain people who are denied so much privilege that greater emphasis must be placed upon them.

I made the point to the said fool, imagine what would have happened in the 1950s and 1960s, had white people in the USA not joined in with and lent their weight to the Civil Rights movement on the grounds of “I'm not going to fight for black rights, I'm a Humanist, so I will only fight for equality for all.” We don't have to imagine as the facts are staring us in the face; the USA would still be segregated, and there sure as hell would be no African American President.

Now, I do not wish for one moment to attempt to take anything away from African Americans and the victory they won so hard in the Civil Rights movement. For it was their struggle, it was their victory, and it was many of them who paid with their lives for that victory. The fact remains however that in 50s-60s USA it was the whites who held the power, who dominated over politics, public services, and companies. Without some of those whites speaking out and taking action, the politicians would never have taken any notice. As much as I admire the late, great John F Kennedy – and trust me, I do – he once advised that the Civil Rights movement needed to “slow down” a bit. It was another man I admire greatly, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who made it clear; “Slow downism leads to stand stillism, and stand stillism leads to do nothingism.” It was very easy for Jack Kennedy to ask the Civil Rights movement to “slow down”; as an affluent, powerful, white male, he enjoyed a great many privileges which the majority of African Americans were denied. The fact is that African Americans could not afford to slow down, and Dr King made that perfectly aware to President Kennedy, and thereby forced his hand to take action.

Back to the said guy who claimed to be a Humanist, he was having none of it, and despite her blocking him, he thence commenced on a hate campaign against my partner, trolling groups she belonged to and slandering her at every given turn. Some Humanist. Some 'champion' of human rights.

I can already hear those who are fond of saying “All lives matter” sneering “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” I would point out to them that the second line of that particular quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm was in fact added by the pigs, who were the ones who were enjoying all the privileges. And that is what it comes down to; if you enjoy any degree of privilege which others are denied, then you cannot say that your life has equal value to theirs, or your struggle and their struggle are the same, because they simply are not. Nobody goes into an oncology ward and moans about their ingrown toenail.

Whether the “All lives matter” brigade like it or not, there are different degrees of privilege within society, and as long as that remains a fact, then we shall never have a truly equal or cohesive, united society. We see this already by even those who claim to stand up for the struggles of others making statements about “the black community”, “the Asian community”, “the immigrant community”, “the LGBT community”, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Yet you never hear anyone speaking of 'communities' by labelling them “white”, “European”, “cisgender”, “native”, “heterosexual”, etc. Why not? Because the latter all enjoy privileges which the former are denied.

Surely 'society' is made up of ALL people, with many differences? And trust me, each and every one of us is different from others. So when we start pigeonholing people into different communities, we immediately set them apart from 'society'.

And anyone who does that has just negated any right they have to whine “All lives matter”.

An A to Z of Creationist Fallacies: E is for Eugenics and Racism

Eugenics clinic, USA, 1920s

If creationists cannot convince people with spurious claims about a 6000 year old earth, designed and created by their god in six days, they will often attempt an emotional response. Amongst these are the claims that the Theory of Evolution leads to eugenics, that those who accept evolution support eugenics, and that Charles Darwin and all other “evolutionists” (their word, not mine) have been and are racists.

This claim appears to be based yet again, whether it be mistaken or are intentional lie, a complete misunderstanding of Darwin's explanation of biological evolution. A common creationist misconception about evolution is that it is an ever-upwards struggle towards 'better', when it most certainly is not, and that 'natural selection' means that only the strongest survive. The picture of evolution as an upwards spiral actually has more in common with Lamarckism, which sees evolution as a progression. Charles Darwin, whose understanding of evolution fits the standard accepted – and proven – model never said any such thing, but rather explained that with all life evolving from common ancestors, it branched out into varying species. Darwin's own drawing of his 'tree of life' in his notes, when he himself was struggling to understand this process, illustrates this beautifully, it does not show evolution as a progression, and Darwin never once claimed that.

Some creationists will quote a common phrase used in reference to evolution, “survival of the fittest”, and will even go as far as to claim that it was Charles Darwin who first said this. He did not in fact, it was stated by the naturalist, philosopher, and economist, Herbert Spencer. What is more, Spencer, who had indeed read On the Origin of Species, stated that when trying to apply Darwin's ideas to economics. Like the creationists, Spencer had completely misunderstood Darwin, and came out with the phrase to suggest a 'weakest to the wall' economic philosophy. However, 'survival of the fittest' in reference to biological evolution may not mean that only the strongest survive, but merely those best adapted.

When Patrick Matthew was hybridising and growing trees on his land in the Carse of Gowrie in Scotland, he noticed how some species would thrive in a given environment, but perish in another. Yet the same species which perished would thrive in an environment better suited to them, which would be unsuited to the flourishing trees. When he wrote these observations down in his 1829 paper On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, he had unwittingly stumbled upon and explained the process of natural selection, which many today recognise him as the father of. Patrick Matthew later read On the Origin of Species and wrote to Charles Darwin, accusing him of plagiarism. In fact, Darwin had never read Matthew's paper, but once he did he was fascinated and started a correspondence with Matthew in which both men realised they had too much in common for personal rivalries to get in the way of. Two men had observed natural selection in nature, and their observations both matched exactly; that species only thrive in environments suitable to them. That is what 'survival of the fittest' truly means; nothing more.

There are liars, there are damned liars, and then there is John Morris Pendleton. John Morris Pendleton is a car mechanic and a creationist lecturer, who because he managed to gain a minor degree in chemistry, claims to be a scientist. In one of his “Hello I'm a Scientist” lectures, working on subtitle for Darwin's seminal work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Pendleton openly states “Darwin's book was actually a justification, a thesis, trying to support racism.” So, John Morris Pendleton got all that purely from the book's subtitle. I would assume that he worked only from the title and has not actually read the actual book. If he had, he would have noticed that nowhere, not once, in On the Origin of Species does Charles Darwin make any reference to human evolution. The term “favoured races” in the title refers only to those species best able to adapt to their environments by natural selection, and has nothing to do with human racial ethnicity. Sorry (not sorry) to burst your little Darwin-hating bubble John, and all other creationists who make this claim, but On the Origin of Species deals only with the biological evolution of flora and fauna and at no point makes any reference to the human race. If any creationist doubts this, or wants to refute me upon it, I challenge them right here and now to provide the proof that On the Origin of Species was a thesis supporting human racism.

Nonetheless, the crazier creationists (and the most dishonest ones – not always the same people) will insist that Charles Darwin supported Eugenics, and that his Theory of Evolution led to all sorts of racial discrimination, experiments, and even the Nazi holocaust. Some even claim that Darwin invented eugenics. Unfortunately for these liars and shysters, their claims not only do not hold up to the slightest scrutiny, but throw up some very inconvenient truths about just who it was who supported Eugenics and other theories of racial superiority.

Eugenics is a philosophy of race based upon 'superior' and 'inferior' genetics, which seeks to improve the human race by selective breeding. Taking it's name from the Greek,Eugene, meaning "well-born", the idea has been around ever since the philosopher Plato suggested suggested selective breeding to produce and protect a superior Guardian Class. It was not until the 19^th century however that such notions started to be taken seriously. Gynaecologist William Goodell (1829-1894) suggested the castration and spaying of the insane to prevent them breeding. Of course, this idea was taken up to include the sterilisation of the mentally disabled and special needs adults, which alarmingly was still a common practice in many countries until relatively recently, certainly within the lifetimes of most reading this. Although officially banned in the UK, it is suspected and there have been claims that many such sterilisations were carried out on special needs people right up to the 1980s. In an alarming move in February 2015, a judge in England ruled that health authorities could forcibly enter the home of a mother of six who has severe learning difficulties, and carry out a compulsory sterilisation upon her, as they believe a further pregnancy could kill her.

The first person to properly promote eugenics and coin the word in modern parlance however was Francis Galton (1822-1911). Galton was in fact a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, and his reading of On the Origin of Species led him to conclude that there were desirable hereditary traits which could be achieved by selective breeding. It is due to Galton's misreading of Darwin's work that some creationists blame Darwin for eugenics, and some go even further and claim that Darwin was personally responsible for Galton's twisted ideas. It seems that some Christians think we are nor merely our brother's keepers, but our half-cousin's. Charles Darwin in fact strongly disagreed with his half-cousin, and in fact it was not until 1883, one year after Darwin's death, that Francis Galton officially gave his ideas the name Eugenics, and published his work Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development.

Eugenics as an idea took off from there, and had a good few notable followers, including psychologist Sigmund Freud, writer and philosopher George Bernard Shaw, writer and socialist H.G. Wells, and family planning pioneer Marie Stopes. Again, because these people were advocates of eugenics and swayed from the dictates of the Bible, creationists today are very quick to point to them and the 'evil' which they spread. Edinburgh lass Marie Stopes comes in for considerable criticism from some creationists, not least because the family planning clinics which carry her name today advise and offer abortions, and some even claim that she was a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In fact, when Marie Stopes set up her first clinics they were to educate people, particularly the poor, about contraception, sparing them the expense of extra mouths to feed, and she also was a pioneer in teaching women that there was no guilt in them enjoying sex. In her time, not only was abortion still illegal in the UK, but Stopes was firmly against it. As for the Nazi accusation, Marie Stopes in 1933 sent a collection of poems to Adolf Hitler, long before the world was to learn of his true nature. Do not forget this was at the same time that Winston Churchill was praising Hitler.

As eugenics grew as an idea it grew as an academic discipline in many universities, and there were eugenics societies, notably in the UK and the USA. Whilst the USA is officially a secular country, we all know that it is culturally very religious. So how could this state of affairs occurred in what were then the two strongest countries in the world, where the Christian churches held so much sway and dictated much of people's lives? Quite simply because it was actually Christians and many church leaders supporting eugenics. Galton himself stated that eugenics needed to emphasise “the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution”. One enthusiastic contributor to the Eugenics Review, journal of the Eugenics Educational Society, was Reverend W.R. Inge DD, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, and Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Championing eugenics as a spiritual quest, Inge once wrote;

"It is the paradox of the spiritual life that if we could take to ourselves ‘the wings of a dove’ and escape from this world of mingled good and evil, we should not reach the rest which we desire. For one at least of the Divine values, Goodness, cannot be realised by flight, but only by struggle."

Another leading Church of England clergyman, Reverend J. H. F. Peile, was also a contributor to the Eugenics Review, who stated that eugenics and church endorsement of it was “a principle to which the Church is already committed”.

Meanwhile, in the USA, the American Eugenics Society had sought, and won endorsement from at least one leading clergyman, and a Roman Catholic one to boot, Archbishop Hayes of the Diocese of New York. And although the UK had been the birthplace of eugenics, it was actually in the United States it was to become a “science”, endorsed in law, where the first experiments would be carried out, and from whence the Nazis would take their ideas.

David Starr Jordan came from a strict Baptist family. He gained his PhD at Northwestern Christian University (later Butler University), in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he also was Professor of Natural History. A Unitarian, although he stood aloof from organised religion, he once said “Religion, like love, can be suppressed and perverted, but religion is the foundation upon which all rest," Founder of Stanford University, he is to this day lauded by many Christians in the USA, including the Christian Scientists. He was also the man who in 1902 published his work on race, Blood of a Nation, in which he theorised that qualities such as talent and poverty were passed on through blood.

Eugenics movements in the USA won funding from some charitable organisations, who were at the least based in the best of Christian motives, no matter how misguided their ideas. The Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation poured money into 'betterment' programmes. In 1908, John Harvey Kellogg MD, a fervent Seventh Day Adventist who declared a “War on passion” and who in his invention of corn flakes hoped such a bland food would prevent masturbation (I kid you not), funded the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. Biologist Charles B Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Spring Harbor, New York, in 1911 with funding from the Carnegie Institution and the Harriman Railroad Fortune. The ERO went on to research and keep records upon thousands of US families, concluding that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds, and favoured immigration restrictions and sterilisation. Some members of the ERO, such as Madison Grant, favoured extermination. Davenport, himself a home-schooled puritan Protestant, also founded the American Breeders Association, dedicated to purity in marriage, of which David Starr Jordan and Madison Grant were also members.

Michigan attempted to introduce a sterilisation bill in 1897, which failed to gain support from sufficient legislators. Pennsylvania passed such a bill eight years later, which was vetoed by the Governor of the state. In Indiana in 1907 a bill was passed and the first compulsory sterilisation of individuals for “imbecilism”, “feeble mindedness” and epilepsy proceeded. Washington and California followed suit in 1909, and while levels remained low, California was the exception which was to be the vanguard of sterilisations under the teachings of eugenics, performing some 20,000 enforced sterilisations from 1909 up to the 1960s. Of the 32 US states which adopted sterilisation under eugenics programmes, North Carolina was the most aggressive. It was in NC that an IQ of 70 or lower was deemed suitable for enforced sterilisation. The North Carolina Eugenics Board almost always approved proposals brought before them by local welfare boards, and NC social workers were allowed to propose individuals for sterilisation. "Here, at last, was a method of preventing unwanted pregnancies by an acceptable, practical, and inexpensive method," wrote Wallace Kuralt in the March 1967 journal of the N.C. Board of Public Welfare. "The poor readily adopted the new techniques for birth control." This deeply religious state, some of whose boundary signs claim “When Jesus returns, he's coming here” ran a eugenics-based sterilisation programme from 1933 to as late as 1977.

Where compulsory sterilisation was carried out in the USA, those it was carried out upon were not always told, most came from the poorest backgrounds, many more women were sterilised than men and as they were seen as inferior, many more people of colour were sterilised than men. Native Americans and African Americans, again mostly women, were the main targets for compulsory sterilisation, sometimes without their knowledge but otherwise bullied into it, or not properly informed. The Native American women's organisation, Woman of All Red Nations (WARN), publicised the fact that Native American women were being threatened with removal of benefits if they had large families and did not agree to sterilisation, while the Indian Health Service (IHS) repeatedly refused to deliver the children of Native American women unless they agreed to sterilisation whilst in labour. In many cases the women had not had the circumstances correctly explained, or because they were given in English rather than the women's languages, they did not understand what was happening. The US General Accounting Office was later to estimate that the IHS had carried out 3,406 sterilisations under these circumstances.

It was the US eugenics programmes which attracted the attention of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and it was the eugenicists in California who were responsible for drawing their attention to it. Californian eugenicists sent literature to German scientists and medical professionals. The newly-elected Nazi government were all too interested and embarked upon their own compulsory sterilisation programme, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, based largely upon a proposed 'model American law' by Californian eugenicist, and superintendent of the US Eugenics Records Office, Harry H Laughlin. Californian eugenicists were invited to Germany, and one of them, C.M. Goethe, told a colleague upon his return;

“You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought... ...I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”

The Rockefeller Foundation went on to fund German eugenics programmes, including one overseen by Nazi scientist Joseph Mengele, before he was transferred to Auschwitz, where he carried out genetic experiments on concentration camp inmates.

Of particular note among these US geneticists for their influence over Nazi ideology was Madison Grant (1876-1937). Grant was a conservationist, a lawyer and a writer. He is best remembered for his 1916 work The Passing of the Great Race, in which he became the greatest promoter or 'Nordic Theory', under which Grant postulated that tall, white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed northern Europeans were racially superior to all others;

“The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant character of the Alpines. Chivalry and knighthood, and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts, are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions, and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north.”

Were this not enough, it was Grant who suggested the rounding-up, separation, and ultimately the elimination of all other races;

“A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”

Madison Grant was undoubtedly barking mad, as well as an out-and-out xenophobe. He considered the white peoples of the Mediterranean to be the same 'Negroid' race as Africans, and his views of the Scots was completely loony. In his 1933 work, The Conquest of a Continent, Grant stated,

“The aborigines were called Picts in Scotland. These Mediterranean Picts spoke a language related to Hamitic or Egyptian, and many place names of this origin are still to be found... ...Curiously enough these Mediterraneans [Scottish Picts] contributed their dark eyes and hair color, but not their short stature. The population of West Scotland has the greatest height of all the people's of Europe.”

Firstly, Grant was alluding to an ancient Scots legend, that the Scots were descended from Scota, daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh, and Gaythelus, a Greek slave who was her lover, and they fled to Spain, then their descendants invaded Ireland, then their descendants invaded Caledonia, founding Scotland. Secondly, the Picts and the Scots were genetically different peoples. Thirdly, west coast Scots are not renowned for their height even today, and in 1933 when this work was written, poverty was rife as was disease, particularly rickets, and west coast Scots, particularly Glaswegians, had stunted height as a result.

Madison Grant was also a staunch Christian, and showed contempt for all other religions and their followers, whom he included among his 'unworthy' races. Also from Conquest of a Continent;

“The settlers of New England may be regarded as essentially rebels against established religion and established authority when the religion and authority were not of their own choosing. This non-conformist spirit persisted in the successive new frontiers as they were settlers of western New York and the old Northwest Territory gave birth to an astonishing number of new sects, religions, 'isms,' and communities, ranging all the way from Mormonism to Shakers and the Oneida Community.

“...the South has remained characteristically American...One of the strange results of the Civil War has been that while the victorious North sold its birthright of culture, religion, and racial purity for a mess of industrial pottage, the South, thought defeated, retained its racial inheritance unimpaired.

“...With its two million Jews, its million and a half Italians, its million Germans, and its three quarters of a million each of Poles and Irish, together with substantial contingencies from almost every other country on the map, the Empire State is scarcely able to meet the requirements of the Founders of the Republic, who, like Thomas Jefferson, feared above everything else the formation of an alien, urban proletariat as creating a condition under which a democratic form of government could not function successfully.”

As barmy as he was an out-and-out liar concerning European and American history and migration, Madison Grant's works were nonetheless extremely popular. The Passing of the Great Race was particularly popular, so much so that by 1937 it had sold 16,000 copies in the USA alone. Consider that was at a time when a great many Americans were still fully or semi illiterate. It was also published in many other languages, notably German in 1925. With it's fantasies about a superior white-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed race of warriors, soldiers, scientists, nobles and knights (yep, Grant originated that silly notion too), and his arguments for the separation and elimination of 'inferior' races, we need not look too far for where Adolf Hitler and the Nazis got both their ideology – and their inspiration for the death camps from. It was the first non-German book to be ordered reprinted and distributed by the Nazis, and Adolf Hitler actually wrote to Madison Grant in which he stated “This book is my bible”.

We therefore see that far from eugenics, ideas of racial purity, and the inspiration for the Nazi holocaust coming from Charles Darwin and the proponents of the Theory of Evolution, they came instead from the USA, pioneered and spread by mostly Christian people, who carried out a 'holocaust' of their own, and who were responsible for promulgating ideas of racial purity and the eradication of other 'inferior' races.

Today of course we look upon these things with 21^st century eyes, where most decent people are absolutely horrified by the bigotry and prejudice of the past. When Charles Darwin was alive, it was in fact quite a common belief among white, Christian, Europeans that were superior to all other races, who ranged from “murderous savages” to “painted heathens”; the entire British Empire, which was to colour one quarter of the globe pink, was based deeply in such ideas. You would be hard pushed to find one white person in those days who did not consider those of other races, even of other religions, to be at the most inferior, and at the least, beneath them.

Thankfully there were a few exceptions who did indeed believe all races were equal. One was a man in Victorian England, who as a Methodist Christian had been a strong campaigner for the abolition of slavery. He went on to study at the University of Edinburgh, he learned taxidermy from a man employed to carry out such, a freed slave named John Edmonstone. The two became firm friends and would speak for hours about animal specimens. So who was this fine fellow who not only hated slavery but treated a black man as his equal and his friend? Charles Darwin, that's who.

Racism and proponents of eugenics still persist to this day, both among some theists. Whilst researching this article, I came across some truly odious 'Christian' websites, from Roman Catholic anti-abortionists continuing to pour their bile upon Marie Stopes, to hardline Protestant white supremacists championing the lies and utter fantasies of Madison Grant. I am sure there are equally some twisted atheists who also support eugenics. Those who promote eugenics today however, are roundly condemned and disregarded by the majority of both communities; it is one thing both the faithful and atheists can agree upon. Yes, all of those 'good Christians' who backed the US eugenics programmes were all in the wrong, every bit as much as the atheists among them. The vast majority of Christians today are good, well-meaning people, and I'm sure there will be some reading this will be as equally horrified at the shameful eugenics record of the USA as atheists are. Please, such Christians, I am not for one moment trying to lay the blame for those programmes at your door, nor would I ever try to suggest that all Christians support eugenics. I merely use the example to hammer home just how much creationists lie (which decent Christians should be very concerned about), or are mistaken, on this matter. By equal measure, to accuse those atheists who accept the fact of evolution of supporting eugenics and racism is an outright slur upon a great many decent human beings.

At the end of the day however, even if Charles Darwin had been a racist, even if he had supported eugenics, even if the USA had not embarked upon eugenics programmes, even if all those who did had all been atheists, it matters not one jot to the truth of biological evolution. What the creationists are attempting in making such claims is an appeal to the heart, not the head. Well, even if that appeal were in any way attractive, and because it is based in lies, it is not, it cannot change the truth one iota. Biological evolution is a fact, and has been roundly proven to be so on it's own merit, and by several other sciences which support it, and it in turn supports. It is often very beautiful, and by equal merit, it can appear extremely cruel. Again, neither of these positions matter to it's ultimate truth. John Keats once wrote “Truth is beauty, beauty truth”, but in life we often have to suck up the fact that not all which is true is beautiful, and that which is beautiful is all too often not true.