The second part of a two-part examination of Manchester’s history which is under attack by liberal journalists left-wing academics, black activists and ‘woke’ social justice warriors in recent articles in The Guardian newspaper.
The Guardian, well noted for its liberal and left-wing politics, is currently promoting its own hand-wringing apologies for its founders at the ‘Manchester Guardian’ having had business connections to the 18th Century and early 19th Century trans-Atlantic slave trade, or at the very least financial investments in the Caribbean sugar plantations and the Manchester cotton textile industry.
In Part 1 of this series of articles, BM Northern region examined the ‘Special issue Guardian supplement’ entitled, “Cotton Capital; How Slavery Shaped the Guardian, Britain & the world”, with its special focus on the city of Manchester. The special supplement was put into circulation on Saturday April 1st 2023, and was followed by articles in the daily Guardian newspaper in the following week.
Manchester was once held up as an example of British industry and innovation, the shining star of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th Century. The White working-class of Manchester were once depicted as the stereotypical northerners, hard-working, hard players, based in traditional communities.
The wealth of industrial cities like Manchester is of course another reason for ‘White Guilt’ and the recognition of ‘White Privilege’ as far as the Left are concerned. This ignores the terrible suffering of the White working-class in Manchester during the many decades of the Industrial Revolution. It is a blind spot for the present-day Cultural Marxists that the founding fathers of Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels based their political ideology on what they observed first hand in the cotton mills of Manchester in the 1840’s.
Cultural Marxists are always keen to re-direct and distort British history to fit their social engineering agenda, one of their key tactics is to change the language used by the media, by publishers and broadcasters to reflect their ‘new narrative’. The new re-direction is to describe the black communities which have colonised some British towns and cities as ‘descendant communities’. Why “descendants?”
The Cultural Marxists are keen to identify these people, not as descendants of West Indian immigrants who arrived in Britain in the late 1940’s, across the 1950’s and 1960’s, but as the descendants of the African slaves who worked on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the cotton plantations of the southern states of the USA.
The truth is that immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean first landed in the immediate post-war period. In 1948 the former troop ship, the Empire Windrush brought the first batch of economic migrants from the West Indies and these people slowly spread out to establish communities in Britain, first in London and then in the major industrial towns and cities including Manchester.
The extremely shaky logic being employed by the modern-day Cultural Marxists is that because the city of Manchester grew up around the cotton manufacturing industry and the cotton was mostly obtained from the slave owning cotton plantations of the United States, then the black communities settled in Manchester have every right to be there.
The leftist argument is that those descended from the trans-Atlantic slave trade are owed a huge debt by cities like Manchester, and therefore they should recognise the debt and grant its black communities’ special recognition. The obvious flaw in the Cultural Marxist distortion of historical facts is that the majority of the black immigrant communities in Britain are descended from the West Indian economic migrants who arrived in Britain in the period of reconstruction after the Second World War, and have no connection at all to the historic cotton fields of the American ‘Deep South’.
The current re-writing of history by the political Left has of course grown out of the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, another useful tool for liberal and left-wing academics, historians and journalists to beat the drum of ‘White Guilt’ and ‘White Privilege’.
The new shift to describe the black communities in modern Britain as ‘descendants’ is a ploy to firstly convince blacks in cities like Manchester that they are the ‘historic victims’ of ‘White Supremacy’ and ‘White Racism’; but secondly to convince the liberal and ill-informed sections of the White British that these ‘descendant’ communities are owed a huge debt by British society. Therefore these communities not only “belong here”, but are owed a continuous apology from the White British for the sufferings of the plantation slaves and a recognition that cities like Manchester were built on the backs of the plantation slaves.
A particularly arrogant and insulting two-page article appeared in the Guardian on Monday April 3rd 2023, under the heading, “Scandalous: Manchester urged to tackle lack of Black representation.” The article was headed by a large, half-page colour photograph of a Black Lives Matter demonstration which took place in the Moss-Side district of Manchester in 2016. This image was noticeable for the number of placards bearing the threatening slogan “No Justice No Peace”, hinting at the threat of violence if the demands of the black communities are not met.
Language distortion is a classic Marxist tactic and The Guardian asserts that the ‘victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade no longer to be described as black slaves but as “enslaved African people”. Cultural Marxism is clearly in action as the Guardian persues its social justice agenda, demanding greater representation in civic leadership in Manchester. Although the black population of Manchester is just 14.8% of the city’s total, the newspaper is demanding they have a greater say, failing to recognise that a large part of that 14.8% are immigrants from West Africa or sub-Saharan Africa, not the Caribbean and with no ancestral links to so-called “descendant communities”.
This Marxist demand for greater black representation in the political establishment of Manchester carefully ignores the number of black councillors in both Manchester and the ‘next door’ city of Salford. The Guardian article whined on about “under-representation’ and demanded, “A place at the table”. Again ignoring the reality that Britain as a whole is still a White majority country, inspite of the onslaught on its population demographics of unbroken non-white immigration since 1948.
Ever since the emergence of the so-called ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, the Marxist political Left has sought to use BLM as another weapon in its arsenal. A tool for social engineering, a propaganda tool to increase liberal ‘White Guilt’, and to generate resentment and anger in black communities. As far as revolutionary Marxists are concerned, this level of agitation is required to raise the “necessary pre-revolutionary tensions”. All part of the left-wing pipe-dream where British society is undermined and over thrown to create the fantasy ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
This was all part of the utopian fantasy world conjured up by Karl Marx in 1848 as he sat scribbling his revolutionary ideas in the Manchester of the Industrial Revolution. It is the sworn intention of all British National Socialists and racial Nationalists that this future vision of the Marxists remains just a fantasy, and Manchester, no matter what vitriol is thrown at it by the likes of Guardian supplements and pro-BLM articles, never happens.
Part one of this post can be viewed by clicking here >>
Resources:
Top Image: Reproduction of the front page of The Guardian’s supplement.
Second Image: A montage of headings from the supplement.
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