History's Heroes are the Heroes of the Class That Rules.

Richard Mellor

This is interesting. I have not heard of this woman before, she is a type of lawyer in the UK called a barrister. She's clearly from the middle class as her accent tells us. I actually love the accent but the class as a whole are as Borat says, "not so good".

She is absolutely right of course, Churchill was a racist bastard, as was Cecil Rhodes who stole a lot of wealth from South Africa and Nelson was a representative of the British ruling class and its a military representative in its struggle against its rivals.

The Irish would not doubt also have no love for these three characters being England's, then Britain's first colony. And we can be certain of one thing, they were all as contemptuous and dismissive of British workers as the colonial people's whose wealth they plundered. Let's not lose sight of the face that these people, the man she takes up in the video, and the heritage they defend, had British children as young as 10 working in coal mines and factories processing cotton that Black slaves picked in the US South.

The Vietnamese never threatened the US for example yet the US government killed three million of them and dropped chemicals on their food and population (not to mention their own troops) that results in children being born deformed even today. The Iraqi's never threatened the US worker yet the US government killed around a million of them also using chemical warfare and their children are still being born deformed today and cancers rampant due to it. None of the people that organized this slaughter should be heroes to working people.

The thing is that in any nation state, workers are taught the history of the ruling class. When we are dragged in to the wars the ruling classes have with each other for markets and the plunder that results from them, workers are told we are fighting for "our" freedom for the "nation" as a whole. For our way of life our culture and all that nonsense.

So we look to these heroes as our own but they are not our own. I never knew about the heroes of my own class in the UK until I was in my thirties. Henry the V111 was a murdering bastard, he murdered thousands of English peasants. Why do we have anything glorifying that thug?

Anyway, I think trying to convince her class colleagues about the righteousness of her argument is a wasted effort; racism is too useful a tool for them when they need it. It's natural for most from her background that seeing the working class as alternative and the force that can change the situation is not an option.  She wouldn't know how to do that and she doesn't see the working class as playing a role at all except a reactionary one, rather than the force that can change society. This doesn't negate her argument of course or her disgust at the comment from the white guy whose name incidentally is Nicolo Ferrari which is Italian. There are heroic and dedicated figures from outside the working class who place the skills their privileged existence has given them at the service of working people in our struggle for a better life. But they are a small minority; the perks are too great.

This woman is right of course, asking a white British person critical of something why they live there just wouldn't happen. I see in the UK. they are trying to adopt the  method of the US ruling class, have color become a race and supplant nationalism with racism both are important of course as they are linked but here in the US especially, race, and identity politics is used to obscure the class question.

I want to write a bit more about that so I'll end these accompanying comments here.