Have We Lost Our Mind?

 It felt so relieving when I finally lowered myself into the public swimming pool, just a few minutes down the road to where I live, for a pre-booked fifty-minute lane swim after five-week abstinence. This was just after the end of a month-long lockdown, the second one this year and one not so severe as the first one, due to the coronavirus pandemic. And just as the second lockdown ends, so freedom is partially restored, for now at least, along with the fantastic news that a new antiviral vaccine is on the cards - and a couple of remarkable statements made over the Media.

It was while this second lockdown was still in place when my wife and I both watched the drama, Small Axe on the BBC iplayer. It was not only just good drama but a true story about the opening of the Mangrove Cafe at #8 All Saints Road, in the London district of Notting Hill. Its owner, Frank Crichlow, (1932-2010) was an Afro-Caribbean immigrant who arrived from Trinidad into England on the Empire Windrush in 1948, then as a young man. 

The opening of the Mangrove, 1968.

Not long after the Mangrove Cafe opened, members of the all-white Metropolitan Police began raids of the venue, intending to close it down. Apparently, after strong resistance to keep the business running, providing an essential social haven for other blacks, and despite word getting around that Crichlow was against taking or selling illegal drugs, the police secretly planted drug packets around the cafe so they could be found and warrant an arrest. This occurred in 1984 when the owner was falsely imprisoned whilst awaiting trial but was acquitted.

But it was in 1970, after several failed attempts to raid the cafe, that Crichlow and eight others organised a demonstration to protest against police brutality. The march was well-attended by a large crowd of Afro-Caribbeans and they stood outside several police stations to make their protest. This led to the trial of the Mangrove Nine at the Old Bailey around a year later in 1971.

The Police Sergeant who led the raids stood in the box and at the start of the trial and with a Bible in his hands, swore an oath to always tell the truth "the truth and nothing but the truth". However, throughout the trial, he riddled his testimonies with lies and then covering them up with his declaration for his love and support for the British Empire with its national and racial superiority. However, with the forceful and persuasive questioning of Crichlow, along with one or two others of the Nine, the sergeant was unable to verify his testimony with any substantial evidence and was ordered by the judge to stand down, and all nine defendants were eventually acquitted by the jury. However, the judge himself rebuked both parties of racial hatred after the conclusion of the trial.

The Mangrove Cafe eventually closed down in 1992. But the institutional racism among the British Police Force continues to simmer, even if apparently underground.

Then came the murder of Stephen Lawrence while he was waiting at a bus stop in the London district of Eltham, April 22nd, 1993. It was a deliberate attack by a gang of five belligerent white thugs on an up-and-coming black student architect from Plumstead who was accompanying a friend as the two waited for the bus to arrive to take them home after an evening out. The conviction of these five was never verified due to "lack of evidence" and the five were photographed as they arrogantly walked out of the Court, wearing suits and ties, back into freedom.

It was over ten years after the death of Stephen Lawrence that a BBC Panorama reporter, Mark Daly, spent seven months training as a police officer at the Stockport Division of the Greater Manchester Police in 2003 after then Home Secretary Jack Straw established the MacPherson Report in 1997, resulting in that the police officers in the Stephen Lawrence case were institutionally racist. What Daly has seen and heard had sickened him. Casual office conversation often was about their prejudice against blacks, their hatred of them, and referring to them as monkeys and therefore should go back to their own (backward) country.

One issue seems to become clear, and that is the parallelism between the attitude of the British Police, whose officers are almost universally caucasian and have sympathy for the former British Empire and its invasion and subjugation of foreign lands whose indigenous inhabitants were black or Asian - and the worldview of the German Nazis who had Jews, blacks, those having physical or mental disabilities, and others who were considered inferior, slaughtered in the Holocaust, simply due to their "evolutionary disadvantage" to their superior Aryan race and therefore looked upon as unfit to survive. And also considering that the non-caucasian living in the Caribbean, including Trinidad, were descendants of African slaves of the Middle Passage into which the white English imperialists had dipped their hands into black profits.

Never mind that the white plantation owner of the 1800s New World was legally able to copulate with a female slave to produce a mulatto offspring, and that has happened far more frequently than sleeping with their own white wives, and the latter only to produce a male heir - the African slave was considered a sub-human, down to the level of a mere animal, a stronger worldview than even Charles Darwin himself would at first have ever considered, yet had never entered their minds that such easy interbreeding negates any idea of physical, mental, or genetic inferiority of the female slave.

Cotton Slaves in American Deep South.

And so the world turns. Technology advances. Computers are invented, followed by the Internet. And with it, we can communicate by typing on a keyboard, press "send" and the recipient would receive the message instantly. Indeed, if it wasn't for the rapid growth of Amazon and other parcel deliveries, the Post Office would have long gone out of business. As technology advances by leaps and bounds, so in Medicine, new methods of treatment are invented, including keyhole surgery replacing conventional methods, along with the discovery of new drugs and the research done on new vaccines.

And so, with the breakout of a new virus from China, the Covid-19 advances around the world, thanks mainly to middle-class long-haul flight passengers, along with public school students skiing on the Italian Alps and holiday-making at the heavily-infested Lombardy region of Northern Italy. Britain gets infected, a three-month lockdown is implemented, and all town and city centres become ghost towns. And in laboratories around the world, scientists are busy in their attempts to find a vaccine to combat this new virus. And this includes those at Oxford.

Personally, I find it difficult to reconcile the refined, well-educated English academic with the loutish, belligerent football fan who makes monkey noises at a black player from the stands. Such thinking endorsed by memories of my cardiac procedure in 2015, where many of the NHS staff at Harefield Hospital, including the consultant who operated, were foreign-born. As with last week when I attended a cardiac clinic at Wexham Park Hospital for a scan. All the staff there were foreign-born, including the doctor and receptionist alike. That does not mean, of course, that the scientists at Oxford are all foreign-born, but what I have experienced in person seem to back this idea.

Ande coming to think of it, I have been wondering whether there's an unclean spirit in the air, the same one which dwelt in the heart of Haman, the Agitite Prime Minister who ordered the slaughter of all the Jews living under the Persian King Ahasuerus around 480 BC, and featured in the Old Testament book of Esther. Could this same spirit also have influence among the Caribbean and American Deep South slave owners of the 1700s and the 1800s? Could this same entity have dwelt in the heart of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts, and at present influencing the hearts of racists, including some football fans and police officers? 

Then the Belgian firm Pfizer was given British approval for its vaccine to be rolled out, the first country in the world to do so. It was State Secretary of Education, Gavin Williamson, who cried out with excitement that Britain was "the greatest country in the world" as if referring to an Empire. I would consider his statement to be nonsense. After all, the vaccine was not made here in the UK but in Belgium, an EU country. However, to give credit, Williamson, whose parents supported Labour, and was educated in a state comprehensive school before graduating in Social Sciences at Bradford University, supported Remain at the 2016 referendum and therefore, I have doubts whether he holds any real nationalistic or neo-Nazi worldviews.

But to my mind, I don't take Williamson too seriously. With the case of Brant Shapp, a Jewish-born Secretary of Transport, he too had made a comment that anyone flying in from a country not listed in the Covid-19 "safe corridor" should quarantine for two weeks, but important businessmen, sportsmen and celebrities - people of higher value - can arrive here in the UK without the need to quarantine.

Whether he was really serious or not, I cannot say. But to differentiate between a "person of higher value" from an "ordinary" person is definitely unbiblical! And extremely unpopular among the masses. When this news appeared in The Daily Mail national newspaper, in the long comments forum trailing the article, just about everyone condemned Grant Shapps, Boris Johnson and the Tory Party altogether. Only one commenter agreed, saying that if in any business suffering a pipe burst and a plumber has to be flown in from Germany, then for him to quarantine for fourteen days from his arrival here would benefit no one, certainly not the business! But such a comment is ludicrous. There are plenty of local plumbers available who can do the work within hours of the call. And besides, is a plumber a person of extra value? I doubt that Brant Shapps had the plumber in mind.

Shapps also voted Remain in the 2016 referendum. But soon after he became a supporter of Brexit after realising that Article 50 shouldn't be dispensed with to remain in the EU. I believe that to differentiate between the value of people according to social status and this combined with Williamson's "Greatest country in the world" could throw fuel into the fire of the Bexiteer's sense of national superiority, and Neo-Nazi supporters would relish in such statements coming from Parliament.

Therefore I tend to believe that this unclean entity is more likely to find a notch among the minds of Brexiteers than of Remainers. However, after witnessing such things going back well beyond Charles Darwin, I'm beginning to ask myself, Are we losing our mind? Is this dominant theory of evolution actually robbing our brains of everything good?

To believe in the supernatural Divine Creation, to accept that since God made us and therefore loves us enough to redeem us and to atone for us through His son Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, is the antidote for all this madness. Paul the Apostle certainly never believed in racial or national superiority. In his letter to the churches in Galatia, he writes that,

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. - Galatians 3:26-29.

Indeed, no man's ideas can eclipse such a statement!