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4 May, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Liverpool University is removing the name of William Gladstone from one of its buildings because the Prime Minister, the great liberal exemplar, had a father who benefited from slavery. The building will be renamed for a Communist, Dorothy Kuya. thetimes.co.uk/article/f864a8…
Dorothy Kuya was no idealistic "private" Communist, incidentally: she was a lifelong member of the CPGB, a creature entirely controlled by the KGB, which worked to destroy Britain down to the last day of the Soviet Union.
Annoying @TheTimes uses the Communists' self-description of "anti-racism campaigner", a cynical label adopted by Soviet operatives for political warfare purposes. As regards slavery, the Soviet Empire re-introduced it to a country that had abolished it on a scale unprecedented.
In other words, if you are cancelling someone for connections to slavery - especially at second- and third-hand - it's a bit much to replace them with a life-long supporter of the GULAG, as Liverpool University has now done.

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More from @KyleWOrton

Kyle Orton Profile picture
25 Jan
Exactly 365 years ago, on 24 January 1656, a physician and farmer from Portugal, Jacob Lumbrozo, landed in #Maryland, becoming the first documented #Jewish resident of the state. He only lived in the New World for about a decade, but it was quite interesting <THREAD>
Jacob Lumbrozo, the first documented Jew in Maryland, was a successful doctor and businessman in America, given a commission to trade with the Native Indians in 1665, not long before he died, and had trade relations to England and the Netherlands. He did run into trouble, though.
In 1658, Jacob Lumbrozo, the first documented Jew in Maryland, was charged under the state Toleration Act, passed in 1649, three months after King Charles I was executed, for blasphemy, i.e. denying the divinity of Christ.
Read 9 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
22 Jan
This is the crux of the problem - diplomatic/political and humanitarian. Any "solution", even a halfway solution, is the same as a call for regime-change. While Bashar al-Asad remains in "power", or at least fronting for an Iranian-Russian occupation, there is nothing to be done.
Here's the other problem: the regime is not going to negotiate its way out of power; sanctions, even in theory, are not going to achieve what a total war did not. And in practice, Asad can load the pain of the sanctions on the populace while his secret police remain intact.
If the sanctions on Asad's state held out the hope of, for example, releasing people from the GULAGs or even just improving their conditions, they would be so much easier to defend. As it is, it is unclear what the sanctions have achieved, or could achieve.
Read 5 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
17 Dec 20
Yesterday, Dec. 16, was 104 years since the State Duma of #Russia's Imperial government closed for the last time. Opened in April 1906 as part of the reforms after the 1905 rebellion (triggered by the war loss to Japan), it was a shocking infusion of liberalism to the Tsardom.
So many what-ifs with Russia, even up to the end. If Nicholas II had not taken direct control at the front in September 1915, or if somebody had murdered Rasputin earlier - which might have stopped Nicholas going to the front (he did it partly to get away from Court intrigues).
The political reforms in #Russia after 1905 were serious, and on the economic side the industrialisation of the country was even more successful - it's one of the reasons the Germans were content with war in 1914; it would have been impossible to win by 1917 or perhaps 1916.
Read 6 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
20 Nov 20
100 years ago on Nov. 17, the last major component of the counter-revolutionary White Guards led by General Pyotr Wrangel left Crimea in steam ships, essentially marking the triumph of the Bolsheviks, three years after their coup, a disaster the world still hasn't recovered from. Image
The Allies supported the White Guards in #Russia from 1918 primarily as a means of pressuring the Bolsheviks into re-opening the Eastern Front against Germany, meaning the incentive collapsed once the Armistice in the Great War was signed, except with Winston Churchill.
Most of the Allies failed to recognise that the Bolshevik regime was a menace in and of itself, one far worse than the Kaiser, and thus the support for the White Guards was limited and listless. By the end of 1919, the counter-revolutionaries were in disarray.
Read 7 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
3 Nov 20
So, it has come to this, the central question:

Are the Trumpists and Republicans (and not-a-few Democrats) right to doubt the polls that show #Biden winning an overwhelming victory over #Trump?

Keeping all musings on this momentous occasion in this thread.
Well, here we go
These early results are not entirely as it might have been wished they would be
Read 206 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
24 Aug 20
#OTD 1572: On the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day, the Catholic leadership in #France decapitated the Protestant elite in Paris, and initiated a wave of mob slaughter throughout the country. The Roman Pope had medals and art made to celebrate this as part of the Counter-Reformation. Image
The most immediate Protestant target of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 was Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, despised by key elements of the Catholic leadership for personal as well as sectarian reasons dating back a decade to the origins of the Wars of Religion. Image
Historian Barbara Diefendorf pieces together the situation in Paris on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre: a Catholic population primed with an essentially genocidal fury at the presence of Protestants, awaiting the slightest signal to act: jstor.org/stable/1859659 Image
Read 5 tweets

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