Cancel culture is Stark raving mad

DAVID Starkey is wrong, HarperCollins is wrong and Cambridge University is wrong. Calm down, everyone. Starkey is a historian and significant academic but in a recent interview appears to have abandoned all rational analysis in favour of polemics. He argues that slavery was not genocide and in that he is quite right as the objective of genocide is to eliminate a race or creed whereas the objective of slavery is to exploit it. However, he then proceeds to make the absurd and frankly infantile claim that if slavery had been genocide there would not be so “many damn blacks in Africa or Britain”.

If one of his students had claimed “the Holocaust couldn’t have been genocide because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn Jews in Israel and Germany”, I can just imagine the mark Starkey would have given. It is not only profoundly offensive but facile in the extreme.

Starkey is only 75 but maybe he has begun to “lose it” or perhaps he is ill because I can think of no other excuse. However, HarperCollins is neither old nor ill and has no excuse whatever for reacting by banning any further publication of Starkey’s histories and saying it will examine his backlist to see if his work should still be issued.

IT WOULD be fully justified in saying it would monitor his work closely and refuse anything racist but why on earth would any reputable publisher ban a thesis on, say, the Plantagenets because it did not agree with the author’s comments on unrelated matters? That is nothing more than bowing to the cancel culture and achieves nothing.

As for Cambridge University, how can it be consistent to expect Starkey to resign his posts while promoting to the rank of professor an academic who made the blatantly racist claim that “white lives don’t matter.As white lives.” The words sauce, goose and gander come to mind and all that great seat of learning has done is to play into the highly dangerous and divisive narrative that racial tolerance is a one-way street.