Prominent British historian, David Starkey, has said that “there will be book burning next” as he launched a controversial attack on Black Lives Matter (BLM) as having “the same values as ISIS (Daesh*)”
Mr Starkey, 75, made the remarks in an interview with The Telegraph, his first since he was publicly savaged for saying that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not genocide.
“Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain, would there?” He said on June 30.
Mr Starkey later issued an apology, saying that his “bad mistake” had cost him “every distinction and honour acquired in a long career.”
“I am very sorry for it and I apologise unreservedly for the offence it caused,” he added at the time.
Historian David Starkey blasts the "Metropolitan wokeness" of those now running many of our public institutions - people who "wear a cloak of impenetrable virtue - and says "we’ve created a proxy of public opinion that doesn’t believe in debate, it believes in silencing people."
— Leave.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) September 12, 2020
Following outcry among some sectors of the British public over that comment - including from the former Chancellor Sajid Javid - Mr Starkey resigned his honorary fellowship at Cambridge University. Canterbury Christ Church University also canceled his position as a visiting professor, and Lancaster University binned his honorary degree, slamming his comment as “abhorrent.”
Yet, despite the public campaign of shaming and vitriol against Mr Starkey, he has now bitten back, saying that the BLM movement’s toppling of statues shows that it has the same values as the jihadist group ISIS. He also accused those attacking him of “Salem-style puritanism.”
“We are going to see book burnings next. The British Library is now purging its shelves,” he claimed.
The former history lecturer at the London School of Economics who has also penned several books on the Tudors, claims that the BBC was involved in attacks against him, saying of the broadcaster: “they would have cheerfully burned me at the stake.”
“Everybody that expelled me was itching to do because they signed up to Black Lives Matter,” Starkey said.
Starkey claims that BLM is trying to “delegitimise” Britain’s past by “beginning with a conclusion… and it is [then] adapting facts to that conclusion.”
“You should begin with the facts and work forward to a conclusion,” he added.
The historian reserves a great deal of blame for the spread of identity-politics obsessed political correctness on universities, which he says have been “deliberately subverted” and which he scolds as “woke super spreaders” who “wear a cloak of impenetrable virtue.”
“Right over the country, you have these kinds of implantations of Metropolitan wokeness. The universities are acting rather like Covid spreaders, these are the super spreaders,” Starkey said of the UK’s universities.
At the end of his interview with the Telegraph, Mr Starkey issued an ominous warning:
“There is an attempt at the obliteration of European civilisation. This seems to me to be the end of everything. In the name of acceptance, of broadening, of anti-discrimination, we’re at the risk of undoing what is our only claim to survive in the future. The only thing that’s made these little islands what they are is this astonishing burst of creativity of the last 500 years.”
* Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS/Islamic State) is a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries
