The slave trade's not so black and white, Ken
Really, you just couldn't make this stuff up. Ken Livingstone excelled himself just last week when he burst into tears when talking about Britain's role in the slave trade.
Livingstone, a man who never met a bandwagon he didn't want to hitch a ride on, was addressing London's first Annual Slavery Memorial Day ceremony and, as he wept, he said: "As mayor I offer an apology on behalf of London and its institutions for their role in the transatlantic slave trade...
"It was the racial murder of not just those who were transported but generations of enslaved African men, women and children.
"To justify this murder and torture black people had to be declared inferior or not human. We live with the consequences today."
It's exactly the kind of soft soak, intellectually bankrupt rubbish which has become this obnoxious little man's trademark over the years as London's mayor.
Livingstone was even comforted by Jesse Jackson, another notorious bandwagoneer, who was quick to demand a National Slave Commemoration Day and, inevitably, reparations.
However, what is so sickening -- and historically myopic -- about the slave commemoration industry is their refusal to actually look at a number of uncomfortable facts.
And the first point is that without the help of the various indigenous African tribes, the numerically insignificant slave traders would never have been able to complete their odious work.
And while all civilised people look back on the slave trade with a degree of horror and disgust, nobody living today can be held in any way responsible for the atrocity, and so, logically, there is nothing to apologise for.
But the increasingly vocal movement in both America and Britain calling for reparations for the descendants of slaves knows that before they can get the money, they must first secure an apology and here Livingstone was quick to volunteer.
If Livingstone was really interested in doing something about slavery, he would have used the occasion to actually try and do some good for a change -- namely, he could have highlighted the growing problem of human trafficking that exists in Britain today.
There are currently thousands of people, particularly women, who are forced to work as prostitutes on the British streets and live lives of absolute slavery.
Or what about Africa itself, where slavery is still widely practiced to this day.
After all, just because Europeans finally found some moral fibre and halted the actual practice 200 years ago, slavery remained in practice in Africa, just as it had been in practice long before the first white man ever saw the continent.
But those points would, of course, have raised some really uncomfortable questions for Livingstone and also for his numerous supporters.
After all, it is much easier to condemn the behaviour of long-dead white men rather than to highlight the current oppressive practices of black Africans who, as far as Mayor Livingstone and his many cronies are concerned, are perennial victims of white, racist oppression that happened a long time ago and therefore remain immune from either any criticism or examination whatsoever.
But then, coming from a man who tried to attract votes from gay people, while publicly embracing Islamic cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi (who wants all gay people killed) and who saw nothing wrong whatsoever in telling a Jewish journalist that he was behaving like a concentration camp guard, can we really expect anything else?
