'Modernity was invented in Britain' - David Starkey hits back at Greta Thunberg

well it doesn't matter that the pronouncements of grethemberg are historically illiterate when the swedish teen speaks we are meant to listen as if her words are holy writ this week she told sky news that the climate crisis quote started in the uk since that's where the industrial revolution started we started to burn coal there so of course the uk has an enormous historical responsibility well i'm not a climate change denier some of what thunberg wants i certainly agree with but to conclude that britain crucible of the industrial revolution should be singled out as if we'd committed an original sin is an act of vaulting in gratitude and contrived amnesia we had no right this tiny tiny island nation to inaugurate about 300 years ago an era of prosperity that pulled millions out of poverty and produced a quantum leap in the story of human progress on a scale that hadn't been seen since the domestication of animals it was something bordering on the miraculous that one country should produce per capita so many men and they were almost all men who would use science and engineering to find ways of solving seemingly insoluble technical problems how many children now learn the names of jethro tull richard arkwright or james watt how many adults know how much the course of civilization was changed by inventions like the seed drill the blast furnace or the steam loom chemicals and mining canals and railways agriculture and shopping our entire human species was enhanced by breakthroughs made in britain to even say that now sounds uncomfortably nationalistic but it's true the world in which we live full of human comforts made possible by technology have their roots in the industrial revolution which took root here cities like my birthplace of bradford sucked in thousands of rural peasants and created wealth with a speed never before seen it was often ugly unfair and dangerous children worked and died in conditions that would now be seen as utterly barbaric there was mass enrichment but also exploitation our people my ancestors perhaps yours too toiled and bled and perished for the innovations that the world including gretathenburg now take for granted she can't have it both ways yes we may have fired up the steam engines that blackened cities like bradford with soot but we also said in train a process of machine driven evolution that gave us advanced healthcare transportation and communications take away britain's industrial revolution greta and you take away the spark that lit centuries of human advancement her belittling of britain is all of a piece it's fashionable to blame us for things we were once encouraged to find praiseworthy we obsess about slavery and colonialism and ignore how we bestowed on the world a global language a way of life that is emulated everywhere we talk as if none of this would have been possible without immigration or the proceeds of the slave trade even when they frequently had no bearing on the leaps of imagination which made the industrial revolution possible of course it's true that few inventions happen in isolation that all innovators stand on the shoulders of others but what was remarkable about the industrial revolution we gave to the world was how much it relied on what britain was a place of stability of contracts and commerce of parliamentary democracy and freedom of conscience incredibly boring but terribly important things like the rule of law and patents gretathonberg ignores all this with her sweeping and pure while indictment of the industrial revolution and a casual libel of british achievements she is the epitome of a culture that actively rewrites history to fit a simplistic story of good and evil and she has the temerity to say to us how dare you how dare she that's the brazier angle [Music] well in just a moment we'll speak to the eminent historian dr david starkey for his reaction to thurmberg's granthambo's comments but first let's hear exactly what she said more or less it started in the uk since that's where the industrial revolution started we started to burn coal there and so of course the uk has an enormous historical responsibility when it comes to historic emissions since the climate crisis is an accumulative crisis it's i find it very strange that they're like they are the ones who we are supposed to look up to now but they are objectively one of the biggest climate villains dr david starkey is with me here in the studio thank you very much for coming in lovely to see you you too colin she's got a point hasn't she it started here we started burning coal furiously before anybody else had even thought about it we bear a particular responsibility uh we do we bear a responsibility for the entire modern world fundamentally fundamentally and that's a quick summary of what you've just said now modernity is invented in britain and you left out half of the story we don't just invent all the important things we're talking about we invent modern dress what you and me are wearing look at what people wore before that we invent all modern games the modern world we invent um the weekend even the french called it and we invent modernity right so what is greater really objecting to she's objecting to the modern world greater well she's sort of an environmentalist but look again at the language you used dare i ask you to scrutinize it you began holy writ original sin dare i say when i when you tried rather ineffectively to flagellate me last week you asked about should should the world forgive me this is religious language that might be david i'm a bit of a loopy catholic i know i know we can only share sympathy and but the problem is that we're having a new religious revival greater thunderbug is not really an environmentalist she's just wearing environmentalist dress let me tell you what she is let me she's really a religious nutter at hyde park corner the end of the world is nigh what if we write david the end of the world isn't i well first of all if it were there'd been nothing we could do to stop it um the millions of people dispute that by the way no the religious point right first this is a form of millenarianism it's completely known about it appears repeatedly throughout history and what we've done we've got rid of god without getting rid of religion and what what you have with somebody like gunberg if she really worships the earth she's a nature she's a worshiper of the nature goddess right and but what we've done we brought the whole notion of flagellate christianity you as a catholic will know all about this we mustn't have too much pleasure it's very bad for you what do you do if you have too much pleasure you flagellate yourself you mustn't have too many possessions because they make you luxurious another great catholic savanna roller at the end of the 15th century in florence which is again one of the precursors of all this the world of the medici the wonderful multiplication of goods in florence what do they do oh we have sinned we have sinned we burn you have a bonfire of the vanities it was that gk chesterton quote wasn't another good catholic who said when people stop believing in god they don't believe in nothing they believe in anything and what we've done we are believing in nature worship again look at relatively respectable figures like i emphasize relatively respectable like like david attenborough david attenborough is really a rather mad late medieval saint or maybe a very early one he's a simon styleitis an ancient seer whereas greater tanburg is the classic medieval child saint who stood on top of the pillar he's the one who stood on top of a pillar you could just imagine that bro there can't you and so fundamentally we should be laughing at them we take away far too we are but we we even here even in this station you take climate change and all those with this awful seriousness if there is a problem technology will deal with it we've already seen what happens when you try to anticipate technology what did the government have to do when we suddenly realized that if you stop producing fertilizer you stop producing co2 at which point our entire modern food chain collapsed well i made the point david you probably didn't see but earlier this week i made the point that technology may well write to our rescue apropos the tankers will have driverless trucks we'll have drones everything i mean it's it's direct we're engaged in a completely irrational response i want to talk about the industrial revolution yeah we both grew up in the netherlands i me on the other side on the other side yeah and maybe it wasn't you know kendall not as industrial no no no i my family comes with the worst center of it my family comes from oldham my father was at platte brothers and i was i he he is an apprentice from 1921 to 1928 was at that cusp between steam power and election there was a reverence even even grow even at 53 i remember sort of growing up there was a reverence because there were still chimneys dotted across the the environment you looked at it there was an industrial museum you were dragged to and you were taught about things like there was lottery and there was that landscape the concern has to be that there is an opportunity cost to obsessing about other things things other than our industrial revolution there's an embarrassment almost about it an embarrassment about the fact that all the people who you know listed some of their yes the great names how does that fit into the picture of a modern britain it doesn't does it so we forget about it but it has to because modernity depends on this perpetual advancement you put your finger on it it's actually about 500 years ago from the renaissance and reformation you've had this world which is based as i said last time on a notion of hard fact external reality and the freedom to debate to analyze to adapt to harness it and that has transformed human existence if we listen to turnberg i'm afraid we've got to abandon modern medicine modern medicine depends on that technology that we're talking about we've got to abandon what we're doing now modern communication we've got actually to abandon democracy you were wrong 18th century britain is not a democracy it's limited government it's a parliamentary government but the very notion that the ordinary man first and then woman in the street was capable of voting is a product of industrialization it's a product of the their enormous betterment of living standards remember you didn't dare mention capitalism capitalism is what enabled all this you left that out when you were talking about the industrial revolution we're the country that invents the limited liability company a little bit yes but but there's never there's never really got going um we we overtook them within the first decade of the 18th century but here you see we were bigger and we did something else which is really important this is where the british empire comes in the british empire globalizes industrialization the beginning of globalization which has led to all the things that i think mr turnburg will quite like like the fact that people in india and africa live longer the fact that they are increasingly at least where there's been capitalism once india and china stopped messing with communism and started half capitalism their living standards saw the beginning of that is britain and it's done above all again through things we don't like like the royal navy and the immense technological advances the technological advances partly through the wonderful royal naval dockyards which every school child should be taken to visit that um and so what we do is we create modernity we export modernity and finally to bring the whole thing back to your point about slavery why can we get rid of slavery why is britain not only the first country to industrialize but the first country to get rid of slavery because we can meet with the machines make it redundant what do we say what do you say to people who will argue i overstate my case as i enumerate that list of achievements from britain and overstate the fact that this little island produced so much they will say these were inventions just waiting to be invented if we hadn't done it somebody else would have done it i'm being a petty nationalist i think this is childish i mean the response is childish innovations tend to cluster this is the most striking thing and they cluster here is it generally known that trinity college cambridge one college produces more nobel prize winners than france there is in innovation breeds of innovation it's also really important we understand although i've mentioned cambridge my own university even though it's disowned me um the the the great center of innovation in britain are cities it is the transformation of london the extraordinary society of london and then the creation of these great new cities birmingham with the lunar society uh derby and with with those wonderful paintings of the the great furnaces edinburgh glasgow because of course it all spreads to scotland but only after union the great the great enlightenment of scotland is a pure product of union when we look at gretham burger we look at the determination almost of people to believe in her mm-hmm and i see it amongst my religious against determination to believe the reluctance it seems to criticize because she's she's young uh possibly even i use the word quote slightly odd i'll say no more than that but you're just typically saint-like they were all mad i mean what would we say again we've reversed our attitude to madness we take madness and disability if you actually pass what she's saying if you transcribe as we did what you said it's worse than rubbish yeah it's deeply deeply offensive it's a libel against all achievements that our ancestors arrived at over the course of hundreds of years and then bestowed upon the world um i mean there's another point isn't there about the the nature of slavery and all this and how that interacts you've you've made that point already just we've got about a minute or so left enlarge if you can on that on this idea that um people will ascribe lots of reasons for the success of this country it's because of immigration it's because of slavery and yet we had people like okay this is predates the industrial revolution newtonian physics what did isaac newton then you know how what's the connection there between you know the benefits of slavery and the ingenuity of some of britain's greatest thinkers because i don't think it's because i don't see it there is one in the sense that there is no doubt that the you're really talking about the caribbean tree you're talking about the the enormous importance of the sugar plantations and then later on uh the southern colonies of the united states well the west indy trade was extremely important from about the 1680s to the middle of the 18th century right so that could make a case today there is no doubt whatever that let's be honest so but it's really important to get it to scale when the national trust did its analysis deeply loaded analysis of its properties about 20 percent 20 percent one-fifth have a direct input from the slave trade and if you actually look and you compare the weight of that input with the weight of what you were talking about in other words british native talent you can see it very clearly in several of their houses you will get about a 20 percent coming from the slave trade and you know what you do with it that money then goes into industrialization yes but who builds it up it's welsh slave quarriers it's welsh coal miners it's yorkshire coal miners it's this enormous explosion of the late 18th early 19th century and you know what this is why bristol has been so much in the news with colston do you know why constance statue was put up at the end of the 19th century right because bristol was failing because it hadn't industrialized because it hadn't become the equivalent of bradford manchester oldham glasgow that's why they suddenly look back so it's an episode it's not the foundation and it certainly is not what actually developed and accumulated into britain the inventor of modernity it's why we can abolish it david i wasn't distracted because you were losing my interest i was simply looking at the number of people who voted more than ten thousand in just under two hours who say by a magnitude of ninety six percent to three percent three point four percent uh in answer to the question gretathonberg says the uk's history means we have a particular responsibility for climate change 96.6 of those 10 052 votes say uh should britain proud of the industrial revolution an emphatic yes an enormous thank you to david stark for coming great pleasure thank you

Channel: GBNews

Views: 127,668

Keywords: GB news, gbnews, Colin Brazier, Gloria De Piero, Michelle Dewberry, Andrew Doyle, Inaya Folarin Iman, Kirsty Gallacher, Liam Halligan, Tom Harwood, Rebecca Hutson, Darren McCaffrey, Simon McCoy, Nana Akua, Mercy Muroki, Andrew Neil, Neil Oliver, Alastair Stewart, Dan Wootton, Rosie Wright, Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Alex Phillips, news, breaking news, Mark Dolan

Id: rRgvJPSOTTM

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Kim147]

And there you have it - the consensus - 96.7% says yes 😁️ .

[u/Kim147]

Rubin Report: Greta Thunberg Lashes Out in Epic Rant Against Leaders on Her Side.

[u/hockiklocki]

It's so sad the public political discourse has struck a new low with people seriously refuting claims of an uneducated child.

On the other hand it's so indicative of the amount of influence media have on the public. They can take a horse and turn it into a political actor, if it can be used to push lies.

Amidst all that rhetoric back and forth, the common people still live in conditions of servitude, or slavery and see no future for themselves or their children. The wealth gap has never been wider, and the disregard and greed of those in power has never been more evident.

It's almost as if the UK elites, who pushed the CO2 lies into mainstream, cashed on it for decades, invented Greta themselves, to now appear as civilized and moderate.

This is just another level of propaganda. They work on the same team as Greta.

What Greta & XR are in propagandist terms is called "controlled opposition". A regime will invent convenient pseudo-dissidents to populate the public space with a kind of opposition they can utilize for their means. A one that makes no actual intelligent demands, one that amplifies the fundamental lies that keep the regime in power, one that instead of demanding rights - demands "more government", etc.

One of the most important laws in public space of reasoning is that "nature abhors vacuum". The main task of every regime is to fill every space, not only positive, but also negative, with it's agents. Only then regime can prevent actual dissent from happening, lure young into fake rebellions, control the emotional impulses of their slaves.

Don't be naive. If there is one well informed and strategic regime that has always been one step ahead of their peoples actions, that's the old British Empire.

All the green austerity that is destroying Britain under Johnson is a directly planned ideological maneuver, which gives more power and more money to the UK "elites", or the capitalist parasites.

Climate change is the leading ideology of capitalist feudalism, not marxism. The reason why it managed to brand itself as "marxist" is precisely why it's so effective.

Even such things as debt forgetfulness were crucial parts of feudal regimes worldwide. There is nothing progressive or wonderful about them. It's just practical means of prolonging the exploitation, preventing collapse.

Don't get trapped in the false oppositions of the public narrative. There is no truth in media - left or right. They all support the same system. You have to think for yourself at all times and measure everything against your personal intellectual autonomy and virtues, like freedom, truth, charity.

It is truly the case of "not knowing history", why people are trapped in this cycle of feudal exploitation.