British comedy legend John Cleese had his mic taken by woke co-panellists at an event in Austin, Texas, after pointing out that British imperialism was not unique and that the British, too, were once slaves.
Cleese, of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame, made the remarks at a South by Southwest festival event titled ‘John Cleese in Conversation’, according to a highly-slanted Hollywood Reporter article.
Riffing on an alleged joke about colonialism by Daily Show correspondent Dulcé Sloan, who is black, Cleese is said to have remarked that people “forget the British Empire was the basic political unit of organization for 6,000 years – the British didn’t start [colonising].”
Indeed, colonisation and empire-building was conducted not only by the British, French, Russians, and other European peoples, but by non-white civilisations such as that of the Arabs, which spread by conquest from the Arabian peninsula through the Levant, North Africa, and — for a time — Spain and Portugal, and that of the Turks, who originate in Central Asia but have now almost totally displaced the predominantly Greek, Christian civilisation of Anatolia and East Thrace, including the former Constantinople — lending credence to the old adage that “many a true word is said in jest”.
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