10 Cleo Reed: Cuntry

Oh, wow, white collar crimes on the company dime
Couldn’t catch a break on company time
Life on the clock’s like, eating with your eyes
Might find God, and go for a hike
More brown liquor, I chase my pain
I’m bitter by the hour, I state my claims
I’m hanging by a nail, my body’s on a scale
And work is really jail

The grass ain’t greener and the fare ain’t cheap
Give me salt and lime in the land of the free
Hate is in the air, getting harder to breathe

Salt and Lime

Ah man, I’m gonna be talking about slavery again??

Here in the UK, we hear a lot about America’s role in the slave trade. We hear a lot the perhaps most brutal and masochistic period in human history. We hear how a total of 12.5 million human beings were stolen from Africa and shipped over the the ‘New World’ in conditions not suitable for factory farmed hens. We hear how around two million simply died on the journey on account of the horrendous conditions that they were forced to live in. They might have been the lucky ones, rather than the 10.7 fucking million shipped off to the New World as slaves and brutally forced to live out their lives as someone else’s property. We are sent films like ’12 Years a Slave’ and think “Gosh, wasn’t the USA just ghastly, as we sip on our tea, toss a fag and spell ‘moisturiser‘ correctly. We watch films and TV shows about the American Civil War and think “Hmmm, yes, I know what that is” as we shove aubergines into our fannies.

We good Brits never had slaves of course. Honestly, I’ve asked Grandpapa, and he swears he never saw one of those slave looking things ever running about his home in the Cotswold’s. Anyway, we outlawed slavery, like, a million years before the Yanks. But I’m sure it was one of those box ticking things because it didn’t exist in good old Blighty anyway up to that point, like when Liz Truss banned Morgan Wallen: sometimes it’s just good to take precautions. Nope, the British Empire had no need for slavery! It was the classic British working spirit that brought us through! We built an empire simply by building a shitload of factories! And simply spinning cotton better than any other country! Where did we get that cotton from? Gosh, I don’t know, perhaps all of Manchester asked for it for Christmas?

Almost eleven million people eventually made their way to the Americas to be enslaved. Only about 388’000 actually made it to the USA. I am not letting The Great Satan off at all here (when have I ever let those cunts off for anything??), and everyone in that country and who deals with them must always be aware of the rotting moral core of everything the country stands for. However, looking at the numbers, it seems other countries need to do a whole lot more reckoning with their own history!!

Firstly, Brazil, what the fuck? Five million?? I’ll have to come back to you another time because I can’t so easily link your slave trade to Cleo Reeds lyrics, but what the fuck, dude??

Britain though? Well we had `our lovely colonies!! Including a lovely few spots in the Caribbean where we could just politely shuffle a few slaves over away from prying eyes! One doesn’t shit where one eats now, does one??

And shit on the British Caribbean we did. In the form of 2.3 million enslaved human beings from Africa.

Now, that’s a lot of fucking Africans for a few pasty white men from Somerset to keep enslaved, especially because British slave owners that had never experienced temperatures above 18° before and considered lettuce in their shepherds pie a bit “Too spicy” kept dying of diseases all over the shop. Because the enslaved people outnumbered the enslavers nine to one, it was clear to the enslavers that they would need to use some pretty fucking heinous methods to ensure the enslaved people didn’t think about any of that Haitian* nonsense over here! “In the eyes of White colonials, this level of brutalisation and racialised violence was not only justified but viewed as an absolute necessity in countries that allowed slavery“.

Historic documents reveal children as young as seven were branded on the face. Whipping was only one of the many forms of racialised violence. Although whipping was said to be punishment for undesirable actions, there was often little distinction between punishment and torture. For example, maiming, disfiguring faces, and using iron muzzles and heavy chains with hooks to increase an individual’s pain were common methods. Quite often these excessive forms of punishments were for minor infractions such as failing to catch enough fish, letting a pot boil over or not tying an oxen firmly to a stake in the ground. Moreover, it seems that many slaveholders took pleasure in conceiving creative manners to torture the enslaved.

University of Glasgow: History of Slavery in the British Caribbean

(*and apparently, if you stop us brutally enslaving you, you’d still owe us roughly £560 million in ‘Independence Debt’ just for the inconvenience caused. Seriously, France, what the fuck, dude?)

Thomas Thistlewood was an English plantation owner in Jamaica, who Wikipedia refers to as a “slave-owner, serial rapist, planter, and diarist”. Based on his backgrounds, upbringing and previously held beliefs, Thistlewood was unlikely much different at all from thousands of British people who decided they’d probably be better off dealing in human cattle four and a half thousand miles away. The only thing that marked Thistlewood out as notable is the fact that he was an obsessive diarist, and so happen to stoically record every single human he bought, killed, raped and/or punished. And the punishments were vile. We can easily picture the standard brutal whipping, but that nothing, that was just play. There also existed something called ‘Derby’s Dose’, and I am seriously putting a CONTENT WARNING here because this isn’t funny in any way. To punish enslaved human beings for crimes as massive and unforgivable as attempting to run away or eating sugarcane, Thistlewood would force another enslaved person to… shit into the mouth of the person being punished. Then that person’s mouth would be gagged, and they would be left with another human’s shit trapped in their mouth for four or five hours.

I say some pretty gross stuff on this blog on occasion, and I can’t deny that I often use shock tactics to make a joke land harder and prompt a bigger reaction. I have never even thought of suggesting anything as sick and horrifying as that. So… hats off to actual, real life 18th century slave owners, I guess…

Slave owners’ punishments weren’t always so elaborately sick and inhumane that they’d turn Eli Roth into Mary Whitehouse. Sometimes they’d keep it simple: just whip the enslaved human being until their flesh hung from their bones, then rub the wounds with salt and lime*.

(*and, erm, yes, also piss. But that doesn’t link to the song as well. And I’ve had quite enough of all that to be honest)

I perhaps could have asked Cleo Reed myself whether the salt and lime reference was intentional, whether her glorious acoustic/electronica tales of social consciousness and self-identification within the class struggle can ever be referred to as a type of modern slavery so the prisons of work in a decaying capitalist structure can be seen as also rubbing ‘salt and lime’ into our Zero Hour Wounds. But, to be honest, when I spoke to her after her amazing support slot for Sudan Archives I was way too overstimulated and excited – I didn’t know she’d be supporting!! I thought nobody else had heard of her!!! – so I may have come across a bit too, erm, insane, and, well, scary.

Sorry about that. Never too old to be a fangirl 🥺.

AOTY: 79

Based on one review! I’ll take it. The users, however, are all slave owners and only rate it 73.

Oh my God, you again??