Manufactured Martyrs: A Survey of Self-Slain Blacks and Anti-White Subversion in Scotland

Sanguis martyrum semen ecclesiae — “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.”[1] It’s an ancient Christian principle embodying some potent psychological and cratological truths. Those who suffer and die for an ideology thereby inspire and invigorate their fellow believers. By honoring and celebrating the martyrs, the believers indirectly honor and celebrate themselves. They increase their own solidarity against a shared enemy, strengthen their own courage and will-to-power, assure themselves of the rightness and righteousness of their cause.

Bashed bacteria bounce back

In short, ideologies that embrace martyrdom are harnessing the power of antifragility. This is a phenomenon identified and named by the Lebanese-Christian statistician Nassim Taleb. When an ideology or entity is antifragile, it benefits from being attacked and from experiencing adversity. Fragile things break under pressure; antifragile things get stronger. You can see antifragility in action everywhere from Christianity to botany to microbiology. When pagans persecuted Christians, they got more Christians. When gardeners dig up Japanese knotweed, they get more Japanese knotweed. When doctors attack bacteria with antibiotics, they get superbugs. The details differ, but the principle is the same: “Attack us and we get stronger.” That’s why Christianity and other religions have martyr-cults: they’re harnessing the power of antifragility. Indeed, martyrdom is so potent as an institutional fertilizer that a sub-principle applies: if martyrs don’t exist, it’s necessary to invent them (the same applies to hate-hoaxes).

Two thuggish Black criminals, two manufactured martyrs: George Floyd and Sheku Bayoh

You can see martyrs being manufactured in that perversion of Christianity known as leftism. In America, leftists made martyrs of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, two thuggish Black criminals who self-slew by behaving badly. But those martyr-cults were only moderately successful, so leftists kept trying. They hit the big time with the martyr-cult of George Floyd, another thuggish Black criminal who self-slew by behaving badly. The martyr Floyd was the institutional fertilizer for Black Lives Matter (BLM), which oversaw riots and destruction not just in America but around the world. It’s interesting and instructive to compare the leftist martyr George Floyd with the Christian martyr St Stephen. Indeed, St Stephen was the protomartyr of the Faith, the first of his holy kind and the model for all who followed him.

Loving and loathing

In both cults there is an in-group and an out-group, the righteous Godly group that supplied the martyr and the unrighteous, un-Godly group that killed him. In Floyd’s case the righteous in-group was Blacks and the wicked out-group was Whites. In Stephen’s case the righteous in-group was Christians and the wicked out-group was Jews. But Stephen died forgiving his killers, praying for his enemies. As the New Testament puts it: “he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep” (Acts 7:60). In Christianity, martyrdom is meant to inspire love; in leftism, martyrdom is meant to inspire loathing. The martyr-cult of George Floyd was also a murder-cult directed at Whites. And a looting-cult, an arson-cult directed at White property. In Christianity, martyrs inspire righteousness; in leftism, martyrs inspire riots.[2]

And in one sense the martyr-cult of George Floyd is wholly unnatural. In another, it’s as natural as the birds and the bees. Why should a majority-White society create and host a martyr-cult that elevates the Black minority and excoriates the White majority? A martyr-cult that insists on the saintliness of Blacks and the wickedness of Whites? Well, I think it’s an example of the parasitic subversion often seen in nature. Smaller and weaker parasites can manipulate their hosts into behavior that harms the host and benefits the parasite. With birds, you’ve got cuckoos. With bumblebees you’ve got cuckoo bumblebees, which behave in a similar way. With rats, you’ve Toxoplasma gondii, a microscopic and mindless organism that subverts the brain of its highly intelligent mammalian host. Healthy rats flee cats, as you would expect. Rats infected with toxoplasma are attracted to cats, who are the next stage in the life-cycle of toxoplasma. The infected rats aren’t paradoxically suicidal; they’re parasitically subverted. And I think there are clear parallels with the self-destructive behavior of White societies that elevate non-White minorities and excoriate the White majority.

Based on a giant lie

I further think that Jews, those aces of antifragility,[3] have played a necessary (but not sufficient) role in this parasitic subversion of White societies. As Kevin MacDonald has documented, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in America was run and funded not by Blacks, but by Jews. In the UK, the anti-racist Runnymede Trust was founded by two Jewish lawyers, Anthony Lester and Jim Rose, to attack Whites and promote mass immigration from the Third World. Lester himself hailed the inspiration of “the ‘Long Hot Summer’ of civil rights action in the American South” during the 1960s. In other words, parasitic subversion in America inspired parasitic subversion in Britain. That pattern has continued. Some of the riots inspired by the martyr George Floyd took place in Britain, which already had its own well-established martyr-cult celebrating a saintly Black who died at the hands of evil Whites.

For once the martyred Black wasn’t a criminal and hadn’t brought about his own death by his own bad behavior. No, Stephen Lawrence was a genuinely innocent victim of genuinely criminal Whites—so, like St. Stephen, he was an ideal martyr. But Lawrence might easily have survived his chance encounter with those Whites and was always at much greater risk of murder by his fellow Blacks. And guess what? A Jewish “anti-racist” called Dr Richard Stone was instrumental in creating and sustaining the martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence. As with George Floyd, the cult is based on a giant lie: that violent, hate-filled Whites are an omnipresent threat to the lives and well-being of gentle, enriching non-Whites. In fact, far more Whites are killed in far worse ways by non-Whites in the ethnically enriched West. But there is no martyr-cult for the White couple Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, horrifically raped, tortured and murdered by Blacks in America. And no martyr-cult for the White schoolgirl Mary-Ann Leneghan, horrifically raped, tortured and murdered by Blacks in England.

Another thuggish Black criminal

There is also no martyr-cult for the White schoolboy Kriss Donald, horrifically tortured and murdered by Pakistanis in Scotland. But leftists in Scotland have striven mightily to create a martyr-cult for a dead Black. And this Black followed the typical pattern of leftist ethno-martyrs: he brought about his own death by bad behavior and stupid decisions. The truth is apparent even in the article about him at highly leftist Wikipedia:

On the morning of 3 May 2015, [Sheku] Bayoh visited a friend’s house to watch TV. His friends noticed he was acting out of character after he took a cocktail of drugs including MDMA and Flakka. He left their property and went home. After he returned home, a fight broke out between Bayoh and his friend, Zahid Saeed. Zahid fled and Bayoh then took a large kitchen knife and left his house. Concerned neighbours called emergency services to report a man with a knife acting erratically, chasing cars and trying to get into cars. Police were dispatched. After six Police Scotland constables arrived at the scene, Bayoh refused to listen to instructions and began to walk away ignoring police commands. He then turned on PC Nicole Short, chasing her, punching her to the back of the head as she ran away, knocking her to the ground, where he thereafter stamped and kicked at her torso while she lay unconscious in the middle of Hayfield Road. Officers rugby-tackled Bayoh after he failed to respond to baton strikes during his attack on PC Short. Bayoh continued to fight and resist arrest and a short time later lost consciousness. Officers immediately commenced CPR and requested an ambulance. He was pronounced dead in hospital. A post-mortem report revealed injuries to Bayoh’s head and face, burst blood eye vessels (consistent with positional asphyxiation), bruising across his body, a fractured rib, and the presence of the street drugs MDMA and Flakka. His cause of death was recorded as “sudden death in a man intoxicated … [drugs] whilst under restraint”. (“Death of Sheku Bayoh,” Wikipedia)

Like George Floyd, Sheku Bayoh took drugs, committed crime, and was accidentally killed by police. And as with George Floyd, the left reacted to Bayoh’s death not by urging Blacks to behave better but by maligning the police for failing to preserve a Black criminal from the consequences of his own bad behavior. The result of such leftist agitation is that police become reluctant to confront Black criminality and Blacks are emboldened to commit more and worse crime, including especially against other Blacks. In other words, more Blacks die because leftists posture about their concern for keeping Blacks alive.

Leftists have performed the same malignant trick with other non-White groups. In the Scottish city of Glasgow, for example, the leftist police refused to take tough action against Pakistani criminals, who were therefore emboldened to commit more and worse crime. This culminated in one of the worst murders ever committed on British soil: the kidnapping, stabbing and incineration of the fifteen-year-old White schoolboy Kriss Donald by a sadistic Pakistani gang. But despite the direct culpability of the police in that murder, there has never been a public inquiry into their conduct. After all, such an inquiry would undermine rather than promote what really matters: the power and prestige of anti-White leftism.

No guesses needed

In short, leftists did not demand or conduct a public inquiry when the police were plainly to blame for the death of the innocent White schoolboy Kriss Donald. So what did leftists do when the police were not at all to blame for the death of the thuggish Black adult Sheku Bayoh? You won’t need any guesses. As that Wikipedia article goes on to state, a “public inquiry” into the self-inflicted death of Sheku Bayoh was announced in November 2019 by the anti-White politician Humza Yousaf. More than five years later, the inquiry is still running. But Wikipedia does not reveal the eyewatering cost to White taxpayers in Scotland: “The inquiry has so far cost £24.8m, with an additional £24.3m spent by Police Scotland, including £17.3m of legal costs.”

Hannah Lavery (second right) “Disrupting the Narrative” with other anti-White activists, including the “award-winning and critically acclaimed” non-binary and neuro-diverse Niall Moorjani in a dress (image from Lavery’s website)

Yes, Scottish lawyers are doing very well out of the leftist martyr-cult of Sheku Bayoh. So are Bayoh’s family, who have received undisclosed sums of compensation from Scottish police with the help of the anti-White Pakistani lawyer Aamer Anwar. Also doing very well out of the martyr-cult is the anti-White Black “poet, playwright and performer” Hannah Lavery, who wrote and directed a Lament for Sheku Bayoh in 2019. Just as the Black martyr Bayoh follows a typical pattern of bad behavior and self-inflicted death, so the Black poet Lavery follows a typical pattern of bad verse and self-serving activism. In other words, she’s a poetaster, which is the useful Latin term for “bad poet.” Lavery’s fellow Black Jackie Kay is also a poetaster and, just as Kay was made National Makar (Poet Laureate) for Scotland in 2016, so Lavery was made Makar for the Scottish capital Edinburgh in 2022. Here is some of

Lavery’s poetastry, as included in Best Scottish Poems 2021:

I was invited here
I am sure I was
to read my poetry
That’s what the email said.

I’ve been writing a lot about trees
Oh! there is this nest I found in a hedge
blue wee eggs. A Starling — was it?

Aye, well. I was invited
that’s what it said.

Tonight, for all you lovely folk
I am unpacking my poetry suitcase — ta da!
The travelling poetry salesman. That’ll be me
Roll up, Roll up, going, going, going…

And they say after, they say, I love
how you spoke about found nests
as a metaphor for immigration
truth is I’ve always been here

I was just writing about this wood
at the back of my house
about a nest I found.

How at night, I duck the bats
as if they might fly into my hair
even though I know, I duck.

Even though I know
they know this place
just as well as they know
I know this place. Still, I duck. (“Flying Bats”)

Like so much modern poetry, it’s simply banal prose chopped into short lines for delivery in a special “poetry” voice. And like so many modern poets, Lavery has made her name not through talent but through her identity. She’s Black and female — bow before her greatness, ye wicked wee whites! Her art and activism never tire of emphasizing those twin poles of her identity. Indeed, her art and activism aren’t simply self-serving: they’re self-worshipping. Her Lament for Sheku Bayoh is intended to celebrate Blacks like herself and malign Whites unlike herself. The play was first “commissioned by the Royal Lyceum Theatre” of Edinburgh. But has any Scottish theater ever commissioned a Lament for Kriss Donald? Or any English theater a Lament for Mary-Ann Leneghan? Or any American theater a Lament for Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom?

“Wicked Whites, Saintly Blacks”

Of course not: leftists regard Whites sadistically killed by non-Whites as fit only for oblivion, not for endless publicity. But leftists have reacted very differently to Hannah Lavery’s play about the self-inflicted death of Sheku Bayoh. The play has been extravagantly praised in the Guardian, which hailed it as “impassioned, poetic and alive with political import” and as “a stark critique of Scotland’s self-image.” The Scotsman went even further, describing the lachrymose Lament as “a beautiful and shattering ritual of rage and mourning that — in the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter — is both painfully familiar, and new in its insistence that here too, in bonnie Scotland, black people sometimes cannot breathe, purely because of the colour of their skin.”

Got that? The simple message of Lament for Sheku Bayoh is that Whites are wicked, Blacks are saintly.

Hannah Lavery was back with that simple message in 2025, celebrating Blacks like herself and maligning Whites unlike herself in the Guardian. As you read her words, note not only her self-righteousness and blaming of Whites for all non-White failure, but also the relish with which she pours opprobrium on Scottish heroes and demands the dismantling of Scottish history:

As a young woman growing up in Edinburgh, I was taught this was a city built on the genius of the Scottish Enlightenment. That story was sunk deep into our bones and passed between us as our treasured inheritance. It formed our sense of ourselves and our belief in Scotland’s good and worthy contribution to the world.

We walked past statues of David Hume and Adam Smith. We celebrated their intellect and claimed it as our own. Statues to those men were erected. Yet no one spoke of what lay beneath that brilliance — of whose labour built their wealth, whose bodies were stolen, dispossessed and abused as a consequence of their “thinking”. Edinburgh was framed not as a city of complicity but of genius. That silence shaped us.

Now, the University of Edinburgh’s review of its legacies of enslavement and colonialism joins a wider reckoning that has been building across Scotland. It confronts the stories we were told — that we continue to tell. That we love to tell.

Scotland has long positioned itself as a nation on the margins of empire. We speak of being oppressed, victimised — or as a benign participant in the British imperial project. But many of us, through our family histories, have always known that’s not the whole truth. It’s a lie of omission. One that has excluded us, exiled us from a national story in which we also have histories to contribute, and in which we have a claim.

Edinburgh University’s recent inquiry into its history is sobering. It focuses on the institution’s financial gains from plantation slavery, its intellectual support of racial pseudoscience and its memorialisation of colonial figures. It names how Enlightenment thinking in Scotland justified racial hierarchies. These aren’t revelations for many Black and Brown Scots, or for those involved with Scotland’s anti-racism movements — they’re confirmations of truths long lived and denied.

And still, we are met with denial, minimisation and the defensive recoil of a nation uncomfortable with the truth of itself. There’s a reflex to preserve pride at all costs within our society — even when the cost is exclusion and erasure of fellow Scots; of their histories and their story of Scotland. […] Race is a social construct. But we must now confront the fact that it was constructed, in part, here, by so-called “great men” — our great men — whose legacy continues to shape our country and institutions. And their legacy still causes us harm.

This harm is not abstract. In 2024 alone, Police Scotland recorded 4,794 hate crimes under the new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. Black and minority ethnic people are 60% more likely to live in the most deprived parts of Scotland than their white counterparts. Black and minority ethnic workers have poorer outcomes than white workers when applying for jobs in our public sector organisations.

These are reverberations of a legacy born in Enlightenment philosophies that theorised racial hierarchies — ideas presented as science, later used to justify enslavement and colonialism. These narratives of white supremacy negatively affect us all, and they continue to endanger and blight the lives of Black and Brown people.

What happens next must therefore go beyond apology and symbolism. It must be structural, sustained and fiercely imaginative. Education is key. Not just to correct the record, but to transform how we imagine and create a better nation. Within our schools, reform is under way — initiatives such as Education Scotland’s Building Racial Literacy programme and collectives such as The Anti-Racist Educator provide vital resources and training. Such efforts must be scaled, funded and politically backed if they’re to meaningfully reshape how we understand ourselves, how we embed anti-racism within our institutions and how we teach Scotland’s history.

Edinburgh council’s Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review, endorsed by councillors in 2022, included a public apology and the creation of an implementation group, chaired by Irene Mosota, to guide reparative action. This included initiatives such as the Disrupting the Narrative project, which has formed the main body of my work as Edinburgh makar (the city’s poet laureate). The meetings of the Scottish BPOC [Black and People of Colour] Writers Network’s writers group at the University of Edinburgh, and the important work of mentorship and support from We Are Here Scotland are also living examples of this reparative work. This work is not symbolic — it is foundational. It allow us to rebuild from the margins, and write ourselves back into the story of Scotland, and into the story we tell. […] History is not settled. Our story is not finished. We are capable of confronting ourselves honestly and critically. We can take pride in our history of social justice movements — but this pride must also own and acknowledge the truth of what and who built this nation. That means interrogating our past and the reasons for our collective amnesia. It means listening to voices long silenced. The time has come, Scotland. The time has finally come. (“This is the week Scotland was forced to confront its role in slavery, and say: ‘Yes, that was us’,” The Guardian, 2nd August 2025)

Hannah Lavery is obviously full of resentment and envy at what Scottish Whites have achieved (notice Lavery capitalizes Black and Brown, but not white, as in “white supremacism”). And she is obviously lying when she writes that “We are capable of confronting ourselves honestly and critically.” Just as obviously, she relishes the prospect of leading a neo-Maoist “Cultural Revolution” in Scotland, of tearing down the wicked White past and creating a glorious non-White future. I’m sure that non-Whites like her, Humza Yousaf and Aamer Anwar would be delighted to exercise arbitrary, unaccountable power in the way Mao and his followers did. It’s easy to picture Lavery and Co overseeing show-trials of Whites, imprisoning and exiling Whites whilst exalting and honoring themselves and their own kind. Okay, I don’t think those resentment-filled non-Whites will ever get the power to enact such persecution, but be in no doubt: all of their activism is directed towards achieving it.

Paragons of pathology

Fortunately enough, although Hannah Lavery likes to think of herself as “fiercely imaginative,” she is in fact farcically incoherent. In that article, she constantly talks about “we” and “us” and “our,” asserting that non-Whites like herself are fully and authentically Scottish. But she’s speaking with a forked tongue, because she’s denying that “Black and Brown Scots” have any share in the negative aspects of Scottish history and culture. The villainy of Scotland is reserved strictly for Whites, the virtue strictly for non-Whites. Indeed, her vision is of  an old White Scotland stained and soiled by “so-called ‘great men’” like David Hume and Adam Smith. That wicked White Scotland can be redeemed only by virtuous, visionary non-Whites like herself, who will “embed anti-racism within our institutions.”

And extract money and prestige from “our institutions,” of course. But when she says “our,” she really means “your” — the institutions were created by Whites and are still funded by White taxpayers. Scotland has indeed been a land of genius, making a vastly disproportionate contribution to the science, engineering, art, literature and philosophy of the West. But all of that genius has been White, from David Hume to Robert Louis Stevenson, from James Watt to Thomas Telford. Non-Whites like Hannah Lavery and Sheku Bayoh neither belong in Scotland nor contribute anything but harm and subversion there. Bayoh is routinely described by leftists as a “gas engineer,” as though Scotland were deprived of a highly skilled technician by the malign forces of White racism and White police brutality. In fact, he was only a trainee, and his drug-abuse and violence strongly suggest that he wasn’t going to become a paragon of the profession. Blacks are rarely paragons of any profession. But they and other non-Whites are often paragons of pathological behavior.

New poet and true poet: the Black Zimbabwean Tawona Sitholè and the White Scot Rabbie Burns

And if they’re not committing gross violence against people or property, then they’re committing gross violence against poetry. Take Hannah Lavery’s fellow “Black poet” Tawona Ganyamtopè Sitholè, a Zimbabwean male who is comfortably “embedded” at the University of Glasgow as a “Lecturer in Creative Practice Education within the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and the Arts.” If you thought that Hannah Lavery’s poem was bad, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Here is one of Tawona Sitholè’s poems, formatted exactly as I found it on the internet:

seeds of antiracist education (by tawona ganyamtopè sitholè)
vakuru vakati chinokanganwa idemo
asi muti wakatemwa haukanganwi
the proverb is a reflection that
what forgets is the axe
but the tree that was cut does not forget
the mouth of this river is dreaming of words
in dreamtime but in the meantime
it is not going swimmingly
bursting on the inside but on the outside
all we get to see is the brave face
so to ask where is the safe space
brave enough for difficult conversations
safe enough for nuanced observations
elsewhere it is just life
“racism isn’t a problem in Scotland”
“oh God she’s talking about racism again”
at the same time
“no matter how much i’m perceived to be loud
my voice is still not heard”
“I feel like I cannot bring my whole self
just parts that are acceptable”
and in the meantime
instead of raising instead erasing
the young talking of problem behaviour
unfair burden placed on people of colour
racial trauma leading to mental unwellness
in all this embarrassing richness
we cannot afford to ignore race
to ignore race is to ignore ourselves
we cannot afford to neglect healing
to neglect healing is to neglect learning
fundo cunoastere seekna al táleem ionnsaich
so much ground covered
so much left uncovered
in the spirit of this dear rugged land

That is the kind of poetry celebrated in modern leftist Scotland. It has no beauty or grace, no style or sweetness. It’s ugly, uncouth and anti-White. That’s why it presently succeeds, of course. But that’s also why it is destined to die and be forgotten, unlike the true poetry created by a true Scot. He’s a White man called Rabbie Burns and his centuries-old verse offers the cure for modern Scotland’s anti-White sickness:

“SCOTS WHA HAE”

ROBERT BRUCE’S ADDRESS TO HIS ARMY, BEFORE THE BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie.
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;
See the front o’ battle lour!
See approach proud Edward’s power—
Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!
Wha for Scotland’s King and law
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fa’?
Let him follow me!
By oppression’s woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us do or die!

[1] The principle was originally formulated by the Christian theologian Tertullian (c.155-c.220 AD) as sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum or “the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.”

[2] It’s also instructive to compare Christian martyrs, who die forgiving their enemies, with Muslim martyrs, who die slaying their enemies. See, for example, my article “Martyr with a Machine-Gun,” which discusses how a vicious political assassin called Mumtaz Qadri became an honored martyr in Pakistan.

[3] For examples of how Jews are antifragile, see the way some Jews have explicitly stated that antisemitism benefits Jews. And the way Jews often commit hate-hoaxes, manufacturing antisemitism when demand outstrips supply.