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Anti Woke movement grows

ks.234

Half way to Infinity
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Students deciding to remove photo of Queen, is it “simply absurd” as Gavin Williamson has said, or is the case that “patriotism and colonialism are not really separable” as one student has said?

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/oxford-students-portrait-queen-remove-common-room-b939503.html
 
Sounds a bit childish. When we were kids we used to not stand up for the national anthem in cinemas and thought we were making an important political statement. Now, Philby/Burgess/Maclean, that was serious!
I don't understand the inseparability of patriotism and colonialism, either.
 
Sounds a bit childish. When we were kids we used to not stand up for the national anthem in cinemas and thought we were making an important political statement. Now, Philby/Burgess/Maclean, that was serious!
I don't understand the inseparability of patriotism and colonialism, either.
I think it’s the underlying objective of patriotism to obscure slavery that the student was pointing at. Attempts to recognise slavery as a formative part of our history are attacked as being somehow unpatriotic or against our notions of our own greatness. It has been said on here that those who wish to recognise the negatives of our past only do so because they “hate” our country. It is that negative energy that antiwokery lives off
 
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Sounds a bit childish. When we were kids we used to not stand up for the national anthem in cinemas and thought we were making an important political statement. Now, Philby/Burgess/Maclean, that was serious!
I don't understand the inseparability of patriotism and colonialism, either.
My take: patriotism is pride in one's country. Pride in this country implies pride in its heritage. Its heritage includes colonialism, slave trading and oppression, often bloody, of indigenous people.

I do think that's a slightly simplistic take, though. The current right-wing attempts to airbrush our past do suggest a measure of shame in what it represents, what we did in the name of colonialism and empire. But then I'd argue that if you are proud of a fictitious, romantic, bowdlerised notion of your country, you're not a patriot in any true sense anyway.
 
Hi,

A few years ago while I was still working, on the day of anniversary of the Battle of Britain I was talking to one of the younger members of staff in another department.

I mentioned the fact this was the anniversary of the Battle of Britain, their reply was, when was Britain at war?

I thought this a bit strange so I asked if the person did not know about the RAF and the Battle of Britain and was told no, they had no idea, never had heard of it.

I then asked if they did history at school, yes they had, when did your history of Britain start I asked, 1950 was the reply! (yes really, I was shocked)

If we don't know about our history how can we know what to do in the future to avoid similar issues.

Cheers

John
 
The use of the word “cancel” in the Express headline is significant. Cancel is becoming part of the right wing lexicon along side “snowflake” and “woke”. It is being used to cancel any discussion of an objective view of history and replace it with myths and lies about our greatness.
 
It's a bit weird that students choose to go to a university such as Oxford which very obviously has a very long history and then they complain about it.
No. What is weird is the idea that access to one of our elite educational institutions should be restricted to those that choose not to discuss the impact of slavery and colonialism.

Weird is the idea that entry to a leading college famed for the study of history should preclude asking questions about our past

Very weird
 
The use of the word “cancel” in the Express headline is significant. Cancel is becoming part of the right wing lexicon along side “snowflake” and “woke”. It is being used to cancel any discussion of an objective view of history and replace it with myths and lies about our greatness.

Agreed. Anyone standing against racism and fascism, or even merely scrutinising our brutal national past, is now accused of ‘cancel culture’. In many cases it is merely platform owners rightly refusing to host vile and offensive content. I’d certainly be accused of it here. I own the place, I pay all the bills, and I have absolutely every right to keep EDL, BNP, Britain First etc racist or otherwise bigoted shit out of here. A democratically elected student union has exactly the same right IMHO. The assumption anyone has a right to hate-speech is hopelessly flawed.
 
Hi,

A few years ago while I was still working, on the day of anniversary of the Battle of Britain I was talking to one of the younger members of staff in another department.

I mentioned the fact this was the anniversary of the Battle of Britain, their reply was, when was Britain at war?

I thought this a bit strange so I asked if the person did not know about the RAF and the Battle of Britain and was told no, they had no idea, never had heard of it.

I then asked if they did history at school, yes they had, when did your history of Britain start I asked, 1950 was the reply! (yes really, I was shocked)

If we don't know about our history how can we know what to do in the future to avoid similar issues.

Cheers

John

A few months ago, a Staff Information Poster appeared on the walls of various parts of my workplace- except one particular area; I'll come back to that later.

This Poster referred to "Artwork" which was found somewhere and that this "Artwork" was unacceptable; please keep your artwork to yourself as some may find it offensive.

The reason why this Poster appeared was that I saw; photographed and promptly reported a Swastika that appeared in a Toilet.

Interestingly, the Poster wasn't displayed where the Swastika was found.

I got the impression that my workplace was keen for this to be swept under the carpet; indeed a paragraph in the response to my email "Encouraged" me to keep it to the local management team.

I wasn't pleased with the outcome of a subsequent meeting, so I reported the Graffiti to the police. They appeared to be more interested in the case.

I spoke to a few colleagues to tell them what I had found and a frighteningly large number of them didn't know anything about the Swastika and it's significance.

Bloody damning indictment on an Education System which is woefully underfunded and poorly supported.
 
It's a bit weird that students choose to go to a university such as Oxford which very obviously has a very long history and then they complain about it.
I think the picture was in a student common room. It seems obvious, and not inappropriate, that formal areas would have a picture of Brenda, just as boardrooms in most public sector offices will have, but there would seem no obvious reason why a student common room would require one. My brief understanding is that it's only been there a few years. My guess would be that it was installed by some sort of Bullingdon-type Tory club. If so, then I applaud the attempt to undermine the influence of such clubs in the college in question.
 
It isn’t trolling to raise questions about our colonial past and the effect that has, and still has, on large sections of our population
I was using the word in the sense of ‘to provoke.’ I see Baroness Somebody, President of the college, is quoted as saying something similar.

‘Being a student is about more than studying. It's about exploring and debating ideas. It's sometimes about provoking the older generation.’

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-57409743

Strikes a chord with this ancient student.
 
My friend works for the National Trust. She is currently the object of vicious abuse, withdrawal of membership and complaint and all because the NT wishes to accurately inform the public, and especially children on educational visits, of the history of the great houses of England. I fail to see what could possibly be criticised in declaring that the man that commissioned the building of this house was a slave trader who had a number of sugar plantations; that is simply the truth and it is deep and nuanced, neither all good nor all bad.
 
There was an interesting article published by The Tortoise, and discussed on the R4 Today programme yesterday. It made explicit the argument - long thought to be true by many of us, but largely unacknowledged in the media, that culture war is an explicit, considered and intentionally followed policy of Johnson’s government (and by extension, I think we could add organs such as the papers mentioned here).

The particularly interesting thing was who wrote it - Matthew D’Ancona, previously known as the anti-conservative firebrand *checks notes* editor of the Spectator. Er, eh?

Whether this represents even stalwarts of the hard right establishment coming out to expose Johnson et al, or if it signifies acceptance and therefore public acceptability of the culture war tactic remains open to judgement. But culture war is, it seems, now more or less official and increasingly bare-fisted.
 
The biggest battle facing any opposition party right now. This is the creation of a think tank and it simply closes down any opposition argument and cements division in their favour; dangerous times, indeed.

Absolutely, and it is far from being without precedent. The Daily Mail and Daily Express are Der Stürmer clones. We know what this shit is, we have seen it before, and we saw exactly where it led. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature really should recognise and fight it.

Britain Trump is Britain Trump. We are about to live through the equivalent scenario to Trump getting a second term in America. This is hard right-wing popularism, it is racist, it is nationalistic and it thrives on division and scapegoating. It needs to shut down arguments in any way it can, just as it did in Germany in the 1930s. The model and rhetoric is exactly the same with the exception that even footballers taking a knee are now seen as dangerous intellectuals that need to be silenced.
 


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