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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
After canceling most people who lived in the last two centuries for not being sufficiently accepting of the current dogma, woke academia has turned its attention to the distant past.
After accusing Isaac Newton and Robert Burns of being complicit in slavery, the British woke war on the past has gone bigger. Edinburgh University had already renamed David Hume Tower after Black Lives Matter activists accused the philosopher, born in 1711, of racism. The Sir Francis Drake Primary School had to change its name and William Gladstone is next.
But even when you get rid of every famous Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman and Welshman, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s just a bunch of white people. As Mary Rambaran-Olm, an Afro-Indo Caribbean academic who decided to study medieval English literature, complained, the “field has traditionally been represented by white people and unsurprisingly still attracts mostly white students due to the field’s inherent whiteness.”
There are no complaints that black studies is too black, attracts black students and is represented by black people due to the field’s inherent blackness, but you can’t have the study of Irishness get too Irish, Welshness get too Welsh or England get too English.
The English, after being accused of colonizing the world, stand charged with colonizing the study of medieval England by the woke academics who want to ‘decolonise it’. Much like the decolonization of other parts of the world, the academic euphemism for ethnic cleansing, means getting rid of all the English. Or at least all the ones with the skin tone common on the isles.
The problem is that England before 1968 was much too white. And the study of it is inescapably the study of white people. Much as Cleopatra has been turned black, there have been efforts to claim that Shakespeare was really a black woman, but it will take an even more massive enterprise of cultural erasure before anyone but the Bridgerton crowd believes that.
In the anti-racist era where every field of study from mechanical engineering to literature must be viewed through the distorting lens of critical race theory, the only proper study of anything involving white people must be their ‘whiteness’ or their racism. But how do you study racism in a country where all the different races were, as Whoopi put it about the Jews and the Nazis: “two white groups of people.” The first step is getting rid of the actual people and making them a metaphor for the current politics and its take on the evils of white people.
Under pressure, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists changed its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. The campaign came from Rambaran-Olm and other woke extremists like Adam Miyashiro, a founding member of the Medievalists of Color, who whined that he was not allowed to present his paper “Beowulf and its Others: Sovereignty, Race, and Medieval Settler-Colonialism,” which described the monster “Grendel as an indigenous person with a specific biopolitics.”
Not only Newton and Hume, but even Beowulf was oppressing people of color like Grendel.
All woke academics know how to do is run everything through the woke sausage machine. The Western world now enjoys the same high standards of scholarism as the Soviet Union where every field, scientific or cultural, was reducible to Marxism-Leninism. In a minor update, woke academics like Miyashiro have been trained to feed anything into the woke sausage machine and then out comes a ChatGPT level paper on intersectionality, colonialism and racism.
When their sole skill in life, sophomoric political reductionism, is rejected because it offers nothing more than cultural vandalism they fall back on complaining that the field is too full of people of the wrong race.
“The thing that strikes one the most is absolutely how white this conference is. With the exception of a couple of East Asian scholars, virtually the entire roster of papers is from white scholars,” Miyashiro’s racist tantrum complained.
Even more shockingly, Tokyo University’s entire Medieval Materials Department is Japanese.
“It’s all white people!” the New York Times headlined its coverage. But medieval England was pretty much all white people. The logic of representation simultaneously demands that black studies should be the exclusive preserve of black people, Latino studies of Latinos, and Anglo-Saxon studies need to consist of a rainbow coalition of angry woke leftists of color.
Is there something wrong with the people from a particular nation and culture being the ones to study that nation and its culture? Miyashiro was not excluded from the conference on any grounds other than his refusal to engage with the culture as it was rather than with his own politics as they are. And that may be the ultimate crime of the medievalists, beyond their whiteness, they refuse to get with the times and make everything about woke politics.
Rambaran-Olm attacks the use of Anglo-Saxon by arguing that the “contested term is not neutral. In fact, one cannot be neutral in the face of racism. Scholarly work, even historical studies, are never separate from current social and political realities.”
What she really means is that history must be subservient to the political agendas of the now.
There’s nothing progressive about that. For nearly all of human history, history was really political propaganda. The past was a fictional narrative designed to prop up whatever king, government or ideology was in power. Pharaohs and emperors destroyed monuments to the past because they provided objective evidence that the past was not in line with their myths.
The emergence of scholarship detached from political schemes was one of the triumphs of western civilization. While imperfect, it made it possible for men and women to try to study the past on its own terms, not because it was politically useful to someone trying to explain why Beowulf was a racist trying to keep Muslim Grendel from settling in Manchester.
The Left is a weapon of mass cultural destruction. Everything it touches dies, even if not physically, then spiritually and intellectually. And it will take modern scriptoriums to keep the past alive as leftists keep on rewriting classic books and banning any apolitical study of the past.
Every totalitarian system needs to reinvent the past in its own image. The Left is no different.
The University of Cambridge’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies insists that “ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism – that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity – by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been.”
Curiously, Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies does not seem to be on a mission to explain that African identity is a construct and that black people never really existed. But if you can get rid of the English, the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish, the former inhabitants of the isles will put up less of a fuss when the whole thing is overrun, colonized and turned over to the EU.
It’s a good deal easier to rob people by first convincing them that they never had anything.
Take away people’s rights long enough and they’ll forget. But that only works when you also take away their myths, their stories and their legends so that they never get the notion to fight for a freedom that they never knew they had. George Orwell’s 1984 seemed implausible to most Englishmen of his day because they could not imagine a people so degraded that they had no sense of the past and remembered nothing of England: living only to exist from day to day.
In 2023, that’s just ordinary life. The knowledge of the past has been reduced to the work of a few fussy academics who still tour historical sites and parse the details of ancient grammar while a younger generation defines Britain in terms of rappers and fake working class accents.
And now the wokes would like to get rid of the academics, completely rewrite the past or, as they put it, “decolonise it”, to teach that the isles experienced a series of migrations in which the latest flood of Pakistanis, Iraqis and Syrians are only the latest and .least violent arrivals.
The Mayor of London is Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants, while Scotland’s First Minister is Humza Yousaf, also the son of Pakistani immigrants. Some would call this colonization, while leftists call it decolonization. The difference between the two is a sense of ownership rooted in the past. Condemning medieval England as much too white settles the question.
If there’s no room for white people in England, how can there be any room for them in the study of medieval England?
Cassandra says
I remember a scene from (I think) the film of Fahrenheit 451, where elderly people are gathered in a clearing in the countryside, memorising books of the literary classics, walking about or sitting, repeating sentences.
Ray Bradbury is as good as Eric Blair.
Kynarion Hellenis says
The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington, was the same kind of film, except the book was the Bible. Very interesting movie.
Jeff Bargholz says
That’s a cool movie. I liked when it was revealed that the Eli character was blind. The movie put out lots of clues, like when the character went under a dark bridge to confront brigands but I didn’t figure it out. It was good storytelling. And Gary Oldman was great in that. I liked Denzel, too. He’s a likable actor.
David Ray says
Denzel is a devout Christian who shunned the idea of seeing that bullshit film “Fahrenheit 911”.
(Half the fun was watching the other actors on the interview reel back in shock at Denzel thinking outside the leftist box.)
Taylor says
Third-culture types are usually alienated, angry and lash-out non-stop. Like I say, we need a multi-decade moratorium on immigration.
Jeff Bargholz says
Grendal was “an indigenous person of specific biophysics?” He was a monster who ripped people limb from limb for no reason other than savagery. He wasn’t even human.
I think the epic is based on a neanderthal, not a real monster And the Grendal mother was even worse that the son.
Leftists are bat shit crazy.
Lightbringer says
Yes, I always wondered if Grendel and his dam, as well as that deep subconscious monster that lurks in our Western tales of ogres and trolls and other creatures of the dark, the damp, and the terror of the wild, all-covering forest, were race memories of archaic humans with whom modern humans interacted. If so, either those archaic humans were around a lot later than believed, or race memories last for a very long time. Just musing here.
And certainly leftists are bat shit crazy!
Jeff Bargholz says
I think you’re 100% right. Humans definitely interacted with neanderthals and they must have been horrible or our ancestors wouldn’t have exterminated them. And many paleontologists think they were cannibals.
I think the stories about trolls under bridges are based on them. I think a lot of monster stories are based on them. Who knows how long they survived before they were absorbed and killed? Surely into written history.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks Jeff. I remember when I was a kid I read some books about trolls in Norway. It was almost a belief system in Norway that they existed. Anyway the stories about Norwegian trolls were good 🙂
It’s easier to believe in trolls when you’re out in wild country like that 🙂
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks Jeff! I read Beowulf at my neighbors house (UCB profs). They had a copy presumably because they were doing research on Skellig Michael (ancient monastery off the coast of Ireland). The raiders of that day drove Christian monasteries practically out of Europe, they had to take refuge on almost inaccessible small islands out in the ocean off the coasts of Ireland and such places. That is one reason why the phrase “Christian Dark Ages” makes me laugh. The Christians of the time were barely hanging on by their fingernails, hardly in control of anything else.
Anyway, I don’t remember much about Beowulf, except for the strangeness of the worldview of that time.
The Christian monasteries of that time were one of the few places that preserved what little written knowledge of that time was preserved.
Jeff Bargholz says
You should read “How the Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill. Knowing you, you’ve probably already read it but if you haven’t. I’m sure you would enjoy it. Those Mick Priests did a lot to preserve civilization after the Roman Empire fell. They deserve credit for that.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Yeah, the church was about the only place where written manuscripts and such were preserved. Where else could someone who could read and write find employment?
David Ray says
(You beat me to the punch! I thought of that book also, while reading his post.)
Mo de Profit says
“ that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity ”
Ask anyone from Scotland, Wales or half the population of Northern Ireland where they are from and you will very rarely hear “Britain or the United Kingdom” only English people call themselves British
Scottish, Welsh, and half the Northern Irish population fly their flags and they are expressing their independence and culture and history.
Fly an English flag and you are a racist bigot.
Chief Mac says
The lefttwats only hate certain colonial enterprises. The say nothing about the Islamofascist empire that controls an area the rivals the British empire at its height
THX 1138 says
“For nearly all of human history, history was really political propaganda. The past was a fictional narrative designed to prop up whatever king, government or ideology was in power. Pharaohs and emperors destroyed monuments to the past because they provided objective evidence that the past was not in line with their myths.
The emergence of scholarship detached from political schemes was one of the triumphs of western civilization.
Every totalitarian system needs to reinvent the past in its own image. The Left is no different….
Englishmen of his day because they could not imagine a people so degraded that they had no sense of the past and remembered nothing of England: living only to exist from day to day.”
All of the above describes Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Christian and Muslim Dark Ages. The Christian Dark Ages were medieval Christianity where mythology became history and the explanation of existence, reality, and the universe. Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system.
Objective history detached from a religious-political agenda? Rodney Stark isn’t the historian to go to for that. But Judeo-Christianity is Leftism. Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism and modern Leftism is preparing the ground back to traditional Leftism, back to theocracy.
Intrepid says
“Every totalitarian system needs to reinvent the past in its own image. The Left is no different”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. That is your S.O.P. It is what you do on a daily basis
Reinventing history to suit your Objectivist purposes. So once again let’s distill your bankrupt philosophy down to talking points:
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Repeat ad inifinitum
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
Atikva says
“Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system” – what a lot of BS!
Siddi Nasrani says
THX1138, your quote, “Judeo-Christianity is Leftism” !!!! Good God man what are you smoking? Or mind bending drugs you are popping?
Have you ever read these books? Or do you save yourself the trouble & let somebody give their opinion?
Algorithmic Analyst says
Oh, well, one more historical fragment. Prior to the age of sail and such, mankind was in a primitive, poverty stricken state. Then there was a burst of scientific and other progress, which allowed a spurt of population growth in the European (white) countries, and was spread all over the world by the new advanced sailing ships of the British Empire and other colonial powers.
Then the whites lost or gave away their edge for various reasons, a whole topic in itself. Whites at one time were 25% of the world population if I remember correctly. But then there was a population explosion in the non-white countries, due to the economic/scientific/technological/medical innovations the whites had brought to them. Then a reverse colonization as non-whites moved into white countries. Last I checked whites were down to 5% or world population, though what it even means to be white is debatable and obscure.
Lightbringer says
Now, that’s just depressing. Kind of like “War with the News” by Karel Capec.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks Lightbringer!
Jeff Bargholz says
Actually, the majority of Earth’s population is white. North America, Europe, South America and India are all white majority. Even Australian Abos and Solomon Islanders are white. India has a higher population than China, which lies about everything regularly. The Chicom population figures are bogus. Those incompetent cretins couldn’t conduct a census if they tried.
There are more of us whiteys than anybody else.
internalexile says
Bring back Monty Python!
Warm Pablum says
Sadly History exists. Who are you to foolishly resist it’s rewriting? How will our betters ever survive the next rewriting? Or the one after that? Will the overwhelming hubris of these rewriters thwart the next set of history rewriters? What about the set of rewriters after that set? or the next? Rewriters are deluded regarding permanence, like spoiled children.
Algorithmic Analyst says
That was one reason for Trotsky’s book on Stalin, to counter the rewriting of history in the USSR as Stalin rose to power, each rewriting being more in favor of Stalin.
Lightbringer says
History will eventually catch up with those who would destroy it.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Falkner
Zelda says
Cole Porter might have been psychic when he write his wonderful song Anything Goes back in 1934
Lyrics:
Times have changed,
And we’ve often rewound the clock,
Since the Puritans got a shock,
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today,
Any shock they should try to stem,
‘Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.
The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today,
And black’s white today,
And day’s night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
It was good fun back then before almost all of us were born, but sadly all too true today. Big sigh.
Domenic Pepe says
The woke leftist DEI LBGTQRSTUVWXYZ++++++ Bolshevik establishment is simply psychopathic and depraved.
It will soon be necessary to eliminate such depravity and psychopathology
from nations and cultures that will survive the onslaught.
Kasandra says
Karl Marx was a big fan of Goethe’s “Faust.” And his favorite line from it was the line that comes from the devil character, Mephistopheles: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” The Left’s raison d’etre is the “ruthless criticism,” as Marx put it, and the attendant destruction, of all that exists. That’s why it must re-frame everything, including – but not limited to – history. It’s also why it is so destructive everywhere it is implemented. It has no realistic program for building anything that will improve life focused, as it is, on destruction.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks Kasandra, excellent points.
The radical left has harnessed the destructive forces of the universe, which in the end will destroy them also.