“Woke” barbarism seems to be triumphing in the citadels of British culture, or some of them, as race-and-gender commissars “rethink” the literary canon, and the history of science, to force them to reflect today’s “woke” ideology.
What fun. This identitarian Gleichschaltung is not only depriving generations of young people—of every color and persuasion—of rare aesthetic pleasures, scientific literacy and a comprehensive understanding of the past. Since young people should be made politically and economically aware, this (pray excuse me) horse-shit encourages a huge deflection of their activist impulses from the proper targets of such energy—state repression and surveillance, rampaging corporations, the Western war machine, a predatory globalist elite—to targets (statues, pronouns, university curricula) whose destruction, or revision, makes no difference whatsoever for the wretched of the earth (an ever-growing sector of the global population), or for the billionaires who call the shots, while yodeling “Black lives matter!”
Speaking of which, the last piece here, about the hoo-ha over Beethoven’s race, is just another “anti-racist” gesture that’s profoundly racist, since (as I’ve said before, and wish I didn’t have to) music is a pan-racial, or (better yet) non-racial human pleasure, as the histories of both jazz and classical music, and the careers of great black classical musicians, and of jazz composers black and white, make clear (or should). To “claim” Beethoven for that race, or any other, is basically no different from the Nazis “claiming” Wagner, and Schubert, while sliming Mendelssohn as a “non-Aryan,” and Brahms as soft on Jews.
(One last thought, or question: Has any “woke” police force yet looked into Karl Marx’s views on race, and slavery in America?)
https://www.rt.com/uk/521478-jane-austen-museum-colonialism/
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/27/if-isaac-newton-can-be-cancelled-no-one-is-safe/
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/510143-beethoven-birthday-250-black/