This week, Luke and I were joined by my friend
to discuss why those who can’t write a story to save their miserable lives are strip-mining the Bard’s bibliography of anything that offends politically-correct sensibilities.If you’re wondering why Charlie has been so silent on X recently: as she explains in her most recent Substack post, and on the Weekly Wrap, her account was hacked — but only her detailed coverage of the Southport murders and subsequent trial was deleted.
The cultural vandals responsible for this “decolonisation” effort are the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, who own the eponymous author’s home town of Stratford-upon-Avon and an archive of his works and personal documents.
The Trust is enlisting the services of academic Dr. Helen Hopkins of the University of Birmingham — a city which has seen its own share of cultural colonisation in recent years — to remove any “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”. Why anyone would dedicate their life to studying something they claim to love, then set about contorting it beyond all recognition to appease the ideology of the day, is beyond me.
The Globe Theatre in London, following the Black Lives Matter cultural revolution caused by the death of George Floyd in 2020, ran “Anti-Racist Shakespeare” seminars — rewriting King Lear to be a cautionary tale about the hubris of “Whiteness”.
But in a rare instance of offence-archaeologists saying something correct, the Trust let slip a telling statement about the legacy of Shakespeare:
This idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy”, it was claimed.
This is because it presents European culture as the world standard for high art, a standard which was pushed through “colonial inculcation” and the use of Shakespeare as a symbol of “British cultural superiority” and “Anglo-cultural supremacy”.
Veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of a “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly ‘West-centric’ worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today”.
As I said when I discussed this with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk this week: they’re right. Shakespeare is proof of the superiority of English culture and English literature. No other nation on Earth has contributed such prolific works of prose and poetry as the English — to the extent that some disbelieve Shakespeare could have been one man, and that a whole group of playwrights was required to produce such a volume of rich work.
Other nations and cultures can either admire the richness of English literary heritage, or seek to denigrate it out of resentment, and hope to fill the vacuum with their less profound alternatives.
For example: the Trust is putting on events celebrating Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, and a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Bollywood dance workshop. If these cultures had produced anything with half the artistic merit of Shakespeare — or Chaucer, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens, Austen, Orwell, Lewis, Tolkien… — then they wouldn’t need to use the corpse of Shakespeare as a plinth to elevate themselves. They would be being read and performed around the world, for their own merits — like Hamlet, Macbeth, or Lear.
I am not exaggerating by calling these repulsive revisionists “resentful Race Communists.”
As I wrote in an essay for the Critic, concerning a concrete definition of Woke:
As Eric Kaufmann recently wrote, Woke means making “sacred totems [out] of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.”
Its means of doing so, as literal communist Ash Sarkar said, is “the redistribution of power, wealth, and land along race, gender, and class lines.” (Somewhat of a tautology, when Sarkar redefines “working class” to mean “diverse” students.)
The purpose of every beam in what Curtis Yarvin calls “the Cathedral” — the architecture of a total state — is to evangelise the gospel of egalitarianism. Every effort must be made to make viewers believe they are living in an antiracist, antisexist, trans-inclusive world.
Any suggestion to the contrary becomes a deviation from the consensus reality constructed by state-funded programming.
This ideology of egalitarianism masks an ethno-narcissistic insecurity, barely concealing their pathological contempt for white people by cloaking it in terms like “inclusion” or “antiracism”. But to decolonise Britain means to impose foreign cultures, customs, and prejudices upon the settled indigenous cultures of these isles. It is colonialism — vindictive, spiteful, and driven by a hatred of the English for the colour of their skin, which is not reciprocated.
To paraphrase Romeo Montague: “Decolonisation by any other name would be Anti-White Racism.”
You can watch the full episode of the Weekly Wrap here:
As for the other controversy in education this week:
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