Although, in theory, nothing surprises me any more when it comes to acts of cultural vandalism, as you aptly call them, what you describe here made my stomach turn. It is clear that this insane ideology won t go away any time soon, as some of my (silent) friends are hoping, as if any totalitarian movement ever vanished on its own. Probably the most shocking part in your description is the one in which a librarian feels entitled to remove books simply because they are old. First of all, the entire raison d 'etre of a library is to preserve what is old. Second, we see here again the core idea that the past is in itself guilty simply for being (the) past. In theory, the claim is that the past needs to be cleaned of its " racism". In practice, though, we can see that now there is an equivalence between the past and racism. We can see here the pathology of the very concept of " progressivism," which by definition is a condemnation of any past, since no past can be " progressive." No matter how much you clean the past you can never clean it enough because it will always be old. A corollary to this insanity is the fact that the librarian in your example was of Indigenous origin, and such people should be more attuned to the past than "pure" Westerners. If they really had anything truly " native" about them. But we live in an upside down world. A world of absolute reversal.
I have two things to say about this post. The first is; "Wait! What? Laura Ingalls out of Little House on the Prairie, daughter of Little Joe out of Bonanza who later became the angel in Highway to Heaven, was REAL?" I put this to my wife earlier, who told me that I am an idiot who must never have read a proper book in his life. The second is that one of the saddest things in all of this is that decent regular people doing what they think is a jolly good thing, in Wales for example, have been unwittingly co-opted by government and the great corporate interests to fire off postmodern chaff in order keep everyones eyes away from the fundamentals of genuine societal progress.
A good read for the brain thanks, but not so good for the blood pressure. The re-writing of history is rampant and tragic. In my country (a little place next to Australia) our national & local libraries are being purged. Wrongthink books (anything white or colonial) are being decreed racist & banned. Anything trans-critical gets the same treatment. Online censorship is of course also in full swing. Wikipedia is also woke, schools & universities the same. It will be interesting to see how vacuous & twisted future generations end up when they are only able to access one side of the story. And that being a very revisionist, biased one indeed.
Also, the idea of " racist buildings" brought to mind another example i once stumbled upon in which some American " scholar" received a grant to study the racism of ... whiteboards, which " center whiteness."
When I were a boy, growing up in south Wales as it happens, we only had blackboards in school. I can just imagine how disturbing it must be for a decolonialist scholar to find that the once ubiquitous blackboard has been completely supplanted by the whiteboard. Surely a whiteboard supremacist’s dream! What else could it possibly be?
When you think that a society can debate such "ideas"--the white supremacy of whiteboards--this alone can tell you that we are living in one of the dumbest eras of human history, or rather, that it's the dumbest people that are the gatekeepers.
Absolutely agree on this. Libraries are a catalogue of ‘Who We Are’ and preserve our history and how we got here, the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all there and must be as an open debate. The book.
Although, in theory, nothing surprises me any more when it comes to acts of cultural vandalism, as you aptly call them, what you describe here made my stomach turn. It is clear that this insane ideology won t go away any time soon, as some of my (silent) friends are hoping, as if any totalitarian movement ever vanished on its own. Probably the most shocking part in your description is the one in which a librarian feels entitled to remove books simply because they are old. First of all, the entire raison d 'etre of a library is to preserve what is old. Second, we see here again the core idea that the past is in itself guilty simply for being (the) past. In theory, the claim is that the past needs to be cleaned of its " racism". In practice, though, we can see that now there is an equivalence between the past and racism. We can see here the pathology of the very concept of " progressivism," which by definition is a condemnation of any past, since no past can be " progressive." No matter how much you clean the past you can never clean it enough because it will always be old. A corollary to this insanity is the fact that the librarian in your example was of Indigenous origin, and such people should be more attuned to the past than "pure" Westerners. If they really had anything truly " native" about them. But we live in an upside down world. A world of absolute reversal.
I feel the same about reversal
I have two things to say about this post. The first is; "Wait! What? Laura Ingalls out of Little House on the Prairie, daughter of Little Joe out of Bonanza who later became the angel in Highway to Heaven, was REAL?" I put this to my wife earlier, who told me that I am an idiot who must never have read a proper book in his life. The second is that one of the saddest things in all of this is that decent regular people doing what they think is a jolly good thing, in Wales for example, have been unwittingly co-opted by government and the great corporate interests to fire off postmodern chaff in order keep everyones eyes away from the fundamentals of genuine societal progress.
A good read for the brain thanks, but not so good for the blood pressure. The re-writing of history is rampant and tragic. In my country (a little place next to Australia) our national & local libraries are being purged. Wrongthink books (anything white or colonial) are being decreed racist & banned. Anything trans-critical gets the same treatment. Online censorship is of course also in full swing. Wikipedia is also woke, schools & universities the same. It will be interesting to see how vacuous & twisted future generations end up when they are only able to access one side of the story. And that being a very revisionist, biased one indeed.
Wait..."anything white"? That seems a bit much even for the woke. Though, in the end, this seems to be the direction.
Also, the idea of " racist buildings" brought to mind another example i once stumbled upon in which some American " scholar" received a grant to study the racism of ... whiteboards, which " center whiteness."
When I were a boy, growing up in south Wales as it happens, we only had blackboards in school. I can just imagine how disturbing it must be for a decolonialist scholar to find that the once ubiquitous blackboard has been completely supplanted by the whiteboard. Surely a whiteboard supremacist’s dream! What else could it possibly be?
Yes, whiteboards do represent genocidal supremacist intent
When you think that a society can debate such "ideas"--the white supremacy of whiteboards--this alone can tell you that we are living in one of the dumbest eras of human history, or rather, that it's the dumbest people that are the gatekeepers.
Absolutely agree on this. Libraries are a catalogue of ‘Who We Are’ and preserve our history and how we got here, the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all there and must be as an open debate. The book.
A new book from you, great. Look forward to it.