Post by Deleted on Nov 12, 2020 8:52:32 GMT
This debate seems to permeate every thread on here without the very idea of itself being confronted, regardless of a defined topic. With the defeat of Trump, the farce taking place in Downing St, the emergence of China as THE world economic power, worth a discussion?
This I read this morning in the Telegraph which is a bit of a "lament" but an insight into current conservative thinking. Copied and pasted because it's behind a paywall.
"
It's time to call out globalist liberalism's racist legacy
The centre-Right cannot leave it up to BLM to lead the national conversations about empire and slavery
SHERELLE JACOBS
DAILY TELEGRAPH COLUMNIST
12 November 2020 • 6:00am
Sherelle Jacobs
Conservatives are starting to smell defeat from the comfort of their lockdown cells. While Donald Trump self-immolates, and the National Trust burns its own effigy, hopes of a clean Brexit are going up in smoke. The centre-Right has lost political momentum because it is badly losing the culture war (which is merely a confusing term for the battle of ideas).
That is partly because conservatives are bad at thinking big. While intellectual fearlessness has lured liberals into the empty extremities of post-modern relativism, intellectual cowardice has paralysed conservatives. Our cautious reflexes are healthy. But from the family to freedom of speech, we often hesitate to follow our values, petrified of the radical places to which they might lead.
But we are also losing the battle of ideas because we are so reluctant to interrogate our history. Conservatives tend to see the past as pristine and semi-sacred, to be respected and preserved. Liberals, by contrast, see it as revolting and backwards, to be denounced and exposed. Both dispositions are wrong.
Take the row over the National Trust’s “woke” agenda, which includes placing properties on a Black Lives Matter-inspired list of shame for their links to slavery. Members are right to feel despair at the naivity of the trust, and the gaucheness of its leadership. The vapid inadequacy of a body that could resort to “calling out” its treasures to score points with fashionable demographics demands our pity as much as our scorn.
But the centre-Right might also ask itself why a Marxist outfit like BLM has come to dominate the national conversation about our past. It is a shame, because conservatives should be interested in slavery. Not just because the West’s concept of freedom was born out of its highly particular experience of the heinous practice, from antiquity through to the 19th century. The institution also confirms contemporary fears about the dangers of extreme liberalism.
What the Left cleverly characterises as white guilt is, in fact, a very specific form of liberal guilt. Untrammelled liberal globalism intellectually powered the most monstrous aspects of slavery and colonialism. The ideology’s astonishing ambitions for human progress demanded astonishing sacrifices. The trans-Atlantic slave trade bankrolled breathtaking economic progress. The extermination of the Amerindians gave birth to the world’s avatar for modernity, the USA.
Victorian liberalism’s contempt for tradition, meanwhile, enabled it to justify unspeakable human cruelty. Enlightened universalists sought to cure the colonised of their cultures, perceiving their distinctiveness as evidence of their barbarity and infantilism.
Liberalism legitimised a particularly dehumanising form of slavery, too. Its secularism deprived slaves of basic legal protections and dignity that might have been afforded to them in the name of religion. Its disregard for the sanctity of the family unit reduced slaves to jumping over brooms to symbolise the marriages the law denied them. Enlightenment thinkers also invented the theoretically beautiful field of scientific racism, which categorised people into meticulous, if ridiculous, ethnic categories.
As a little girl in Geography class, I remember being mesmerised by the straight lines of the bureaucrats’ ruler slicing across the maps of Africa. As a floaty hippie at university, I recall being scandalised that, while progressives like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham defended undemocratic imperialism, it was up to conservative Edmund Burke to lambast its conceited excesses.
Liberalism is not inherently evil. We have benefited from its thirst for innovation, its heady ambition, and its knack for reinvention. Liberals were instrumental in dismantling the institutions their ideology erected. But it has a past – one that today has been cunningly disguised under the banner of anti-racism.
As a mixed-race Briton, I find that movement’s demands for white atonement despicable. My white ancestors, blind with cataracts from hammering the white-hot metal of slave chains in the workshops of Cradley Heath, owe no apologies to my black brothers and sisters who rotted in those shackles. Nor is it up to the living to atone for the deeds of the dead. But if an apology is owed, perhaps it should come from those liberals who blindly glorify the spirit of an ideology that – when left to run riot – enabled the colonisation of millions and the enslavement of millions more.
It is depressing to see Europhiles so self-convincingly condemn the supposed parallels between Brexit and Britain’s imperial past, as Sir John Major did in a snide speech this week. In fact, there are chilling continuities between today’s globalists and yesterday’s imperialists. It is the metropolitan overachiever who feels terror at Britain’s “top second-rank” status, as Sir John reproachfully put it. It is the pseudo-intellectual who fantasises about an EU superstate engineered to rival China. It is the moronic universalist who believes that humanity can only be rescued through multilateral super-bureaucracies that have only perverted and bankrupted the Third World through their neocolonial policies.
But it is also the timid conservative who allows the liberal to so wantonly rewrite history and call the shots. Only by confronting the rot in our past can we finally air the progressive’s dirty laundry. "
She is obviously very confused but does reflect some of the comments on here.
This I read this morning in the Telegraph which is a bit of a "lament" but an insight into current conservative thinking. Copied and pasted because it's behind a paywall.
"
It's time to call out globalist liberalism's racist legacy
The centre-Right cannot leave it up to BLM to lead the national conversations about empire and slavery
SHERELLE JACOBS
DAILY TELEGRAPH COLUMNIST
12 November 2020 • 6:00am
Sherelle Jacobs
Conservatives are starting to smell defeat from the comfort of their lockdown cells. While Donald Trump self-immolates, and the National Trust burns its own effigy, hopes of a clean Brexit are going up in smoke. The centre-Right has lost political momentum because it is badly losing the culture war (which is merely a confusing term for the battle of ideas).
That is partly because conservatives are bad at thinking big. While intellectual fearlessness has lured liberals into the empty extremities of post-modern relativism, intellectual cowardice has paralysed conservatives. Our cautious reflexes are healthy. But from the family to freedom of speech, we often hesitate to follow our values, petrified of the radical places to which they might lead.
But we are also losing the battle of ideas because we are so reluctant to interrogate our history. Conservatives tend to see the past as pristine and semi-sacred, to be respected and preserved. Liberals, by contrast, see it as revolting and backwards, to be denounced and exposed. Both dispositions are wrong.
Take the row over the National Trust’s “woke” agenda, which includes placing properties on a Black Lives Matter-inspired list of shame for their links to slavery. Members are right to feel despair at the naivity of the trust, and the gaucheness of its leadership. The vapid inadequacy of a body that could resort to “calling out” its treasures to score points with fashionable demographics demands our pity as much as our scorn.
But the centre-Right might also ask itself why a Marxist outfit like BLM has come to dominate the national conversation about our past. It is a shame, because conservatives should be interested in slavery. Not just because the West’s concept of freedom was born out of its highly particular experience of the heinous practice, from antiquity through to the 19th century. The institution also confirms contemporary fears about the dangers of extreme liberalism.
What the Left cleverly characterises as white guilt is, in fact, a very specific form of liberal guilt. Untrammelled liberal globalism intellectually powered the most monstrous aspects of slavery and colonialism. The ideology’s astonishing ambitions for human progress demanded astonishing sacrifices. The trans-Atlantic slave trade bankrolled breathtaking economic progress. The extermination of the Amerindians gave birth to the world’s avatar for modernity, the USA.
Victorian liberalism’s contempt for tradition, meanwhile, enabled it to justify unspeakable human cruelty. Enlightened universalists sought to cure the colonised of their cultures, perceiving their distinctiveness as evidence of their barbarity and infantilism.
Liberalism legitimised a particularly dehumanising form of slavery, too. Its secularism deprived slaves of basic legal protections and dignity that might have been afforded to them in the name of religion. Its disregard for the sanctity of the family unit reduced slaves to jumping over brooms to symbolise the marriages the law denied them. Enlightenment thinkers also invented the theoretically beautiful field of scientific racism, which categorised people into meticulous, if ridiculous, ethnic categories.
As a little girl in Geography class, I remember being mesmerised by the straight lines of the bureaucrats’ ruler slicing across the maps of Africa. As a floaty hippie at university, I recall being scandalised that, while progressives like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham defended undemocratic imperialism, it was up to conservative Edmund Burke to lambast its conceited excesses.
Liberalism is not inherently evil. We have benefited from its thirst for innovation, its heady ambition, and its knack for reinvention. Liberals were instrumental in dismantling the institutions their ideology erected. But it has a past – one that today has been cunningly disguised under the banner of anti-racism.
As a mixed-race Briton, I find that movement’s demands for white atonement despicable. My white ancestors, blind with cataracts from hammering the white-hot metal of slave chains in the workshops of Cradley Heath, owe no apologies to my black brothers and sisters who rotted in those shackles. Nor is it up to the living to atone for the deeds of the dead. But if an apology is owed, perhaps it should come from those liberals who blindly glorify the spirit of an ideology that – when left to run riot – enabled the colonisation of millions and the enslavement of millions more.
It is depressing to see Europhiles so self-convincingly condemn the supposed parallels between Brexit and Britain’s imperial past, as Sir John Major did in a snide speech this week. In fact, there are chilling continuities between today’s globalists and yesterday’s imperialists. It is the metropolitan overachiever who feels terror at Britain’s “top second-rank” status, as Sir John reproachfully put it. It is the pseudo-intellectual who fantasises about an EU superstate engineered to rival China. It is the moronic universalist who believes that humanity can only be rescued through multilateral super-bureaucracies that have only perverted and bankrupted the Third World through their neocolonial policies.
But it is also the timid conservative who allows the liberal to so wantonly rewrite history and call the shots. Only by confronting the rot in our past can we finally air the progressive’s dirty laundry. "
She is obviously very confused but does reflect some of the comments on here.
