And the 2015 ungrateful little jerk of the year award goes to Rhodes Scholar Ntokozo Qwabe

Like me, you’ve probably had just about all you can take of the pronouncements of the Oxford law graduate who co-founded the Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford campaign, wants the Tricolor banned from the university, deeming it a “symbol of violence, terror and genocide for many” and comparing it to a Nazi flag; accuses the university of spreading “injustice” around the world; and claims that its students suffer ““systemic racism, patriarchy and other oppressions” on a daily basis.

That’s right - he’s a wanker (or “social justice campaigner”, which amounts to the same thing).

I was reminded of silly little Ntokozo last night while rereading American art critic and social commentator Roger Kimball’s 2012 conservative classic, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia  (available here). I doubt it’s the kind of book that our pompous Kwazulu-Natal-born justice warrior comes across very often (or he’d no doubt be calling for Roger Kimball to be banned from the planet for thought-crime), but I would recommend he read the following short extract from a section on John Buchan:

Buchan was a partisan of the British colonialist enterprise; he did believe in the civilising mandate of the British Empire. The only question is whether that was something of which Buchan ought to have been ashamed. In fact, what was already crystal clear in the early 1900s… has become sadly, grimly reinforced in recent decades: everywhere Britain went benefitted immensely from its wise and beneficent intervention. Were there mistakes? Yes. Were there unnecessary cruelties, stupidities, miscalculations? You bet. But the British colonial adventure was an incalculable gain for the colonised. The British brought better hygiene, the rule of law, better schools, roads, industry, and manners. Santayana was right about the colonial rule of the Englishman: “Never since the heroic days of Greece,” the philosopher wrote in Soliloquies of England, “has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.” What’s happened in Africa in the period of de-colonization - better call it “rebarbarization,” a much more accurate name - is stark evidence that Santayana was right.

In the unlikely event that any American campus has ever erected a statue or plaque to George Santayana, I suggest they save themselves a lot of trouble and remove it right away. Or maybe they don’t need to, because I doubt that the hordes of ignorant, cultureless leftists who seem to inhabit places of higher learning these days will ever have heard of him.

Speaking of rebarbarisation, I would suggest that Ntokozo leaves off attacking countries and institutions which have done so much to spread the benefits of civilisation, and turns his attention instead to the appalling state of affairs in his home country, where, in 2013/14, in a country with a smaller population than the UK,  there were 17,068 murders at a rate five times higher than the world average, 46,253 rapes (!), and 119,351 robberies involving the threat of violence or actual violence. As South Africa is an independent black-run country with a majority black population, I’m not sure what this level of barbarity - overwhelmingly committed by blacks on blacks - would have to do with colonialism in  particular, or nasty old Whitey in general. Maybe the campaigning Boy Wonder could stop whining about colonial exploitation and dreaming up spurious things to be offended by, and bugger off back to his native land to address the horrors of life there. The quicker, the better.