Friday 26 May 2017

What Western academics, Jeremy Corbyn and Islamic fanatics agree on

Believe it or not, this list wasn't compiled by some bitter old right-winger like me...

...but by David Hirsh, a sociology lecturer at that hotbed of cultural Marxist academic nuttery, Goldsmiths College. And it's because Western academics indoctrinate their students with this sort of poisonous, irrational, civilisation-threatening nonsense that so many young people vote Labour (well, that and the fact that very few of them actually know anything). 

Of course, the process starts earlier than university. A piece of research in 2015 found that 40% of British schoolchildren didn't know what the Battle of Britain was, that 10% of them thought it was fought against the Vikings, and that a further 10% thought it took place in 2014. When I arrived in England from Norway at the age of six, I was sent to the Wimbledon Common Preparatory School. My very first memory of it is sitting in Miss Perkins' class, using crayons to draw action-packed scenes from the Battle of Trafalgar. As we spoke English at home, as my parents had both served in the RAF during the war, and as my mother was a Scot, and my Scottish grandmother lived with us, I wasn't exactly in urgent need of cultural integration. But those simple, early lessons in British history certainly helped me feel part of my new country, without in any way lessening my pride in the one I'd just left: in a way, they acted as an inoculation against all the fashionable, self-hating nonsense spewed out by educated fools in the 1960s - and ever since.  

What, I wonder, do British children draw in class these days? The Russian Revolution? The Slave Trade ? Martin Luther King? Hitler? Nelson Mandela? The Battle of Orgreave? The Heroic Defence of Raqqa? Not, presumably, the Battle of Trafalgar - or, it seems,  the Battle of Britain. Pity.

This is the sort of effect I was going for back in 1959. To be honest, I'm not sure I quite managed it:


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