Ramsay enemies becoming curiouser and curiouser, by Janet Albrechtsen.
On Monday night I went to my alma mater, the University of Sydney, to listen to a group of academics deliver the case against a course on Western civilisation funded by the Ramsay Centre. …
A young woman of indigenous heritage kicked off the evening by telling us we were meeting on stolen land, the sandstone blocks bound together with mortar made from the remains of indigenous bodies, surrounded by a university that had made money from indigenous artefacts. The scene was set: white people are bad. This was an evening of self-flagellation that I did not think possible outside some religious cult or a dungeon for S&M. …
John Frow, a professor of English literature, mentioned Pauline Hanson’s motion deploring the rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation. “That motion makes it clear that the notion of Western civilisation has become code for a racially imagined culture under attack from racially imagined others.” …
The Ramsay proposal is “part of the worldwide rise of aggressive racial and cultural supremacism” [said Cambridge, academic Priyamvada Gopal]. …
Shima Shahbazi, another PhD candidate, started by criticising Western aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Then she claimed that “the idea of opening up a centre for Western civilisation or the Western tradition, or whatever, involves violence on so many levels”.
“The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is structurally, institutionally, morally and epistemically violent to other knowledges,” she said. …
Student Representative Council president Imogen Grant objected because “elite private schools will be funnelling rich, white private school students into a degree that will reignite the idea of empire”. …
Two hours of emotive claims from “gobsmacked” academics delivering a concentrated dose of everything that is wrong with identity politics. White: bad. Western: evil. No learning, no debate, but lots of unshakeable victimhood with words and ideas treated as a form of violence. The only censorship is their attempt to rip academic choice from students. …
And just when I thought I had safely escaped one crazy rabbit hole, I flicked on the TV and ABC’s Q&A flung me back down into another, this time with talk of Shakespeare’s whitesplaining. Mercifully, a small red button on the remote control saved me from more people turning up their nose at Western culture.
Antisemitism and now anti-white racism are being nurtured in taxpayer funded organizations. These are the very people trying to tell us that race is merely a social construct and that Islam is the religion of peace. Consistency and facts are not their strong points, but they are brilliant at wordsmithing and self-deception.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
