Sent: Monday, March 21, 2016 09:25
To:
To:
Subject: Fw: Fwd: Oxford Fights Back
A little long, but a
damn good read.
This letter is a response from
Oxford to Black Students attending as Rhodes Scholars to remove the statue of
Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes.
13 February 2016 11:29:18
Subject: OXFORD - THE FIGHTBACK HAS
BEGUN
Interestingly, Chris Patten (Lord
Patten of Barnes), The Chancellor of Oxford University, was on the Today
Programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday on precisely the same topic. The Daily
Telegraph headline yesterday was "Oxford will not rewrite history".
Patten commented "“Education
is not indoctrination. Our history is not a blank page on which we can write
our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views
and prejudice"
Rhodes must fall ????
“Dear Scrotty Students,
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has
contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford
students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more
deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we
approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to.
Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t
understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were
the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I
at Oxford?”
Oxford, let us remind you, is the
world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since
at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of
Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through
the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger
Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir
Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert
Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie
Cocks. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study
here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their
dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.
And what were your ancestors doing
in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short
lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally
honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has
been as near as damn it to zilch.
You’ll probably say that’s
“racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the
rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are
different at other universities. We’ve watched with horror at what has been
happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of
Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”;
the #blacklivesmatter; the creeping
cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom
rightly called “the closing of the American mind”. At Oxford however, we will
always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering,
identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day
we lose the right to call ourselves the world’s greatest university.
Of course, you are perfectly within
your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue
political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting
procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela
Rhodes scholarships) We are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case
– postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge
your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the
grisly modern terminology has it – but we are colour blind. We have been
educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our
Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex,
race, colour or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.
That means, inter alia, that when
our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on
the back, give them a red rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from
South Africa. What a clever chap you are!” No. We prefer to see the
quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another
key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn
thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic –
otherwise your idea is worthless.
This ludicrous notion you have that
a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College, because
it’s symbolic of “institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is
– which we dispute – so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that
they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated
really does not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s
statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop?
As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors
include two kings so awful – Edward II and Charles I – that their subjects had
them killed. The college opposite – Christ Church – was built by a murderous,
thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves:
does that invalidate the US Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened
views about Muslims and India: was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the
war?”
Actually, we’ll go further than
that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly,
vandalistic and dangerous. We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what
you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have
been doing to artefacts in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history.
And who are you, anyway, to be
lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your #rhodesmustfall campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa
and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites
have to be killed”. One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son
of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer;
Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a
beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially
conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly
and decisively!
Great. That’s just what Oxford
University needs. Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela,
burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of
government indifference and ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita
murder rates, institutionalised corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism
and a collapsing economy. Please name which of the above items you think will
enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.
And then please explain what it is
that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an
Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least
20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the
irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly
don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and
fabric of our beloved university.
Understand us and understand this
clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from
you.
Yours,
Oriel College, Oxford
Posts
3 comments:
No, that letter is NOT a response from Qxford. The school has far more decorum than the sneering, condescending tone adopted here. Which, if you think about it, proves the protesters' actual point.
This was written by paranoid Breitbart climate-change denier James Delingpole, the QWERTY Achilles.
While there are racists in the UK who feel this way, that wasn't written by Oriel College. Typical of how RWD is constantly ginned up to hate "the other," from whom RWD has "nothing to learn."
OTOH, it's sickening that people permit themselves to be brainwashed this way. OTOH, it's also really a sad state of affairs.
Why would RWD even care about Oxford University, Cecil Rhoades and what this all about anyway? It's doubtful that RWD has clue about any of this and what it means. A lot of hatred expressed there by James Delingpole about people that he knows little about and has no contact and who know real affect on his pathetic life. What a bigoted jerk.
Setting it in Oxford allows RWD to agree with it because if it was sent from Harvard RWD has been conditioned to reflexively sneer 'pointy-headed intellectuals' and spit.
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