Fair cop, guv! Western Civ is a recidivist racist with a literary rap sheet long as your arm
Save our universities from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation! Nick Riemer, PhD, expert in verb semantics, The Sydney Morning Herald, yesterday:
Many academics have accused Ramsay of being the intellectual face of a Western supremacist politics … After Christchurch, the urgency to accurately identify and obstruct the ideological enablers of racism in society could not be greater. Ramsay’s executive academic officer recently argued that the centre’s distinct contribution … is that it “attempts to integrate” the works of Western culture “into a coherent whole” by teaching Plato alongside Shakespeare and Virgil in a single, unified program of study … for the sake of “coherence”, it is claimed, texts of the European canon should be studied together … If society is to escape from the murderous civilisational hatred displayed on Friday in Christchurch … universities simply must stop legitimising this kind of thinking. There is a clear analogy between thinking that European books belong together and thinking that European people do too.
Judge yourself: a grab bag of texts from Ramsay’s “indicative curriculum” for the BA in Western Civ:
The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels); A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf); Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault); Songcycle of the Moonbone (Wonguri-Mandjikay people); Voss (Patrick White); Analects (Confucius).
Unquenchable ardour for Ardern. Suzanne Moore, The Guardian, March 18:
We have watched as (New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern) shows the world what real leadership is. Jacinda-mania had died down since 2017, when she became the country’s youngest prime minister … She became something of a celebrity … But was there any substance to her? … Where is the steel? Now, in the most horrific of circumstances, we have seen the steel. We have seen the qualities that define leadership in such a way that it is clear she is a lioness and that to call so many of our current leaders donkeys is a disservice to hardworking donkeys the world over.
Forgotten Ardern’s immigration lead? Reuters, August 22, 2017:
(Launching her) election campaign … she has no plans to drop Labour policies aimed at slashing the intake of foreigners by tens of thousands per year amid a migration boom blamed for everything from unaffordable housing to stagnant wage growth and overcrowded roads.
Ardern’s foreign minister is Winston Peters, leader of her party’s coalition partner New Zealand First. nzherald.co.nz, yesterday:
… Peters will travel to (Muslim-majority) Indonesia and Turkey this week and will convey New Zealand’s “sympathy and support” after the attacks in Christchurch.
Speech by Peters, July 28, 2005:
Many of the migrants coming to NZ come from societies that have no tradition of tolerance or freedom of speech … (In NZ) the Muslim community have been quick to show us their more moderate face, but as some media reports have shown, there is a militant underbelly here as well. These two groups, the moderate and militant, fit hand and glove everywhere they exist … to promote fundamentalist Islam.
NZ parliament’s gun reform proposals, NZ First’s dissent, April 7, 2017:
(The report) targets legitimate ownership of legally held firearms by licenced users, importers, and dealers … we cannot support the general thrust or direction of this report …