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Come on, England!
What side are you on in the culture war?
The Tory Party in the UK, in pace with their ideological right-wing sister party in the US, the Republicans, are stoking a full-blown culture war against what they term to be ‘left wing’ or pejoratively, ‘woke’. This seems to range from climate change to basic human rights. Rights to protest and even vote are being actively suppressed, academic freedom is being attacked in schools and universities. Critical race theory and Black history, designed to counter centuries of the mythologisation and white-washing of the history of imperialism and colonialism is being specifically targeted. Statues of slavers now have more protection under law than the victims of sexual assault. In the past few weeks, a British government select committee report recommended that the teaching of the term ‘white privilege’ should be made illegal.
Meanwhile in Canada, there is the horrific discovery of more evidence of the systematic genocide of First Nations people — planned and executed by the Canadian and British governments, hand-in-hand with the Catholic Church — crimes that, to use the language of the old Catholic catechism, truly “cry to heaven for vengeance” (peccata clamantia).
The past weeks, thousands of people took to the streets all over the UK to defend the simple right to protest, as well as to voice their anger at the blatant and…
