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Too Good Not to Quote
I came across this on the blog Skating Under the Ice (which for some reason is also called a rose by another name ) by Willis Eschenbach. It is a response by Ariel College at Oxford University to a request by African students to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes because of his racism. Some of the better excerpts:
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?”
And…
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.
If only some of our own colleges and universities had the same backbone.
* “Autres temps, autres moeurs” – Other times, other customs: in other eras people behaved differently.
Published in Education
For what it is worth, Snopes ( Not much IMHO) casts some doubt that this actually came from the university:
http://www.snopes.com/oxford-letter-to-students/
Sweet, sweet music to my ears.
This could replace Keith Olbermann’s “treacherous Russian whore.”
This couldn’t be real: the Brits are even more PC whipped than we are.
If real, the author(s) are undoubtedly unemployed by the time we read this.
Honestly? Cecil [CoC] Rhodes and the Raj are the hill to die on?
;)
(No, nobody is a hill to die on. They are people, and as in the case of every other person, flawed.)
Better even than reading this fine letter, which is fun regardless of its authenticity or provenance, is finding Willis Eisenbach’s blog. I’ve read his work on Watts Up With That and enjoyed it very much. Now I’ll have more to read.
I’m stealing this. Thanks dude.
The salutation “Dear Scrotty Students” was a bit of a tip-off.
Snopes states, for what it’s worth, “first originated as a satirical op-ed piece written by a London-based contributor to Breitbart.com.” 2 years ago in 2015. Too bad I missed it, could have used it to convince a few of their wrong attitudes.
This should be engraved above the entrance to every College and University in America.
A thought just popped into my head: I wonder if [CoC] might eventually become a violation of the [Code of Conduct] and start being [Redacted].
To quote from the CoC:
I wish it were authentic, but even if it’s not, I love the pushback and attitude that it included. It should be sent to every US university with a gold frame.
@clavius , I am glad you looked at Willis’s blog. He is a really amazing person. Like you, I first found him on the https://wattsupwiththat.com blog where he wrote very elegant studies of various climate issues often based on his wide ranging experience at sea. His personal blog is much more political than I would have thought and I agree with him much more often than I would have thought given his early history (he was one of the student protestors who held Ronald Reagan hostage during a conflict with the University of California schools) and the fact that he now lives in California.
First they came for Cecil Rhodes…
Yeah, I doubt the Oxford faculty would call their students “tossers” in public even if this letter did reflect their true feelings.
James Delingpole, perhaps?
No hills, no dying, just truth always everywhere cowardice nowhere. Then PC goes away because mob leaders are innately cowardly but survive and grow because of other’s cowardice.
I am not a big fan of Cecil Rhodes. I doubt that many Ricochetti are. But once the left gets the Cecil Rhodes statue pulled down, they will want to take the statue of Winston Churchill down and on and on till infinity. Let the statues stand.
I’d include the students in this actually.
Cecil was a thug who made his name in a grubby enterprise (mho) but (a) bit pushy to ask that his statue be taken down when you arrive in a foreign country and (b) if you used racism as a yardstick (and why not sexism, or antisemitism or…) you would have very few statues left in England, if any, which would be sad.