The Beginnings - Rudyard Kipling.

[Theland]

I don't think our response to diversity, inclusiveness and enforced equality will come from the far right parties, but from within our own tribe.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_beginnings.htm

Is it not time we took back our country, culture and history?
Is it not time to stand up for ourselves, and do what we can within our own spheres to promote our own culture?

[Theland]

Hmmmm!
You have a point.
I do think though, that we need to be aware of all the crazy stuff coming out of the left field and infiltrating our institutions.
Critical race theory, intersectionality, lived experience being elevated to absolute truth, small steps towards a thought controlling government.
Real, and scary.

[woofgang]

Theland your original post suggests that you believe that there was a time in the past when the concepts of country and culture were stable and homogenous entities. Even the briefest glance at history will tell you that this is not true. So what is it that you want to go back to? Which point to you was perfection?
I am not sure how or why we need to "take back" our history? or even if its possible for history to be "ours".....I mean yes some of it involves our ancestors but they didn't own it and we don't own it....it just is a series of facts.
Whose culture would you like us to promote? I am betting that mine isn't yours!

[woofgang]

lived experience is a truth....maybe not the whole truth but then what is?

[pixie374]

Theland, some of us may not want to go backwards. How about women, gay people, non-white people etc. History and culture has not always been nice to people who aren't white, heterosexual and male.

[Theland]

Renaming buildings and streets, pulling down statues, dedicating teaching to black history month etc, being told to be ashamed of our whiteness etc
That's just scratching the surface.

[woofgang]

I am not sure that anybody sensible has said that white people shoiuld be ashamed of being white. Street names and buildings in many places are changed on a regular basis, often to reflect the highest bidder. To my knowledge, ONE statue was pulled down and that one has been controversial for years.

I ask again, which was this perfect time you want to go back to and how can history be stolen?

[Theland]

History can be rewritten. I don't want to go back to any age, this one will do.
Preservation is the answer, through our institutions, trusts and traditions, and not using positive discrimination to airbrush our history, like putting black actors into medaevil dramas and films. The last two productions I saw of Macbeth had a black witch in act 1 scene1.

[woofgang]

there were black people here since the Romans invaded

[Theland]

Maybe, but not in such numbers as to be reflected in the films and dramas we are shown today.

[douglas9401]

Maybe time to insist on that oxygen you were talking about elsewhere.
Clear your head.

[Theland]

Douglas - thanks for that. Now I have a brain and the wit to trade insults with you and ridicule you, and I'm good at it, but I won't. So enjoy your little victory.

[woofgang]

Theland "Maybe, but not in such numbers as to be reflected in the films and dramas we are shown today."

so if they were here (and its not MAYBE, they were) how is it airbrushing to depict them as being here?

[jno]

white people weren't here in such numbers either. There were 3-4m people in Roman Britain - and the Roman army was made up of people from all over the empire, including the Middle East and Africa.

But you'd have been able to tell the natives: they were the ones painted blue.

[Theland]

I'm not a total knobhead when it comes to our history.
Look at the very first photographs and films of crowds taken in the late 1800's and early 1900s, and see how many BAME faces you see.

[pixie374]

Theland, are you requiring accurate percentages based on colour? I don't see you arguing so much when bame people are under-represented...

[Theland]

Quite.

[pixie374]

To which? Are you bothered if white people have 95% of all roles, work... etc?

[Theland]

No it doesn't bother me.?
Have you watched Holby City lately?
Its like African TV!

[pixie374]

I haven't and I would be unlikely to notice, let alone care. What is the benefit of categorising humans by skin colour, anyway? Are they only half a point if they're brown? What worries you?

[Theland]

What worries me is not in the example above.
That is only a very small part of a small symptom of the larger problem which is cultural appropriation, quite literally seeing our country being taken over by an alien culture, putting their own identity on it and relegating the indigenous people to second class citizens.
We see it also with Black Lives Matter, which, if you examine closely means Black Lives Better, and the sad portrayal of white sympathising pawns being brainwashed and carried along on a wave of Marxist propaganda in the mistaken belief that they are being valient Social Justice Warriors, righting the wrongs of the past.
They are not.
They are blind accomplices stoking up the flames of their own funeral pyre.
But that's enough for one post.