Woke weekly bullettin #19

by

While legions of media are rushing to postulate and prove that the woke dictatorship does not exist (except to admit that the woke agenda is bound to win), here is the usual review with the latest wokeshit from around the world, with a special focus on Old England, which with its woke madness, now advancing by Orwellian Thought Police, alone would be enough to fill a dozen bulletins a week.

UK - Monument to Royal Consort is “offensive”

The Royal Parks, the British chiarity responsible for London's parks, including Kensington Gardens, has classified the Albert Memorial, the monument to Queen Victoria's consort, as “offensive.” This it says on the website, “representation of certain continents draws on racial stereotypes that are now considered offensive”. The problem would be the representations of the continents, Africa, America, Asia and Europe with their related “stereotypes” of the time. Remember that with the Confederate monuments it had started this way.

UK - Those racists, imperialists, slaveholders and colonialists Churchill & Co.!

At the Hertfordshire County Council, Tory administration, the portrait of Churchill and other British prime ministers of the 19th century will be displayed with information explaining their connections to “racism, slavery and colonialism.” The cliché that British conservatives (only them?) are nothing more than Labour with a five-year delay is confirmed.

UK - That fascist Guglielmo Marconi!

Cardiff, Wales. A statue commemorating the first transatlantic radio broadcast without commemorating its inventor, namely Guglielmo Marconi, has finally been unveiled. The monument, a statue of a radio from the 1940s-50s, comes at the end of a soap opera that began in 2022, when the Welsh city council resolved to honor Marconi's historic 1895 experiment. But Marconi (despite the Italian TV fiction) was staunchly fascist, and so the monument snubs Marconi with a very elegant woke dance step.

UK - That capitalimperialist Constable!

In Bulletin No. 6 we had reported on the Fitzwilliam Museum and the blaming of nineteenth-century English landscape painting for having a nationalist background. But the epidemic of wokeshit targeting painters such as John Constable is spreading to the National Gallery, which in its next exhibition scheduled for October has decided to “contextualize” Constable's painting "The Hay Wain". But if for the Fitzwilliam the problem with Constable was an idealized England in its countryside, thus national-traditionalist, for the National Gallery the trouble with Constable is that his paintings did not take into account the socio-economic issues of the time. So, the contextualization of his hay wagon will take place according to the Marxist orthodoxy of class struggle.

UK - Those white Whites!

West End “theatrical segregation” continues to cause debate. Returning to the theater performances reserved only for people of color, a kind of reverse apartheid, is actor Kit Harington, the Jon Snow of "Game of Thrones", on stage with the play "Slave Play" that adheres to these wokeshit. The actor, in an interview with the BBC, vindicated segregation by defending the choice of production and recalling how British theater has always been a “historically white” space, but he also added that no one would forbid a white person from buying a ticket to colored-only shows. Goodness gracious.

UK - Those white Welsh white miners!

The Labour government in Wales (the one that would like to ban by law the “politicians lies”) is strongly committed to the work of decolonization, so much so that it even wants to decolonize the National Coal Museum, has now allocated £130,000 to eradicate “systemic racism” within Welsh libraries. As the Telegraph reports,

“By critically examining and challenging the dominant paradigm of whiteness, LIS (library information science) professionals can work towards creating more just and inclusive institutions that serve all members of their communities”.

Ireland - those imperialists Irish colonized by the English!

We finally leave England, moving on to its former victim Ireland. For it is not only Wales that is taking racism and “its colonial past” head-on. Ireland, too, must come to terms with its imperial past! Writing this in bold letters is the Irish Times itself, which titled back in 2020, Ireland has yet to come to terms with its imperial past.

As usual, the Wokeist reasoning is convoluted, so get yourselves comfortable. Ireland notoriously suffered under the heel of the British Empire. However, it too has a stain on its history: it served as a colonial laboratory. It follows that it must amend its faults. Not to mention that in any case Ireland was affected by British influence, and as if that were not enough, in creating its independence, it forged an ethnocentric nationalism. It is therefore time to come to terms with the colonial and imperial past and with racism and whiteness.

It is precisely for this reason that the Irish government (the one with the hate speech law we have already dealt with) launched last year the National plan against racism, for which Dr. Ebun Joseph was recently appointed as special advisor. Joseph, who came to Ireland from Nigeria in the early 2000s, is the creator of the first Black Studies module at Dublin University College and a staunch supporter of Black Lives Matters. And, as her Wikipedia page recalls, she was among those who advocated the removal of some statues from the Shelbourne Hotel in 2020. These were female statues from the Beaux-Arts era with Egyptian and Nubian subjects, which had been referred to by the academic as “representations of slaves,” therefore inappropriate, sexist and colonialist. A few months later it was ascertained that these were not servants but aristocrats, so the statues were put back in place. Noblesse oblige.

Eating insects is vegan

Insects and cultured meat are vegan. Despite the fact that vegans do not even eat honey, as it is an animal-derived food (the poor exploited bees...) the Guardian points us to the existence of ento-veganism, that is, vegans who eat insects. To save the world, of course. It is worth mentioning that last year Wired explained how cultured meat was also suitable for a vegan diet. Then certainly the hard-core vegan and/or vegetarian will not be beguiled by these spin in glory of processed food (and there goes the meme with Anakin and Princess Amidala), but the media operation is certainly interesting and worth keeping an eye on.

Bologna: “a piadina squacquerone and worms, thanks”!

Speaking of crickets to note the article in Il Resto del Carlino that interviews a professor from the Department of Agri-food Science and Technology at the University of Bologna, Cesena branch, about cricket flour in piadina. Net of the headline and the usual digressions, the close of the article is worth noting:

«Have you tasted piadina with insect flour? “No. To tell you the truth, I'm not very attracted to it but it's right not to show closure. No one is forced to eat it. There are many of us, though, and the world population is bound to grow. Producing food for everyone is a challenge, diversifying sources is desirable. Starting now also points to future productive independence"».

In short, let's not get sidetracked by our personal good taste and be picky; there are starving children in Africa!

UK - Let's empty the jails, we need free cells

Did you think it was over with the news from London? But it wasn't. On July 12, Oceania's IngSoc regime announced emergency measures for prison overcrowding in Airstrip One. There was talk of putting “a few thousand” prisoners back on the streets with sentences of no more than 4 years and not related to violent crimes or sexual assault (yet, news reports inform us of people convicted of butchering a 14-year-old with a machete who were released after a few months due to prison overcrowding).

Meanwhile, a 15-year-old was the first person put on the stand on riot charges since anti-immigration protests in recent weeks. The boy now faces up to 10 years in prison. Along with him, several other minors ranging from 14 to 12 years old are reported to have been charged, as reported by the same X-profiles of the Ministry of Love and local Oceania Though Police departments, which boast of having arrested more than 1,000 people.

Noteworthy among them was the case of 61-year-old retired taxi driver David Spring, who was sentenced to 18 months on summary conviction at the request of prosecutor Alexander Onakomeme Agbamu for shouting during protests at policemen “you are no longer British” and chanting “who the f... is Allah?” Judge Benedict Kelleher, in explaining the sentence, said it was meant to be exemplary. It seems clear that it is not so much prison overcrowding that is a problem, but the need to find space for a new category of inmates.

Meanwhile, the social profiles of British authorities are being flooded with messages of blame and the hashtag #TwoTierJustice.

[update august 20, 2024. A few hours after this wokeshit bulletin was published, the BBC trumpeted the following news: “Emergency move to ease prison overcrowding in England activated as more rioters set to be jailed”. Evidently our “conspiracism” doesn't get into Belfablog posts in time for reality to overtake it. And now, dear "bro, it's flat”, where is your God?].

UK - No crusaders, we're British!

What the Luftwaffe could not do the politically correct succeed. So begins Gianandrea Gaiani in commenting on the news that the 14th Squadron will abandon the nickname Crusaders, which it boasted since World War I. As the Daily Mail confirms, the renunciation of the name stems from the complaints of a lone RAF member. Poor thing!

UK - Half a million for gorgeous memorial to trafficking victims

Meanwhile in London, newly-elected Sadiq Khan breathes new life into the project he started last term for a monument in the Docks area to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade. The list of six finalists for this £500,000 project has been finalized. Noteworthy are renderings published by London News Online.

Among the top-rated works is a 12-meter statue dedicated to Nana Buluku, the supreme creator goddess in Dahomey mythology. It is worth recalling the affair some time ago concerning the possible return of the so-called “Benin bronzes” in which the Dahomey kingdom itself was criticized for its key role in the slave trade. Expect some short-circuit woke in the coming months in case the statue of the African deity is selected.

Milan - Here are the anti-statues (cancel culture takes it easy)

On the subject of statuary in the public square, we return to Italy, with an unfailing controversy around Montanelli, the former idol of the anti-Berlusconi left, now only recalled as a molester of little Eritrean girls. The last vandalism was in April, and recently the Milan edition of the Corriere della Sera returned to the subject thanks to journalist Pierluigi Panza, who is to be applauded for the way he summarized the phenomenon:

“the spread of the woke culture even in Europe and in Milan is jeopardizing the primacy of the patrimonialisation of the past both through disinterest in history and through actions that appeal to cancel culture”.

The article is about the proposal of the secretary of the Milan branch of Giovani Democratici, Giuseppe Pietro Pepe, an architecture student, who proposes adding new monuments to be contrasted with pre-existing monuments in a perspective of reflection and critical dialogue. He stated:

“a solution capable of ensuring the stone narrative of the past and, at the same time the values of a contemporaneity in search of new symbols”.

The GD secretary's proposal is completed with the idea of a monument composed by

“a sculptural wall in memory of the violence perpetrated on the population of the Italian colonies by the Royal Army. The idea is that of a metal slab, at least four meters high and wide, in which are piled several Eritrean and Ethiopian metal dolls, between 20 and 30 centimeters in size. In the center of the slab is a rectangular hole that will point toward the Montanelli statue”.

Beyond the proposal itself, thinking about the “compensatory monument” would be largely outdated by the current practice of cancel culture, so it should not be seen as a renunciation of the destruction of unwelcome monuments, but only a temporary “take it easy”, waiting for better times to start picketing again. The school case is that of Monument Avenue in the former Confederate capital Richmond, where the statue of African-American tennis player Arthur Ashe was added in 1996 for the same purposes stated by Pepe, mutatis mutandis. Today, neither the Confederate monuments nor the tennis player's remain in Richmond, but a cluttered thoroughfare of empty pedestals obscenely defaced with graffiti.

As a side note, allow us an ex cathedra line about “new monuments” and the re-signification of urban spaces made during that “deplorable colonial-imperialist past”. Tourists swarming through cities like Paris or London normally go there to see the sites of past greatness: the boulevards of Baron Haussmann and the London in Empire glory built by the architects of William IV and Queen Victoria. As well as to visit museums conceived in the same century for the same purposes. Postmodern, wokeist deconstruction will thrill newspapers and activists, but certainly not the tourist. We are willing to bet ten euros that after the destruction of Confederate monuments the number of visitors to Richmond's Monument Avenue has drastically plummeted. Which, in an age of anti-overtourism rhetoric, some might even see as a positive.