Itchy Racial Erector

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the title of this piece is an anagram for “critical race theory”. I don’t think it will catch on as a new title for CRT, but it makes more sense than the original.

The death of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, has left me curiously saddened. I’m not a Royalist by any stretch of the imagination. A hereditary monarchy has to be one of the daftest institutions we’ve ever come up with, and yet the allure and romance still resonates. Part of the pull of something like Tolkien’s “The Return of the King” is all about this weird nostalgia for the existence, and rightness, of a ‘king’ and a monarchy.

For all the flaws, and, yes, the evils of a historical system which effectively saw most of the land of a country gobbled up by those with the might to take it, Queen Elizabeth was a remarkable woman. To someone like me, born in Manchester, her accent wasn’t just posh. It was posh that had been to the gym, spent overnight plugged into the 3-phase, and pumped itself full of steroids. And yet beyond the superficialities here was a woman who, despite my disdain of the monarchy, I could greatly respect.

There is so very much to criticise about the institution of monarchy, the unearned privileges, power and influence it affords, and yet I find it hard to level the same degree of criticism to the person who, through no fault of her own, was born into that system. She discharged her duty, as she saw it, with great dignity and dedication and devotion to the country and traditions she represented.

And now we have to live with King Charles III who has previously expressed some considerable degree of support for the WEF agenda.

Here’s our new monarch, during covid, trying not to infect everyone in the pub as he sups a beer. One has to remark on those royal sausage fingers. Not the wurst I’ve ever seen, but, as we say in the UK, “you don’t get many of those to the pound”.

The thing about the British monarchy is that it represents an unbroken line of tradition and history that stretches back to Alfred the Great. Well, apart from a brief interregnum when the party-pooper Oliver Cromwell took control. Whether we judge that tradition and history as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, depending on one’s point of view, is largely irrelevant. The history and culture of a nation and its peoples is important - and few countries, if any, can hold themselves up to ‘modern’ moral scrutiny and remain unscathed. Warts and all, we’ve got where we are today as a result of that history.

So, it’s important to take a balanced view of how we got to where we are today, to reflect on the wrongs and the rights, and how to move forward. I think this is a process that ought to apply to an individual as much as it does to a country. We can’t change the past, it’s done and dusted, but we can take stock and decide where to aim for in the future.

This process of reflection, both at an individual and national level, does require some honesty if it is to be at all useful. The reason you haven’t been employed yet might not be because you have the wrong skin colour, or are disabled, or queer, or trans, or whatever flavour of the marginalizati you are. It might be because you’re an asshole. Being dishonest with yourself won’t help. Society might bend over backwards under the influence of some Itchy Racial Erector and give you a job - but you’ll still be an asshole. Just an employed asshole now.

There was a time in my career at an industrial research lab where I applied for promotion to be “group leader”. It was the only way, at the time, to improve my pay. I would have made an OK group leader. The person I was up against was a black guy from Nigeria. He got the job.

I could have been the kind of person to think he only got the job because of some diversity goal, or because the company didn’t want to appear ‘discriminatory’, but the absolute honest truth is that he was a much better choice than me - and he did a great job.

Those possessed by the spirit of the Itchy Racial Erector do not, it would seem, feel the need for the same degree of honesty.

This curiously unbalanced view of history in which, it would seem, that white people have been uniquely evil - or if not unique, certainly the most despicable - is a very common theme today. Like so much of the ‘woke’ reasoning, it bears only the most superficial resemblance to reality.

Another example of this is the push to teach kids that the gender binary came about because of white colonialist’s desire for oppression. Sexual dimorphism, it seems, was not a thing that arose in our deep, deep evolutionary past - but was cut whole from the cloth of oppression. And not just any old oppression. How prosaic! No, it’s white oppression!

One simply cannot reason with such people. You’d get more sense from a supermarket trolley, which would undoubtedly have a far better grasp of history.

We can roll our eyes (but don’t do that because it betrays your white supremacist tendencies) at all this stuff, but it’s more serious than we perhaps realise. The cat, yes, the naughty one, keeps hitting the target again and again and his recent stacks have been quite brilliant.

out of the blue: perceptive redshift (part 1)

The normalization of views that, a mere decade ago, would have been considered bizarre and extreme is warping the understanding of what extremism is. Against uncontrolled border immigration, Sir? You MAGA fascist bigot extremist. You, Sir, are a threat to our Constitutional Republic.

This is all so much more than a fight against X, where X is the latest pile of drivel from the woke, it’s a fight for the very soul of our nations. Do you want a government that considers those who disagree with it to be extremists? Do you want the right to be able to freely express your opinions and criticisms, however contentious? Do you want your cultural traditions and values to be respected, or only the cultural traditions of those deemed ‘worthy’? Do you want honesty, warts and all?

Everything rests on a proper, truthful, honest and balanced view of history and our journey through that. Those who control history control the present. Those who get to dictate what is extreme, and what isn’t, will end up controlling you.

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