When the Bolsheviks were going to bring Russians to revolution, they promised gold and green forests. The past was oppression, now liberation beckoned. But once the Bolsheviks were installed they quickly carried out the worst repression the Russians had ever experienced, far worse than anything tsarist.

The suppression was inversely proportional to the promises.

This is also the case with the new woke religiosity that uses racism as a crowbar. It will lead to the introduction of a new racism, against white people. Do you think it will be a pleasant society for your descendants to live in?

Robert Tombs has a great article in the Telegraph about what’s on the stairs. Teachers should study it and make up their own mind as to whether they can participate in this:

The ‘anti-racist’ mission to destroy Britain is working – and we have surrendered. This was never about history, but crude propaganda, yet our best institutions were all too happy to capitulate.

The Woke missionaries are promoting “reconciliation with history”, so did the Bolsheviks, but this has nothing to do with history.

We play with the pretence that the obsession with slavery and colonialism is about history. We even accept activists’ claims that the goal is to uncover some long-hidden aspect of our past and “to face it.” But real history seeks above all to understand and it aims to get the whole story. Trawling through the past in search of something to discredit is gross propaganda.

The fact that large and well-known institutions fall for this is a sign of crisis. They fall for woke like dominoes. They do not resist. This is a revolution from above, not a demand from below.

There is no seriously serious reason when institutions such as the Church of England, Cambridge University, Kew Gardens, the National Trust or the Bank of England solemnly announce that they are investigating their guilty past. It is well known that Britain, and thus the monarchy and many other institutions, were involved in the slave economy. It is equally well known that almost every other country was – not only European countries, but also African, American, Asian and Middle Eastern countries.

But Britain led the way in the abolition of slavery, many other countries that now use racism as a weapon, held back.

The British anti-slavery policy was strongly opposed by American, European, Arab and of course African states, who had to be persuaded by diplomacy, bribes and sometimes force.

This epoch-making endeavour, not participation in the slave trade, is the part of our history that is now being deliberately downplayed and distorted. But even if we have to repeat the basics – of which many children and young people seem ignorant – argument alone is not enough, as it requires a willingness to listen and be convinced by clear facts.

We are already getting signals of what is to come:

In reality, there is no such will among those who single out Britain, as if that country and its monarchy were uniquely tainted. Sometimes their motives appear to be ideological, as succinctly expressed by the newly elected general secretary of the National Education Union, Daniel Kebede, who has spoken of “taking back education from a brutally racist state”.

Now it’s a role change. Now it is our turn to become slaves.

People without historical knowledge have no idea that revival movements create new career paths that attract a particular type of people.

But behind such ideological wording there are plenty of less lofty motives. “Anti-racist” and “anti-colonial” notoriety is a shrewd career move in those areas of academia, publishing, curatorship and entertainment, where competition for jobs is intense and exceptional ability rare: how else can you tell a professor of postcolonial literature or lecturer in hate studies from another?

If you smash an institution, it’s not just about restoring it. Woke is like a red or black revolution. It tears down institutions with several hundred years of history. How can they collapse like a house of cards?

Large institutions have repeatedly succumbed to pressure from younger employees. The trustees of such bodies, usually well-intentioned people but rarely experts, seem afraid to do their duty to safeguard their institutions in the interest of the wider public. Nevertheless, in the law, trustees have a large and largely irresponsible discretion, and if they yield to each “woke”initiative, the consequences will be serious and in some cases irreversible.

Historical context is overlooked as in the case of the Benin Bronzes, statues from the slave state of Benin. This was a state that sold its own population and the British put an end to it. Does Britain owe Benin anything?

The sorry saga of the Benin bronzes is a study in such institutional failure. A large number of these objects were brought back by a British expedition in 1897, and are now in many museums in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States. The kingdom of Benin, far from being a defenceless victim of gratuitous colonial aggression, was a violent slave-owning despotism that killed slaves for ritual purposes, and the 1897 expedition put an end to it.

International museum curators have decided, without caring much about other opinions, that the bronze should be returned unconditionally as “colonial loot” to Nigeria. This consensus is based on a systematically distorted account from 1897, which glosses over the anti-slavery aspect of the British intervention.

Even where you don’t find any examples of racism, you manage to twist something out of history.

Even high institutions cannot now be trusted to protect historical objects. Moreover, they are all too willing to tarnish their own reputations for the sake of virtue signalling. Cambridge University carried out research which found no evidence that it had benefited from slavery. Was finding a reason to celebrate? Far from. The subsequent report levelled scurrilous accusations against 18th-century students, and instead of honouring the university’s anti-slavery campaigners, preferred selective criticism.

There are disclaimers across the board. Politicians, media, nobody resists.

Woke is like an auto-immune disease that attacks the institutions and causes them to destroy themselves and thus society.

Government ministers have been reluctant to get involved. But we are experiencing a wholesale attack on our culture and history abetted by publicly funded or charitable institutions. In many cases, their trustees are appointed by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, whose ministers cannot pretend that this is none of their business.

The ministers have been reluctant to get involved. But we are experiencing a wholesale attack on our culture and history supported by publicly funded or charitable institutions. In many cases, their trustees are appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, whose ministers cannot pretend that this is none of their business.

It can lead to the thought of a figure like George Soros in the USA who destroys the judiciary and the electoral system on purpose. Then you can ask about the subject. Is it nihilism?