Posted by: bj | July 7, 2020

Oxford

Subject: Oxford

OXFORD – THE FIGHTBACK HAS BEGUN

This letter is a response from Oxford to Black Students attending as Rhodes 

Scholars to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes. 

Interestingly, Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), The Chancellor of 

Oxford University, was on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 on precisely 

the same topic. The Daily Telegraph headline was “Oxford will not rewrite 

history”. Patten commented “Education is not indoctrination. Our history is 

not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should 

have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice” Rhodes must 

fall ????

              “Dear Scrotty Students, Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has 

contributed greatly to the comfort and wellbeing 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?”

        Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest existant 

university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th 

century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilization, 

from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and 

beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, 

John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, 

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar 

Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks.

We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here 

are conscious of what a big deal we are.

Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere 

her accordingly.

        And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud 

huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African 

civilization of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The 

contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilization has been as near as 

damn it to zilch.

        You’ll probably say that’s “racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford 

prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the rules are different at other 

universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities. 

We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from 

the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered 

institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the? 

#?blacklivesmatter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political 

correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called “the closing of the American 

mind”. At Oxford however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate 

to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics and empty sloganeering. The 

day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the 

world’s greatest university.

      Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time 

at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it 

does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for 

Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships) We 

are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case – postgraduates, 

making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, 

let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the grisly modern 

terminology has it – but we are colour blind. We have been educating gifted 

undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and 

beyond for many generations.

        We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed. We do, 

however, discriminate according to intellect only.

        That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come 

up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red 

rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What a 

clever chap you are!”  No We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested 

in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the Oxford 

intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but 

you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic – otherwise your idea 

is worthless.

      This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes 

should be removed from Oriel College, because it’s symbolic of 

“institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is – which we 

dispute – so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t 

pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated really does 

not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s statue on 

the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop ?  As one 

of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include 

two kings so awful – Edward II and Charles I – that their subjects had them 

killed. The college opposite – Christ Church – was built by a murderous, 

thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives.

      Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US 

Constitution?

      Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: was 

he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?”

      Actually, we’ll go further than that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign 

is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous.

      We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to 

do here is no different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have been doing to 

artefacts in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history

      And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it 

should order its affairs? Your ?#?rhodesmustfall campaign, we understand, 

originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told 

one of his lecturers “whites have to be ki

One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a rich politician 

and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”;

    – another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary 

of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious 

black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and 

decisively!

Great. That’s just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural enrichment 

from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic 

almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of 

the world’s highest per capita murder rates, institutionalised corruption, 

tribal politics, anti-white racism and a collapsing economy.

Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 

22,000 students studying here at Oxford.

    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.

Yours, Oriel College, Oxford

Advertisement

Responses

  1. WOW ! now that’s what I call TRUTH !


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Categories

%d bloggers like this: