This Has Become a Neo-Maoist War on the Past

It's not just in Britain. It's all over the West! It's time for our 'leaders' to stop it whilst there's still a civilisation to save!

From Sp¡ked

By Brendan O'Neill

The woke elites have launched a Cultural Revolution. They must be stopped.

Britain is in the throes of a Cultural Revolution. Statues are being tumbled, past art erased, people cancelled. Wide-eyed Woke Guards, heirs to Maoist-style intolerance, are compiling lists of monuments to target and individuals to humiliate. They are remorseless. Nothing old that runs counter to their newthink can be tolerated. Tear it all down.

The speed with which protests over the murder of George Floyd morphed into a war on the past has been staggering. The mob’s toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol was the noisiest, most visible victory so far for the new Cultural Revolution. They’ve moved on swiftly. The appetite for erasure seems insatiable.

Last night, a crowd in Oxford demanded the destruction of the likeness of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College. In an effort to keep the woke wolf from the door, the Museum of London Docklands took down a statue of slave trader Robert Milligan yesterday. The Woke Guards are circulating a list of the next evil bronze and stone entities that must be swept aside. It includes statues of globally significant historical figures. Sir Francis Drake, Christopher Columbus. Purge them, erase them. Britain’s neo-Maoist cousins in the US have already made short shrift of Columbus: yesterday in Richmond, Virginia a mob tore down his statue, set it on fire, and threw it in a lake. Their fervour and madness are easily a match for the most committed Red Guards who swept China for ‘unacceptable’ artifacts in the late 1960s.

When a statue can’t be toppled, it is abused. Churchill’s monument in Westminster was spray-painted with the word ‘racist’. Even Abraham Lincoln, who fought a war to end slavery, did not escape the mob’s grafitti. Well, he’s a white man, thus evil. In Leeds, the statue of Queen Victoria was defaced, including with the spraying of pink paint on her breasts and crotch, bringing to mind the extra element of sexual humiliation – hair-cutting, the confiscation of clothes – that China’s Red Guards would visit upon women who dared to possess incorrect thoughts.

The fervour for erasure is not limited to statues. Incorrect art and entertainment is expunged, too. Yesterday the BBC and Netflix cast into the memory hole old episodes of Little Britain because they feature white actors occasionally dressing up as black people. Leigh Francis (aka Keith Lemon) tried to placate the Woke Guards by issuing an emotional apology for his past mimicking of famous black people. Aussie comic Chris Lilley, who has also played non-white characters, will be next. His ‘massively outdated comedies’ must be razed too, says one compliant cheerleader of the new Cultural Revolution. They won’t stop there. History is full of film, literature and entertainment with questionable depictions. Light the matches. Indeed, Gone with the Wind has already been taken down by HBO Max because of its depiction of black people. What will be next?