Horrible Histories

The progressive elite is waging war on our past.

Picture William Shakespeare in your mind’s eye. Who do you see? A beardy balding white bloke, wearing a ruff, dashing about in a pair of his mum’s tights. Right?

Wrong.

Over the last fifty years or so scholars have been desperate to abandon this classic, Ladybird Book image of the bard. And have attempted to ‘update’ (Red Flag!!!) our understanding of not just his work, but Shakespeare’s identity as a man.

And aye, there’s the rub.

Because according to some academics William Shakespeare might not have been a man at all. In fact they have occasionally claimed, that he might well have been a woman. Or perhaps a gay man. And possibly bisexual. Actually scratch that, according to a couple of wrong professors, he was ‘undeniably’ bisexual. While the Guardian (obvs) claims this Elizabethan man living in Stratford Upon Avon in, ye knowest, Merrie Olde England, was clearly a black dude.

OK they concede. Maybe Shakespeare might have conceivably been white, but he clearly had a black lover. See, it describes a ‘Dark Lady’ right there in my Brodie’s Notes. So what other possible explanation could there be?

Frankly it’s exhausting.

The upshot is that the progressives have spent much of the last few years finding ever more bizarre ways to claim Shakespeare as one of their own.

But unaccountably they’ve never managed to get these nonsense claims to stick. And so the world of well educated academic stupidity seems to have finally, thankfully, abandoned its woeful attempts to reframe the Bard as part of The Resistance, a disabled black woman fighting Elizabethan transphobia, oppression, and privilege through the revolutionary medium of iambic pentameter.

These days it seems they’re happy leaving that sort of thing to Netflix.

But now that he’s been acknowledged as just another boring old dead white guy, many Shakespearean scholars seem to have changed tack.

And declared that rather than being the greatest playwright who ever lived, an unrivalled weaver of words, whose majestic works have remained unsurpassed for four hundred years.

Shakespeare was in fact, well, a bit crap.

Relegated from unquestioned literary genius to merely just, OK I guess, if you like that sort of thing.

A middling talent whose overrated oeuvre should be appraised in the context of Bengali poets and Bollywood dance workshops.

After all, Hamlet’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s certainly no Adolescence.

With the only real redeeming feature of his work being that according to The Atlantic magazine, all his plays, yes literally all of them, were acktualy about race.

There have even been calls to stop performing his plays on the completely reasonable grounds that Shakespeare was white, and so has no value.

I’m only joking of course.

It isn’t just because he was white. That would be silly and racist.

They want to ban him because he was white and male. The lethally bigoted combo, which has never achieved anything, except, you know, building, and inventing everything.

Now the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, a charity which runs a big chunk of Stratford Upon Avon, has decided that the entire town, and Shakespeare’s legacy, needs to be, yup you’ve guessed it, ‘decolonised’.

Because the trust claims that our Will’s legacy is being used to promote, again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, ‘white supremacy.’

Get Out!! You’re Bard!

Makes sense.

After all it long been established there’s nothing the hordes of mythical Nazis, racists and while supremacists who live rent free in every Guardian reader’s (dunder)head, love more than hopping aboard a far right bandwagon for a coach trip to Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford Upon Avon.

There the skinhead mob goose step up and down outside Anne Hathaway’s cottage, throw around Elon Musk style salutes outside Shakespeare’s childhood home, and stalk about the thatched cottages searching for dark skinned Othello lookalikes to shiv up with a bare bodkin.

To justify branding Shakespeare and his works, Hitler adjacent, the trust claims that many of Shakespeare’s 38 plays 154 sonnets, and zero Marxist manifestos contain

“language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”.

No shit Shylock.

Shakespeare was writing 400 hundred years ago. When sacking people for micro aggressions, mutilating children’s sex organs in the belief that it would somehow free their ‘gendered soul’, or encouraging men to beat the crap out of women in the name of sport, wasn’t even a thing.

People were just less civilised back then I guess.

It’s ludicrous to expect Romeo and Juliet to include a scene where the star crossed lovers sign a consent form. To condemn Shakespeare for not using the murder of Julius Caesar as an opportunity to link knife crime with toxic masculinity. Or to lament how the Bard refused to explain how the Tempest was the inevitable result of man made climate change.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust had one job, to preserve the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

And I want to be fair here, because it seems that for the most part, it does an excellent job at pursuing this goal. Yet there is clearly a part of the organisation (the bit which receives cash from the wokemongers at the Arts Council I’d wager) which unaccountably seems hellbent on destroying that legacy.

And it’s not just the bard botherers of Stratford Upon Avon who are up to this nonsense.

The Royal Institution, an organisation set up in 1799 with the purpose of

‘diffusing the knowledge of, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, as well as enhancing the application of science to the common purposes of life’

has seemingly decided, that its actual job is to inform visitors to the Faraday Museum whether groundbreaking scientists like Humphrey Davy were racist, or had links to slavery.

(Spoiler Alert. Yes. And Yes.)

Davy as I’m sure you all know, invented the eponymous miner’s lamp. An ingenious contraption which prevented the naked flame from a lamp from igniting coal gas. Davy’s invention undoubtedly saved the lives of countless 19th century miners.

But who cares? Davy is a dead white guy whose humanity enriching invention does not absolve him from the sin of living in the 19th century. Or the offence of marrying someone whose dad, (Their dad!) once owned forty slaves.

Forget lamps. If Humphrey Davy were any kind of proper scientist surely he would have invented a Time Machine. Travelled 200 years into his own future, read some Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and then returned, suitably enlightened, to his own time.

He would then have divorced his sin stained wife and spent the rest of his life atoning for his whiteness, (you can never atone for your whiteness), and denouncing the monstrous inhumanity of his beast of a father in law.

That a supposed ‘scientist’ of his stature didn’t pursue such a clear course of action is frankly unfathomable.

The offence archeologists at the Royal Institution diligently trawled through all eighty three of Davy’s scientific notebooks in the hope of unearthing some unforgivable racist transgression. And what’s the best they could come up with?

Well, hold onto your hats.

The scientists found that Davy believed in a discredited theory that skin colour could be changed by the environment.

Look. I don’t want to tell you your job Dr Science. But I’ve been to both Alicante and Cardiff. And I’m living proof that it can.

Seeing as thanks to the ‘environment’ my skin colour changed from a healthy golden brown in sunny Spain, to a more cadaverous green in the Welsh Wasteland.

This braindead, revisionist plague is infecting ever more of our great museums and public institutions.

It has already ruined the wonderfully quirky, weird, and wholly unique Wellcome Collection, is becoming an ugly blemish on the National Gallery, (where every possible painting is accompanied by a note scolding the artist and/or subject for ‘links’ to slavery), and is now making an unwelcome appearance at the Museum of London, where staff are being encouraged to ‘challenge embedded whiteness’ wherever they find it. (Clue: Everywhere.)

And by ‘encouraged’ I expect they mean they will suffer career jeopardising consequences if they refuse to embrace this divisive, ugly, modern day racism.

No one actually wants this rubbish. And yet our bosses. The progressives elites who run everything, control everything, and ruin everything, don’t care what people want. They will impose it on us anyway.

Not content on wrecking our present with their jackboot stomping, finger wagging, and incessant scolding, they are hellbent on ruining our past.

We are told that Great Britain generally, and England especially, is a chimera, a land of nothing, a desolate wasteland, devoid of culture, history, or worth.

A place which never really existed. Which only came into being as a ‘nation of immigrants’.

This is a lie.

The truth is that we are, or more accurately, were, perhaps the greatest country in history.

A tiny nation which saved Europe from Napoleonic tyranny.

(Perhaps my favourite historical quote. Czar Alexander of Russia to the Duke of Wellington on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.

‘It is up to you to save the world. Again’.

Again!!! Imagine that! I feel I’ve achieved something when I get a new subscriber here on Substack. )

Britain, lest we forget, is a country which fought and helped win, two world wars, on the side of the good guys. Which for a while stood naked, defiant, and alone as the lone bulwark against the existential threat of actual Nazism.

(Just finding that link, and of course there is a Guardian article rubbishing the idea that Britain ever stood alone, denouncing it as ‘a myth’. Is there no part of our legacy that these history hating goons will not gaily besmirch?)

A country which once boasted the biggest navy, and the largest empire the world has ever seen.

And used the riches and power that came with that empire to systematically destroy the trans Atlantic slave trade. This is a hugely important part of our nation’s glorious history strangely not celebrated in our schools by the supposedly anti racist, reparations-demanding, progressives.

(And yup, inevitably it’s another historical fact denied by the Guardian)

And all that is just the blood and treasure Genuinely Great Britain sacrificed in armed conflict for the greater good.

In peacetime our nation gifted the world the Industrial Revolution.

This is not as that buffoon Boris Johnson would have you believe, something to be ashamed of. It is instead perhaps humanity’s greatest ever achievement. A milestone in our species’ development which ultimately transformed the world from one where over 80% of people lived in extreme poverty, to one where now, over 90% of our planet’s inhabitants don’t.

With the worst deprivation today being in sub Saharan Africa, Yemen, and the nice parts of Birmingham.

Over the course of three hundred years we literally used our British brains to haul humanity from the windmill age to the internet age.

Though our current elites, stupidity magnets which they are, (yes. I’m talking about you Ed) are desperate to send us right back there.

But now our past is to be recast, re-defined and reinterpreted.

Our heroes Nelson, Wellington, Shakespeare, and Churchill consigned to the racist bin. Buried from view like so much radioactive sludge. More toxic than Dad’s internet browsing history.

The only male hero our nation seems allowed to celebrate nowadays is not only not British, he’s not even human. That analogue for harmless, blameless, innocence, the well meaning, naïve, immigrant child, Paddington Bear.

Our once proud nation has been reduced to little more than an endlessly looping Tik-Tok video of obese, rainbow flagged nurses dancing through empty, crumbling hospitals in blank eyed celebration, as our bovine, apron grasping, populace is corralled into house arrest, quaking timorous in our holes during history’s most selective, (you’re vulnerable queuing in Waitrose, but immune on a BLM march) and arguably least dangerous (to most people) pandemic.

The whole thing has become so terrifyingly authoritarian and unrelentingly gay. Like we’re all living inside a North Korean version of Eurovision.

And we’re teaching our children this nonsense as fact. No wonder only 41% of Gen Z are proud to be British.

Maybe it’s jealously. Perhaps the progressive elites feel compelled to denigrate the achievements of the past because their own list of accomplishments is striking in its paucity.

Witness the uniform uselessness of our current government front bench. Not a single one has ever run a business. Built a company. Or even it seems, held down a real job. The only thing they have ever created is the imaginary experiences listed on their counterfeit CVs.

The progressives have produced no art which will pass the test of time. Built not one monolith, structure or institution which will endure the ages. They have forged no new industry (except I guess the humanity hating make-work grift of DEI), fostered no innovation, birthed not a single life enhancing invention.

They have not improved the lot of mankind in any way whatsoever. By not a single jot.

In fact, in fifty years time I expect the only lasting monument to the progressive’s wretched reign will be a functionless Net Zero power grid, an empty space in the British Museum, (no doubt renamed Museum of Decolonisation) where the Elgin Marbles used to be, and the mangled genitalia, shattered bodies, and ruined lives of thousands of one-time ‘trans kids’.

Who will rightly, never forgive our generation for the harm we did them.

And yet despite creating nothing but division, rancour, racism, and misery, these joyless progressives, these know nothing scolds, these pinch faced authoritarians, seem totally convinced that they are themselves somehow the pinnacle of humanity.

Smug in their own supremacy. Unwavering in the certainty of their own absolute goodness. Convinced that there is nothing in the world that cannot be improved by their intervention, meddling, guidance, and instruction. These cocksure narcissists consider themselves morally and ethically perfect. Civilisation’s Final Boss.

But surely they are not the first people ever to hold themselves in such high regard.

We can assume that the Aztecs who ripped the beating hearts from human sacrifices. The Spanish who tortured in the name of God. And the Red Guards who helped Mao Zedong torture, starve, and kill 80 million of his fellow countrymen, were all equally convinced of their own exalted place, on the right side of history.

EXIT STAGE LEFT: PURSUED BY BEAR

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