It’s cultural appropriation to wear a sari and do yoga but it’s not cultural appropriation to say things like “decolonize the curriculum.” Because pretending that you know something about being a colony is completely cool and not in the least insulting.
I hate every part of wokeism but none as much as the fashionable use of the word ‘decolonize.’ My sister is in graduate school and has been assigned an article on how to ‘decolonize’ business schools. We have personally experienced both being a colony and decolonization but ridiculing our experience is perfectly fine.
Clarissa's Blog 
Since they’re talking about the business schools, that means that they’re going to destroy the business schools, right?
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Of course. This is all utterly pathetic. A culture is dismantling itself for no reason at all.
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Oh, it’s not for no reason at all. Those rotten bastards are going after the currency.
By pure coincidence a video popped up showing that Janet Yellen woman who runs the Federal Reserve talking about the so-called billionaire’s tax. Stock market items were specifically mentioned to be targeted with a tax on unrealised capital gains.
It struck me that one of the problems that we have with all of the money printing that is going on is that the people who receive money at very low rates of interest, who are supposed to use that money to reinvigorate the economy, instead chase higher yields on the stock market and spend the money there.
That is why even though the amount of money being printed is rising dramatically, the half of the economy that regular people participate in is crashing due to a shortage of money, even as the half that is fed by newly printed dollars, most of which is stock market speculation only, is rising but only for the already rich.
Then I remembered what happened to the Japanese oligarchs after WW2, which in short involved the government physically taking the stocks and bonds out of the safes of the oligarchs by force, then using the stocks and bonds to collateralise a new bank, then opening an account for the oligarchs into which the value of the appropriated stocks and bonds was placed along with a withdrawal limit, so that the oligarchs could only withdraw a fraction of their money per month.
After that, the Japanese government engaged in massive money printing to an extent that the value of the currency itself fell by 97%, after which the newly dispossessed oligarchs were allowed to withdraw as much of their much less valuable money as they wanted.
At the same time, the other measure implemented by the Japanese government was to force the firing of a very significant proportion of educated Japanese people from companies owned by the Japanese oligarchy.
Through those two measures along with land redistribution that the previous Japanese government had engaged in already to fuel the war effort, the Japanese economy went through a reset.
Logically, any total psycho who wants to try the same stunt is going to go after the business schools that teach and motivate young people who are more energetic than any policy maker, and undermine them as much as possible so as to teach them the new way of doing things.
I know the type of person who works in government institutions that implement this kind of policy. They’re not creative. The find something that has already happened and run the whole thing all over again, convinced that this time it will work because they are the special ones doing it, and actually think that they’re clever because they read about it while the average person didn’t.
So, I think that they’re implementing COVID mandates on purpose because they know people will quit, dislodging them from their jobs just like Japanese workers who were fired, while absorbing assets like houses the mortgages of which cannot be maintained by unemployed people, plus siphoning off stock market equity which will really only impact those who weren’t given free money in the first place, which means the middle class.
Lastly when the economy is a smoking ruin they’ll fire up the printing press like nothing anyone has ever seen before and destroy the currency itself, so that everyone is left holding practically worthless money while being at the mercy of the ones who did it.
The following video about Japan isn’t perfect and is aimed at the “Eat The Rich” chanting idiots, but it’ll do:
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It’s exactly this. When you ask this crowd how a “decolonized” curriculum in their discipline of choice would look like, most of them have no clue at all. When they manage to produce a response, it’s along the lines of “teach more work by women/people of colour” (which was already happening 20 years ago when I was an undergraduate so what’s the point then) or vague mumbo-jumbo about “dismantling hierarchies of teaching and learning”, etc. In the absence of any clear articulation of what the end goal is, I can only presume it is dismantling and destruction.
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“pretending that you know something about being a colony…”
More than a fad – decolonization songs and dances have been a featured acts within the social sciences for at least the last two decades.
From the first time I encountered “decolonization” advocates delivering a paper and pretending to be real scholars, I wanted to squirm and look away in embarrassment as there is no known cure-all for the earnestly stupid.
It’s mostly condescending “noble savages” jibber jabber layered with important sounding dollops borrowed liberally (lol) from Lenin’s crude pamphlet “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”
Very telling that your sister was assigned this kind of reading in business school: it seems the wokesters have now colonized every nook and cranny of the academy. But, if she’s courageous enough, there’s plenty of published critiques out there of the approach to be found.
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BUSINESS school, you know? How stupid can it get?
She’s standing up to the bastards but nobody else in her program is.
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Business school in Canada, yes?
Told you so. The woke elites face no organized, effective opposition here. Resistance is futile – you will be assimilated.
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Yes. Concordia university. The profs still think that marketing is what it was in the 1980s. Everything is terribly outdated. But they have embraced the woke fads, and thats enough.
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“I/We would like to begin by acknowledging that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather today. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. We respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.”
’nuff said…
And, in case you thought it might be any better down the street…
https://www.mcgill.ca/equity/initiatives-education/indigenous-initiatives/land-acknowledgement
(Resistance is futile etc.)
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” acknowledging that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands”
Then start a movement to give it back! They couldn’t possibly make worse use of it….
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“Then start a movement to give it back!”
From the point of view of the Mohawks, why would you want the hassles of possession when you and your descendants can enjoy the advantages of being a rentier for “as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, and the grass grows”?
More seriously, putting aside the problem that the Mohawk claim is completely fictional (see link below,) I believe the point of these now ubiquitous public acknowledgements is to undercut the Lockean “natural rights” that are foundational to liberal democracy – ie “life, liberty and property.”
It’s a return of neo-feudal thinking that rights are not natural to all citizens alive in the here and now but are conferred on special individuals by their virtuous birth. We are all being groomed.
https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/blogs/news/montreals-mohawk-myth
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Today I was listening to the radio (CBC, not some right-wing outlet) that openly discussed these very issues. Different views on territorial acknowledgments as well as to whom the land under Montreal did actually belong. So it does not seem to be a taboo topic in Canada.
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The taboo part is not being able to say “we conquered these savages and that’s great.” Everywhere else in the world, it’s a completely normal thing to say. But here we feel fortunate still being able to say that maybe territorial acknowledgements aren’t necessary in every context.
We have so profoundly forgotten what freedom even means.
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“(CBC, not some right-wing outlet)”
Here’s the thing, Canadians have little or no access on a regular basis to any media or partisan political commentary that challenges woke pieties. The general rule is – it’s all woke, all the time. (It’s a one-party woke democracy from coast to coast to coast)
“So it does not seem to be a taboo topic in Canada”
Interesting theory. I suggest you might test it by loudly heckling the next “territorial acknowledgement” statement you hear in any public gathering of your choice in English-speaking Canada. Pro tip – there will absolutely be consequences. (Quebec has its own special rules because native land/nationhood claims challenge directly the nationalist colonial victim narrative.)
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Colonization of primitive cultures by more advanced Western civilized nations has actually been very beneficial to the human race, taking people from the inefficient use of spears and worship of the harvest gods to nuclear weapons that have rendered world wars unthinkable, and fertilizers that yield abundant crops to feed an ever-growing world population.
The loss of ignorant innocence and its replacement by valid scientific realities* and the humane constraints of enlightened governance have been worth it, every step of the way.
*such as the annual high-dose flu vaccinations for senior citizens and the 3rd COVID-19 vaccination booster shots, which I got today with no side effects at all.
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I understand what you mean, but personally think that it is the opposite because every culture was primitive once and evolved as it wanted to. Colonising a place robs inhabitants of self determination, and therefore their humanity.
Some islands in Polynesia and Micronesia, for example, were not colonised and were adjacent to technologically superior peoples, which meant that they cold decide for themselves what they wanted to partake of and how.
Their lives seem to be quite wonderful, with the biggest threat to them seeming to be outsiders who want to come and “help”.
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These island nations were spared colonization by their unique status as tiny islands that were not considered worth the effort by superior powers. The vast majority of primitive cultures lived on landmasses which did not allow them that advantage.
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—which meant that they cold decide for themselves what they wanted to partake of and how.
Some time ago I’ve read about some Pacific island (forgot which one) where the inhabitants decided that the most important things to borrow from the westerners are firearms, preferably automatic. This took traditional wars between tribes to a whole new level…
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“the inhabitants decided that the most important things to borrow from the westerners are firearms, preferably automatic. This took traditional wars between tribes to a whole new level…”
““The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power… International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.”
Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations
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Yep. For most African warlords the distinction between capitalism and communism came down to preference for the M16 or AK-47.
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