Scholarship in the UK is in the deepest, ugliest anal cavity imaginable. Today I listened to a 40-minute talk of a British scholar about how wonderful and free Cuba is. She told us that there’s no censorship in Cuba and repeated the old, hoary lies about the success of the Cuban literacy program. The worst part was that the talk was given to an audience of Ukrainian hispanists. The absolute tone-deafness of praising Cuba to people who are at this very moment under assault by troops that Cubans joined and support was shocking.
The British scholar is so utterly ignorant that she said that the de-colonization discourse is the opposite of Soviet ideology. In reality, of course, the post colonial discourse was heavily controlled and promoted by the USSR during the Cold War. Today, Russia is using it to justify its war against Ukraine. This discourse states that colonialism is what developed countries do to underdeveloped countries. The colonial presence in Ukraine, according to this line of thought, is what the US is “doing to Ukraine”, while Russia is trying to “liberate” Ukraine from the US colonialism. “Decolonization” equals anti-Western, anti-US mentality. This is why we keep hearing about “decolonizing” the classroom and “decolonizing” knowledge, which simply means discarding modern science and all Western civilizational achievements.
My blood pressure went up a mile while I listened to this propagandistic garbage. This was the third presentation by a UK scholar that I’ve attended as part of this program, and they aren’t simply woke. They are the most primitive, inane kind of woke. It’s very sad.
I’m participating in another British conference next week, and I have a feeling I’ll need heavy blood pressure meds to sit through it.
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