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.
Clarissa's Blog 
“blood pressure went up a mile while I listened to this propagandistic garbage”
Aren’t there Q&A’s after the talks?
If you’re not allowed surely you can contact one of the Ukrainian hispanists and plant some molotov questions?
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Oh yes, I asked. What I usually do is say, “Thank you for this wonderful presentation. It was very enlightening. Of course, we all understand that [the exact opposite of what the person said] is true. Do you have a response to this?”
This gets them really flustered. But doesn’t help much with my BP problem.
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Even in the decolonization framework – how is former colonial power fighting with other colonial powers over its former colonies a “decolonization”???
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Russia never recognized itself as a colonial power. In the decolonization discourse, only a developed country can be a colonizer. Hence, Russia was never one. And Ukraine was never its colony. It was its integral part.
Yes, this is insane. But decolonization theory is insane.
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Yes, but that’s because Russia auto-colonised itself in keeping with Marcuse and Adorno’s observations on abnegation …
And so Russia didn’t have to be colonised because it had already surrendered to its own Greatest Refusal, the most powerful coloniser of them all.
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Try RIBA where there were architects trying to get Léon Krier cancelled not only because of his design of Poundbury for then Prince Charles …
BTW, does this make me Nazi adjacent for wanting to defend Non-Eyesore Architecture?
(Does the Hugo Boss make the Reichscancellers less fat than Göring?) :-)
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