In Australia, the ABC, through their programme Q&A chose a discussion about a “dead white guy” having influence over the Australian cultural landscape. The dead white guy, is of course, William Shakespeare. The ABC producers wondered if Shakespeare, the person most likely to have given society the foundation of culture through his epics of comedy and drama, contributed to ‘whitesplaining’ history. Columnist, John Carroll suggested that ‘by implication Homer, Plato, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Mozart and Jane Austen have been cast as agents of the devil, responsible for the rise of a civilisation that has polluted the entire world’ and this is one view being put by University of Sydney academics. The make-up of Australian society has changed greatly and rapidly over the past few decades. Going from a mostly white, Anglo-Irish society, a relatively small Aboriginal population, to a country where almost half the population has been born overseas or has at least one parent who was. Australia has truly become a multicultural society accepting more migrants each year, per head of population, than any other OECD nation, apart from Canada, larger than 10 million people. It’s interesting to note that, in Canada too, there is an attack on culture, which reminds me of the ‘cultural cringe’ that Australian’s used to suffer from in the sixties and seventies. The push for the alienation of traditional culture doesn’t only come from the Universities, as there has been a trickle-down effect through the school system as well with the acceptance of post-modernist and politically correct, green left political culture. As Jordan Peterson suggests, students have been subjected to Marxist ideology where students have been taught about the West’s ‘capitalist exploitation of other people, of its own minorities and the disadvantaged in general’.
Western Culture under Attack Part 5
