Thus, we see demands that classical music must be cancelled because it is mostly the work of dead white men. The Nazis burned books whose authors were Jewish; the neo-Nazi race theorists seek to ban anything and everything whose authors were dead white males. It’s all about skin colour. Just as the Nazis insisted that there’s no such thing as a good Jew, today’s race theorists insist that there’s no such thing as a good “dead white male.” As for living white males, they are tainted by the original sins of their ancestors.

Many years ago, when I was an angry teenager, I saw a play by the Marxist playwright David Edgar which was intended to expose the false philosophy underlying white supremacist ideology. The only scene in the play which I recall was an angry exchange between a sympathetically portrayed Marxist and his antagonist, a white supremacist activist. In this dialogue the Marxist tried to convince his interlocutor that political history was centred on class struggle, whereas the white supremacist responded that, on the contrary, it was centred on the struggle between the races. The Marxist sought liberation in class war, the white supremacist in race war. One sought to sow discord in society by dividing one class against another, the other by dividing one race against the other. In spite of their differences, an objective observer could see that they shared a common hatred of those in power and a common belief that political victory would take violence and the cancelling of their opponents.

Even in the wildest reaches of the imagination, I could not have foreseen that the Marxist would come to endorse the white supremacist view of history. It seemed inconceivable that Marx could be seduced by Hitler. And yet “critical race theory” is as obsessed with race as were the Nazis. According to the new generation of Marxists, the political struggle is not about class war but race war; it’s not about a struggle between the classes but a struggle between the races. Like the Nazis, the critical race theorists don’t believe that racism is a prejudice in individuals but is something determined by history. It is not something evil in the heart of men but something systemic in history itself. Since this is so, the solution is not teaching and preaching the love of neighbour but the destruction of the “system.” And since the “system” is history itself, the final solution is the cancelling of the past, the utter erasing of the collective cultural memory of the people.

In this race war on culture there must be no mercy. The critical race theorist demonizes “dead white men” as surely as the Nazis demonized Jews.

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