Subject: Rhodes Scholars, the letter was unsigned and we have no way of verifying its authenticity. However, we do know there is controversy over the Rhodes statue and Oxford has at times issued declarations that it will not remove the statue. This letter is submitted for your consideration, because some of the points made are relevant to situations in the USA.
OXFORD – THE FIGHTBACK HAS BEGUN
This letter is a response from Oxford to Black Students attending as Rhodes Scholars, who want to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes.
Interestingly, Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), The Chancellor of Oxford University, was on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 on precisely the same topic. The Daily Telegraph headline was “Oxford will not rewrite history”.
Patten commented “Education is not indoctrination. Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice” Rhodes
must fall????
“Dear Scrotty Students,
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well-being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: ”Why am I at Oxford?”
Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilization, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.
And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure, we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African civilization of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilization has been as near as damn it to zilch.
You’ll probably say that’s “racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities. We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the” black lives matter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloomrightly called “the closing of the American mind”. At Oxford however we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the
world’s greatest university.
Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships) We are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the grisly modern terminology has it – but we are color blind. We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, color or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.
That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What a clever chap you are!” No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic – otherwise your idea is worthless.
This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College, because it’s symbolic of “institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is – which we dispute – so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated really does not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop? As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful -Edward II and Charles I – that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite – Christ Church – was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: was he then the wrong manto lead Britain in the war?”
Actually, we’ll go further than that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous. We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have been doing to artifacts in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history.
And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your “rhodesmustfall” campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed”. One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!
Great. That’s just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tire necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates, institutionalized corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism and a collapsing economy. Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.
And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.
Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to
learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.
Brilliant.
Nice to know that not everyone employed in academia is a Marxist, race baiting, fatuous left wing activist ass like the self proclaimed K-12 “educator” Chris Sousa or a majority of crap slinging professors in the dysfunctional humanities departments of university level institutions including Chico State.
Well, I was thinking the same thing, however I don’t limit to one individual of the
educational system in the USA.
I sadly reflect on what ever some educators of a liberal mindset are pounding into their students heads on a daily basis, sometimes takes a lifetime to undue the damage.
The acronym ‘PC’ needs to be recognized for what it truly is… poisonous and corrupt
It’s fake, Pie. Maybe if you spent some time in my classroom I could teach you how to verify a source’s credibility using critical thinking and research skills. You’d have to refrain from bullying behavior during your time there, though, and I know how difficult that is for you.
att Chris ….. From Truth or Fiction “By mid-February, administrators made clear that the Rhodes statute would not be removed. Around that same time, the “Oxford Pushes Back” letter to student demonstrators first surfaced on a discussion board called the Daily Gripe, on February 13th. Some of Patten’s quotes are included in the Oxford Pushes Back letter, but there’s no indication that he actually wrote it, or that it came from the university. In the end, there’s no way to tell who the original author was.” And that Chris is why I put in my disclaimer.
Seems like sloppy work from Truth or Fiction—I was able to find the original author quite easily by simply searching the text of the first paragraph. I’ll e-mail them to let them know they got this one wrong.
I see now that you did do some work in trying to verify this story—the mistake was on Truth or Fiction’s end, not yours. My apologies.
Chris, even the title says “allegedly”!
“we have no way of verifying its authenticity.”
…I mean, of course you do. I just did it in thirty seconds on Google. The original writer is James Delingpole, who wrote the letter as part of an article for Breitbart in 2015. To his credit, Delingpole explicitly presented this as the letter Oxford should have written to the protesters, and didn’t try to pass it off as real. The article then became something of a chain e-mail and permutations started claiming that it was a real letter from Oxford.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/12/24/mud-huts-v-western-civilization-rhodesmustfall-must-fail/
Why do you sell yourself short like this? You have every ability to fact-check these things; you just choose not to.
In addition, basic skepticism would make one realize how unlikely it would be for Oxford to send such an insulting letter addressed specifically to its “Black Students.” Not just the protesters–it insults the intelligence and ancestry of all Black students! That is by definition racist.
Chris, my information actually came from a Google search. I was fact checking and it took me to a fact check site. That’s why I prefaced the letter the way I did. I was not presenting it so much as an unsigned Oxford letter, but as a letter with many salient points, regardless of who authored it. Why not argue the points made, wouldn’t that be more relevant?
So wait—you were able to fact-check it? Then why did you say there was no way to verify its authenticity? I’m not following.
I focused on that aspect rather than on the “points made” for these reasons:
1) Fake news is an absolute crisis in this country. The ability of citizens to verify the information they’re getting is crucial to our survival as a democracy. It is important to point out the original sourcing of any article these days, especially when there is controversy over its authenticity. A huge problem I see every day is that people do not make any effort, no matter how easy, to do so.
2) As I said, the “letter” is blatantly racist. It specifically addressed “black students,” not just protesters, then repeatedly denigrates their intelligence and ancestry. That’s wrong and hateful, and seriously compromises the integrity of Delingpole’s argument.
3) There are almost no substantial points brought up in that letter for why the Rhodes statue should stay—it’s almost entirely ad hominem. Since it makes almost no substantial arguments, it does not merit a substantial rebuttal. I am sure there is a good case to be made for the Rhodes statue to stay. Delingpole did not make that case, nor did it seriously address the case that the statue should go—it simply demonized the opposition in racially inflammatory terms.
I am not a knee-jerk statue attacker or defender—I think monuments to our Founding Fathers and other presidents should stay up to celebrate their accomplishments and ideals despite their sins and flaws, while favoring tearing down statues of historical figures such as Confederates whose legacies aren’t as deserving of celebration. I don’t know enough about Rhodes to say where I’d fall in his case, but no one would come out more informed on why it should or shouldn’t be removed based on that hateful article. It’s pure red meat for Breitbart readers, not serious argument.
Let me make this real simple for you, I went to google, I entered the usual search parameters, it gave me Fact or Fiction, I read the report and it said, Truth or Fiction “By mid-February, administrators made clear that the Rhodes statute would not be removed. Around that same time, the “Oxford Pushes Back” letter to student demonstrators first surfaced on a discussion board called the Daily Gripe, on February 13th. Some of Patten’s quotes are included in the Oxford Pushes Back letter, but there’s no indication that he actually wrote it, or that it came from the university. In the end, there’s no way to tell who the original author was.” That is why I said I couldn’t verify it and put in the disclaimer. I did NOT have the time to search thru every single piece of information on the internet that mentioned this letter. So I went with what I had. But, I made no attempt to say the letter was anything except, “unverified” and “alleged”. I left up to the reader to do their own investigation if they were so inclined.
Yes Jack, again I am sorry. I did not realize you had attempted to fact-check the claim. In this case it was Truth or Fiction’s fault for sloppy research, not yours. I relied on Snopes, which in this case was more reliable, but even they did not link directly to the Breitbart article for some reason, so I still had to copy-paste the first paragraph of the letter in order to find the original source. I have e-mailed ToF to ask them to update their fact-check. I maintain that the letter is quite racist and not up to the standards you have set for this blog.
Hey thar MrJack,, Y’all can lead a horse to a crick o’water, but ya cant stop em from drinkin’ with their head a pointin’ downstream……….. If ya git my drift son
Thanks Lone Star…lol
The messages contained in this letter don’t depend on the letters origins. They remain valid, period!
When students create and use slogans that are designed to agitate and then have the audacity to claim they represent historical accuracy they deserve to be challenged and challenged greatly. When students conspire to erase history by tearing down monuments they deserve to be challenged greatly! This letter does that.
I just saw an interview with a “teacher.” She assured the reporter that she taught her students about BLM, social justice, and how to agitate and protest. She was quite proud of that but she could not tell the reporter the date of our nations birth.
An agenda does not represent historical accuracy, not even close.
If students want to be heard and taken seriously they need to grow up and participate in discussion and debate. Agitating, bullying, looting, burning, and committing crimes, including murder, do not promote understanding or change. They just piss people off.
I’m glad to hear that arrests have been made in America for some of the worst agitators. Glad too for the Presidents order to throw the book at those who destroy historical monuments.
Thanks for posting this letter, Jack, it’s contents speak to the ongoing situations we face. Ignorance abounds!!
Telling black Oxford students that they are “idiots” and “feeble-minded” for disagreeing with him, that they don’t deserve to be there, needlessly saying that their ancestors were “living in mud huts” while whites were building Oxford, etc., are not “valid messages,” Tina. They are racist messages that attack the protesters’ ancestry rather than their arguments. An argument could have been made, and probably has been made, in defense of the Rhodes statue and legacy without this racialized language. James Delingpole could not make that case, because he is a racist.
If students want to be heard and taken seriously they need to grow up and participate in discussion and debate. Agitating, bullying, looting, burning, and committing crimes, including murder, do not promote understanding or change. They just piss people off.
Delingpole showed no evidence of any such conduct by the protesters he is attacking as ignorant blacks who don’t deserve to be at Oxford because they disagree with him. You seem to be making assumptions here. You should question why you are making such assumptions.
The letter addressed black stUdents because it was black students that wanted the statue removed.
If a professor of color addressed such a letter to “white students” that followed up with such denigrating language about the students’ intelligence and ancestry I doubt you’d give them the benefit of the doubt. The references to the “ancestors” of the protesters are particularly egregious and unnecessary. That has nothing to do with the argument in defense of Rhodes and everything to do with Delingpole’s prejudices. It’s not a dogwhistle, it’s a bullhorn.
Re: The letter addressed black students because it was black students that wanted the statue removed.”
Our local left-wing moron doesn’t get that. No surprise there.
I get it just fine. I’m saying that doesn’t make it acceptable. He could have addressed it to “protesters.” Delingpole chose to address “Black Students” for a reason, and it’s the same reason that he chose to denigrate their heritage: racism. Not only could he have made his case without singling out black students (I find it incredibly hard to believe that *only* black students and no others were protesting) and insulting their ancestors, but his case would have been more effective at reaching a non-racist audience had he done so.
But he wrote it for Breitbart; a non-racist audience is not the group he was trying to reach.