Hello, this is Wilhelm. This blog discusses the issues of woke politics and cancel culture.

The culture wars have long felt like something from America, but in the last couple of years a British version has become alive as well, with statues destroyed by rioters and a war on the country’s colonial history is only getting worse. The country’s most famous modern author, JK Rowling, a feminist icon, has had her reputation hurt over her views on the “trans” issue. British cultural figures like Ricky Gervais and John Cleese and even the brilliant playwright Tom Stoppard have criticised the censorship of the modern thought police who work online.

The government appears to understand that this issue can no longer be ignored. Early this summer, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden wrote a response to Liverpool University’s shocking decision to remove the name of former Prime Minister William Gladstone from one of its buildings over his family’s connections to slavery (he was proudly anti-slavery). 

“Confident nations face up to their history. They don’t airbrush it. Instead, they protect their heritage and use it to educate the public about the past. They “retain and explain,” rather than “remove or ignore,” he said in the Telegraph.

This urge to erase history is like Mao, the Cato Institute explained last year. It can be seen as a less-bloody cultural revolution, led by childish leftists with no real plan how to navigate the complex world we exist in. They may have succeeded in shaming a growing list of western institutions into backing the woke agenda, but there is no strategy – and it is destined to trigger a backlash they are unprepared for. As were the French revolutionaries of 1789.

Because cancel culture impacts us all, and society is worse off due to it, but the actual victims are those who are cowed by the mob, those who are shamed for their traditional views, those who accept the left’s claimed cultural supremacy. That means the people who will be drawn into the purge are also those on the left but who are not sufficiently “pure”. If Gladstone can be villified, anyone can be. But we must not accept it.

To quote Bismarck: “The main thing is to make history, not write it.” And nor to deny it.