RHODES RECLAIMED

 As the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign at Oxford burbled on predictably, with Britain’s shameful left-terrorized academics mainly in hiding despite the great imperialist having provided £700M (in 2015 money) for his Scholars on racially non-discriminatory terms and despite the campaign’s Black student leader being exposed by journalists as a barking-mad anti-imperialist who even wanted the ‘swastika-reminiscent’ French tricolor banned from public display, a stout defence of Rhodes and other less-than-ideal yet still admirable figures appeared in the Catholic Herald (Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, 29 xii). A sample:

"The desire to have Rhodes removed from history springs from a tyrannical political correctness that denies that Rhodes did anything good, and that any celebration of his memory can be justified. But the truth is that there was a lot of good about Rhodes, and that he is a man worth remembering. He may not have been a saint, but this world produces few saints; he is certainly not worthy of damnation"

Guardian correspondents also rejected the demonization of Rhodes, pointing out the worse iniquities of such venerated figures as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Alfred Nobel and King Richard III – and the foundational anti-Semitism of England’s widely-revered Magna Carta (28 xii).


RHODES SCHOLARSHIPS – A NOTE

(Taken from Cape Times, 29 xii)

On his death in 1902, Rhodes left $10 million to create an educational trust. Yet, rather than arranging any society of like-minded ‘White-supremacist, Anglophile capitalists,’ he founded the Rhodes Scholarships Trust to support the first international education fellowships in the world.

Every year, 89 Rhodes Scholars from 32 countries are supported. The Rhodes Scholarships’ aim is to educate international young leaders (who are committed to public service) at his beloved Oxford University.

According to Rhodes’ express wishes, successful applicants must exhibit “qualities of truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for the protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship”.

More specifically, Rhodes Scholars were to strive at “promoting cross-cultural understanding and peace between nations”.

By bringing a culturally diverse group of young people to undergo a common educational experience, Rhodes envisaged that these future leaders of the world would “prevent war and promote the best interests of humanity”.

He specified that the scholarships be awarded without regard to race or religion. “I could never accept the position that we should disqualify a human being on account of his colour,” he wrote.

Finally, he instructed his trustees to adapt his plans for the scholarships to “respond effectively to changing circumstances”. To date, there have been 7,688 Rhodes Scholars representing a broad spectrum of human “race”, gender and sexual orientation. Some of the most noteworthy Scholars are:

Alain L Locke (1907): First black Scholar – homosexual writer, philosopher, educator – “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance.

Jan H Hofmeyr (1910): South African educationalist and liberal politician who anticipated an end to racial discrimination.

Edwin Hubble (1910): Astronomer of Hubble Telescope.

Norman W Manley (1914): First Premier of Jamaica, one of Jamaica’s seven National Heroes.

John Marshall Harlan (1920): US Supreme Court Justice.

Howard Walter Florey (1921): Nobel Prize winner in physiology for discovering penicillin. Provost of The Queen’s College, Oxford. {Yes, I knew his daugher – a lovely girl who had migrated to Edinburgh, albeit her good looks accompanied with more pseudo-liberalism than with scientific capacity.}

John Carew Eccles (1925) 1963: Nobel Prize winner in neurophysiology.

William Fulbright (1925): US senator and originator of the Fulbright Fellowship programme. To date, more than 325,000 individuals from 155 countries have received Fulbright Grants, including winners of 53 Nobel Prizes.

Dean Rusk (1931): US Secretary of State.

Bram Fischer (1931): Anti-apartheid activist and lawyer.

William Jay Smith (1947): US poet laureate.

Bob Hawke (1953): Prime Minister of Australia.

Kris Kristofferson (1958): American singer, songwriter, musician, actor.

Wasim Sajjad (1964): President of Pakistan.

Bill Clinton (1968): 42nd President of the USA.

Edwin Cameron (1976): South African Supreme Court Justice, homo rights and HIV/Aids activist.

Malcolm Turnbull (1978): Prime Minister of Australia.

Anthony John ‘Tony’ Abbott (1980): Prime Minister of Australia.

Naomi Wolf (1985): Author of the international best-seller The Beauty Myth.

Roxanne Joyal (2001) and Marc Kielburger (2000): Founded the Free the Children International Charity.

Eusebius McKaiser (2003): South African public intellectual.

Cheikh M’bengue (2006): Caribbean studies expert.

Yusuf Randera-Rees (2007): Founded Awethu Project in South Africa – aims to incubate 500 entrepreneurs from under-resourced backgrounds.

Kingwa Kamencu (2009): Presidental candidate, Kenya.

In 2003, to promote non-racial leadership development for Africa, the Rhodes Trust joined in the creation of The Mandela-Rhodes Foundation. It provides scholarships for African students, chosen on criteria very similar to those for the Rhodes Scholarships, to undertake postgraduate study in South Africa.

According to Nelson Mandela: “We see The Mandela-Rhodes Foundation as a significant initiative within that broader framework of South Africans taking responsibility for the transformation of their society, so grievously skewed by a history of colonialism and apartheid. We shall once more take hands across historical divides that others may deem unbridgeable.”

Yet the mighty – and mightily generous – Rhodes, who had always opposed Boer enslavement of Bantus [who themselves wanted to enslave or just kill seriously-low-IQ Bushmen] was to be humiliated by his own central-Oxford  college – in 2015 run by wymmin, though R himself could hardly have objected, he having been as queer as a coot.


REALISM AS WAS  

As government papers for 1986 were made public under the UK’s 30-year rule, it turned out that Mrs Thatcher had been well advised in the aftermath of Black rioting in Tottenham (in the course of which a police officer had been stabbed to death) by the young Conservative intellectual Oliver Letwin. Apparently Letwin – the son of Russian Jews who had fled Kiev for Chicago and who himself went on to hold fellowships at Princeton and Cambridge – attributed the problems of the Black murderers to “bad moral attitudes” rather than to the more fashionable “urban deprivation.”

Naturally the press and political class of 2015 Yukay were scandalized and Letwin had to offer a form of apology; but he was defended (as normal in days before all problems of minorities had be be blamed on prejudice) by race equality guru Trevor Phillips (q.v.) – Blacks still being allowed to allude to truths about Black stupidity and psychoticism which left-enfeebled Whites had learned to suppress.


EUGENICS LIVES

 Eugenic practices were found to be alive and well at the London Sperm Bank, where wouid-be contributors were advised to hold themselves in if they had family histories of autism or hyperactivity  (D.Telegraph, 31 xii).

The  revelation – by an offended would-be Abrahamist donor – especially annoyed official dyslexics who had got in the habit of claiming super-authors Hans Christian Anderson, Gustave Flaubert, William James, W.B. Yeats, Agatha Christie and Winston Churchill as somehow one of them.

{How we can all play up our childhood impediments – today including many -isms – so as to achieve the treasured status of ‘victim’! Churchill’s lisp did not stop him winning several school prizes at Harrow.}


OXFORD RECLAIMED

A Guardian correspondent succinctly replied to anti-Oxford Rhodesteria:

"Dr Robin Russell-Jones (Letters, 31 December) cannot have been paying attention when he was in Cambridge in the 1960s if his impression was that “Oxford provided numerous politicians, almost all Conservative”. He presumably never came across Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins, Richard Crossman, Antony Crosland, Denis Healey, Tony Benn, Michael Stewart, Barbara Castle, Frank Soskice, Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams, Michael Foot, Patrick Gordon-Walker, Anthony Greenwood, Christopher Mayhew, Ivor Richard, Dick Taverne et al, all Labour ministers in the 1960s and all from Oxford. It rather devalues his other musings about Oxford in the current debate on Rhodes.

Rhys David
Redbourn, Hertfordshire


MULTICULTI CRASH

 The West’s trainload of peecee-revelling politicos hit the buffers as the Solunnis of Saudi and the Shitites of Persia – whose 1350-year-long religious and racial differences were denied or ignored by Western diners ooops thinkers – began expelling or imprisoning each other’s diplomats if they had failed to behead them in street riots.

The mass execution by Saudis of Shitite cleri al-Nimr and 46 others — the largest carried out by Saudi Arabia in three and a half decades — laid bare the sectarian divisions gripping the region as demonstrators took to the streets from [Shitite] Bahrain to [mainly Solunni] Pakistan.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Saudi Arabia on Sunday of “divine revenge” over al-Nimr’s death, while Riyadh accused Tehran of supporting “terrorism.” The war of words threatened to escalate even as the U.S. and the European Union sought to calm the region.

The upsurge of hostilities obliged even the BBC to mention the usually banned terms Sunni and Shi-ite. In the West itself, even holy peecee-crazed Sweden began to close its borders – which had been open since the 1950s to parade internationalist piety.

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