One of the things about living in a totalitarian society is that, once something has been identified as problematic, everyone ends up competing to attack in the most aggressive way. Fail to do so, and you may find yourself being the next person identified as problematic. Perhaps that explains why the University of Oxford, founded in 1096, is contemplating ending sheet music because it’s part of white supremacy.

To be honest, it’s a little bit hard to make sense of the story because it’s so screamingly stupid. Apparently, music professors are claiming that all Western classical music has “complicity in white supremacy.” This seems to include such composers as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Handel, all of whom were living in continental Europe in the 17th through 19th centuries and none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with Blacks, Africa, or the slave trade.

The problem is that they and their musical notations existed at the same time as the African slave trade. And that’s not a typo:

University staff have argued that the current curriculum focuses on 'white European music from the slave period', according to The Telegraph.  

Documents seen by the publication indicate proposed reforms to target undergraduate courses.

It claimed that teaching musical notation had 'not shaken off its connection to its colonial past' and would be 'a slap in the face' to some students.

And it added that musical skills should no longer be compulsory because the current repertoire's focus on 'white European music' causes 'students of colour great distress'. 

A couple of comments. First, this strikes me as being profoundly insulting to “students of colour,” who are presumably so dull-witted and hypersensitive that they are incapable of coping with anything from the past. The reality is that Africans have been enslaving each other since time immemorial because all people enslaved each other.

The only ones to break from this idea were the Jews (think Passover, the celebration of the world’s first slave revolt). It took the Christian world until the late 18th century to catch up with that idea. The Muslim world still hasn’t. The reality is that slavery has always been part of the human condition and it’s only because of White Jews and Christians (with or without musical notation) that it ended in the West.

Second, I think the Oxford music teachers know this is bunkum. They’re raising it only because they feel that, unless they chime in on the Black Lives Matter issue and show themselves to be on board with it, they will be the next target. Under the tyranny that is BLM, if you’re not with them, you’re against them, and if you’re against them, you will be destroyed in the next purge (and there’s always a next purge).

As I watch the endless waves of BLM stupidity in corporations and academic institutions in the English-speaking world, I’m reminded of nothing so much as the mourners at Kim Jong-il’s funeral. They knew that the secret police were watching and that anyone showing insufficient grief was at risk of being carted off to a concentration camp. That’s why you see videos such as the one below showing thousands of people engaged in hysterical weeping. Yes, they were told that their communist godhead had died, but what you’re seeing in these videos isn’t grief, it’s fear:

That same stench of totalitarian fear is, quite disgracefully, oozing out of Oxford. An institution with over a thousand years of solid academics behind it shouldn’t be groveling before the Marxist BLM thugs.

IMAGE: West Façade of the Old Bodleian Library by Tristan Surtel. CC BY-SA 4.0.