by Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci
Join the Queerness and see the world (but only in peacetime, heh)
The saga of rainbowshit in the US Armed Forces continues. We dwell here on the case of Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram (trans MTF) who in early 2024 had been making waves on social media for a speech about respect and “proper use” of pronouns. According to Fram, this would strengthen “the spirit of the armed forces and help win wars.” Oddly enough, this speech had sparked snickers and controversy on social media, not least because, notwithstanding the lieutenant colonel's absolutely stellar record as a rocket scientist, U.S. Space Force programs compared to their Russian and Chinese counterparts are generally backward on many fronts. And yet, in an interview with The Advocate, the lieutenant colonel reiterated his position. Indeed, he relaunched: how, did you not know that during the Civil War there would have been as many as 400 cases of transgender people having fought? A low estimate anyway, since we are talking about nearly 1,000 queer combatants between North and South as The Advocate itself recalls. Out of 3.3 million enlisted, for the sake of full disclosure....
Yet in the U.S. Armed Forces not everyone thinks like Bree Farm and Marianne P. Malizia, quoted in the last installment. A senior DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) manager in the Navy (who had to write an essay on “white privilege” to fill that role, think about it) made it clear in an interview stolen by Steven Crowder and published on X how much of the staff sees the whole thing as a “waste of time.” And that if the Navy were to actually go to war inclusiveness would be immediately cast aside. I mean, yes, nice inclusivity, nice queerness, nice rainbow flags, YMCA dances, but if war comes, the real one, priorities come back too. The real ones...
UK: new careers, the decolonizer
Do you have no skill or purpose? Have you been discarded as a cashier at MacDonald's and your last resort is to offer yourself as a guinea pig for dangerous pharmaceutical experiments? Don't despair!!! Now you can find your way! Become a decolonizer too!
475 pounds a day of public money will be used in England to pay an “expert” to “decolonize” Hadrian's Wall. The task of this very useful and productive worker will be to rewrite the driving routes in two forts of the Roman limes in Britain - Arbeia and Segedunum - so that visitors will be made aware that the nasty, nasty Roman legionaries (“including Africans”), had arrived as an army of occupation and enslaved and killed people. Because, rightly, “Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?”
The corollary of this initiative is that by insisting that the Romans were cruel and bloodthirsty colonialists, England, too, must do mea culpa with its knees on the chickpeas for its colonialist past. Romanes eunt domus!
Of climate cultists, feminists and other fools on the loose.
Come the warm season and the ecoterrorist actions also resume, from the temples of art, history and capitalism. In England, two sprightly octogenarians (one of whom is also a pastor of the Anglican Church) tried to damage with chisels a shrine that contained a copy of Magna Carta. From John Lackland to John LackCO2.
In France, on the other hand, the usual feminist wokeshit. At the Centre Pompidou in Metz where the exhibition Lacan, The Exhibition: When Art Meets Psychoanalysis, which is also hosting Courbet's infamous The Origin of the World on loan from the Museé d'Orsay, is underway, a number of works including Courbet's own painting were vandalized with me-too writings by the “artivist” Deborah de Robertis and her cronies. Among the vandalized exhibits was also Luxembourg-based de Robertis's most famous work, Mirror of Origin, or photos of her own performance showing her own “origin of the world” with her legs spread in front of the more famous (and pour cause) Courbet. The exhibitionist is indeed remembered for such performances, including in 2016 again at the Orsay in front of Manet's Olympia. Interestingly, the proclamation launched by de Robertis blamed “the misogynistic divide” in the art world and called on “all women, with vulva or without” to fight back.
Reinvent the wheel / 1. Finally, even the mainstream was caught by a slight suspicion...
“You can fool me twenty times, but on the twenty-first I'll spot it!” said Groucho Marx. And so it was that even the “Corriere della Sera,” with the pen of Luigi Ippolito, on May 24 came to the conclusions that yours truly has been shouting in the desert for four years:
Cancel culture has touched the extreme vertigo: self-cancellation. Cambridge University's historical journal, hitherto titled “Anglo-Saxon England,” has announced that it will change its name to “High-Medieval England and its Neighbors”: [...] the very term “Anglo-Saxon” has become problematic, something to be ashamed of.
Welcome that they have finally noticed the phenomenon in “Corriere della Sera” as well. Although, Ippolito allow us the schoolteacher's clarification of this topic before it was mainstream: cancel culture has always been a matter of “self-cancellation.”
But reality is hard to grasp, and many would not see it even if it materialized and bit them in the calf: a jumble of goodthinkers on social pointed out how this insistence on removing the word “Anglo-Saxon” from the title of an academic journal as if it were a deletion of the word from all the dictionaries in the kingdom was a bit clickbait. Perhaps, but it's good to remember that cancel culture is very much in fashion in Cambridge: from the conference where they call Churchill worse than the Nazis to the gypsoteca forced to explain why plaster casts are white. As Agatha Christie would say, two coincidences are a clue, three coincidences are a proof.
Reinvent the wheel / 2. The vandalized statues in NY.
Another partial warning that the public is beginning to like cancel culture less and less comes from the U.S., where, abetted by the election climate and the sometimes “heterodox” peace protests we have already covered in Bulletin #12, the second thoughts have begun. Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, who at least on issues of urban decorum winks at the conservative electorate, has offered out of his own pocket a “bounty” to those who will allow the identification of vandals who at a pro-Palestinian rally scrawled a the World War I war memorial dedicated to the 107th Infantry in Central Park. Now Adams reinvented the wheel and blaming the vandals.
«We should not remain silent, because our silence gives the belief that everything is okay and it is not okay. Not only was this statue desecrated, but down the block, another statue was desecrated. We know how important free speech is to this country. It’s the core of our democracy, one that many Americans, like the symbols of these men, fought and ensured that it would stay intact. It’s a unique qualification that this country is so proud to have. These heroes of World War I, who this memorial is honored by, and if you look closely and read the history of this memorial, it is not like others where they lift up generals and high-ranking individuals».
Crocodile tears.
Editor of the Centro Studi Machiavelli “Belfablog,” Emanuele Mastrangelo is editor-in-chief of “CulturaIdentità” and has been editor-in-chief of “Storia in Rete” since 2006. A military-historical cartographer, he is the author of several books (with Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia e Wikipedia. L'enciclopedia libera e l'egemonia dell'informazione).
An essayist and popularizer, his publications include "Alessandro Blasetti. The forgotten father of Italian cinema" (Idrovolante, 2023). And with Emanuele Mastrangelo "Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia and the Hegemony of Information" (Bietti, 2013) and "Iconoclasm. The contagious insanity of the cancel culture that is destroying our history" (Eclectica, 2020).
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