Julie Burchill - Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics

Julie Burchill

Academica Press

WashingtonLondon

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burchill, Julie (author)

Title: Welcome to the woke trials : how identity killed progressive politics | Burchill, Julie

Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2021. | Includes references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021949414 | ISBN 9781680532333 (hardcover) | 9781680532340 (paperback) | 9781680532357 (e-book)

Copyright 2021 Julie Burchill

FOR JIM OWEN

And for the Terven Tribes across the world and our male allies - especially Harry Fair Cop Miller - Venceremos!

When we consider the phrase Flaming June we might think of the famous portrait by Frederic Leighton showing a sleeping woman in an orange dress which Samuel Cortauld once called the most wonderful painting in existence. But the June we lived through in 2020 was not a month of sensual slumber and molten gold sunsets. It was a conflagration of sensibilities as one cultural artefact after another went up in flames lest it offend some petulant cry-bully. The summer of 2020 - and the days ever since, right up till now as I write this in the autumn of 2021 - will be remembered for the vanity of the bonfires.

Youd think that everything that happened last year would have made this book a piece of gluten-free cake to dash off at top speed. But I found it something of an embarrassment (literally, for the perpetrators and capitulators) of riches. This was both the easiest and the most difficult thing Ive ever written because by the summer of 2021, not each new day but each new hour brought some new snippet of Woke insanity. So each morning I would read back the previous days work, only to find that half a dozen new acts of idiocy had taken place while I slept. Id go to bed reeling from the fact that rambling was racist and wake up to the glad tidings that cyclists wanted to be included in the ever-lengthening queue of those who may be eligible for Hate Crime status.

As the insanity picked up velocity, I was increasingly reminded of the tsunami of sound that comes at the end of the Beatles song A Day In The Life, that cacophonous orchestral crescendo which John Lennon instructed George Martin should be a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world. Imagine it now as you read this.

First they came for our fond memories of television, which had seemed such an innocent babysitter at the time: Fawlty Towers (mentioning the war), The Dukes Of Hazzard (Confederate flag), Brum (the mischievous car who may reflect language and attitude of the 90s) and Songs Of Praise (Cat Lewis, a producer of the programme and self-professed campaigner for a better world Tweeted of Rule Britannia Do those Brits who believe its OK to sing an 18th Century song about never being enslaved, written when the U.K was enslaving and killing millions of innocents, also believe its appropriate for neo-Nazis to shout We will never be forced into a gas chamber?) Then they came for cartoons; on the Disney streaming service, Dumbo, Peter Pan, Lady And The Tramp and The Jungle Book are preceded by the dire warning This programme includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures - these stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.

Then they came for the music; in the winter of 2020 the BBC announced that the audience for sweary Christmas favourite Fairytale Of New York would be segregated; older listeners could hear the original on Radio 2, while over on Radio 1 the word faggot would be removed lest it offend tender young ears. Theres the whole weirdness of Woke right there; old people want the unabridged version while youngsters want the censored one. Its meant to be the other way around if rock and roll was invented these days, old people would be out there dancing to it and young people tut-tutting about how offensive it was.

They came for the museums (the Natural History Museums Charles Darwin collection because he had voyaged to the Galapagos Islands in the course of colonialist scientific expeditions) and they came for the old houses as the National Trust appeared to have mistaken itself for the National Front when it published a list of nearly 100 properties under its management which it claimed had links to slavery and colonialism. They came for full stops, which intimidate young people when used in social media communication as they are interpreted as a sign of anger and insincerity according to linguistic experts. They came for the female genitalia: a college in Michigan decided to cancel its production of The Vagina Monologues because it was discriminatory, given that not all women have vaginas. They even came for the rainbows, when someone called Kirsty Conway complained in the summer of 2020:

Not long after lockdown was imposed, I was pleasantly surprised to see a rainbow flag on my drive home from work. However, as I saw more rainbow flags I quickly realised that these were not intended as support for the LGBTQ+ community, but rather as support for the NHS. I felt saddened, and disappointed. I am proud to work for the NHS, and of course public support for the NHS, and all other essential workers, can only be considered a good thing. However, I couldnt help feeling that taking the rainbow flag, which has been a symbol of LGBTQ+ pride and protest for more than 40 years, and repurposing it to represent support for the NHS, was at best thoughtless, failing to consider what this symbol means to our community, and at worst an act of erasure, sending a message that LGBTQ+ rights are not considered important.

Racism was the big one, suddenly detected everywhere, a parallel deadly virus. Master bedrooms were racist. Chessmen were racist. Brunch was racist, according to the actor Alan Cummings, reeking of white privilege. Sherlock Holmes was racist, the countryside was racist, fried chicken was racist, the anti-racist film In The Heat Of The Night was racist. As the One Little Indian record label became One Little Independent, the whole lazy lip-service aspect of virtue-signalling was summed up gloriously by the NME headline ONE LITTLE INDIAN CHANGE NAME TO HELP FIGHT RACISM. Yep, that seems sensible - never saying the world Indian again will surely defeat one of the greatest evils on earth.

Hawaiian shirts, camping, gardening, biking, hiking, jogging, mathematics, trees, botany, libraries, roads, lawns, soap, craft beers, peanut butter, dieting, wine, spelling, Thomas The Tank Engine, robots, interior design, surfing, hockey, the Smurfs - ALL RACIST! Ill leave it there but its a fair bet that by the time you get to the first proper chapter of this book, something else that made you think or laugh will have been cancelled or castigated for fear of attracting the wrath of a group of people who appear to have a deep distrust of thinking and laughing. Monstrous regiments of Violet Elizabeth Botts have joined the Stasi and started up a series of deranged sideshows detracting from the very real ills of a society with a risible level of social mobility all across the colour chart - white working-class boys do worse in education than any other group, dont forget.

The star turn of these witch trials is J.K. Rowling, who has nothing to do with racism but who has attracted the considerable ire of the small, well-financed, extremely loud trans-lobby who have never seen a drama that wasnt about them, even if it was the killing of a black man in Minneapolis. After a period of attempting to placate the geek chorus, Rowling was recently re-born as a fearless and funny feminist who responded to the proposed book-burning of her Harry Potter bestsellers with Whenever somebody burns a Potter book the royalties vanish from my bank account. And if the books signed, one of my teeth falls out. That the Harry Potter actors who turned on her are from privileged backgrounds while as an impoverished single mother she once worked in cafes (and went on to drop from billionaire to mere multi-millionaire status due to the sheer amount of money she gave away) made the situation even more grotesque. I dont think the fact that Rowling is self-made and theyve been feather-bedded all their lives are completely unconnected with this wrangle; the more privileged people are, the less they understood how women without money are vulnerable to male incursion.